Brett's Footnotes¹

May 10, 2009

Finally Did It

Well, I finally broke down and bought myself a 360, after buying myself a big TV to go with it. I've been playing a little Assassin's Creed, some Braid and Schizoid, and will no doubt dip into the Fable 2 and Halo 3 that came with the Elite bundle I picked up.

A few questions for my readers. a) What's the best out there for the system? b) What are your gamer tags? If you'd rather not post to the comments, send me an invite/request or whatever at brettdouville -- inventive gamertag, I know, but I couldn't get the one I wanted and was tired of futzing with the thing at that point.

Cheers.

Posted by Brett Douville at 08:53 PM | Comments (5)

March 29, 2009

GDC 2009 Art Sessions

Having no actual artistic abilities myself, I rarely attend art sessions at GDC. As I mentioned in the last post, I pretty much confine myself to design sessions. But having attended a couple this year, I think I'll try to at least get to one each year in the future.

The Brütal Art of Brütal Legend

BEST OF SHOW

Double Fine Art Director Lee Petty gave an absolutely terrific talk about the development of three aspects of Brütal Legend's look -- its epic characters, epic skies, and epic terrain. He discussed some particular influences and inspirations for the game, such as heavy metal album covers and a specific artist (you'll have to look this one up, I'm not too up on my painters). From that, he addressed problems they encountered along the way with each of those areas and how they solved them. In a way, this was a fairly engineering-focused talk, if you consider (as I do) engineering to be a problem-solving discipline. Petty described how the characters' original look left them feeling detached from the world, in part due to low pixel density (and a lack of heft to their materials), and how they addressed that within the constraints they faced for the game -- simply throwing more textures at the problem wouldn't work, since they had the potential for far too many types of characters to be on-screen at any one time, so techniques like UV mirroring, low-frequency and high-frequency noise textures came in, with vertex coloring contributing blending information.

Petty spent a significant time describing their lighting models for time-of-day, and how that worked with characters. The big take-away for me in this area of the talk was that a simpler, if less realistic model, is a big win if it gives the artists better control and faster iteration. The original lighting model was highly complex, and difficult to control, and was scrapped in favor of better control for the artists. A sped-up time of day clip showed the results, and they were spectacular.

I won't go into any detail on the terrain issues -- primarily, they were interested in using a fairly simple height map, but addressing the lack of overhangs, and how to match models with the environment to make it closer to seamless.

This was definitely my favorite talk this year; although I'm a huge Double Fine fanboy, the game under discussion was just a bonus. What I specifically enjoyed was the application of craft to solve specific problems in the look of the game.

The Illustrative Rendering of Prince of Persia

This art talk actually straddled art and engineering in a slightly different way; rather than talking about how they solved problems with art, the presenters described the goal for the environments and the characters, and then separately discussed how different rendering techniques were used to achieve those goals. There were discussions of specific techniques (such as rendering characters' slightly bigger and only the back faces to achieve outlines), and providing bias information to artists to control when it was applied. A big take-away from both of these talks was to provide different lighting solutions for your characters, distinct from the environment.

When I'm back in Maryland, I'll be sure to finish this up with the technical talks I attended.

Posted by Brett Douville at 01:28 PM | Comments (2)

March 28, 2009

GDC Post 1: Design Sessions

Rather than do an enormous post about all the things I saw at GDC (like last year's post), I thought I'd break this up into a few talks basically by discipline. First up, the design sessions I attended.

It's interesting to note that in the past, for the most part I attended no programming or art sessions whatsoever, but this year I actually mixed it up quite a bit. Last year I think I may have been more interested in design simply because I was doing some of my own design, though it has been a trend for years. Programming talks tend to be less interesting to me simply because I'm in the trenches with that stuff all the time -- and art stuff is just out of my area.

Satoru Iwata's Nintendo Keynote

There were a lot of great things in Nintendo President Iwata's talk, but for me the most interesting thing was the distinction he made between the "downward spiral" many game companies face and the "upward spiral" Miyamoto's process brings. In the downward spiral, financial pressure leads to shipping early, which leads to poorer quality, which leads to poorer scores and lowered revenue. Miyamoto, instead, sees ideas everywhere and keeps teams very very small while he prototypes: this relieves financial pressure, giving them time to find the fun, which leads to better reviews and better results.

There were some announcements of new games and improvements with the latest system software, but for me the biggest insight was that above. There were a couple of announcements of games (including a new Zelda title, which I will of course buy), and attendees got a free copy of Rhythm Heaven.

East Meets West

Unfortunately, this year I had to skip out on Clint Hocking's talk, which I always really enjoy, and attended instead a panel with an American designer (Emil Pagliarulo, of Bethesda Softworks, where I now work), and two Japanese designers (Suda51, of Killer 7 and No More Heroes fame, and Fumito Ueda, of Ico and Shadow of the Colossus). These were all designers whose games I've played a ton, consuming everything each has contributed to, so this was a great talk to see.

Despite some translation issues (although they make an effort, I think perhaps development talk is too specialized for the translators we have at GDC to be particularly effective), I picked up a few observations from listening to the speakers. Culturally, Japanese developers seem to follow more of an auteur theory, with the primacy of a single designer, who tends to follow his instincts and promote a shared vision of the game that starts with him, whereas Westerners tend to value feedback and individual contribution, with more of a tension between the designer's instincts and back-and-forth with the team as a whole.

Another minor note: Ueda pointed out that he tends not to use conversation or dialogue in his games because it requires repetition to convey information to the player, which breaks the realism of the conversation itself. Since these two can't be brought into harmony, he just designs conversation out.

Stop Wasting My Time and Your Money

Last year, I particularly enjoyed Margaret Robertson's talk Treat Me Like a Lover. Apparently she must have gotten quite a lot of good feedback, because this year, she got a prime spot mid-Thursday rather than Friday morning at 9 am. This year, Robertson talked about big stories in games and how we don't need them. Progressing from the most compressed story ever written (Hemingway's six word story) to little stories in art (in the Tate Museum) and audio, she talked about how smaller ways of telling stories are a good production solution because they are far more flexible -- if your mission structure has to change, you don't have to record a bunch of new voice lines to cover the bits of stories that were taken out. She also railed against "save the world" stories -- we have saved the world hundreds of times, perhaps we can focus on something else now? On the whole, a thought-provoking topic, reinforcing just how hard it is to do a good story, as well as lots of little ways you can tell little stories well -- and making me hold our own story guys at Bethesda in very high regard indeed.

My First Time

Well, not my first time, but a Game Design Challenge presented by Eric Zimmerman that focused on sex and autobiography as themes. The big surprise was that Kim Swift of Portal fame was not permitted to participate by Valve (which I think they'll come to regret -- it's never good to censor your people). But a couple of latecomers actually managed not only to come up with a design in 36 hours, but to win! Of the three, I think Haro's was my favorite, since he actually implemented something and since it appeared to work very well, but all three presented interesting designs. I love this part of the conference every year, because it tends to showcase real games that you could actually make that are far off the beaten path. Terrific stuff.

Experimental Gameplay Sessions

Jon Blow's Experimental Gameplay Sessions are always interesting and intriguing; regrettably, I was only able to stay for the first hour this year. The first hour focused mostly on different ways of looking at spaces, with a first person game in which the user can paint a white environment with black paint to reveal the world beneath, a platformer which ran around on shadows, and a crazy four-dimensional exploration game. There were a lot of interesting games here, some really thought-provoking. I particularly enjoyed the lots of little games presented by the designer of Fate. Look for notes online on this talk and make sure you play them, these guys are really pushing innovation, and gamers who enjoy something new should get a look at their efforts.

Posted by Brett Douville at 11:09 AM | Comments (1)

February 28, 2009

Getting In

From time to time, I get emails or questions about how to get into the industry; usually, these are from friends of friends, friends of family, the wider network of people I don't know directly but to whom I have only a degree of separation. A few weeks ago I got just such a request from a friend who teaches high school English, and then his student got in touch this week with a few questions. He's looking at getting into the game development business in a few years (after finishing schooling), and after a preamble asked the following three questions:

1. How did you get into the industry? I guess this would be most important to me right now, given that I only have the next four years to prepare.
2. What sorts of things have you found to be most essential in the development of games you have worked on?
3. Is there anything that you did in particular to get yourself taken seriously? I would certainly like to find myself, at least eventually, in a position to be able to persuade a co-worker or peer to approach a project from my point of view, as it seems you have accomplished.

