Long post ahead.
I have never been a huge fan of the Legend of Zelda games, at least not since Link to the Past. There are plenty of reasons to like Zelda-- the cohesiveness of the design, the high production values, the archetypal storytelling-- but for some reason the games don't keep me engaged. And I think it's because at a high level they are completely deterministic.
In any Zelda title, you can open the pause menu and view a status screen that shows your progress towards collecting all the artifacts required to complete the game. From the outset, I know that I need to obtain this specific set of widgets to 'win,' and end the game. Subconsciously then, the game becomes not about exploring a world to find a succession of interesting places, and finally defeat Ganon and free the missing princess (the primary conundrums of the narrative,) but instead of fill in this chart on my pause screen, piece by piece, in order, until the game is over. It become mechanical-- about completing a series of incremental acts, all predetermined and laid out to me from square one, instead of organically progressing towards a larger final goal. And I naturally disconnect from that kind of experience. It feels too artificial, like I'm just going through the motions of pressing the right buttons at the pre-determined times, making no choices or impact of my own.
Now of course this is true of almost all games-- in any given video game, I can only perform a pre-determined set of actions, leading to a pre-determined set of outcomes. However, the element of predestination in one game can be much more or less explicit than in another. It comes down to both structure and presentation. Half of the issue is just how linear the progression of the overall game is; the other half is whether or not the player sees it coming.
So, you could think of the progression through a narrative game as a piece of twine, with a hung curtain hiding its endpoint from its beginning. As the game is played, the player pulls the twine towards himself, gradually revealing more and more of it from behind he curtain, until he reaches the endpoint, revealing the full length of the twine and completing the game.
With a Zelda game, to my eyes the curtain is largely transparent, evaporating the anticipation of finding out what comes next, and the illusion that my progress forward is determined by my own decisions. Instead of building a final composition within the game's framework, I'm simply painting by numbers.
But, Zelda aside, I think that the twine analogy can be a useful tool for plotting the structure of any narrative game. I am talking about games that have at least one predetermined path through from the start to at least one discreet ending. Each possible path, each parallel universe in this string theory, is an individual thread that makes up the piece of twine. The defining attribute of the twine when describing a specific game's structure is how the individual threads diverge, reconverge, and eventually terminate.
Let's take my pet example, the posterboy for linear single-path structure, F.E.A.R. It would be a single piece of twine; there are no branching paths or significant player choices that meaningfully impact the outcome of the overall progression. F.E.A.R. is a single, unified length of twine that the player continually pulls on from start to finish. However, it's still compelling because this level of authorial control allows the designers to take advantage of more cinematic techniques than with other structures, and the constant anticipation to see what lies next behind the curtain keeps the player engaged. Other games that might be a single length of twine are Gears of War, all of id's FPS's, and Prince of Persia: Sands of Time.
Now consider a game like Hitman. The game is composed of a set sequence of levels, but the player's progression through each individual level is not restricted to a single thread. Instead, available to the player are a great number of possible threads to follow to the required objectives, none of which might be obvious to the player upon first glance. Hereby, at the beginning of each level the length of twine diverges into perhaps a dozen individual threads, which then tangle together into a loose knot; the player must examine the gamespace to pick out a viable thread to follow. The longer the player spends with this knot, the more it is unraveled, until the player has fully untangled the threads from one another, allowing him to see all the possible paths from the point of divergence back to the point of reconvergence (completing his objectives and exiting the level, which must happen for the player to proceed.) The beauty of this approach is that the player only need untangle one single thread and follow it to progress to the next knot; on the other hand, a devoted player can spend hours upon hours on a single knot, untangling it further and further until they have separated and examined each of the individual threads therein. After traversing the sequence of individual knots, the twine reconverges one final time, presenting the player with a single unified outcome to the game overall. Other games that might share this structure are Thief: The Dark Project and The Warriors.
Now picture an open-world game, like Grand Theft Auto 3. Centrally, there is one primary thread. This thread leads the player through the core story missions-- the critical path-- that ground the game in a central sequence of events. The player can simply follow this single thread through to the end, experiencing the full progression of the core experience, and complete the game, reaching its endpoint. However, all along the length of twine, additional threads branch off and terminate on their own. These are the sidequests, the optional missions that the player may take on to acquire additional assets ingame, or simply to flesh out their own experience. These secondary threads may be passed up entirely or returned to after skipping them initially, but they never impact the central thread. Eventually, regardless of how many side-threads the player has followed, they reach the same conclusion upon finishing the central thread, and completing the game. There is only one overall endpoint. You could picture this piece of twine taking the shape of a pine tree-- the critical path is the trunk leading all the way to the top, while the secondary threads are the branches the split off and give the tree its distinctive shape. Other games that might share this structure are Morrowind and Oblivion, Bully, or Fallout.
Though I do love many of the above-mentioned games, something that disappoints me about them is that they all lead to a single conclusion, regardless of the broader decisions the player makes beforehand. Any meaningful impact that the player's choices seem to have on the overall arc of the game narrative is an illusion. This is why games that feature multiple conclusions, dependent upon meaningful choices made by the player throughout the game, are particularly interesting to me.
