The middle child at peace

It's been close to two years now since I made a provocative wager on this blog. Most commenters at the time took me up on it. Recently, the underlying question seems to be on some people's minds.

Chris Hecker's recent IGDA keynote fretted about how video games might avoid ending up in the "cultural ghetto" along with comic books; Matt Burns wrote a piece, seemingly at least partly inspired by the keynote, on video games and cultural legitimacy. Harvey Smith (on twitter and facebook) took issue with games industry people for their tendency to denigrate the achievements of comics as a shorthand for highlighting video games' failings.

But the more I've thought about it, the more I wonder: what if this cultural ghetto isn't so bad after all?

There's danger in putting too much emphasis on an analogy. And while much is analogous between the history and state of video games and comics, people tend to get lost in the specifics, and wrapped up in the emotional investment they have in each medium. The point isn't to argue for the merits of either, but to recognize that most people just don't care.

And then I start to wonder, seriously, why do we care if the world at large cares about us? Why do we need the cultural legitimacy merit badge? And I start to wonder if it's not all just insecurity on our part. And if maybe we're not seeing the value and beauty of the space we're in because we're too busy looking over the fence at Stanley Kubrick and Orson Welles.

I'll reiterate that, despite my original argument's oversaturation of bile and dissatisfaction, I still stand behind the wager. Video games will not achieve the same cultural stature as film, television or the novel in our time. But I regret that everyone got too wrapped up in defending comics to note the more useful and relevant section of the argument: on investment versus passivity, and how video games' nature and inherent strength is also, in the quest for mass acceptance, their major weakness.

Passivity and disposability are the currency of popular media. Experientially, the value of film or television for most viewers is the ability to sit back, turn off, and consume. The most popular entertainment is the work that requires the least foreknowledge, the shortest attention span, that supplies the most instant gratification-- the entertainment that requires the lowest investment. This all translates to accessibility, which is the key to wide appeal: anyone-- ANYone-- can simply place themselves in front of the screen and watch. Great art may take mental investment to appreciate, but a film doesn't simply stop if you don't "get" it. Hence, the potential audience for any kind of expression in that medium is near-infinite, all viewers being equal in the watching of the thing.

Whereas games require comparatively enormous individual investment. The chosen input device (and there are many) must be learned and become natural to use. The inputs for the individual game you're playing must then be mentally mapped to the input device. The rules of each individual game must then be learned and internalized. And then, while the entertainment experience is ongoing, each player is actively judged for their performance: did you make that jump? Did you hit that note? Did you kill your enemy? Did you clear that map? Video games are the only popular entertainment that you can actually fail at. And so many potential players ask, what's the point? Why do I care whether I'm good enough to be entertained? And games have lost them.

The other issues of technical requirements, exorbitant prices, embarrassing content, weak public image and such do contribute, but distract from the core of the issue: that interactivity is itself a barrier to entry. And games are interactivity. The human mind will never change so much as to favor our work on the whole over the allure of the passive. Video games present interactivity as a language with the potential to say great, meaningful, important, timeless things. And it's a language many people simply aren't interested to learn.

This leaves us, then, as something of a middle child. I'd wager that we already mean more to more people than comics do (and if we don't, who cares?) and that conversely we'll never be a behemoth to match truly passive media. And maybe this is the best of both worlds. An audience that, having crossed the barriers to entry, is by its nature more invested in our work; a public profile by which we have the means to occasionally reach into the mass consciousness, but which affords us the freedom to continue experimenting with subject, form, and style; an industry which is truly international; which is capable of producing both multi-million dollar blockbusters and single-creator labors of love (and releasing both on the same platform); which manages to be neither too big nor too small, and is the more vital, unique and exhilarating for it. We are a medium for us, and while there are more and more of us every day, we'll never be for everyone. In a way, it's liberating: freedom to make incredible things, without being everything to everyone. It's why I still stand behind my wager that we won't be the next film, books, or TV. But I no longer look at it in terms of the qualitative. It's simply true. And possibly reason for celebration.

The urge to outgrow what is already our little brother is only a sign of insecurity; the urge to overtake our big brother, to destroy and subsume passive media, is vanity. The assumption of inherent value--that to be the biggest, the most dominant, the one new medium of the century, is in fact desirable at all--is perhaps natural, but also seems a fairly limited interpretation of the media landscape and our own role in it. We should be proud if anything that we are marginalized for the very thing that makes us great; that we are not less than what the mass audience wants, but different. In acknowledging the strengths of the lot we occupy, we might strive to accomplish those great, meaningful, important, timeless things within it, instead of looking always for a way out.

To be at peace with our identity as the middle child is to be comfortable in our skin, secure in our nature, and hopefully to one day fulfill our own potential, not anyone else's. We are what we are, and what we can be no one else can. If we make the most of it, we'll hopefully someday lose the urge to talk about ourselves in terms of what we aren't.

[This post continues in the comments below, wherein Chris Hecker helps me expand my thinking on the issue.]

Read More...

Summary only...

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"

Read More...

Summary only...

Homespun

There is a Goodwill outlet down Fillmore St. from my apartment. Being that this Goodwill is in the middle of San Francisco, there are sometimes exciting finds in the used software section. Most recently, I picked up an original boxed copy of SimCity (on 3.5" AND 5.25" floppy!) as a cheap collector's item-- the cover art is wonderful, one of my favorite video game box covers:


Inside, I found the following slip:

click for big

20 years ago, the makers of SimCity could reasonably solicit users to submit bugs and suggestions through the post, in exchange for "nifty prizes." (Don't forget to include your phone number in case we need more information!) Web forums have taken over this function, sure, but there's something incredibly nostalgic about picturing some computer game player (in, let's say, Minnesota, on a chilly November evening in 1990) sitting down at his kitchen table with a ballpoint pen and writing out his great ideas for how to improve SimCity, then walking out to the mailbox and sending the letter off in hopes of receiving a reply from the game's creators, and maybe a nifty prize.

Times have changed and cheap nostalgia is easy, but I don't think it's unfair to lament the personal feeling the games industry had to it at the turn of the 90's. The entire industry has gotten exponentially larger in the intervening years, and so the creators of the biggest games tend to be the furthest distanced from the average player, unsurprisingly. Certainly this is one draw of the indie games community-- that it feels like a community, with relatable individuals making small, personal games to share with their dedicated playerbase.

It's wonderful. But it doesn't diminish the fond memory of buying a box of disks from Babbage's or Egghead Software, taking it home, and feeling that you'd opened up a personal conduit to the creators of the thing you held in your hands. We may have entered the age of impersonality... or maybe we just need to restart the practice of packing in a signed letter with our street address on it.

Read More...

Summary only...

Game design

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

Read More...

Summary only...