In the interests not of putting off these questions in the future, but of not repeating myself too much and giving anyone else interested a starting point, I asked the young man if he'd be alright with me posting my somewhat edited response here. He was, and so here it is:

There are a million roads into game development; basically everyone I've met has gotten in a different way. I'm an engineer, so I have a particular lens which might be different from yours if you are interested in design, but I'll tell you a bit about what I do and how I got to where I am.

I started gaming when I was 8 or so -- though it was obviously different from the sorts of games you've been playing in the last ten years or so. I started out playing text adventures on a mainframe -- my father would bring home a dumb terminal from his job at a defense contractor and we'd tie up the phone line for hours, pouring out 14-inch wide green-and-white paper onto the floor as we made our way through caves and bizarre rooms and avoided a thieving dwarf. When I was 10 or 11, we got our first home computer -- an Apple II+ with 48K of memory (later expanded to an amazing 64K) -- on which I wrote my first games (as well as my first 3D renderer - in wireframe). These were usually text-based, though some had primitive graphics. I picked up BASIC, of course, and even a little bit of assembly and a variant of Forth, but I stopped programming much in the way of games or anything on my computer probably by the time I was 14.

I ended up going to college for a degree in the humanities (physics and philosophy) and decided in my senior year to look for something different. I had always enjoyed computers, so I thought about going to get an advanced degree in that since physics had turned out not to be for me and I already knew what people thought of stand-up philosophers. I got a masters and was on my way to get a doctorate when I decided that an academic life wasn't really for me. So I cast around for something else, and discovered that in the years I hadn't been doing much gaming, it had grown from being a garage business to big business. I thought it might make a fine career.

I didn't know anyone in game development, but I had played some games on occasion over the years and was a fan of the LucasArts adventure games¹. I received some good advice from a friend that when I was applying for a job with a company, it was a good idea to find someone in that company that you admire and contact him, as well as sending it to the HR department. So I sent Tim Schafer (then of Day of the Tentacle and Monkey Island fame) a letter and my résumé, and then followed up with a call a week later. I was going out to the Bay Area anyway to talk with someone else about a job, and asked if I could take Tim to lunch while I was there, so I could pick his brain about getting into game development.

When I turned up in San Francisco, he had set up not just lunch with himself but interviews, which led ultimately to a job as a senior programmer writing the gameplay systems for Star Wars: Starfighter. I have been amazingly lucky in my career thus far, and that was certainly the start. Never did get to work with Tim, though I still await his releases with bated breath². Maybe some day.

Anyway, that's how I got in. The advice I received about finding someone in an organization whose work you really respect was excellent advice, and helped me a lot. I might have gotten a job anyway... but perhaps not. One never knows.

I can recommend a few general guidelines for getting in down the road, once you've gone to school. The first is college... go and get a degree in something that can hold your interest for four years. But experiment, too -- make sure you try a variety of stuff, you never know what might be grist for the creative mill later. There'd be no harm in some introductory psychology, and a whole lot of reading -- personally, I think I have grown immensely through the contact with minds far greater than my own reading the classics provides. Ultimately, to be able to learn to communicate and persuade, you need to practice -- write papers, do research, argue and debate. All the stuff you'd do in college no matter what you want to do later; but learn to think in specifics, not the big hand-wavy "and magic happens" we still see in design documents and discussions from time to time.

At the same time, it's probably worthwhile to keep playing games. But you can't just play them to play them, you have to play like a designer. Take them apart with your brain, analyze how the systems go together, how the various game mechanics reinforce one another (or don't). (As an graduate student in engineering I encountered Warcraft: Orcs and Humans and spent an inordinate time thinking about how I would design the C++ object hierarchy, or solve the various search problems they had.) Think about failures as well as successes. Read books on game design (there are a few good ones -- I like Rules of Play and have been reading Challenges for Game Designers as well). But when you think about games, think about why they entertain you -- if you are just being entertained, you're not doing it right ;) There isn't a games equivalent of Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer, as far as I'm aware, but that sort of close reading is useful.

Finally, build games. You don't have to be a programmer to make games. You can make board games and card games. You can prototype that way, or make games that are meant to be played that way. Don't limit yourself... people who only play games are boring (and don't come up with interesting games or game themes). While you can't prototype certain types of videogames very well with pen-and-paper, such as shooters, you can still think about the interactions of systems that way.

None of this needs to be expensive -- you can often get enough of a game's design from its demo. You can build card games with decks of cards and some adhesive paper to stick onto them. There used to be a whole company devoted to making games cheaply -- you just had to supply the tokens and dice and stuff like that, they'd supply a cheap card stock board -- called Cheap Ass Games. If you're familiar with it, you can try stuff out in Flash, or in Flex, or in whatever other crazy things they have these days. Most colleges have student editions of software at a deep, deep discount for students, I bought my first C++ compiler this way.

I think that if you've been doing those things, you'll be taken seriously. Frankly, you'll need to pay your dues before you can be expected to be taken too seriously. But being in game development is great fun, offers lots of interesting challenges, and so paying those dues should be interesting. If you have passion for it, and work hard, you'll progress well. The best way to convince anyone of your seriousness is to work hard; producing good work is the only sure path to success. I've been successful not because of my big ideas of things I'd like to do down the road but because I've worked hard to make the projects I was part of a success by focusing on what needed to be done now. Being the best you can be at what you're doing right that moment is the best you can do... and it will open doors. If you have a game you want ultimately to make, you should keep it in mind and enrich it with your work over the years, and maybe some day you'll get to make it. But the only way to get that to happen is to work your hardest on whatever you're doing, and to take on additional responsibilities as long as you can do a good job of them as well. I don't say this to discourage, but rather to encourage -- take your energy and enthusiasm and invest it in your projects, and it will pay off. You may be able to make the game you want to make, or not, to be honest. Ideas are important, but they are only the seed; it takes a lot more to make a good game. Your energy and effort will be what leads to you having authority to persuade co-workers. Your effort and energy and results *are* your credentials. Even when I have been faced with projects or tasks I didn't believe in or agree with, I tried my hardest to make them work. I have been lucky in that these have been few.

¹These were not, of course, the only games I had played by any stretch. I also had a fondness for Ultima games and the occasional console title. I investigated a lot of companies. (back)

²Daron Stinnett, my boss for many years and a friend for more than a decade now, was kind enough to indulge me when I told him I probably wouldn't be getting much work done the week that Grim Fandango came out. I also waited until Psychonauts was released to get an Xbox. I'll probably by my next next-gen system when Brutal Legend finally releases. (back)

³I happen to have, somewhere, a stack of uncut cardstock for the Magic: the Gathering release that would become Invasion, though we called it Spectral Chaos. I also playtested what became Ice Age and it was made with paper stuck to common alphas like lands and walls of wood. That's how Richard made the original sets -- just existing decks of cards or card stock; he refined the mechanics with that. (back)

Posted by Brett Douville at 09:47 PM | Comments (0)

February 16, 2009

A Zombie Game Done Right

When I was growing up, I didn't see a lot of zombie movies -- I remember seeing a pared-down version of Night of the Living Dead, but beyond that I hadn't really seen many. I mostly got my "horror" fix when I was quite young from Channel 56's "Creature Double Feature" and then later from the early novels of Stephen King¹, as well as the occasional horror comic I could score from the houses of much older cousins, which were shocking even by today's standards, as they were pre-Code, though I didn't know it at the time.

By the time I was an adult, I hadn't seen much in the way of zombie pictures, and didn't really care to see any more. That pared-down version of Romero's classic had turned me off on them, and there was no way my parents would have let me see some of the other classics, like his follow-up Dawn of the Dead, as they were far too violent, had I even cared to. But a few years ago, a friend of mine recommended 28 Days Later and I added it to the queue. Eventually I bumped it up near the top and watched it one week when I was alone in the house.

It turned me back on to the whole phenomenon. It really transformed how I looked at the whole zombie genre, because of the fact that although the zombies themselves were a significant threat, and one that had to be dealt with, the real danger was the people surrounding the protagonists. In 28 Days Later, this was the military group who had plans for survivors. In Night of the Living Dead, which I finally saw in its entirety (both on DVD and then just last October on the big big screen at the AFI), it was some of the people locked up in the house with the hero, and then finally a bunch of good ol' boy deputies that did him in. In the original Dawn of the Dead, it's a gang of bikers. In 28 Weeks Later, it's just about everyone -- but especially Robert Carlyle, who's a big problem both in the opening scene of the film (which occurs concurrently with the original film), and not too long after, when he starts the whole thing up again.