One title that might come to mind then would be Deus Ex. The player makes choices throughout the game, many seemingly meaningful-- whether this or that character lives or dies. However, when you examine the game's structure, you can see that it has most in common with the series of knots above. While I can approach the game's challenges with a number of different strategies based on the supplied affordances, my decisionmaking loses meaning when I reach regular, pre-determined narrative chokepoints. The most notable of these might be the fact that I must flee from my government agency and join the NSA; regardless of the choices I make up to that point, the game proceeds down a single vector before again splitting off into a number of separate threads. The threads reconverge periodically throughout the game, at points where the designers have made a central narrative decision for me. Likewise, the multiple endings are an illusion; all of the threads reconverge again immediately before the ending-- at the doors of Area 51-- before splitting cleanly into three distinct threads, each of which represents one ending I may choose at my own whim. Like in the games above, nothing I have done up to this point has any impact on the ending I receive. Instead, I'm told to choose either Door A, B, or C, and walk away with the ending I've picked. The other game I can think of that shares this structure is Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, which is even more transparent as it hands you the possible endings as options in a dialogue tree.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl shares something in common with the Deus Ex endgame structure, but distinguishes itself by providing an entirely open-world framework as opposed to DX's controlled narrative, and offering at least one ending which is based entirely on the player's own incremental decisions made throughout the body of the game; and depending on the player's approach, this may be the only ending available for that particular campaign.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is an open-world first-person shooter with moderate RPG elements. How the player navigates the gameworld is up to them, as is the range of actions they may take. All but the NPCs most essential to the critical path can be killed, factions can be joined or turned against, and the player can generally exploit the game with idealism, pragmatism, or profit in mind. The interesting part of the game's twine is that it does have a central thread that the player may follow to the end, as well as subquests that split off; but reaching the end of the central thread is not guaranteed, and which tangential threads you follow actually impacts what conclusion or conclusions you receive.
Basically, your destination at the end of the game (spoilers ahead) is the Sarcophagus that houses the carcass of the Chernobyl nuclear power generator. Inside the Sarcophagus is rumored to be a Monolith, that will grant the wish of anyone who addresses it. Throughout the game, a variety of metrics are tracked in the background, unbeknownst to the player--which factions he has aligned with, how much money he has hoarded, and so forth. Dependent upon his overall behavior throughout the game, he will only make one resultant wish when he addresses the Monolith at the endgame (for instance, "I want to be rich" if he's gathered a certain amount of money.) Hereby, the player's own incremental decisions and demonstrated disposition throughout the game have a meaningful impact on the outcome of the overall narrative thread, lending gravity to his actions and acknowledging his uniqueness as an individual actor.
However, the attentive player will follow the central narrative thread all the way to its endpoint and discover that there is a secret entrance to the true source of the Monolith's power, deep beneath the Chernobyl NPP. The player's personal Monolith ending is also available at this point, but the player is rewarded for completing the entirety of the central thread by being given the option to explore a different, more narrative-focused than player-focused, conclusion. The player may decide to either join with the C-Consciousness Project that powers the Monolith, or destroy it, and with it wipe the Zone around Chernobyl from the Earth. Again, this ending is not available to all players-- the Chernobyl NPP can be reached without having discovered the tools required to reveal the secret entrance. If the player investigates the central thread fully they have access to the game's "true" ending, but only if they have, through their own decisions and effort, acquired the tools to reveal it. Hereby, even the "stock" endings to the game are a personalized conclusion based on the individual player's actions earlier in the campaign, while the ability to choose between one encountering them them allows the player to maintain the power of decision up to the very end.
In S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s case, the twine immediately diverges from its starting point. It splits into two threads-- the central thread, and a secondary tangential thread, which represents the player's side-actions, the ones that determine his Monolith ending. These two threads proceed parallel to one another. The tangential thread splits further and further as the player defines his secondary ending, eliminating possible tangential threads through his own actions. Likewise, at the point where the player has the option to pursue the secret entrance in the NPP, the central thread splits off into two-- one branch is a dead end; the player will not reach the C-Consciousness project, and only has the secondary ending available, while the other continues the central thread to its true conclusion. If the player does follow the central thread to its true endpoint, the central thread and secondary thread reconverge immediately before the finale, at the doors of the NPP. From there, the player may explore the NPP and decide which path to take. However, unlike Deus Ex or the like, not all endings possible at the campaign's start are available to the player one they reach this chokepoint, but instead only those he has made available to himself through his own actions over the entire course of the game. He may have three possible endings available, or only one, never two. The point of this is, as bolded above, that the possible conclusions are entirely dependent upon the meaningful incremental decisions made by the player, organically over the entire course of the campaign. In the end, everything I do as a player matters. Conversely, in a game where all possible threads reconverge before the twine's endpoint, and are all available for my unrestricted choosing, any decisions I've made up to that final narrative chokepoint become meaningless; all those earlier threads might as well have been one single length of twine.