Single-A games

Ever get that feeling? That optimistic, uplifting feeling that despite the economy, torture, and global pandemics, a few little things might be going right in the world? That's just how I felt upon completing a couple of notable independent games this past week: The Path and Zeno Clash. They made me happy that engrossing, novel, invigorating games are occupying that middle ground between retro/lo-fi and triple-A blockbuster, now more than ever. It's something I've been talking about for years, and to play such vibrant examples really makes me excited for the future.

Single-A games

The middle ground I'm thinking of is hard to pin down, but a few common properties describe it: the games have smaller teams and budgets than your standard, triple-A retail shelf title, but use similar, modern graphical technology (full 3D, modern rendering techniques.) They're bigger productions than single-author, bedroom coder, 2D/Flash/ASCII efforts that one often thinks of as the definition of "indie" but explore similarly outre themes and aesthetics compared to most mainstream fare. They use many of the same design, structural and representational elements as big, triple-A games, such as immersive first-person or third-person direct control over an avatar, a fully navigable 3D gameworld, voiceover and scripted sequences, but are generally shorter in length and lower in rendering fidelity. Basically, they are like a triple-A production that has been strategically and drastically reduced in scope, allowing them to focus on specific, and less conventional, mechanics and aesthetics, and smaller target audiences than their mass-market counterparts. They benefit greatly from the reduced overhead and plugged-in audience that digital distribution channels like Steam and Direct2Drive provide.

Putting one's finger on just what to call these sorts of games can be tricky. I've used "game noir" in the past, but that has too specific an aesthetic connotation. I've tried "B-games," like B-movies, but that has negative implications of quality, even if the most vital films of the mid-century were often B-movies. So I'll try this: Single-A games. They're like triple-A games, but trimmed down and tightened to fit a smaller team, smaller scope, and usually a smaller audience-- to try new, interesting, and exciting approaches that the baggage of a triple-A production can almost never allow. Single-A games: they're what we need more of, and The Path and Zeno Clash are two outstanding examples.

The Path

Created by Michael Samyn and Auriea Harvey, The Path takes the Little Red Riding Hood fairytale as its jumping-off point. The player chooses one of six girls, each named with a different synonym for "red" (Ruby, Scarlet, Ginger, etc., except for Carmen, whom I'm guessing might be a reference to the opera heroine? A commenter below suggests a play on "Carmine.") The player's stated goal when choosing a girl is to lead her to Grandmother's House, and to "stay on the path." This is simple--the path leads straight ahead to Grandmother's House, and the player need only hold the 'walk forward' button to succeed. However, upon ignoring the game's directive and leaving the path, the player is immediately lost in a deep forest, where a variety of strange objects and characters are waiting to be found. Each girl has a different reaction to these points of interest, which bit by bit builds up the individual character of your chosen charge.

Two other characters can be found wandering through the woods-- the girl in white, an ethereal figure who plays without a care and tends to lead the player to interesting things, and the Wolf, who takes a different form in each chapter. Upon leaving the path, there is no way to return to it-- the only way to escape the woods is to find the girl's Wolf. A sort of compass leads the player to the Wolf's location, but figuring out how to draw the Wolf out can take the form of a point-and-click style puzzle.

Upon either walking down the path or finding the girl's Wolf, the player enters Grandmother's House, which takes the form of a garish, off-putting virtual installation art piece. The most interesting thing about The Path is experiencing each chapter through the lenses of the different girls' personalities, piecing together their mindsets through the snippets of reactions they have to the world, and discovering the forms that their different Wolves take. Grandmother's House is twisted a different way for each girl, presenting a very subjective environment informed by their individual traits, and the experience you had in your own playthrough with that girl.

The art is at times both lovely and disquieting, and always quite accomplished-- the world and the characters, and especially the Grandmother's House installations are wonderfully realized. And though less overt, the systems are interesting in their somewhat combative dialogue with the player. It's a game that wants you to play it in a particular way-- slowly, contemplatively, and aimlessly. You can feel the designers witholding information and control from the player to this end: if the player chooses to run instead of walk, after a few moments the camera lifts up as if on a crane to look straight down at the girl, and the screen darkens with gloom to the point that seeing where you're going is impossible; spending most of your time walking is the only feasible approach. A sort of map exists which plots your trail through the woods, but only appears each 100 meters that you run, and only fades in for a moment-- it allows you to periodically readjust your heading, but denies the player the ability to check their map constantly, encouraging the feeling of being lost. Compass indicators pointing to the Wolf and the girl in white are ever-present on the screen, but update so slowly that the player is required to stop and wait for them to "catch up" if they want to use the compass at all. It can be frustratingly transparent, and in some cases makes the systems completely unreadable (I didn't know until I looked on the game's Steam forum that the compass indicators were anything but artsy embellishment-- they update SO slowly that without a tutorial, I didn't realize they meant anything at all.) But the core systems of movement, interaction and camera control are so transparent and solidly implemented that such examples only make the hand, and the intent, of the authors that much more noteworthy an aspect of the experience-- these are systems with purpose, based on a calculated thought process, which is more than can be said for many games.

The Path is the sort of unique, personal, and affecting experience that subsequent single-A games might aspire to match. It's only $9.99 on Steam, Direct2Drive, or direct from Tale of Tales.

Zeno Clash

Games boast the potential to transport the player to worlds completely removed from our own. And yet we so often fall back on tired or blase settings that when a truly unique, unprecedented gameworld appears, it's a real rarity to be celebrated. Enter Zeno Clash, the creation of the brothers Bordeu-- Andres, Carlos, and Edmundo. The land of Zenozoik is a completely novel invention, a gameworld unlike any you've seen before. It's not just crazy and new, but strikingly beautiful to behold.

Coming off of a string of intriguing mod creations, some overambitious for the size of their team, ACE Team decided to focus on "one or two innovative mechanics," resulting in Zeno Clash, a very linear, constrained game all about close-range arena battles decided by melee combat and primitive firearms such as muskets and slingshots. The game's protagonist is Ghat, a man who, as the game begins, has killed Father-Mother, a towering bird-like figure who's raised hundreds of children that populate the land. The game alternates between depicting the events leading up to the assassination of Father-Mother in the past, and Ghat's long, arduous journey through Zenonzoik as he flees Father-Mother's territory, pursued by her assassins.

The wonderful thing about Zeno Clash is how every presentational and gameplay element compliments every other-- the world itself is fairly medieval in its level of technology, which lends itself to the raw, small-scale fisticuffs of the core gameplay. The story of the protagonist's flight provides the rationale for a rapid tour through all different parts of this amazing, alien world, allowing the developers to show off environment after stunning environment, showcasing the sheer breadth of the creators' imagination. The first-person perspective gives the player the viewpoint of an actual inhabitant of this place, surrounding them with every strange detail, making this imaginary place all the more real. Consider Zeno Clash from an elevated third-person perspective: the gameworld and characters, having so little relation to our own, become that much more artificial, like scale models. Approaching this fantastical architecture and the unbelievable inhabitants of this world at eye level is what makes it all feel so real.