One thing that has always concerned me about games involving zombies is how they fail to capture this basic element. Though I admit I haven't played lots and lots of them, zombie games tend to pit the player against the giant zombie army, with the tools to wreak major carnage. It's good fun, but it lacks the commentary that the zombie movies provide.

But I've finally found the game that makes other humans your worst enemy, and it's the four player co-op extravaganza Left 4 Dead.

Lots of virtual ink has already been spilled over Left 4 Dead, so I'm not going to belabor the point too much. While the game is certainly challenging, on its hardest difficulty level it virtually requires close coordination of the efforts of you and your friends to overcome. It rewards co-operative play in so many ways, and the costs of working against the plan can be extreme.

The first time I played, I nearly wiped our little party when I looked down into some tunnels and saw a critter lying, crying on the ground. Naturally, I thought, "Cool, easy kill" and shot the witch, waking her and sending her screaming up into our midst, causing all kinds of mayhem. "Who shot the witch, who shot the witch?" my buddies were yelling over the xfire or Steam chat² channel we had going. Sheepishly I said, "So, is that bad?" and had explained to me that the witch was basically a Terminator that didn't activate until you got too close or shot her.

Whoops.

We've had evenings where a horde would suddenly descend on us, depleting our ammo, because we hung back too much, didn't keep the forward momentum going because we're all so used to the pacing of games that allow you to spend time finding all the areas on the map. We had someone accidentally set off the fiery trap we had laid for a tank, saying, "Oops!" as his fellows fried. We've opened doors too early. We've left doors behind us open that should have been closed. We've taken painkillers we should have shared with our friends. We've failed to cover friends' backs when they manned the occasional turret. We've gone off chasing a smoker, forcing our buddies into danger trying to track us down. We left one partner to die at the very end of Death Toll, because we didn't realize he wasn't making his way to the boat, and we saw his name listed under "In Memory Of" in the credits.

I'd like to say we've made every mistake human nature allows, but I have no doubt we have several more to make. The zombies... well, the zombies are dumb, or at least, they follow easy-to-understand rules. It's the unpredictability of the humans around you that gets you into real trouble. Hearty congratulations to Valve and the team at Turtle Rock Studios for a job so well done.

¹I remember a few doozies from that time: Five Million Years to Earth, which I could recall only as "Hobb's End" until I started writing this article and found it again on IMDB, and The Brain That Wouldn't Die, now viewable on Google Video. That's what I'm listening to in the background while I post. Stephen King remains a guilty pleasure; the man scared the pants off of me for a solid two weeks of sleepless nights after I read 'Salem's Lot, even sleeping with a crucifix beside my bed; I think I was 12 at the time. Recently I read his new collection of stories, Just After Sunset and it was okay -- but last year or the year before I had to put down The Cell as basically unreadable. I give everything he writes a shot though and finish most of them. (back)

²We have an ongoing disagreement on this issue; some prefer Steam, some prefer Xfire for voice chat. It's a constant source of moderate amusement. (back)

Posted by Brett Douville at 10:50 PM | Comments (2)

February 14, 2009

SF Link

A little shout-out to Ye Olde LucasArts crew:

The Chronicle recently posted a list of the "Nine Best Star Wars Games". Happily, Starfighter made the list.

I don't think I've played that since the year it shipped. I should give it a look again. My kids might even be able to play the sequel in co-op now...

Posted by Brett Douville at 02:18 PM | Comments (4)

February 09, 2009

Managing Difficulty

Lately I've been playing Buffy the Vampire Slayer on last gen's Xbox, and it has stirred up a few thoughts I have about difficulty, mostly because it gets it so horribly wrong. I've been gaming a long time, and have come up with a long list of must-haves for most games, particularly games which target the mainstream audience. In my career at LucasArts I helped steer difficulty in some specific directions, some bulleted below, and I actually got a game credit in the "hey, thanks" list for a late but timely suggestion to the project's design director when he used it whole cloth.

The other thing that I ran across in the last few weeks was a little video project by a blogger where he discussed what he felt was the most innovative game of last year -- Prince of Persia, which in a way dropped difficulty altogether, by making the Prince more or less invincible. The Prince was accompanied by a companion who would rescue him when he misjudged, bringing something we saw the beginnings of in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time to fruition: a less punishing form of death. Now, I'm fairly certain that I would prefer the latter to the former, but I understand the impetus to applaud the designers. After all, they took a thorny problem and tried something different -- they eliminated difficulty altogether.

Now, bear in mind that I'm targeting mainstream games -- these bullet points are not for games like Ninja Gaiden, which use their difficulty to club gamers into submission. That is more or less its design goal -- to provide an extreme level of challenge, and managing difficulty for them is and should be to make the game as difficult as possible. Similarly, performance games like Guitar Hero, which have difficulty levels but for which the practicing and not the "getting through the narrative bits" is most of the fun, are exempted -- they should adopt and have adopted some of these, but ultimately, it's not what they're about. Here I'm basically talking about mainstream-targeting games with a narrative through-line, primarily action-adventure titles and shooters.

(Program note: I started this post a week ago and a Firefox crash erased it for good; hopefully, I'll recover all the points I had in mind. Crashes always throw off my creative rhythm.)

• Make it easy to switch difficulty whenever the player wants. This may have been somewhat more difficult last-gen, but not appreciably so, so I'm not prepared to give Buffy a pass for this. I'm several levels through this game, and I've decided that the difficulty level is distracting from my enjoyment of the game. I came in looking for some basking in the Buffy-sphere, and picked the "Normal" difficulty, thinking that I'd take it easy on myself, as I used to play games like this on "Hard".¹ However, here I am, maybe a third of the way through the game, perhaps half, and I'd like to dial it back and coast awhile, probably to the end, get a little extra Buffy fix. But changing the difficulty in this case means... starting over. Wow. What. Were. They. Thinking. This is rule #1. This one can't be broken.

• Name your difficulty settings well; describe the user experience for each. We have enough space on the screen to say, "Use this setting if you are unaccustomed to first-person shooters; you can always make it more difficult!" or "You will die. Many times. Most of them unpleasantly. Regardless of your experience level." It's okay to say Easy, Medium/Normal, or Hard... but we have to know what that means to the designer. I thought "Normal" for Buffy meant, "Normal for the sort of person who would watch Buffy" but apparently it actually meant, "Normal for a game designer, who has played more hours of games this week than you do all year."

  Note: there may be a temptation to name this stuff from your fiction, but there's a fine line there. If Buffy named its Hard mode "Slayer", I'd want to play just because, hey, I want to be the Slayer. Isn't that why I'm playing this game? Mainstream players may not understand that you're being cute, and may be turned off when you call your easy level of difficulty "Puppy mode".

• Adjust to the player. I'm not talking some extreme form of dynamic difficulty adjustment, that fabled Shangri-La of difficulty design which somehow magically keeps the player in the sweet spot of perfect level of challenge (and which we will never reach). Sucker Punch did an amazing job with this in Sly Cooper; I don't recall it making a return in the sequels, but it was in the original game and was inspired. After dying a few times on a level, the game would grant you a "lucky silver horseshoe" when you returned; this would prevent your death, returning you to full health once over the course of the level. If you died several more times, it'd give you a gold, which was worth two deaths. It was a simple little crutch, accommodated different levels of ability and the fact that the developers may have been unable to judge the difficulty of their levels. I recommended a variant of this to my friend years ago, and that's what they implemented.

• Make it clear what dials the difficulty knob turns. This is one we sort of failed on my LucasArts projects; we had a very clear idea of what difficulty was going to be, but ultimately we didn't communicate it to the player. It's a few years back now, but what I recall is that we simply applied a multiplier to the damage enemies did to the player. The thinking was that players would get the same experience, they'd just survive longer and thereby be able to defeat more enemies.

• Provide the player with more knobs. It's great to say Easy, Medium, and Hard, but it's even better to allow the player to adjust certain aspects of the game themselves. Perhaps a gamer wants harder puzzles but simpler combat or vice versa. If your game supports jumping puzzles, feel free to give the player a knob saying, "OK, you can jump a little further." The best example of this I can recall is System Shock 2, which gave three axes of difficulty via its configuration files.²

• Do not hide the things that make the game easier. Buffy hides secrets in each level, and tells you on the pause screen how many there are to be found. Unfortunately, in almost all cases, these are things that make the game easier -- health potions that you carry in your inventory, and health and power crystals you give to Willow to power you up in between levels. This is insane. Not only is the game difficult, but I have to seek all over your levels (risking more spawning vampires) to find the things that'll make my life easier? Legend of Zelda has been hiding hearts in stray clumps of grass for years -- don't be stingy! Your mainstream players want to get through the game and feel a sense of accomplishment. Be big-hearted and let them.