I feel that player-dictated feedback is important, as it's what sets games apart from film or books. Even when it's simply choosing a series of binary forks in the path, that they actually lead somewhere unique to that player is essential to the experience. Gradually revealing a length of twine can be enjoyable, but is it any different, really, than the film experience? And if my individual actions don't impact my branching campaign's outcome, have I really accomplished anything unique? If we return to the tree analogy, as an invested player, I don't want my twine to come out looking like a pine, or a palm, but a full-grown oak.
3.31.2007
Twine
3.20.2007
Personality
Today I was thinking about Personality of Place.
I am not a big proponent of author-dictated narrative in character-driven games, but I do think that the strongest player narratives come out of games with well-crafted and unique author-dictated settings; these settings are conveyed both through the core fiction and NPC's personalities, and through the physical spaces provided by the level designer. Since the scenarist provides the raw setting data to the level designer, it's important for the settings themselves (the Places where the play occurs) to exude their own inherent personality for the level designer to play off of, either by way of exploiting expressive locale archetypes or drawing from an original fiction. Many games suffer, in my opinion, by setting their games in spaces that have no ingrained personality of their own, and thereby nothing for the level designer to channel into a truly living gamepace.
Considering my job, this train of thought started with F.E.A.R. as its reference point, compared to prior Monolith games, specifically NOLF2 in this case. While the core gameplay of F.E.A.R. is outstanding in my opinion, I feel it suffered from a lack of Personality of Place. Each setting was inherently generic-- warehouse, industrial plant, office building, office building, office building, high-tech research facility-- and that carried through into somewhat aimless level design. The story occured alongside the levels as opposed to within them-- exposition was through verbal transmissions, usually revolving around events unseen by the player. While the spaces showcase the combat effectively, they gave the level designers no strong personality traits to build off of, as they weren't integrally tied to strong narrative elements or immediately evocative locale archetypes, resulting in an overall rather dry player experience. I single out F.E.A.R. here, but this could be said of many, many action/shooter games (for instance Splinter Cell, Black, Max Payne, The Punisher, The Warriors, and so forth.)
Compare this to NOLF2, which not only had an extremely strong narrative featuring a cast of distinctively-voiced NPCs, but a succession of levels that had as much personality as the game's human characters. When it comes to snap-visualizing a space, which says more to you: "villain's secret undersea base" or "wastewater treatment plant?" "60's spy agency headquarters" or "industrial warehouse?" Hell, even "abandoned suburban home in Akron, Ohio" or "office tower?" In my opinion, the first of each of those pairs evokes not only a strong visual but a tangible mood, a personality-- something to shoot for in both look and feel of the resulting playable spaces. Choosing settings with strong Personality of Place has led to outstanding level design in such recent games as Psychonauts (the settings being the mindscapes of a variety of quirky characters) and Hitman: Blood Money (the settings being a number of exotic and not-so-exotic locales, each home to a very distinctive target for assassination.) When picturing levels, do you get more out of "sewer, factory, office, research lab" or "Mardi Gras, Mississippi riverboat, Heaven & Hell-themed rave, French opera house?" Could Psychonauts' run-of-the-mill platformer gameplay have been so engaging if it didn't take place in the minds of a paranoid conspiracy nut, a battle-hardened army general, and a frustrated painter of black velvet matadors?
The scenarist of a game is not only responsible for inspiring the player's forward movement through engaging plot points and relatable NPCs, but for inspiring the level designers to create spaces that truly exude personality, by supplying them with exciting and unique core Places to develop. It takes an incredibly self-motivated and inventive LD to infuse a boring Place with strong personality strictly through gameplay; on the other hand, an inspiring fiction and locale can lead to truly outstanding playable spaces which breathe with a unique and palpable personality all their own. To put this in MDA terms, there are types of Places that have a built-in aesthetic for the level designer to work towards, adding a unique and tangible set of emotional metrics to the process, which leads to more inspired and engaging playable spaces.
3.12.2007
Texas
Greetings from Sugar Land, Texas.
I've made the move and it's my first day at TimeGate. The project I'm working on seems to have a really solid groundwork laid for us level designers, and I'm looking forward to digging into the work.
Being in Texas is a sort of culture shock deja vu. I'm from Florida before I moved to the west coast 6 years ago, and this big, flat, hot, Republican suburban sprawl is a little uncomfortably familiar. On the way in from the airport, I saw a Support the Troops yellow ribbon bumper sticker, the loop of which was replaced with a cut-out of a Christian cross, on the back of an SUV. My first day included The Cheesecake Factory for lunch and Chili's for dinner. I'm just trying to keep my head low.
I'm planning to write up my impressions from GDC soon. There's a lot of ground to cover there, and hopefully I'll start on it when I get home. But for now, I'm off to complete my first day as a level designer.
2.26.2007
Eye
What ranking did you get last time you parallel parked?
This past weekend, Rachel and I went to the Exploratorium together. It's a hands-on science museum featuring interactive exhibits that demonstrate how the human senses and other natural phenomena work. It makes apparent many things in your everyday life that you take for granted or wouldn't otherwise be able to detect, such as exactly which points you look at when observing a photograph.
We went out to dinner afterwards. As I washed my hands in the bathroom, I imagined an exhibit that might observe you while you washed your hands, and give you a readout of how "well" or completely you had washed them, giving you a "Percentage Clean" rating, or a graphical representation of the spots you had cleaned or missed.