Mechanically the game is a joy (though my one major complaint would be that the game defaults to Hard difficulty, and even Normal, the lowest setting, exhibits some serious difficulty spikes. How about an Easy mode, guys?) Every impact of fist and swing of bludgeon feeling weighty and solid. The player's attacks really seem to make contact with their targets, creating a strong illusion of physical connection between the player and the occupants of this place, as opposed to the disconnected floating viewpoint of some other first-person games. The combat system is deep enough, allowing the player to dodge, parry and counterattack strategically. Selecting a particular weapon is a meaningful choice, as each has its own specific advantages and disadvantages. But much like a standard FPS, the core mechanics of Zeno Clash are fairly constant throughout; what makes the gameplay really interesting is great, creative level design that changes up your situation continually over the course of the game. One level might be a fairly standard arena battle in a city square, while the next challenges the player to fend off hostile creatures on a wooded path; the next might send you hunting for scurrying game in the underbrush, or defending a boat as it's rowed down a stream, or keeping a torch lit in a pitch black netherworld to keep shadow creatures at bay. The variety in gameplay challenges handily matches the ever-changing scenery and twisting, surreal storyline.

The novel gameplay paradigm and highly unorthodox setting, likely too risky for a triple-A production, perfectly suit the single-A scale and direct download platform chosen for Zeno Clash. In fact, it's the sort of game that most likely never could have existed without the viability of this middleground. I hope that ACE Team is successful with Zeno Clash (and perhaps they are-- apparently the game was Direct2Drive's #1 download this week) and that other small, innovative development teams will be encouraged to stage their own wild experiments following this model. Zeno Clash is available on Steam and Direct2Drive for $19.99.

So What?

Alright, so I think these games are great, and you should play them. So what?

The point is that they demonstrate the amazing potential in the single-A space for individuality, experimentation, and immediacy. They sidestep many problems that normally plague boxed triple-A products-- problems like unfocused design, "safe" (boring, juvenile) settings and mechanics, overlong campaigns that nobody finishes, and inflated price tags-- delivering fresh, unique, and easily-digestible experiences that can reasonably be dived into, enjoyed, and completed over the course of a half-dozen hours or so, all for less than the price of a used copy of that big-budget blockbuster that came out a couple months ago. If the single-A space could expand from the current slow trickle of releases to dozens of titles released every year-- or every month!-- then single-A games might act as that bridge between bedroom indies and corporate blockbusters, giving emerging talents a place to shine, and all of us more, different, inspiring experiences to enjoy.

Is this a natural progression as more funding for independent teams becomes available and the barrier to acquiring the means of producing immersive 3D worlds is lowered? 15 years ago, pixel art side-scrollers were our triple-A blockbusters; now the one-man productions using this model are innumerable. Hopefully games like Zeno Clash and The Path (and Gravity Bone, and Flower, and so on,) are early glimmers of the successful intersection of immersive 3D and the indie mindset. And hopefully they're to be followed many, many more.

Read More...

Summary only...

A worthy model

Flower is a sensational game.

And by that I mean to say that it is a great game, but also that its purpose is to transmit a physical sensation of gliding on the wind. It's successful at this, and certainly worth experiencing for oneself if you've got a PS3 lying around.

The game is unique but not without predecessors, and affecting without being complex. It's a simple, straight-forward experience which doesn't deny being a video game, but manages to instill feelings in the player that few games ever do. It's a game anyone can pick up and play by its very nature. And it's a model worth repeating.



Mechanics focused on transmitting a concrete, sensational aesthetic. Games are uniquely suited to putting the player into novel physical contexts and allowing them to be and do things that would otherwise be impossible. In your natural life you won't ever have the experience of swooping along the tips of the grass like a sparrow, but Flower aims to replicate the experience of gliding on the wind with as little remove as possible. It doesn't start at genre and work backwards, or with a series of plot points it wants to tell, but instead starts with a single core sensation it wants the player to experience-- one that most people have probably had in dreams-- and figures out what mechanical and presentational elements will make that feeling possible.

Discoverable progression elements and intuitive controls. The only inputs in Flower are tilting the controller to change the angle of your flight, and pressing a button to gain speed. The game features no explicit tutorial on how to get to the next level, but the method of progression is quickly and naturally apparent to the player. These are both inroads to legitimate accessibility. Where many games follow genre conventions to fulfill established players' expectations, or tune down the difficulty of their hardcore game to accommodate inexperienced players, Flower's concept and execution lend it that "pick-up-and-play" quality in a way that feels completely natural.

Small scope, high fidelity. You only do one thing in Flower-- fly around on the breeze through different locations. The game takes only a few hours to complete. There is no voice acting or any pre-rendered cutscenes. And yet, it's one of the most beautiful, high-fidelity games I've ever played. The game is a model of focus-- no extraneous mechanics, no interactive side-alleys for the player to spin their wheels in; no grinding or backtracking or punishing difficulty to arbitrarily extend the length of the game; no overreaching visual or story elements requiring player attention or graphical bandwidth to be diverted from the core experience. This restrained scope allows the game to be sold for only $10. And so Flower is a game inexpensive enough that most people might reasonably be willing to pay for it, a game accessible enough that most people might reasonably be able play it effectively, a game short enough that most players might reasonably finish it, and a game beautiful enough that most anyone might reasonably praise it in comparison with even the biggest AAA productions. It manages to be a budget game without going retro 2D or looking cheap, thanks to a singular focus on reasonable scope of design.


I would love to see more games that use Flower as a model, not in the copycat sense of being "flying games" or "games where you're the wind," but in the high-level approach that the production implies. Smaller, shorter, higher-fidelity, more focused, more sensate experiences that are affordable, accessible, and digestible. The primary obstacle to one designing a game with these principles in mind seem to be finding an engaging core sensation that fits the constraints. I can't wait to see the results that this challenge brings.

Read More...

Summary only...

GDC Guide 09

GDC shouldn't need much of an introduction: it's thousands of game developers from all around the world gathering in San Francisco to talk shop and gain contacts. It's catching up with friends you often haven't seen in a year; it's good vibes about creativity, passion, and the future of games.

For the last couple years I've put together a GDC guide for the design-minded and art-interested. 2009 is below; I've left off keynotes, tutorials and award ceremonies in favor of Wed-Fri sessions, but suffice it to say that the Game Design Workshop and Game Developer's Choice Awards are worth attending. Also be sure to spend as much time as you can in the Independent Games Festival pavilion! Play them all!