• Test your difficulty settings on real people. Years ago I was playing Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight, which LucasArts had released shortly before I started working there. I was playing on the hardest difficulty setting and got to the mid-game level where Kyle Katarn has to escape a falling Star Destroyer, or whatever, within a certain time limit. I tried again, and again, and again. Finally I asked a designer friend of mine, and he said that the way they set the time for that level was to take the fastest tester's time to complete it... and to subtract ten seconds. I could have played that for days and not beaten that time. Finally, I just asked for the cheat code to move to the next level and moved on. Particularly when we develop for the mainstream, we are not our audience and we do not share our audience's goals. This is true for me with Buffy: I'm looking for more Zander-Cordelia banter and Willowisms... not another ten nailbiting vampire combats.

  This is true not just of combat. I knew someone who struggled with getting out of the Black Mesa lab -- because it didn't occur to him to break the glass on the elevator door with the crowbar he was carrying.

• Give players time to get used to new tools before you throw a challenge at them that demands those tools. Buffy has thrown several new kicks and spins and other combat moves at me to absorb into my arsenal of moves. However, because I can only really use these in combat (since they use up a resource that I can't otherwise recharge), I'm kind of stuck. I'd like to be able to practice these before I have to use them in combat, but I don't have any option to do so. Zelda games have historically done this well also -- big challenges appear after you've gotten a new ability, but usually you have an opportunity to use that ability in a safer, less threatening environment, typically in level navigation.

• Make suggestions. We have the tools to fight player fatigue. If a player spends a long time in an area, we can detect that and give them hints. That can even be one of the knobs, "give me hints when it looks like I'm lost." I know that Perfect Dark Zero got some flak for this particular decision, but honestly, I think it was a good one. Hardcore players should be able to turn it off, and it should never be a crutch to avoid careful level design... but it should be used as a crutch for players who are easily disoriented in virtual spaces.

• Your easiest setting should basically be "push button, win game". You will think that it can't be made easier, that there are no wall missions. You will be wrong. Make it easier.Give them an out.
  

I'm sure there are more, and almost certainly I had another one or two in mind last week, but I'm getting tired and thinking of finishing a movie before hitting the sack. I'll add to this if anything from last week occurs to me again, and I encourage comments to throw out ideas I might have missed or forgotten.

Difficulty often breeds frustration, particularly in the narrative-plus-action games that licenses lend themselves too. Give your players a break... and they'll come back.

¹Sad but true, I'm also getting older, but it's not a lack of finger dexterity that gets me in the end, it's the lack of time to play on a more regular basis. I got very close to the end of Metroid Prime 2 some years back and then got quite busy with work. I've never gone back, because attempting to play once your skills start to fall away is no fun at all. (back)

²Normally I'd say putting it in the config files was bogus, but it was definitely a hobbyist game, and it was on the PC, where config files were practically the latest and greatest tech. :) (back)

Posted by Brett Douville at 11:33 PM | Comments (4)

January 27, 2009

Suppose Death is a Woman, What Then?¹

My thinking on this issue has come together over the course of a few items which happened to come into my life at the same time. The first two of these were two terrific books, both given to me by the same wonderful woman², The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, and Death, With Interruptions by José Saramago.

In both works, the figure of Death is identified as a woman, and in one of them takes a rather central role. A female incarnation of Death is not, of course, new -- Gaiman's most famous creation, Dream, has a sister in Death. But for me, the character had always been masculine, whether due to the early influences of A Christmas Carol (where the ghosts appear all to be male, and the ghost of Christmas Future is closely associated with death) or of On A Pale Horse³, or even the Twilight Zone episode with Robert Redford called Nothing in the Dark. I'm not really certain where I got this idea of death as a masculine presence, but it's certainly always been there.

I read these two books within the last few weeks, finishing them within a couple of days of one another. I remarked to myself on the coincidence, two female characters embodying death, bringing female qualities to the character. In the Gaiman book in particular, the mothering traits of the feminine are emphasized... death is an empathetic, caring, figure, and that side comes out in the Saramago as well.

This is, of course, where Buffy the Vampire Slayer enters our story, though not because of any representations of death in the show. Instead, it's because my enjoyment of the first season of the show caused me to hunt down a copy of the original Xbox game which bears the license. I remembered playing a small amount of it at the time it came out because the developer was working on an Indiana Jones title for LucasArts at the time, and also because we were looking at fighting systems for the Full Throttle sequel (later canceled). I mentioned in this blog that I picked up that as my first licensed title that I bought because of my interest in the license⁴.

While I'll take up some other points with Buffy's gameplay later, the relevant bit here is how often Buffy, and games in general, treats death in a less welcoming way -- it's a huge obstacle. Not only do the vampires or whatever it is that killed you taunt you and trash talk you as your crumpled Buffy avatar falls to the ground, but you end up repeating everything in the level up until that point. This is a fairly common approach to dealing with death in games, though perhaps more common last generation than this. But it's an intensely rough and I would even say masculine approach to failure: toughen up and get through this!

I'd like to see a more humane approach to death, a more feminine approach to failure in games -- treat me more kindly as you kill me off. Don't make me repeat more than is necessary for me to learn my mistake. Don't tell me how much I suck as I die, an experience which gets its fullest expression in the Unreal Tournament series, where to add personality to the 'bots, they have all sorts of voice lines that imitate the sorts of things you'd hear from a deathmatch with human players on the Internet, which is precisely why I have no interest in playing competitive shooters like Halo on the Internet. Treat me with empathy, say "Gosh, you died. You might not have realized that such-and-such creature is more dangerous, and you should focus your fire there first" or "If Buffy doesn't crouch to go down a ladder, it's not a ladder." (Granted, better art often solves that problem entirely.)

The last bit that brought it all together was Shamus Young's "video project," where he discusses what he feels to be the most revolutionary game in 2008: Prince of Persia. He finds it revolutionary because the player is simply not allowed to die. I've embedded it below for your viewing pleasure -- he makes a cogent argument that I'll not repeat in its entirety here.

Now, I'm not arguing for games that make failure impossible. I'm enough of a hardcore gamer that the mere whiff of failure isn't enough for me -- I want the actual opportunity to fail, so long as that failure feels fair to me, although I would certainly enjoy a more empathetic solution. I'd like to know why I died and get some strategy pointers, and I'd like the opportunity to attempt that same challenge again as quickly as possible.

At the same time, I can see a great deal of value in providing difficulty settings that move away from "Easy" "Normal" "Hard(core)" to something more useful. More like, "Navigation Difficulty -- Your sidekick will rescue you, Your sidekick will rescue you n times, You will learn by constant failure" and "Puzzle Difficulty -- Puzzles will nearly solve themselves, You will be given clear hints whenever you spend more than 3 minutes on a puzzle, You will need your Internet connection to check GameFAQs when stuck." Give me knobs and dials to customize the level of challenge I want, and stop treating me in demeaning ways when I inevitably fail. I'm not looking for challenges that take me hours to overcome -- I'm looking for new experiences that hopefully teach me a little something along the way. Treat me with a little empathy... and Death as if she's a woman.

I'll be back to this space in a week or so with another post... I've no idea yet what about. :)

¹Normally I would apologize to an author for appropriating his line, but given Nietzsche's misogyny, I'll pass. (back)

²In fact, this same woman has helped contribute to me blogging again, so, all my readers should be glad that I have made her acquaintance. All three of you! (back)

³Wow, who knew that Piers Anthony returned to this series a little over a year ago. I'm rather too old to read Piers Anthony anymore, but perhaps at some point I can entice my sons into the series and sneak their copy of the eighth book when they check it out of the library. :) (back)

⁴ While I certainly own other licensed titles, those are almost entirely due to my former employer. I also have a 007 title because it featured a co-op campaign, which Andrew and I played a bit of, and some stuff I bought for the kids. (back)

Posted by Brett Douville at 12:43 AM | Comments (1)

January 20, 2009

Analysis Paralysis

I always keep my eyes open for something a little different, especially on the consoles and handhelds. I'm particularly interested in the weird stuff that turns up on consoles because they seem to have the greatest mass market reach in some ways, while also being clearly intended for gaming use¹. This is why I have copies of things like Rez, or Killer 7, or Okami; they're different, and different sometimes goes a long way.