Though something like this would be complex to accomplish in real life, it would be par for the course in a video game. You have your avatar wash its hands, perform whatever inputs are required, and the game rates you on how well you did. Supplying control input to, and receiving tangible feedback from, "the computer" is part and parcel of the gaming experience. Tailoring your input to attain a specific numerical rating (the "perfect game" or "S Rank") is the central mechanic of many games-- Dance Dance Revolution, one-on-one fighters, shmups, and so forth.
Everything that happens in a game can easily be tracked internally (see the stats screens for Rockstar's GTA3 series and Bully); the question to the designer is: which information is revealed to the player, and which remains hidden? It's an interesting aspect of design, since any statistical information that the game reveals which the player cannot visually observe himself exposes the "third man" in every scene-- the Omnicient Eye of "the computer," which doesn't otherwise exist as an entity in the diegesis of the gameworld. In a game, you could be supplied with a numerical ranking upon completing the hand-washing action, but if you somehow received this data when washing your hands in real life, what would the implication be? That you were being surveilled by some unseen force.
In a game with a realistic setting, I think designer-dictated information control is important as a means of maintaining the game's artifice. If my character is in a gritty, real-world locale, performing down-to-earth, human-scale actions, numerical stats and ratings are going to break the suspension of disbelief-- how is my Strength rating of 8 derived? Did I get that from my yearly physical exam? Does my avatar "feel" objectively like he has about an 8 in strength relative to other people? How do I know the Armor Rating of a leather jacket? I've never seen it sewn onto the tag of any article of clothing I've ever bought. Anything in life is only knowable through direct observation-- as I practice something, there's no meter for me to fill or any objective scale for "leveling up"; I can only determine my own improvement through direct observation of the results of my practice.
Hereby, in a game where my character increases in skill over the course of the game, I would much rather have all the numbers hidden from my view as a player. If I practice shooting, I would love for the only feedback I get about skill improvement to be my character's shots becoming observably more accurate; I'd love not to have a weapon's effectiveness determined by its having an "Attack Rating of 10," but by my observing that, yes, a claw hammer is a fairly deadly bludgeoning weapon, and I know my character to be fairly strong, and when I try out swinging the weapon at a piece of plywood, observing that the wood is cracked in half.
The other side of this would be intentionally designing the game to provide the player with excessive amounts of tracking information that they would never be able to observe on their own, very overtly throughout normal play. This approach could effectively reinforce the futuristic Police State as a setting. Consider playing a character in a setting like that of 1984 or Minority Report; each action you performed, even when your character was completely alone, could present the player with a numerical score onscreen, implying their actions being constantly watched and recorded through some sort of active surveillance, acknowledging the computer's Omniscient Eye as an active entity in the gameworld.
Just another instance of the possibilities of a designer intentionally uses a game's "gaminess" to aesthetic ends.
2.21.2007
Pro
Official announcement:
I will begin work as a level designer at TimeGate Studios on March 12th!
TimeGate's most recent release was Extraction Point, the official expansion pack for F.E.A.R. Considering my work with WorldEdit and the F.E.A.R. maps I've released, I would say that TimeGate and I are a pretty good match :-)
TimeGate has been on the scene since the late 90's, gaining prominence with the Kohan series of RTS games before switching gears with the release of Extraction Point. I was very impressed with my playthrough of the expansion, which recently won PC Gamer Magazine's Expansion of the Year 2006 award. It's a great team of guys there and I'm excited about the project.
I'll be moving to Texas immediately after GDC. I'll miss being in the Bay Area with Rachel and everyone else I know here, but I feel like taking on this new role will be worth it.
I hope to find the time to release BENEATH pt. 2, which is not so far from completion at this point. I'd like to make it a priority, as I'd hate to see this go unfinished, since I'm excited about how I plan to finish up the story.
In any case, with this move I'll be a professional designer, which just makes me happy beyond words. I'll keep this blog up to date with how it all works out. Thanks to everyone who's provided me with the encouragement and support to do this thing. Lone star state, here I come :-)
2.19.2007
Subvert
As any dilligent nerd should, I've familiarized myself with the ouevre of Osamu "God of Manga" Tezuka. His storytelling is masterful, and some of it is simply mind-blowing in scope. Over the decades that he produced material, he created an incredible range of properties, from Kimba the White Lion, to Black Jack the outlaw surgeon, to the millenia-spanning Phoenix series, to an eight-volume retelling of the life of Buddha, and of course his trademark character, Astro Boy.
Until recently, the original, Tezuka-directed Astro Boy animated series from the 60's wasn't available domestically. Now it's been released in two excellent box sets, the first of which I picked up and have been watching an episode or two of per night.
The thing that stands out about Tezuka is that he is first and foremost an entertainer, regardless of his subject matter. His stories are all peppered with flashy fights and plenty of quick little jokes and sight gags. Thereby, even a story with a deep theme and complex plot can entertain a viewer who's simply interested in a few laughs.