Practical

Helping Your Players Feel Smart: Puzzles as User Interface	Randy Smith	TBD	Game Design/ 60-minute Lecture
Overview: This presentation examines the predictable series of steps players take when approaching a puzzle or challenge and describes a set of principles adapted from user-centered design that can be employed to keep players on the path to discovering the solution for themselves. Examples are drawn from the presenter’s experience on the THIEF series and DARK MESSIAH OF MIGHT AND MAGIC and from Valve’s Portal.

It goes without saying that Randy Smith is a smart dude with valuable experience in this area. A chance to glean the knowledge should not be passed up!

The Iterative Level Design Process of Bioware's MASS EFFECT 2	Corey Andruko Dusty Everman	TBD	Production/ 60-minute Lecture
Overview: This session examines the BioWare Mass Effect team’s new level-creation process, which is focused on maximizing iteration for quality while minimizing rework and cost. It shares some of the lessons learned from creating Mass Effect and evaluates how well this new process is working based on current experiences.

Iteration in level design is beyond essential. In the current age of high-fidelity visuals, agility can be hard to maintain. Always interesting to see how other studios tackle common problems.

Beyond Balancing: Using Five Elements of Failure Design to Enhance Player Experiences	Jesper Juul	TBD	Game Design/ 20-minute Lecture
Overview: This 20-minute lecture presents a toolbox for improving the design of failure in video games. Based on research on player reactions and attitudes towards failure across different audiences, the lecture identifies Five Elements of Failure Design for better failure design in single player games.

As someone who's following up that game that had Vita Chambers in it, this issue is well within relevancy for me. It's an interesting problem, and one that can easily be over- or undersolved.

Master Metrics: The Science Behind the Art of Game Design	E. Daniel Arey Chris Swain	TBD	Game Design/ 60-minute Lecture
Overview: Seven cutting-edge metrics-based game design techniques have been gathered from some of the leading game designers in the world via personal interviews. All are presented visually and in a hands-on style. Each is intended to be practical for working game designers who seek to make better play experiences.

While designer instincts are important, cold, hard numbers cannot be denied. Gathering hard metrics along with soft playtest interview feedback is essential. Input on best practices in gathering and utilizing this data is always valuable.

Valve's Approach to Playtesting: the Application of Empiricism	Mike Ambinder	TBD	Game Design/ 60-minute Lecture
Overview: This talk will focus on how Valve is broadening its playtest program to apply methodologies from behavioral research which should serve to both increase the stock of useful information and to decrease the collection of biased observations.

And speaking of which, you couldn't ask for better than insight from Valve, the masters of data-based design.

Player's Expression: The Level Design Structure Behind FAR CRY 2 and Beyond?	Jonathan Morin	TBD	Game Design/ 60-minute Lecture
Overview: While designers often want to support player’s expression, it rarely materializes in the end. This lecture describes how this particular problem was approached on FAR CRY 2. It explores its level design structure at every level and concludes with examples on how it could be applied to other projects.

Open-world level design is an interesting topic to me, mostly because I haven't really done any of it. A breakdown of how Far Cry 2's playable spaces were conceived and constructed is sure to be illuminating.

Lighting with Purpose	Jay Riddle Paul Ayliffe	TBD	Visual Arts/ 60-minute Lecture
Overview: This session offers attendees a guide to better understanding both the aesthetics of lighting and its practical application in game development. By sharing recent examples, the speakers will demystify the process and bring insight to the how and why of its use. Don't just throw lights in your worlds willy-nilly. Light with purpose!

I view lighting as just as much of a design element as an art element. My hope is that this session will present concepts like direction and readability to lighting artists-- and some pointers along these lines that could be applicable to designers as well.

Everything I Learned About Level Design I Learned from Disneyland	Scott Rogers	TBD	Game Design/ 60-minute Lecture
Overview: Scott Rogers (GOD OF WAR, MAXIMO) reveals his secret weapon for designing levels: Disneyland. Learn how to inject the genius of the Magic Kingdom into your own game designs. Topics include player's thematic goals, pathing techniques, and illusional narrative. From skeletons to trash cans, there’s a lot to learn from Disneyland!

As commenters below have pointed out, there's more to 'learning from Disneyland' than a single ride. I've frequently heard the comparison between a game and a Pirates of the Carribean-style ride, which are worrisome: keep your hands inside the cart while you watch interesting things pass by. The description of this talk sounds like it analyzes the park as a whole-- from skeletons to trash cans-- which could touch on some interesting approaches to directed but open spaces.

Theory

Fault Tolerance: From Intentionality to Improvisation	Clint Hocking	TBD	Game Design/ 60-minute Lecture
Overview: As a follow-up to the second-highest rated talk of GDC 2006, this presentation looks at the specific challenges of designing game mechanics that both allow and encourage players to play expressively, while opening the door for them to accept small incremental failures and set-backs as an engaging element that adds depth and variety to dynamic play.

Clint Hocking's talks are routinely the most thought-provoking and engaging at GDC. A 'sequel' to the first talk I saw him give, from GDC 06, is hard to resist. He tends to talk about designing the kinds of game experiences that mean the most to me.

Read Me: Closing the Readability Gap in Immersive Games	Patrick Redding	TBD	Game Design/ 60-minute Lecture
Overview: Visual fidelity and procedural complexity have grown independently of one another. This disconnect means that game information presented to players often provides little feedback about their actions. Patrick Redding (Ubisoft Montreal) discusses why the disparity must be addressed before games can tackle more complicated problems in narrative and AI.

Though this could theoretically (get it?) go into the Practical pile, Redding tends towards the higher-level. I suspect this will be less an in-depth examination of specific techniques as much as an overview of limiting factors to addressing more complex issues than shooting, jumping and driving through game mechanics.

Stop Wasting My Time and Your Money: Why Your Game Doesn't Need a Story to be a Hit	Margaret Robertson	TBD	Game Design/ 60-minute Lecture
Overview: Stories help sell games, but they help break them, too - adding expense, frustration and inflexibility to the design process. Drawing on first-hand experience of troubleshooting a wide variety of story-based games, this session will demonstrate how you can deliver high levels of emotional engagement and strongly marketable themes without bogging your game down in cut-scene hell.

Margaret Robertson is awesome. I hadn't heard of her before going to see her talk at last year's GDC, and it blew me away. Her topic this year is right up my alley.

From First Date to a Committed Relationship: Designing for Engagement and Sustained Satisfaction	Scott Rigby	TBD	Game Design/ 60-minute Lecture
Overview: Based upon multiple studies with over 10,000 gamers, this session presents the Player Experience of Need Satisfaction model (PENS) which focuses specifically on those experiences that lead to sustained engagement and player value. Each of three specific intrinsic needs will be reviewed (autonomy, competence, and relatedness), alongside specific game examples, recommendations, and strategies for implementation during design, development, and testing.