It's also why I picked up a copy of Persona 3: FES, which came in its extended edition last summer or so. I was enticed by the mix of traditional JRPG fare with some weird slants. First, and probably most visible to non-gamers, was the decidedly quirky method of summoning critters to do battle for you -- the protagonist and his party cast their various magics by, well, shooting themselves in the head and heart with some sort of pistol-looking thing². This was enough to provoke mild curiosity, but not really enough to draw me into the game -- it's really just a different animation for summoning and except for what it says about culture, has no bearing on the gameplay whatsoever. What really drew me in, and what garnered it critical acclaim, was the non-traditional play whereby you gained in power by strengthening relationships between the hero and various other characters in the high school which he attends.

That seemed really cool. I liked the idea of having more powerful magic in the areas in which I was investing the character's time. So I started off, getting a few social ranks with the "mage", a geeky character who wanted to pursue a romance with his teacher. And then I found myself in which the "Chariot", a jock who was pushing himself tremendously hard on the swim team, to the point of passing out in practice. There was also the "Hermit", a character I met in the game's MMO. And the "Lovers". And the "Emperor". And. And. And.

Soon I had at least half a dozen storylines that had hooked me enough that I wanted to know how they turned out. I began to devise strategies and jot them down in a text file on my laptop (open while I played, so I could remember which spells were "ice" and which were "fire" etc, since the names didn't map to my Final Fantasy knowledge). "OK," I'd tell myself, "I can go to the student council meeting on Tuesday, but then I need to go to swim practice on Wednesday and make sure I get down to the art room on Thursday. Oh, but wait, what about the mage?" After a while, I started to feel exhausted at the thought of playing, and would turn to other things.

It's analysis paralysis. I didn't actually care much at all for the actual use of the magic I was getting, which was typical RPG repetitiveness. I just wanted to know how the stories would play out, and I had this anxiety about whether I was spending enough time with each character to bring those stories to their conclusions. Would I end up finishing the game but only partway through half a dozen storylines? That wouldn't do at all. Could I add more to my schedule?

In the end, I feel like the game gave me lots of interesting decisions to make, but unfortunately, I'd need to go elsewhere to understand the longer-term ramifications of those decisions. This hasn't been a problem in other RPGs, in my experience; I've always known more or less where a particular road would take me, even if in general terms. Or I knew, as with Fallout 3, that I'd have time to explore all the options in which I was interested, so long as I didn't finish the main quest.

It's not as if the stories were necessarily all that interesting, even. It's just the thought that I would start a story and maybe not get to finish it. There was just enough mystery there to hook me.

In the time since I've stopped playing, I've several times thought of going over to GameFAQs and tracking down some sort of story document. Something always stops me, maybe some vague sense that I'll get back to the game some day or feeling like it's just not right to do it. I'm still wondering how I would resolve this in the game, and some day maybe I'll find out. I'll let you know.Maybe I just need to find the right frame of mind.

Anyone else have this feeling with a game? Also, join me again in the next several days or so for a discussion of Death... as a Woman.

¹Despite Sony's protestations to the contrary. (back)

²I'm convinced that this is a Japanese thing, along the lines of drawing power by being totally committed to a plan of action. I remember reading in James Clavell's Shogun a scene in which the hero gains new life after deciding to commit seppuku when commanded to by the titular character. Although he fails in the attempt (a faster, samurai-guided hand intervenes and plucks the dagger from his grasp at the last moment), he nonetheless feels suddenly, completely, vibrantly alive having decided to pursue death in that manner. (back)

Posted by Brett Douville at 10:20 PM | Comments (0)

January 12, 2009

Making Golems

One of the books I read as last year drew to a close was Michael Chabon's Maps and Legends, a collection of essays about his influences, his thoughts on genre, and of particular interest to this specific entry, his thoughts on writing. The pieces cover all manner of influences, interests, and beliefs regarding writing (both his own, and others'), and he reveals much of himself; many of the short pieces appeared previously, and in advance or concurrently with the novels they prefigure or discuss. It's clear that Chabon deeply inhabits his interests as he writes, that he's passionate about his influences and that he shares much of himself in his writing.

"Golems I Have Known¹", the last piece, is of particular interest to creators of all kinds and to me particularly. As the title might indicate, the essay deals a bit with the creature of Jewish folklore that has crossed over to various other locations -- I met my own first golem in Dungeons and Dragons², and you can see them all over the place, including World of Warcraft and any number of our electronic entertainments. The famous Golem of Prague featured prominently in my favorite Chabon novel, The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and the essay touches on this golem and others that supposedly the author has personally encountered, as well as other literary golems such as Frankenstein's Monster. The essay is adapted from a speech that Chabon gave several times earlier in the decade, often for book-signings and the like, and I can't help but think that I would really have liked to hear him give this speech.

Although he spends some time describing the construction of a golem, and the dangers which lie within the process (especially at its termination), the folkloric creature is of less interest to Chabon (and to me) than the metaphor he weaves from it. The folkloric golem is a product of devotion and ritual, a constant outpouring of oneself that presents great dangers to its creator, who at all times is at risk of being destroyed by his creation. The golem thereby is a metaphor for all worthwhile creative endeavor; the artist puts more than simple effort and craft into the making of a work of interest, he puts a great deal of himself, perhaps all of himself. When the creation is completed, it is animate, a living thing that can destroy its very creator, if it has been made properly, that is, if the creator has risked everything. Coming at the end of a collection in which Chabon makes clear some of the direct events in his life which are reflected in his work, the discussion is a powerful one.

And of course, here's where games come in. Of any creators, we game-makers arguably make the most living simulacra out there. Other media seem dead by comparison; we make systems that live and breathe if we choose them to, though in many cases we simply follow closely the frameworks of other media we're interested in emulating, or which have informed our own growth. Yet so many of our creations strike me as curiously lifeless, as if no one has given anything of themselves in making it. Not all, for certain, and I'll talk about some that I've played and read about that seem to me to have a bit of life to them, but many -- most -- of what we put out on the shelves or the web or what-have-you seem to barely skim the surface of actual individual lives. At least in the triple-A space, we bring dozens of unique life perspectives to the table, if we're lucky and yet, as anyone who has played them for years and years can attest, this year's games aren't really all that different from last year's, in terms of actually carrying real emotional content. I'm not even asking about whether they can make you cry, or whatever, I'll take as read that at the very least we can make some cutscenes tied to gameplay about characters we can manufacture some feeling for (through tricks we steal from film, primarily) -- I'm talking about lasting emotional impact, characters or events that educate us. As I've mentioned in other ways in this blog, I think this shallowness is a real problem for us.

There are counterexamples, and they give me hope. I think there were a number of games over the last year or so that bore the mark of the people that made them. Some I think show promise that more of interest is coming³, some that are already quite interesting (Jason Rohrer's work, or Rod Humble's The Marriage), some that I need to play (here's looking at you, Braid), and then the occasional Tim Schafer game. I've always felt that you can learn a lot about Tim Schafer from playing his games -- he creates characters from aspects of people he has known, his subject matter is always fresh and interesting and clearly of personal interest; clearly, business decisions did not drive LucasArts into Grim Fandango. His games remain some of the few story-based games I've played more than once, if not the only ones.

So, I'm calling on those game developers who stop by this blog to invest something of themselves in what they make. You can create animation that contains quirks from that third-grade gym coach, you know, the one with the bushy mustache and what seemed like the longest arms in the world -- perhaps something in the way he held his arms out when he was frustrated can make it into a bellow. You can model based on the outsize oddities you've encountered in your life. You can write from stuff in your life -- in the thousands of little datalogs and books and whatever that is "background material" in many of our games these days, you can craft a story that is touched with just enough of your personality to elevate it beyond the trite, rehashed bits we see in so many stories. You can say, as I've heard it said, that we're in a business, that we make "games not art", that we are hit-driven and product-driven and our audience doesn't want that, and it's all about the money. To that I say, echoing the title of the other book I received along with Chabon's: Shakespeare Wrote for Money.

¹Subtitled, "Or, Why My Elder Son's Middle Name Is Napoleon," which I like for many reasons, not least of which is that it properly indicates that Chabon has exactly two sons. :) Yes, I am also a geek about language, but of course, you knew that already. (back)

²Of stone, as I recall. (back)

³Everyday Shooter, while it feels personally influenced, also feels like the product of someone who hasn't lived a lot yet, and I don't even a little bit mean this as a slam. I honestly look forward to great things coming from Jonathan Mak, when he learns a little bit more about the human condition or at the very least, if he already knows more than he's saying, when he can put it into gameplay. (back)

Posted by Brett Douville at 10:05 PM | Comments (3)

January 04, 2009

Where the Time Goes

Over the last year, I've tried to keep reasonable records of what I've read, watched, and played, trying to get a feel for how I spend my leisure time. I didn't do it as a specific sort of experiment, nor did I use it to drive what I consumed; I mean, I didn't specifically keep tabs on how many movies I had watched, nor how many books, and didn't decide with what to entertain myself next based on how much I had done. I took stock mid-year, just before I started working in an office again, just out of curiosity, but continued on as I had. Yes, I am completely aware that such categorization and records make me a complete geek. This should not be news to anyone.