For instance: Astro Boy is a children's show, but the most recent episode we watched operated on a few assumptions that would most likely go over the intended audience's head, and featured a few quick twists that led to a significantly complicated plot. To synopsize:
Some 50 years ago, a prominent scientist, "Dr. I.C. Frost," hypothesized that if astronauts could freeze themselves during an extremely long space flight, they would be able to defrost upon arrival to explore faraway planets otherwise unreachable by humans. So, to prove that his theory is right, he established a secret lab in a hidden facility in the deserts of Egypt, built a robotic sphinx and an army of robotic crabs for protection, constructed his cryogenic chamber, and froze himself, to be defrosted in 100 years. Present day (50 years on): a nefarious character has set his sights on Dr. Frost's well-guarded technology, and employs a covert agent to kidnap Astro Boy, drain him of all but the last reserves of his power, and strand him in the desert. Having no memory of how he got there, Astro calls out for help, lost in the wastes. The nefarious character "rescues" him, restoring his power on the condition that Astro will help him in his "expedtion" to an "ancient tomb." Astro proceeds to do battle with the guardian crabs and the Sphinx, gaining entry to the secret lab. However, upon her defeat, the Sphinx reveals the nature of the tomb/lab, Dr. Frost's wishes, and her purpose. Astro then realizes he's been had, drives away the nefarious man and his crew, and agrees to keep Dr. Frost's resting place a secret between himself and the Sphinx, until Dr. Frost awakens once again. Astro flies off to another adventure, ending the episode.
Note that the above is stated in chronological order, whereas the TV episode starts at present day, and reveals the backstory later on.
The point of typing all that out was to illustrate that 1) the show's premise was based upon an understanding of the speed of spaceflight to other star systems and the concept of cyrogenics, and 2) the plot itself is fairly complex and relies on a dialogue between two different time periods and a third-act "reveal" of the nefarious character's true nature. Regardless of how far some or all of this might fly over the heads of an audience of children, the show succeeds in engaging and entertaining any viewer by featuring frequent robot combat (between Astro and the crab robots, and Astro and the Sphinx,) and a constant stream of very clever little sight gags, inserted during otherwise mundane sequences. So, a viewer that doesn't understand or care about the plot can nonetheless enjoy the show entirely for the frequent robot fighting and simple jokes, and maybe absorb the themes of the story along with the core entertainment factor.
I think that video games are ideally suited to be message delivery systems (MDS) following just the same formula. The main draw, the core experience, of a video game is the gameplay itself, which in many cases is buffered by narrative elements. The gameplay is wholly separate from the narrative; one can easily exist independent of the other. However, in most narrative games, the story elements support the gameplay and vice versa, or the two elements at least run alongside one another. Much like the viewer of an Astro Boy cartoon can enjoy the jokes and action without appreciating the overall plot and themes, the player of a game can enjoy jumping and fighting and leveling up without investing himself in the story. It's the idea of the short positive feedback loop, laid out by a colleague of mine and expanded upon further in this Gamasutra article-- the player (or viewer) is driven forward by constant small rewards to complete a larger task. The classic Lucasarts adventures are successful for the exact same reason the classic Astro Boy is: there's a joke at every turn (every click,) giving the player constant tidbits of entertainment regardless of their overall investment or progress through the total work. Overserious adventures fall flat, since when the player is stuck, they have no levity to tide them over until they figure out that frustrating puzzle. Genuinely funny adventures that keep the player stuck for too long also fail, since hearing the same jokes repeatedly stops being funny.
The possibilities for subversion in games are endless, and some games have begun to mine those possibilities. Grand Theft Auto 3 comes to mind, as does the more recent Dead Rising. GTA3's draw was the open-world action gameplay: ramping cars over buildings, blowing up crowds of onlookers, leading the cops on wild chases through the city. And yet, even if the player completely ignored the core storyline to freeform, every radio station that played in every vehicle was densely packed with ruthless satire of American culture in the form of Laszlow's bewildered talk show hosting, and the variety of consumer-lampooning advertisements that played between songs. The gameplay itself was the draw and the experience that sustained the title, but it also acted as a message delivery system, inundating the player with Rockstar's very specific point of view.
Dead Rising is the more recent, and more overt, but relatively less successful example, as its message is largely delivered during skippable cutscenes, as opposed to alongside the gameplay itself. It's great nonetheless-- it's a Japanese game, clearly made for the American market (released exclusively on the 360,) starring American characters and taking place in America, but the story itself is explicitly anti-American, anti-consumerism, anti-Western-culture. The draw of the gameplay is smashing thousands of zombies, and smash zombies you do, but at each plot point the thrust of the narrative rails on the Western way of life, targetting American gluttony, virulent consumerism, and government corruption. The idea of consumer as zombie, admittedly lifted from Dawn of the Dead, and the rampant destruction of all the products and shops in the mall as an anti-consumerist fantasy do underpin the gameplay itself, but the real, outright message delivery occurs during the discrete, skippable cutscenes, and fails to some degree through lack of integration with the core experience.