This one sounds like it may be some good-natured academic mumbo-jumbo, but useful approaches to thinking about a subject can often be distilled from what on the surface seems to be an over-systematized thesis paper.

The Human Play Machine	Chaim Gingold	TBD	Game Design/ 60-minute Lecture
Overview: Every game we make or play engages a human faculty, whether it’s movement, make believe, or flirting. But are we, as game designers, using the full range of the human animal’s play capacity? What latent play faculties have the Nintendo Wii, casual games, and player authorship games (SPORE, LITTLEBIGPLANET) tapped into that makes them so novel, fun, and broadly appealing? What play faculties do we traditionally engage, and what play potentials are still out there?

Exploring fresh avenues of play and mediated creativity is incredibly important. Presumably one of the designers of Spore's creature creator knows a thing or two about the subject. Taking casual games and the success of the Wii as jumping-off points makes me somewhat dubious, but I trust some novel angles will be presented.

The Job

Creative Career or Grueling Job? Staying Passionate about Our Craft in the Games Business	Don Daglow	TBD	Game Design/ 60-minute Lecture
Overview: The games business keeps spawning more mega-corporations. It's tempting these days for individuals to start thinking of ourselves as depersonalized cogs in a big machine, or as boats torn from our moorings by distant storms and tossed around in the surf. Are we in creative careers or grueling jobs? Does the answer seem to change day by day and week by week?

I'd be interested to hear the perspective of such an industry veteran, and more pointedly the president of Stormfront until it closed, probably right around the time that Daglow was submitting this talk proposal. He's been in it for a long, long time; what's the secret, man?

Failure is NOT an Option - Basic Survival Techniques for any Producer/Designer	Rich Vogel	TBD	Production/ 60-minute Lecture
Overview: This session gives you important insight on why games fail and by providing these insights we learn how to survive. The speaker will provide examples and give his personal experiences fire fighting in the trenches. Expect to see lots of examples.

High theory is useless without the ability to get shit done right and out the door. This could easily go in the Practical pile, but it feels more like a "get the job done" thing. Ship it, ship it good!

10 Things Great Designers Exhibit	Gordon Walton	TBD	Production/ 60-minute Lecture
Overview: The speaker shares his condensed, 10 step version of his 25+ years experience in hiring and working with game designers, focused towards emerging challenges in game development. Expect to learn what to look for in a successful designer, and be entertained and inspired simultaneously!

Though the speaker's experience is heavily online-focused, I'd be interested to hear a veteran's take on what's made a good designer through the years. Hopefully it could give me some tips on how to become a better one myself!

Just for Fun

Experimental Gameplay Sessions	Jonathan Blow	TBD	Game Design/ Two-hour Panel
Overview: A series of short presentations, where game developers demonstrate and talk about their new and experimental games. Independent games, academic projects, and AAA mainstream games are all represented.

Always interesting. Get exposed to small, new, weird, funny, innovative indie titles. Though for the most part you could get the benefit of this session by taking the list of games and downloading them yourself, the developers' takes on the pieces adds useful context, and usually some of the titles covered aren't available to the public at the time of the session. Expand your horizons!

Nuances of Design	Jonathan Blow	TBD	Game Design/ Two-hour Panel
Overview: Most modern games are conduits for a large amount of visceral communication: the colors and sounds that the player sees, along with the way his actions feel, convey most of the game's information and constitute most of the experience. By augmenting a classical presentation with play sessions, we hope to facilitate understanding that is instinctual rather than intellectual.

Similar to the above, but playable! An interesting 'tactile lecture' approach. A laptop is required-- talk about elitist!!! Just kidding, but I've never attended because for two years I didn't have a laptop, and for the third my battery died. Maybe this year I'll make it.

The Game Design Challenge: My First Time	Eric Zimmerman Steve Meretzky Kim Swift	TBD	Game Design/ 60-minute Panel
Overview: Welcome back for another year and another Game Design Challenge, where three amazing game design greats create original concepts around a very unusual game design problem. Join us as returning champ Steve Meretzky squares off against two new challengers.

The Game Design Challenge is often hilarious and entertaining, but it epitomizes the 'Just for Fun' heading-- completely frivolous. If you're paying your own money to be here, there are much more responsible ways to spend your time. But if you've got an hour to kill, you're pretty much guaranteed some laughs and a good anecdote coming away from the session. Did you know that Alexy Pajitnov once made pants for himself? This I learned at a prior Game Design Challenge.

GDC Microtalks - One Hour, Ten Speakers, Unlimited Ideas	Richard Lemarchand Robin Hunicke Eric Zimmerman N'Gai Croal Frank Lantz Jenova Chen Tracy Fullerton John Sharp Clint Hocking Jane McGonigal	TBD	Game Design/ 60-minute Lecture
Overview: Imagine this: ten visually intense game design micro-presentations in a row, given by ten great speakers in the course of one fascinating hour! Come along to have fun, be challenged and get creatively inspired, or use the session to preview speakers who are talking elsewhere at the conference to see if you like their style!

When 20-minute sessions just can't satisfy your desire for compressed ideas and truncated trains of thought! Could be fun, could be pointless, could be thought-provoking... probably all of the above, cycling in 10-minute intervals. Some good speakers, to be sure.

Little Hands, Foul Moods, and Runny Noses 2.0: The Research You Should Know When Making Games for Kids	Carla Engelbrecht Fisher	TBD	Game Design/ 60-minute Lecture
Overview: When developing games for children, especially preschool and elementary aged children, game designers often work in a vacuum. Far removed from the experiences of childhood, they might create games that they believe are interesting for children, but never have the opportunity to interview or watch children play the games.

Though I don't personally make children's games, the evolving design of games for kids has rankled me for a while. The current trend seems to be making kids' games the simplest, dullest, most child-proofed experiences possible. And I have to assume that children find this boring as hell! Remember playing the NES as a child? Remember Zelda's worldmap being a vast mystery? Contra kicking your butt even with the 30 lives code? Going back to Punch-Out!!, Metroid or Super Mario Bros. again and again until you finally beat them after months of trying? Children have a whole lot of time on their hands, enjoy being challenged and the feeling of accomplishment that comes with overcoming real obstacles, and can't be harmed by difficult or 'dangerous' situations in games. The overwhelming popularity of Pokemon for instance demonstrates that kids aren't looking for something simple and shallow. I hope the research here will bear out my feeling that children's video games don't need to treat their audience with kid gloves.

Cinematic Game Design III: Action!	Richard Rouse III Martin Stoltz	TBD	Visual Arts/ 60-minute Lecture
Overview: This next installment in the popular Cinematic Game Design GDC lecture series focuses on action scenes. Many games deliver highly immersive conflict, but action films manipulate a wider range of emotions and make their conflict meaningful. A series of film clips that demonstrate different cinematic action techniques will be shown and deconstructed. Each technique will then be analyzed to see how it can be applied to gameplay to make a game more visceral and compelling.