Here are the numbers and a little explanation of what each of these meant or entailed. This only includes films, books, or games that I finished this past year, and was regardless of whether I started them this year (though you can safely assume all films were started this year ;)

• 192 films: More accurately, 192 film or video experiences. I saw 36 movies on the big screen, but also 16 seasons of television (I consider each season a single unit, rather than by DVD disc), and a large handful of Dr Who episodes from the '70s that I watched with the kids. So call it 150 movies, and nearly 50 'other'.
• 62 books: This is pretty accurate; I 'read' 3 audiobooks (I feel sure this is under by a couple), 9 were non-fiction, and a few of these were graphic novels or comics compilations¹.
• 8 games. Yeah, let me repeat that: 8 games. This number climbs to 9 if you count Fallout 3 which I played through twice at work. It's probably fair to count it. These are videogames only, not the boardgames I played at the couple of Game Nights I attended this year or the multitude of games I played with my sons, nor any of the time I spent at their baseball games or anything like that.

There are a few ways to interpret this data or to blog about this information. I'll talk about the game-related stuff primarily, since this is mostly a game blog, but there's overlap for sure.

The Resolutionary: I could, of course, look at that list and say, "Hey, I need to resolve here in the New Year to spend more time playing games over the next year." It's fair to say that this just isn't going to happen. I have to say, I've found myself less and less interested in spending my time playing them. I enjoy them socially -- I recently started up World of Warcraft again to be able to play with friends in California once a week. I try to play co-op once a week (and it's more like once a month, if I'm lucky, given the time difference), and I enjoy that when I play. I love sitting down and playing co-op Gears of War or competitive Guitar Hero with a friend. But sitting playing a single-player game hasn't grabbed me all that much lately.

The Accountant: That bit about playing a single-player game not grabbing me isn't entirely true. I played Fallout 3 in its entirety twice through, clocking around 350 hours with the game, though I was being paid for this time. Perhaps a better title to look at would be Ratchet & Clank 3: Up Your Arsenal, which I played probably for nearly 100 hours, since I managed to max out every weapon, get every bit of armor, and find every secret whozit or whatzit. If I look at the hours I spend at each of these activities, they are roughly the same: if you discount audiobooks and consider books to be three or four times as long as movies, and consider movies at about two hours, and games to be an average of about 50 hours or so, this all seems to come out in the wash.

The Biorhythmicist²: I could say that these things go in cycles. I do know that I spent a significant amount of time last year playing games, having finished 5 games in the last 3 months of 2007. And I know that towards the end of 2006 I had a bunch of time to play as well, and did so. This has a little bit of weight, because there are times when I definitely feel the itch to play games. But I haven't spent any significant amount of time on a game since August, which is when I started playing Persona 3: FES.

The Apologist: Hey, maybe I'm just not playing the right games, the games that will really grab me and not let go. This may be true -- I did not yet buy Braid, although I definitely intend to when a PC version is available, or when I buy a 360. [I admit, I am rather dying to play that game, but I'm not going to spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars (I don't yet have an HD TV) to play it. I'm sure it's good, and I will play it.] Also, games tend to be less and less about finishing them, and more and more about the experiences of playing them with friends, for example, and certainly if you have a Wii, which doesn't have lots of traditional single-player games. Both of these arguments have some force, for sure. I have spent several hours on Super Smash Bros. Brawl or Mario Kart Wii with the kids, though I haven't been too interested in "finishing" them. I am unable to finish any of the Guitar Hero games on Expert because I tire of playing the same songs over and over in practice mode to be able to beat them and move to the last tier or two of songs.

In the end, all I can really say is that I didn't play a lot of games this year, although there are a few that have caught my eye that I'd like to play in the next year or two. I'm going to keep track of this stuff through the next year as well, and see where we are a year from now.

One thing I can say is that I'd like to blog more about games in the next year. I didn't blog much over the past year, less because I didn't have things to say than that I fell out of the habit. In the end, maybe that's all that's happened with games this year. Maybe I've just fallen out of the habit? I don't feel like reading and film are habits, but games, games definitely might be. And that may say a lot about my relationship with videogames.

Okay folks, my laundry is out of the dryer and awaiting folding, so I'm going to leave you with this and come back soon with some talk about making golems.

¹The graphic novels were generally compilations of comics, and I counted these as a single item per title. So, for example, I read all 9 of the extant Y: The Last Man collections and counted them as one, and similarly the first six 100 Bullets collections. I think I may have read a few others (Invincible, for one) but didn't record them. I did also read a couple of years of Best American Comics and counted each separately. (back)
²Warning: I entirely made that word up. Do not attempt to float this word by William Safire at a party, as he is likely to laugh directly in your face, perhaps spraying you with a fine gin and tonic. (back)

Posted by Brett Douville at 10:24 PM | Comments (2)

September 17, 2008

A Quick Note for SWRC Fans

So, I was at the Maryland Rennaissance Festival this past weekend and was thoroughly overwhelmed by one tattoo in particular:

I asked him about it (rather than surreptitiously snapping it) and he said that he loved the game and although he wanted to get the appropriate helmet for the tattoo, he couldn't find reference art on it.

Nice to meet friends in the strangest places, isn't it?

Posted by Brett Douville at 09:05 AM | Comments (0)

August 24, 2008

That One Time It's Different

Spoilers ahead, including in the footnotes.

Over the last several months I've been occasionally dipping into No More Heroes, Grasshopper Manufacture's first title for this generation of machines. I had played Killer 7 while between contracts a year and a half ago and had enjoyed both the gameplay and the bat-shit craziness of the storyline, elements of which are still pretty memorable. I had also seen Suda51 last year at GDC and found him really interesting¹. I was curious to see whether his latest game lived up to the title of his talk, "Punk's Not Dead." By and large, I'm happy to say it did.

The game is interesting in its punk aspect -- it knows it's a game for hardcore players, and characters constantly deride the hero for being an otaku and play up stereotypes associated with gamers. So right off the bat, it's snubbing its audience. If the game had a face, it would be a sneer.

But at the same time, in little ways it entirely embraces its audience. It knows it's not going to be mass market, and so it does things that might not fly in a mass-market game. In particular, there are several "one-offs", little things that are different here and there, and which tell me that someone at Grasshopper was passionate about something. There are other things about it that both mock and embrace their audience, but the one-offs are what have survived in thinking about this article.

Now, I confess, one-offs are something teams I've always worked on have tried to avoid. They're the special cases that games that are intended for the mass-market try to avoid, for at least a couple reasons:

• They can be confusing, or at least, we as developers think they might be. Usability studies give us some belief in this: players want clarity in how their expectations are met. We strive to give them this by a consistent interface (and perhaps an interface which is consistent with other games in our genre). They know that Y means jump always. They know how the jeep is going to behave, because we played Halo and it works just like that. So we attempt to lower the bar to entry by working within the constraints that seem to apply to the mass-market. I'm sure we're not always right, but with millions of dollars on the line, we're trying both to provide a particular wish-fulfillment fantasy and not alienate a large segment of the audience.
• They can be expensive, or perceived as so. Once you hit your stride in developing a game, it turns out that you have almost no time left to actually finish it. And at that point, adding in features that are going to be used in exactly one place seem expensive (in terms of cost per gamer-minute playing it vs. the rest of your game) or frivolous (Joe's doing what again? he could be supporting three animators for the same amount of tech!). They get cut in proportion to how much work they seem to be -- we cut a major enemy in Republic Commando a full year before ship because the work just didn't justify the one-off, as the rest of the game would have suffered. We would have used the enemy maybe twice, and that would really have been once too many, since the environments would have had to be highly constrained.

Now, you might say that this is all foolish, that the market's really hungry for something different and wacky, with lots of individual one-offs. But as I write this, No More Heroes shows 200K sold in the US, Zack and Wiki shows 250K in the US. Both of those have been out for months (8 for NMH, 10 for Z&W), and yet Madden NFL 2009 has been out about a week and sold 1.33 million.