In the past, I've seen the disconnect between gameplay and narrative to be a failing of games; ideally, I believe that the player's actions should BE the narrative of the game, the events themselves perpetrated by the player dictating entirely "what happens," as opposed to the separate gameplay simply propelling the player to the next pre-scripted sequence. But I think there's a huge amount of value in intentionally exploiting that disconnect in the current generation of games to subversive ends. Since the gameplay lacks bearing on the narrative, the narrative can be whatever the designer wants. Players will consume enjoyable gameplay first and foremost, and swallow whatever rides sidecar to that experience. This is true of any game, even those with the highest production values, extending this concept to the widest possible audience. What's most exciting to me about this concept is that it's a chance for games to have tangible social impact-- something that, as a medium with an extemely large and impressionable audience, it's high time they achieved.SUBVERT! SUBVERT
2.04.2007
Theatre
This Friday we went to one night of the Noir City film series at the Castro Theatre in town. I love old film, especially stuff immediately pre- or post-war, including pre-code American pictures, Alfred Hitchcock, and pulp noirs. Friday was definitely about pulp, but it was also a tribute to cinematographer John Alton, so it was all beautifully shot and the imagery was just stunning.
The movies were definitely grade B as far as their star power and scriptwriting went, which is the draw of half the films shown at the Castro. It's also part of what made the evening interesting to me, as a viewer. The audience was definitely not taking the films overly seriously, and there ended up being a lot of "laugh lines" throughout both films that I wondered if I would've noticed or enjoyed if I'd been watching them at home on DVD. Seeing film in a theatre, especially with a big crowd of fellow movie lovers, is a truly communal experience.
It's something that, I guess, video games will never have, which may be to their benefit or detriment as a cultural medium. Games are integrally focused on the individual, the player, even when that player is participating in a multiplayer game; the player's experience is entirely self-centered, whereas the moveigoer's experience is entirely... hmm, the opposite of that. "Self-sublimating"? Maybe "introverted" versus "extroverted?" The film experience is entirely focused on the actions of others onscreen and in the movie theatre, is what I mean to say. In other words, much of the enjoyment of these films came from vicariously sharing the exact same experience with hundreds of others simultaneously, and my reactions to the events onscreen resonating through them.
I'm not sure what the implication is. I feel that games have a harder road to hoe than movies since, at their inception as a mass medium, anyone with a nickel could walk into a theatre and see a movie, enjoy it with others, discuss it with others, share it with others, and walk out with no baggage. All games (except arcade games, which were simple and have fallen out of favor) require a significant hardware buy-in, and can only be shared with a limited audience (usually at most the players involved in the game and a few onlookers, barring public tournament situations.) Games as an experience are more intimate-- based on the player's actions themselves and limited in being shared with a living room of others-- which is powerful, but also precludes the accessibility and appeal to the collective unconcscious that moviegoing provides.
Something like World of Warcraft probably appeals better to the strengths of both games and movies (a player-driven experience that is nonethless unchanging in its nature and shared simultaneously by tens of thousands of others on your server, as well as requiring only the bare minimum computer that most people already have for e-mail.) I hope someday this genre of game will be able to develop more engaging and meaningful play to go along with its appealing base architecture.
1.30.2007
Christmas
Last year was my first GDC. The conference comes again in March, and I couldn't be more excited about it, honestly. The sessions, keynotes, and Game Developer's Choice Awards were all outstanding and tend to make one terribly excited to be working in games. As I was telling a colleague, GDC has given me that sense of anticipation I used to get as a kid waiting for Christmas. It's the most wonderful time of the year.
It goes without saying that I'll be there for Miyamoto's Keynote, and the GDC Awards. Phil Harrison's thing, I dunno, probably not. I got my fill of his shitty infomercial company line at last year's Keynote. Why does this guy get to Keynote two years in a row?
I'm also planning to take the whole week off and attend...
| (305) Game Design Workshop | Marc LeBlanc | Monday, 10:00am - 6:00pm — Tuesday, 10:00am - 6:00pm | Game Design/ Two-Day Tutorial |
| Overview: This intensive 2-day workshop will explore the day-to-day craft of game design through hands-on activities, group discussion, analysis and critique. Attendees will immerse themselves the iterative process of refining a game design, and discover formal abstract design tools that will help them think more clearly about their designs and make better games. | |||
I've heard from a number of people that the workshop can be really fun, not to mention enriching in how one thinks about game design. LeBlanc has pioneered some of the biggest "Big Ideas" in design philosophy since his stint at Looking Glass, and I think it'd be fascinating to have two full days of intensive work study with him and my fellow attendees.