It bothers me that "how to make your game more like a movie" is a "popular" series at GDC constituting three parts. Broad cultural influence is of course essential to good game design, but showing clips from big-budget action films as a guide to how you should design your video game is just a problem, plain and simple. I'd be interested to see the actual content of this presentation, as it sounds scary on the surface.


Art & Postmort

The Brutal Art of Brütal Legend	Lee Petty	TBD	Visual Arts/ 60-minute Lecture
Overview: A behind-the-scenes look at creating the art for a highly ambitious, Heavy Metal inspired original game, this talk examines how the look of Brütal Legend was defined and realized. Details on how Double Fine met the challenge of creating a unique, stylized look while also delivering a “AAA looking” game on the current generation of consoles are revealed.

I am actually not super-psyched on Brutal Legend's visual style, but I do love any big-budget AAA game that shoots for a non-standard aesthetic. Maybe this presentation will help me warm up to Brutal Legend's particular take on dark 'n' quirky.

Creating First Person Movement for MIRROR'S EDGE	Tobias Dahl Jonas Aberg	TBD	Visual Arts/ 60-minute Lecture
Overview: Dice has taken the first person genre to new grounds with the free running first person adventure MIRROR'S EDGE. Learn what some of the challenges were and how we successfully overcame them when creating a believable first person full body experience

First-person body awareness is pretty excellent in my opinion. I can see my feet? Holy shit! Seeing DICE's processes for conceiving and implementing their first-person parkour sounds interesting.

The Unique Lighting in MIRROR'S EDGE: Experiences with Illuminate Labs Lighting Tools	David Larsson Henrik Halen	Wednesday, 10:30am — 11:30am	Visual Arts/ 60-minute Sponsored Session
Overview: We will present the technology and ideas behind the unique lighting in MIRROR'S EDGE from EA DICE. We will cover how DICE adopted Global illumination into their lighting process and Illuminate Labs current toolbox of state of the art lighting technology.

Sure it's a sponsored session, but the lighting in Mirror's Edge was really cool! The bounce lighting off bright orange paint onto a white concrete wall was just beautiful. I'd love to see how they did it.


There you have it, a full lineup! Sounds like a great selection of sessions this year-- it's all incredibly interesting, even the stuff that might rub me the wrong way :-) Safe travels and hope to see you there.

Read More...

Summary only...

Informative

[This post was graciously republished by Edge Online.]

I decided I wanted to make video games when I was nearing the end of my college career. I knew I wanted to get into design. Unfortunately, I didn't know how.

During this time I attended a free seminar held outside Seattle on the topic of how to get into game development. It was presented panel-style, featuring a group of producers, artists, and HR managers on an auditorium stage before a surprisingly large crowd. Individual sessions throughout the day touched on the qualities developers look for when hiring, how to put together a good CV, a Q&A forum with the panel, and so on. Near the end of the seminar, one of the speakers summed up the takeaway of this entire how-to-get-into-the-industry confab:

"Make cool shit, and show it off to anyone and everyone."

The statement, simple and common sense as it is, was driven home in the context of this big to-do at a convention center outside of Seattle. It seemed almost a trite sentiment, but if these industry people bothered to bring us hundreds of neophytes and wannabes all the way out here, and agreed that this simple mantra was what we needed to hear, then that must be all there is to it. And as far as I can tell, it's turned out to be true over the years.

I'm sure that most designers, myself included, occasionally get an e-mail or question at a social function (often from a mom, on behalf of her teenage son) asking "how do you get to be a video game designer?" The answer is already stated above, but I'll go into detail here, drawing on my own experience.

For my part, I'll assume no technical skill. If you can program code or make art, you've already got advantages I didn't when starting out. Let's assume all you've got is a desire to design video games, and a modicum of free time (or the ability to make some for yourself) and that you're not going to a video game-related college or trade school (for my money, I say just get a good liberal arts degree from a state school.) I'll also assume your interest is in big, commercial games; if you're interested in indie games, redirect here.

My approach was to enter via level design, which is the practice of creating gameplay spaces for the player to inhabit. In a game like Half-Life, the level designer lays out the rooms in part of Black Mesa, and places enemies and power-ups throughout these rooms, as well as scripting thing like the events occurring outside the initial tram ride, or the resonance cascade sequence. In modern game development the artistic side of world-building is generally the responsibility of another person entirely; a level designer doesn't make textures to put on walls or build 3D objects, but may sometimes help decide where these things are placed in the level.

So, step 1: Make cool shit. The barrier to entry here is a capable PC, but if you have a machine that can run new games then it can probably also handle making content for those games. If you're in college there is always the computer lab.

Many PC games ship with free editors that you can use to make your own levels. So, find out which games include level editors, then pick one you enjoy playing and would like to make your own content for. This is the important part: you need to choose a project that you really, truly want to play the end product of, as opposed to picking something you think is "marketable." It's the only way to maintain the momentum required to get projects finished, and to make sure you're really getting into something you're going to enjoy doing. If you like first-person shooters, Doom 3/Quake 4, Unreal Tournament 2KX/3/Gears of War, Half-Life 2 (and all the Source games like Counter-Strike, Left 4 Dead, Portal, and Team Fortress 2) F.E.A.R., Far Cry 2 and Crysis are only some of the games that ship with editors. Roleplaying games like Neverwinter Nights, Oblivion, and Fallout 3 all feature tools for making your own content. Realtime strategy games like Warcraft 3 and Dawn of War ship with level editors as well. New games featuring full editors are becoming less common these days due to the scale of projects and the resources required to support the tools, but it's likely that more than a few of the games you like have released the means allowing you to make your own content.

So, dig in. If you're a big multiplayer gamer, make deathmatch or capture-the-flag maps. If you're more interested in singleplayer games with a lot of scripting and enemy encounters, make sure you use an editor that allows you to build that kind of content. Making multiplayer arenas won't do you a lot of good if what you really want to do is set up interesting situations for a single player to find himself in. Most released tools have a wiki or community forum online, filled with tutorials and tips on how to get your level up and running. Spend time after work or school building simple little test maps until you have all the core gameplay concepts down: your first level out of the gate shouldn't be an epic production. Instead just make a simple box and figure out how to get enemies spawning in there, then branch out to more complex situations. Once you have the basics of your editor down, start stringing what you've learned into a more full map that someone else could play through and enjoy.

At this point, move on to step 2: Show your stuff to anyone and everyone. Join forums populated by people who are interested in the game you're working on, and modding in general. Post updates as you make progress. Ask others for feedback, and for advice on how to solve problems you encounter. Most importantly, find people who are interested in playtesting your maps for you. Send early versions out to others on the web and ask them to play them, then to send you any constructive criticism they have.