Anyway, so it's a bit of a pleasure to find a game that in little ways does things a little different from time to time. Here are a few examples:

• Scorpion Extermination: In the game, there are lots of "odd jobs"... these are part of the filler material that happens in the open-world game between the boss battles². Now, each odd job could be considered a sort of special case, I suppose. But really, as a coder, I can see how I would have coded them to make them all the same. Basically, they tie together a location, an animation, and the way you have to wiggle the Wii-mote to achieve the goal. The content is different every time, from picking up coconuts to cleaning graffiti, but it's basically the same gameplay, much like God of War's door opening animations. I've digressed. The Scorpion Extermination one is different in that it's the only one where the title of the mission is displayed on screen, up in the top-left, in one of those "monster" style fonts.
  How did this happen? I'll tell you exactly how it happened. Someone passionate on the team, someone like my buddy Nathan ³, liked something about the idea of this mission. I can just hear him coming into my cubicle now and saying, "Dude, we need to put the mission name on the screen for this one." "Why?" "Because it's (cue emphatic voice and dramatic hand gestures) Scorpion Extermination". And that night that guy would stay late and code it in somehow, maybe as a horrible special case, and a year later I'll still be remembering that silly little mini-game that was different from all the others, because someone's passion showed through.
• Leaving my apartment, and Jeane the cat: So, your apartment has a few functional things in it. You can save your game, replenish your health, look at your collection of Lucha Libre masks, learn a new wrestling move, etc. And, to no apparent benefit or interest whatsoever, you can play with your cat, Jeane. Playing with your cat involves watching an animation of you playing with your cat -- feeding it, petting it, teasing it with a toy, lots of little stuff with no real interaction (though I think you can press the A button to advance it in some way). It's totally minimal, and yet I did it every now and again just because hey, why not?
  When you leave your apartment, every time, the game stops at a particular frame of the "walk through door" animation, does their specialized render frame buffer effect for load transitions, and plays a guitar chord. Well, every single time except exactly once. One time (one time!), they don't stop it there. The main character exits, and the door stays open, and his cat wanders around near the door and then slips out, only to appear in the boss battle (as a totally minimal element) that comes up not long after.
  A year from now, I am going to forget many details about this game, but I am going to remember the one time that the cat got out.
• My shorted lightsaber: Okay, they're not called lightsabers, they're called something else, but to me, if it walks like a duck... Anyway. Nearly every mission in the game is fundamentally the same. You walk into an area, turn on your lightsaber, and carve up a bunch of low-level baddies until you get to the boss. There are a couple variations on this, and those are interesting, but they don't stick in my mind as much, mostly because they're not as fun. The one that really sticks with me is the level where Travis walks in with his lightsaber, and then someone turns on the sprinklers, which causes it to short out. However, it doesn't just short out, it shorts out and starts hitting Travis with zaps of electricity, so he walks as if he's being electrocuted at each step until he can find the sprinkler controls and shut them off. He goes through the whole level this way, and then has to fight his way back because progressing to the next level happens where he started. It's brilliant, and a year from now, I'll still chuckle about it.

I don't know, maybe this stuff just sprung from the mind of Suda51, but it didn't feel like it, or perhaps it's just not how I imagine it based on teams I've worked with. Cheers to the special cases: as a manager responsible for hitting dates, I hate them. As a player... yeah, they're what I remember. I like Suda51's games precisely because they show exuberance and passion -- their gameplay is decent, but their passion shows through in a lot of little ways.

Believe it or not, I have a couple other posts brewing, so the few of you who still check back here now and again, make sure you comment so that I know you're still reading ;)

And yes, that's two in one night. Hell, that's two in one month. Wow, I think I sprained something.

¹Also super interesting from Japan that year were the Ouendan guys -- their characterization of Japanese culture as "hot" vs the West's "cool" was almost revelatory. (back)

²I know what you're thinking: "Brett, you're talking about a game with little inconsistencies and special cases, and it has bosses? Aren't those all special cases?" In this case, they're really not. The boss battles, while they have varying art, are actually fairly similar in play to one another. Each boss may have a slightly different special attack, but the battles basically boil down to a strategy of waiting for a special move, making sure you're not in front of it, and stepping up to whack the boss a few times. If not for the completely crazy situations in which they're set, they would be thoroughly uninteresting. This makes them entirely different from Zelda, where each boss has you using a new trick, or Shadow of the Colossus, where each boss is a different navigation puzzle using a very small set of skills. (back)

³I specifically mention Nathan here because of Wookiees. In Star Wars Republic Commando, Nathan came to me and said that he felt like the Wookiees were lacking -- and they were, their weapons didn't feel sufficiently cool and as an occasional companion, they didn't really differentiate from the squad except for being, well, less cool. But here they were, modeled to be bigger and bulkier and generally meaner-looking than Chewie, but undersold by their animations, AI, and accoutrements. (How's that for alliteration?) Anyway, he suggested we give them killer melee attacks, which sent my lead engineer worries abuzz -- too frivolous and expensive! But we found a way to data-drive it so it felt like a relatively small amount of tech for a large amount of variability, a clear win. And to date, they remain some of my favorite animations in the game, including the one that I told Dave Bogan we couldn't include both because of being worried about memory late in the project and our ESRB rating. Damn, Dave, that was cool. It was the right decision, but I wish I could have made it differently. Still have it somewhere? I'd love an AVI :) (back)

Posted by Brett Douville at 10:54 PM | Comments (6)

May 19, 2008

Respect My Time

So, lately I've been playing Dark Cloud 2. Honestly, I'm no longer sure why, as I've stopped taking much pleasure in it. Generally speaking, I love Level 5's games -- I played about 100 hours of Dragon Quest VIII and beat every available puzzle in Professor Layton's Village (even helping Stephen Totilo over at MTV's "Multiplayer Blog" find one he had missed). I even played quite a bit of the original Dark Cloud, though I had gotten stumped at one point, being unable to beat a boss due to how I had upgraded my weapons or something. When my original PS2 was stolen in a burglary, including the memory card, I was glad at least that I no longer had to be guilty about not finishing Dark Cloud¹; although I really enjoyed the hook of the game, being stuck in that spot with no way forward nor back was frustrating.

I was really drawn in by that hook: the "georama" elements. The bad guy was out there destroying the world by sucking up all the people and their homes and villages and what-not, and imprisoning them in little spheres that he distributed through dungeons. Sure, it's not the most amazing premise, but what it underlied was a fun little puzzle game. You'd go through the randomly generated dungeons, finding the little bits of geometry and the parts you needed to put everything back together, and then you'd return to the original village's spot and lay stuff down. The real fun for me came in interacting with the newly regenerated villagers: they would complain about not wanting to live next to so-and-so, or "wouldn't it be nice to have the river nearby", or some other simple requirement, and then you'd go and move everyone around until you had found an arrangement of homes and other cultural objects that made everyone in the village happy. It was not so much a process of restoring the world as restoring it and granting everyone's wishes in the meantime. It was immensely more satisfying and innovative than I had a right to expect in such an early PS2 title.

The things that reviewers faulted the game for were things like how generic the dungeons were, or how generic the story was, or that the action combat was just button-mashing, or whatever, the usual complaints. But I was quite happy with all the effort they had put into the little villages -- the feeling that there were lots of individual little people living out their fairly simple lives, yet who had enough personality to describe in nicely written prose (no voice acting) what would bring them contentment. If you had simply looked at the GameFAQs list of things to do for each village, you would have robbed yourself of all the little pleasures that the game offered.