Let's take a look at some of the other sessions that have grabbed my attention:
| |||||||||||||
I think that fully-realized, engaging NPC crowds are going to be one of the big leaps from this to the next evolution of games, not to mention that I'm psyched for anything related to Assassin's Creed.
| |||||||||
I love studios that bank on their own original IP, and the Lith maybe most of all. Sign me up.
| Designing GEARS OF WAR: Iteration Wins | Cliff Bleszinski | TBD | Game Design/ 60-minute Lecture |
| Overview: Cliff Bleszinski, designer of GEARS OF WAR, outlines the design processes that yielded GEARS OF WAR. He takes the various features that worked in the product and breaks them down, step by step, describing how the collaborative and iterative process made them shine. | |||
| |||||||||||
These both sound like excellent design overviews/postmortems from a couple of wildly divergent but highly successful developers. One is a breakdown of how the most successful recent "core gamer's" game was designed, and the other how the breakthrough mass-appeal title Guitar Hero came to be. Tell me all about it.
| |||||||||||
This is a big one-- a showcase for recent, usually small-scale experimental game design hosted by Jonathan Blow, whose time-bending Braid brought the house down last year.
| Exploration: From Systems to Spaces to Self | Clint Hocking | TBD | Game Design/ 60-minute Lecture |
| Overview: Whether we are exploring a system-space or a simulated two or three dimensional space, every game is in some way an exploration game. This presentation examines exploration in games, and how designers can better utilize our human compulsions to explore in order to offer players a more meaningful experience. | |||
Clint Hocking is always a fascinating thinker and speaker. He's heavily into the MDA thing and the whole emergent/Looking Glass philosophy, which should come into full practice now that he's broken the bonds of Splinter Cell. I wish his talks could go on for longer than an hour.
| Game Design in Agile Development | Rory McGuire | TBD | Game Design/ 60-minute Lecture |
| Overview: In the leap to next-generation, traditional development methods are starting to show their seams. Larger technical complexities are giving designers shorter periods to find the fun and polish game play. This session covers Agile and Scrum methods, focusing on how their fundamentals benefit designers in the next generation development environment. | |||
| |||||||||||
Two sessions addressing two cutting edge approaches to design, iteration, and production flow. Maybe they'll be a little dry or over my head, but I'd love to be up on the newest approaches to next-gen studio game making.
| |||||||||||
Molyneux is generally full of shit and ditched out on his session last year, so hitting up this presentation should be good for gossip-making at least.
| Interactive Cinematography | Thiery Adam | TBD | Game Design/ 60-minute Lecture |
| Overview: Film has developed a set of camera rules and influences that have become the language of cinematography. For some reason, its wealth is largely unapplied to the camera in video games. This lecture is about learning from other mediums and figuring out how to go beyond with interactivity's possibilities. | |||
Active camera control is so much more important to the player's perception of a game than most people give it credit for. The incredibly dynamic camera in God of War, Gears of War or Resident Evil 4 are great examples of an effective, active in-game camera. I'd like to see what this guy has to say.
| Narrative Landscapes: Shaping Player Experience through World Geometry | Brian Upton | TBD | Game Design/ 60-minute Lecture |
| Overview: When a player moves through a game world the physical geometry of the virtual space imposes an implicit structure on the play experience. This session explores practical level design techniques for shaping that experience, drawing on examples from real games and theme parks as well as academic research in virtual environments and city planning. | |||
Directly tailoring the player's experience through space design? Yes please.
| Reflections of Zelda | Eiji Aonuma | TBD | Game Design/ 60-minute Lecture |
| Overview: Aonuma explains the development team's formidable task of progressing the epic franchise across multiple generations of Nintendo systems. This is a rare opportunity to learn behind-the-scenes development challenges and triumphs from Link's latest installments. | |||
Zelda... Seeee-crets! Sounds like fun if there's nothing else going on in this slot.
| |||||||||||
I love, love, love Suda51's crazy ass. If you think I'm missing him in person you've got another thing coming.
| SPORE's Magic Crayons | Chaim Gingold | TBD | Game Design/ 60-minute Lecture |
| Overview: This lecture discusses the appeal, challenges, and techniques used in the design of games with a strong player creativity component. Many programs will be compared and analyzed, but specific emphasis is placed on the design and methodology used in the development of SPORE's editors. | |||
Spore session. Pretty much a given.
| |||||||||||
Warren Spector musing about the state of the art in game-driven narrative? I'm not missing this one.
| The Imago Effect: Avatar Psychology | Harvey Smith | TBD | Game Design/ 60-minute Lecture |
| Overview: The Imago Effect: Avatar Psychology Creating an in-game representation often holds a strange fascination for players; for some games, we spend more time crafting our avatars than we do playing. On the surface, character creation seems simple. This session explores the notion that there's much more going on in the player's mind, taking a look into the ways we let our audience engage in self-express through avatar. | |||
Avatar creation and customization is one of my favorite feature of any given game in practically any genre. Being able to fully customize my own avatar in the upcoming Mass Effect sold me on that game about twice as hard as I would've been otherwise. I don't know if I can ever forgive Harvey Smith for Deus Ex 2, but I'm into this subject and he seems like a smart guy.
| The Game Design Challenge: The Needle and Thread Interface | Eric Zimmerman | TBD | Game Design/ 60-minute Panel |
| Overview: The Game Design Challenge is back for another year, with three talented designers tackling a very unusual design problem. Their assignment? Design a game with a highly unorthodox input device: a square of fabric, a needle, and some thread. At the session, each panelist will present a unique solution to this game design enigma, and the audience plays an important role as well � by voting in the winner of the Game Design Challenge 2006. | |||
| The Metagame: A Battle of Videogame Smarts | Frank Lantz Eric Zimmerman Warren Spector Marc LeBlanc Jesper Juul Clint Hocking Jonathan Blow Tracy Fullerton | TBD | Vision/ 60-minute Panel |
| Overview: The Metagame combines a gameshow format with strategic competition and lively debate. Inspired by Herman Hesse's The Glass Bead Game, in the Metagame six videogame sages compete in a battle of aesthetic analysis and critical connections. | |||
Here are a couple of frivolous, fun sessions run by the insufferable Eric Zimmerman. But everybody likes seeing design superstars playing little games. I'll be there.