This accomplishes two things: one, having others playtest your maps will just make them better, period. Take constructive criticism to heart, try to implement the changes that others suggest, then have them play again to see if the experience is any better or worse. A project created in a vaccuum will likely only be enjoyable by its creator. Having more eyes on your project early will help you polish it into something that can be understood and enjoyed by anyone who encounters it.

Secondly, getting your stuff out there onto the web helps you make connections that may later be entry points into doing this as your job. I got my first design job when someone on a message board I frequented suggested I apply for an open position at his company, and recommended me to his boss. If I hadn't been linking to my maps online, talking to people about them, and generally making myself visible, I never would have known to apply at that company or had that inside connection. The first people to get a shot at any open job slot are the ones that somebody on the inside already knows. So, make yourself known. Enter contests and level showcases. Be proud of your work. Eventually someone will notice.

You need to end up with a few levels worth showing off, then to compile them into a portfolio and send it to any company you know of that might have an opening. The most useful portfolio is made up of screenshots and especially video of levels you've made, along with of course the level files themselves so potential employers can play your stuff. Capture video of playthroughs of your maps with something like Fraps, then upload them to a site like Youtube or Vimeo. Include these links along with the screenshots of your work and descriptions of each level. The most important thing to any potential employer is going to be the quality of your work; it's your job to make that work as easily accessible as possible. My most recent portfolio (which, granted, includes professional work) is a post on this blog, containing the aforementioned screenshots, videos and text in an easy-to-read web format.

Finally, no job is too humble to be your first. When I graduated college, I didn't have a level design portfolio yet; but, knowing my long-term goal, I worked as a quality assurance tester, first temp then full-time, for a year and a half while I worked on my levels on nights and weekends. Working QA made my day job productive to my end goal (experience inside a game studio, familiarity with the processes,) while giving me time to work on my portfolio during off hours.

Similarly, I jumped at the chance to move 2000 miles away to Texas and work on a low-budget expansion pack as my first design job. It wasn't glamorous or convenient, but if you expect to be hired right out of the gate to work on the next Grand Theft Auto or Halo game, you are very likely to be disappointed. Experience leads to new opportunities; don't be too proud to work on a project nobody's ever heard of, or that your friends wouldn't preorder. In all likelihood you will learn a lot in the process, making you better prepared for the future.

Speaking of Texas, unless you're very lucky, don't expect the first job offers you get to be right down the street from your house. Games industry people tend to move around a lot, or at least once or twice. If you can't go to where the games are, your options are going to be severely limited. Many commercial game companies are in big metropolitan areas-- think of moving as an opportunity to experience a new part of the world and you'll be better off for it.

So, in long and short form, make cool shit, and show it off to anyone and everyone. If you can't maintain the energy required to build a worthwhile portfolio during your off hours, game design may not be right for you. But find a project that excites you and pour yourself into it, and good things should follow in time.

Read More...

Summary only...

Yearbook

Leigh Alexander, video game journalist person and writer of the SexyVideogameland blog, started a side project a little while ago: it's a sort of yearbook of video game developers of all stripes who volunteer to participate, under the (possibly slightly unfortunate) banner of SexyVideogamedeveloperland. I opted in, as have a number of developers from prominent studios like Bethesda, Ubisoft Montreal and Sony, as well as some indie projects, representing programming, design, QA, art, and everything in between.

It's an interesting project, specifically because its main goal is to humanize game developers, who are often obscured behind the monolithic banners of their publishers or development houses. The most useful aspect of this venture as I see it would be the project's potential to inspire. I know that one major step in my own process of realizing I wanted to make games professionally was reading about the few individual figures the games industry made available to fans at that time: Will Wright, Peter Molyneux, Tim Schafer, Warren Spector and others. Seeing that games were made by people, and reading the stories about how they'd gotten to where they were, that they tended to be conversant on games the same way I was, and that this was something that anyone could do if they were willing to put forth the effort, was the inspiration I needed to decide I was going to devote myself to the pursuit of making games.

So, I added a little "how I got into game design" blurb on my post. If some young person reads through the SVGDL entries and it brings them one step closer to joining the game development ranks, I think there will have been a positive effect. The main thing the project needs is more developers getting involved, and more people getting the word out. If you have a minute and the means, jump in!

Read More...

Summary only...

On Invisibility

Thanks to friend Chris Remo for republishing this essay on the Gamasutra network.

When one is moved by an artist's work, it's sometimes said that the piece 'speaks' to you. Unlike art, games let you speak back to them, and in return, they reply. If the act of playing a video game is akin to carrying on a conversation, then it is the designer of the game with whom the player is conversing, via the game's systems.

In a strange way then, the designer of a video game is himself present as an entity within the work: as the "computer"-- the sum of the mechanics with which the player interacts. The designer is in the value of the shop items you barter for, the speed and cunning your rival racers exhibit, the accuracy of your opponent's guns and the resiliency with which they shrug off your shots, the order of operations with which you must complete a puzzle. The designer determines whether you win or lose, as well as how you play the game. In a sense, the designer resides within the inner workings of all the game's moving parts.

It's a wildly abstract and strangely mediated presence in the work: unlike a writer who puts his own views into words for the audience to read or hear, or the painter who visualizes an image, creates it and presents it to the world, a game designer's role is to express meaning and experiential tenor via potential: what the player may or may not do, as opposed to exactly what he will see, in what order, under which conditions. This potential creates opportunity-- the opportunity for the player to wield a palette of expressive inputs, in turn drawing out responses from the system, which finally results in an end-user experience that, while composed of a finite set of components, is nonetheless a unique snowflake, distinct from any other player's.

One overlapping consideration of games and the arts is the degree to which the artist or designer reveals evidence of his hand in the final work. In fine art, the role of the artist's hand has long been manipulated and debated: ancient Greek sculptors and Renaissance painters burnished their statuary and delicately glazed their oils to disguise any evidence of the creator's involvement, attempting to create idealized but naturalistic images-- windows to another moment in reality, realistic representations of things otherwise unseeable in an age before photography. Impressionist artists, followed by the Abstract Expressionists, embraced the artist's presence in the form of raw daubs and splashes of paint, drifting away from or outright opposing representational art in the age of photographic reproduction. Minimalists and Pop artists sought in response to remove the artist's hand from the equation through industrial fabrication techniques and impersonal commercial printing methods, returning the focus to the image itself, as a way of questioning the validity of personal and emotional artistic themes in the modern age.

The designer's presence in a video game might be similarly modulated, to a variety of ends. If a designer lives in the rules of the gameworld, then it is the player's conscious knowledge of the game's ruleset that exposes evidence of his hand.

Take for instance a game like Tetris. Tetris is almost nothing but its rules: its presentation is the starkest visualization of its current system state; it features no fictional wrapper or personified elements; any meaning it exudes or emotions it fosters are expressed entirely through the player's dialogue with its intensely spare ruleset. The game might speak to any number of themes-- anxiety, Sisyphisian futility, the randomness of an uncaring universe-- and it does so only through an abstract, concrete and wholly transparent set of rules. The player is fully conscious of the game's rules and is in dialogue only with them-- and thereby with the designer, Alexey Pajitnov-- at all times when playing Tetris. While the game's presentation is artistically minimalist, the design itself is integrally formalist. But whereas formalism in the fine arts is meant to exclude the artist's persona from interpretation of the work, a formalist video game consists only of its exposed ruleset, and thereby functions purely as a dialogue with the designer of those rules. Embracing this abstract formalist approach requires the designer to let go of naturalistic simulation, but allows the most direct connection between designer and player: a pure conduit for ideas to be expressed through rules and states.

Alternately, the designer's hand is least evident when players are wholly unconscious of the gameworld's underlying ruleset. I don't mean here abstract formalist designs wherein the mechanics are intentionally obscured-- in that case, "the player cannot easily obtain knowledge of the rules" is simply another rule. Rather, I refer to "immersive simulations"-- games that attempt to utilize the rules of our own world as fully as possible, presenting clearly discernible affordances and supplying the player with appropriate inputs to interact with the gameworld as he might the real world. Theoretically, the ultimate node on this design progression might be the experience of The Matrix or Star Trek's holodeck-- a simulated world that for all intents and purposes functions identically to our own, and with which the player may interact fludily and unconsciously. This approach to game design bears most in common with Renaissance artists' attempts to precisely model reality through painting, to much the same ends: an illusionistically convincing work which might 'trick' the viewer into mistaking the frame (of the painting or the monitor) for a window into an alternate viewpoint on our own reality.

However, where Renaissance artists needed to model our world visually, designers of immersive simulations strive to model our world functionally. This utilization of an underlying ruleset that is unconsciously understood by the player allows the work of the designer to remain invisible, setting up the game as a more perfect stage for others' endeavors-- the player's self-expression, and the writer's and visual artist's craft-- as well as presenting a more perfectly transparent lens through which the game's alternate reality may be viewed. Every time the player is confronted with overt rules that they must acknowledge consciously, the lens is smudged, the stage eroded; at every point that the functionality of a simulated experience deviates jarringly from the natural world's, the designer's hand is exposed to the player, drawing attention away from the world as a believable place, and onto the limitations of an artificial set of concrete rules dictated by the designer.

Clearly the theoretically ideal, VR version of 'being there' is impossible with current technology, and may never become a reality at all. But using the concept of perfectly invisible simulation as a lens for examining player immersion in current games, how do common design conventions of today unintentionally draw the designer's hand into the fore, resulting in more mediated or artificial experiences?

One common pitfall might be an over-reliance on a Hollywood-derived linear progression structure, which in turn confronts the player with a succession of mechanical conditions they must fulfill to proceed. If I, as a player, must defeat the boss, or pull the bathysphere lever, or slide down the flagpole to progress from level 1 to level 2, then I understand the world in a limited, artificial way. Space doesn't exist as a line, nor are our lives composed of a linear sequence of deterministic events; when our gameworlds are arranged this way, the player must be challenged to satisfy their arbitrary win conditions, which in turn requires that they understand the limited rules which constrain the experience. The designer's role is dictatorial, telling the player "here are the conditions that I've decided you must satisfy." The player's inputs test against these pre-determined conditions until they are fulfilled, at which point the designer allows the player to progress. Within this structure, the designer's hand looks something like the following:

Creating games without a linear progression structure, and therefore without overt, challenge-based gating goals, allows the player to inhabit the space with a rhythm that better mirrors their own life's than a movie's pacing, as opposed to focusing on artificial pinchpoints that cinch the gameworld's possibility space into a straight line.

Another offending convention might be a question of where the game's control scheme lives. In character-driven games, the player's inputs most commonly reside in the controller itself, requiring the player to memorize which button does what. The simple fact that the player can only perform actions which are mapped to controller buttons confronts them with the limitations of their role within the world; the player-character is not a 'real person' but a tiny bundle of verbs wandering around the world. Run, jump, punch, shoot, gas, brake, and occasionally a more nuanced context action when they stand in the right spot-- this is the extent of the player's agency. More pointedly, having to memorize button mapping is a ruleset itself, and one that pulls players out of the experience. "How do I jump?" "What does the B button do?" These are concerns that distract from the experience of being there.

Alternatively, the game's control scheme might live largely within the simulation itself. If the player's possible interactions lived within the objects in the gameworld instead of within the control pad, the player's range of interactions would only be limited by the extent to which the designer supported them, as opposed to the number of buttons on the controller. Likewise, the more interactions that are drawn out of the gameworld itself, as opposed to being fired into it by the player, the more immersed the player is in the experience of being there, as opposed to the mastery of an ornate control scheme. This control philosophy does not support many games that rely on quick reflexes and life-or-death situations, but perhaps that isn't such a bad thing. One need only look at the success of The Sims and extrapolate its control philosophy outward: each object in the world is filled with unique interactions, resulting in seemingly endless possibilities spread out before the player.

A related convention that unduly exposes a game's underlying mechanics results from our need to communicate the player-character's physical state to the player. In many genre games, the player must know his character's current level of health, stamina, and so forth. In real life, one is simply aware of their own physical state; however, since games must communicate relevant information almost entirely through the visuals, we end up with health bars, numerical hitpoint readouts, and pulsing red screen overlays to communicate physical state. The player then is less concerned with their character being 'hurt' or 'in pain' as with their being 'damaged,' like a car or a toy. The rules become transparent: when I lose all my hitpoints I die; when I use a health kit I recover a certain percentage of my hitpoints; I am a box of numbers, as opposed to a real person in a real place.

Similar to the prior point, the hitpoint problem presents a limitation native to game genres which rely on combat and life-or-death situations as their core conflicts, as opposed to implying an insurmountable limitation of the medium as a whole. If I am not in danger of being shot, stabbed, bitten or crushed, then I am free to relate to my player-character in human terms instead of numerical status, thus remaining unconscious of the designer's hand.

All this isn't to say that downplaying the designer's hand is an inherently superior design philosophy; clearly, many of us connect deeply with the conscious interaction between player and machine. But as our industry rides a wave of visual fidelity ever forward, our reliance on game genres tied to the assimilation of concrete rulesets only deepens the schism between player expectations and simulational veracity. It's been posited that games are poised to enter a golden age-- a renaissance, one might say-- and as designers, we might do well to step out of the spotlight, stop obscuring the lens into our simulated worlds, and embrace the virtues of invisibility.


[I'd like to thank Clint Hocking, whose presentation I-fi: Immersive Fidelity in Games informed my thinking.]

Read More...

Summary only...