| |||||||||||
Sounds useful.
| Censorship of Video Game Content: Time to Fight Back | Lawrence G. Walters | TBD | IGDA/ 60-minute Lecture |
| Overview: The intent of this lecture is to educate the attendees regarding the current legal climate associated with video game content laws, and evaluate some potential future trends. | |||
| Who's the Real Bully?: Rights and Responsibilities in the Anti-Game Debate | Daniel Greenberg | TBD | IGDA/ 60-minute Roundtable |
| Overview: Beating up on the games industry is easy and grandstanding carries little political price. Defending any new media is very difficult. What can developers do? What are our rights, what are our responsibilities, and what are our choices in defending ourselves and protecting our work? | |||
A couple of sessions about the current state of games, regulation, censorship, and freedom of speech. Zeitgeisty!
| Preserving Games: Saving the Past and Setting Safeguards for Today | Henry Lowood | TBD | IGDA/ 60-minute Roundtable |
| Overview: This roundtable meets twice. The first meeting emphasizes preserving digital games of the past, many of which are rapidly becoming endangered. The second shades towards organizing an archiving strategy for games produced today. | |||
I've started to think about historical game archiving and game culture heritage preservation. I'd hate to see so many games of today and yesterday go the way of the thousands of films that have been lost to history through neglect. Games have the advantage in that they're non-physical in their essence so there's no flimsy film to dry out or burn up. This seems like an interesting topic to explore.
| Game Criticism: Opportunities and Approaches (Day One) | Ian Bogost | TBD | IGDA/ 60-minute Roundtable |
| Overview: What contributions can criticism offer to the medium of videogames? What unique opportunities exist in different critical media, for example, blogs, traditional journalism, and academic criticism? What techniques are most useful for such critics? What are the good and bad examples of game criticism that already exist, and how can we learn from them? | |||
Games are just now developing their own critical approaches and language. As representative of an arm of critical thought still in its gestation period, I'd look forward to what these guys have to say.
| |||||||||||
Game design icons discussing what they'd term as the most significant games of all time. Sounds like fun.
Looks like the space under my Christmas tree is overflowing! Hope to see you there.
1.29.2007
Stress
I've been thinking about my own self-induced stress lately. Here are the factors:
- I work in QA
- I am eager to begin working in a design role
Am I too impatient? Am I too hard on myself? Or am I too lazy? I feel like I don't spend enough time at home working on my mapping. But I don't have a good metric for that. How many hours per day did other level designers put into their maps and mods before they went pro? How many months or years? Do I spend too much time reading and posting about games online, or playing games? Or do I not spend enough time with my girlfriend, or reading, or traveling? I'm trying to find a balance, but I admit that I'm impatient regardless. I want to be where I want to be and I want it now. I don't know if I should expect myself to be making quicker progress on my work, but I do. So I'm sort of stressing myself out. I'll be happy when my night job turns into my day job, and I can actually enjoy myself when I'm not working. I'm looking forward to it.
Another short-term factor I've noticed in my own dissatisfaction is when I reach a point in the mapmaking where I'm not sure exactly how to proceed. I think part of learning level design is figuring out an effective workflow, recognizing exactly which aspects of the map need to be completed in what order, and being prepared to tackle them when the time comes. I'm facing some aspects of this map that I haven't had to deal with yet-- specifically, meeting a friendly NPC in person for an expository scene-- which I still need to figure out how to set up and script, not to mention writing the actual dialogue to be spoken, and recording it, and putting it into the game. I've gotten to the point though that I know my next step is to write the dialiogue, at which point I can lay out the sequence of the NPC delivering it, script it in, and then move onto the next scene. In general, I'm much more comfortable when I know exactly what work I need to do, and just have yet to do it, than when I'm uncertain about how to proceed. I think that's really true of myself in any regard; I thrive on certainty, knowing what goals I have to complete, and completing them. This probably figures heavily into why I'm drawn to games, and specifically the ones I am.
Here are some progress shots of the living quarters where you meet the aforementioned NPC:
"Sup bro"
A comfortable seating area, with dining table in the background (the two of each seat will become significant.)
Another outstanding bathroom set that I'm slowly becoming famous for.1.24.2007
More
Welcome to the first scripted sequences of BENEATH pt. 2!
Some dastardly ghosts swarm you:
But that's just a trick.
Then, a Heavy and his cronies burst through this door! The Heavy easily tosses over this huge reception desk, scattering junk everywhere:
Then you fight the dudes!
Next I'll either be scripting the NPC conversation sequence, or the next fight sequence... I also need to convert that overhead bridge seen in the last shot into a working retractable walkway.
More to come!