So, I was really thrilled to move forward and play the sequel, which I finally picked up recently for a song. I remember being quite busy when it came out, and so its release passed me by, but it garnered significantly better reviews (and checking game rankings, it looks like it nearly hit 90%, whereas the original was just under 80%). Lately I've had a little more time and so I pulled it out and started plowing in some hours. The thing that has been biting me again and again is one of the points that Margaret Robertson made at her GDC 2008 talk, "Treat Me Like a Lover." This game has absolutely no respect for my time. Here are the principal issues:

• There are keys in the game that only unlock one thing. This is fine; for example, each level has a monster who will drop the key to exit the level, which is a one-time use item used when, bingo, you wish to exit the level. (Some levels also have rooms with their own locked doors with a separate unique key. And there are also chests which are locked which have a third type of key.) What is not fine is that every time I go up to the exit, I have to open my inventory with a button², and page through all of my stuff until I find the item. If I accidentally select the wrong item, I am "rewarded" with a little, unskippable animation of one of my lovable little avatars shrugging his or her shoulders at me. "Too bad, you doofus," they mock, "that's not the item. Come on, you can do better than that!" This whole thing should have been a one-button procedure -- bump into the exit and get a dialog which asks, "Do you want to use the Airy-Fairy Key to move to the next level?" or "You need to find the Airy-Fairy Key to progress."
• There are chests that are empty. Admittedly, a chest that were placed by a level designer in a hand-constructed dungeon would be even more perverse, but in the use of randomly generated dungeons, somewhere someone built a treasure table and included a line in it that said, "1% chance: empty". As the player, I go up to the chest, I hit a button to "open" it, and then I watch slowly in anticipation as the chest opens to deliver... nothing. Just another few seconds of my life. Gone. This is another easy thing to fix -- if you want to have some chance that some dungeon floor will have less loot, you have a weighted distribution of the number of chests on a given floor. One percent of the time, a floor has nine chests, and the other 99% it has 10. Fixed.
• Dialog lines are skippable. Woo-hoo, right?! I can read the dialog and skip ahead at my own speed. Terrific, since I read far faster than the voice actors can deliver their lines, especially the old tree god thing, which talks as if it had just woken up and hadn't had caffeine in the last thirty or forty millennia. Except that, although I am able to skip over the dialog, I am unable to skip over the animation which accompanies each voice line, so in 90% of the lines, I read through it quickly, skip over it, and then wait while some culturally generic shrugging or hand-waving gesture is displayed on screen. The solution is obvious -- we have the ability to randomly access memory, guys... we can skip ahead in the playback. If you are streaming animation data from disk... well, it's time to look into animation compression so you can load the whole shebang in at once.
• There's a health item vendor. Terrific! Except... well, to get one of those villages back up to 100%, I had to install her there. Which means that every time I want to load up on bread, I need to sit through two load screens (one to exit the dungeon, and then another to go to the place where the bread vendor is) to get there, and then another one to get back into the dungeon. This is meaningless time-wasting, and there are design solutions. Just go ahead and give me UI elements between floors of the dungeon; I'm certain that every player has had to exit the dungeon at one time or another to fill up on health stuff, since you can only carry 20 of them. There is no reality issue here -- I'm playing a game where I am placing all kinds of stuff into the world and moving it around as if it were SimCity. No one would have quibbled... and in fact, if you wanted to preserve "realism" as a player, you could certainly make the trip any time you needed to.
• There are several mini-games going on that I'm not sure whether I need to participate in. For example, I can photograph stuff and combine the photographs to come up with ideas to invent things, for which I can buy the requisite parts. However, I'm not sure that's necessary and hopefully it isn't -- since I stopped doing that a long, long time ago. You can also gain medals by doing various things in playing the levels, like beating them under a time limit, or only using one of your weapons, or catching fish of a particular size. By the time I realized that wasn't necessary to do, I had already amassed quite a few of them. These "collectible" elements are part of a "more is more" strategy that has just completely backfired here.

I think these are the major culprits. There are some minor quibbles which have more to do with not having a good idea which way to power up a weapon, which isn't really an abuse of my time, it's more just an anxiety generator as to whether I've made the right choice. There's the scaling of difficulty -- I've had to replay early dungeons tons just to power up my weapons enough to get through the later ones. I lose time every time I die because I want to skip over the "GAME OVER" fade-in and go right back to the main menu so I can continue my game from the last save point, except that there's no way to do that and I instead end up pausing the game by mistake.

All of this would be reasonably fine for me if they hadn't replaced all the charm of the georama world-building with an element whereby you have to recruit people from the town in which you originate to populate the new towns. Gone is the back-and-forth with villagers about what they're looking for, and instead, you have a charmless task of simply filling in the blanks that are generated by a list of requirements you slowly uncover -- it largely becomes a UI game at this point. "Oh, I need to put this person here. And his house has to be purple. Why couldn't I ask him that?"

Well, now that I've gotten all that off my chest, I actually find that I have no need to play further. Wow. I didn't expect that. Catharsis! Geez, I guess I should blog more often! ;)

¹For those playing our home game, the other I was most glad I didn't have to feel guilty about not finishing was Kingdom Hearts, where I had gotten as far as the Tarzan levels. That was another game I really wanted to enjoy but... well, not so much. And for the sake of full disclosure, I also didn't come anywhere near finishing GTA III, but I didn't even care enough to feel guilty about that one. (back)
²Not the X button -- the square button, which I usually forget, so habituated am I to the right thing to do is always the X button on the PS2 controller. Why I am I habituated to do this? Because it's a recommendation in the TCRs Sony makes everyone follow - make the X button the right thing to do in any given situation. (back)

Posted by Brett Douville at 11:27 AM | Comments (2)

April 03, 2008

This Message Brought to You By...

The other night I was watching The Weather Man, a quirky little film starring Nicholas Cage¹. Although it turned out to be somewhat mixed up with the point of the movie, product placement featured heavily in it, particularly early on, with three very prominent fast food franchises appearing in the first 30 minutes or so of the film. It was so blatant that I had to hope that it had something to do with the movie, but at the same time, I was still being subjected to a bunch of marketing. All of this had come a scant half hour after watching an hour of HBO's The Wire², where the detectives were sitting around a table, a Dunkin Donuts box prominently displayed in the foreground. I'm thinking of switching entirely to period pieces and science fiction³ to get away from the constant incursions of advertisting.

You know, it starts to get annoying, ads all over the place, the constant encroachment of other marketing opportunities on entertainment. It's twelve minutes of previews before a film, preceded by a slide-show sponsored by Coke. It's DVDs where you can't skip past all of that with a simple tap of the menu button. It's constant and everywhere and very hard to escape, even in a world which includes TiVo and its brethren.

I hear about in-roads being made to place advertising in games. There was a story up on GamaSutra just this past week or so, two companies joining together to provide ads in future games. And since I've begun writing this piece, Gearbox Software CEO Randy Pitchford has shown up on GamaSutra to discuss the benefits of ads in games. Pitchford identified three reasons for in-game ad placement: authenticity, budget, and cross-promotion. Although I have some thoughts about those last two, I want to focus on ads and authenticity.

Authenticity is an interesting beast. I haven't played Gearbox Software's games, except for a little bit of that multiplayer Wolfenstein game, but on the face of it, authenticity seems like a fairly reasonable argument. Pitchford cites specific examples of real-world corporations that participated in the Nazi war effort⁴, such as Philips and Opel. Not having agreements with these companies, says Pitchford, would mean leaving out authentic details like the Philips and Opel logos.

Now, I'm not going to claim that there aren't any players out there that would miss such details, but I have to say, I suspect their numbers are relatively few. And as soon as advertising money starts getting in there, I start to wonder about things. I'm not asserting that there was or has ever been any impropriety at Gearbox -- Pitchford is in the industry news a fair amount and he seems like he has integrity. But when I read Philips is giving them money and at the same time hearing that one of their levels "happens to take place in" the Philips factory in Eindhoven (in the Netherlands), I see the potential for the whiff of impropriety.

It's my feeling that when you deal with corporations about issues like this, you need to question their motives. In the case of Philips, are they hoping to get a fair shake from history about their involvement with the Nazis? I gather (from Wikipedia) that some would call Philips' actions during the war collaboration. Are they simply looking to get the brand out there, assuming brand growth simply from recognition? After all, most people don't associate Tylenol with poison despite the Tylenol killings (still unsolved!) back in the 1980s. Wouldn't it be better to associate the Philips name with a pleasant series of scheduled rewards, make the consumer associate heroism with the Philips brand. Are they going further, suggesting that a helpful supplier of intelligence might be a Philips manager, wearing a Philips cap?

Honestly, I don't know. But I wonder how I would be able to determine authentic from ad-driven in Brothers in Arms. I doubt we'll get information about what Philips paid for, and how much they paid, as most companies would consider those to be trade secrets. We have Pitchford's reassurances, but once money enters the equation, it's hard to know where the authenticity line is. The point is not that I think Gearbox's games will be less authentic as a result; the point is that I won't know what's authentic and what's not, despite being a fairly well-read and literate consumer of games. It's distracting not knowing while I play.

I'd like to see Gearbox be able to just use the material, since it was clearly present in photographs of the period; then at least I'd know that it was coming from their own point-of-view, and I could read their attempts at authenticity as genuine, as a selling point, or as a creative drive. But I know that lawsuits, with their immense expense, have had a hugely chilling effect of the use of such materials. I look around at some of the threats of lawsuits and such and wonder what brought us this far. It's crazy to me that the Anglican church would threaten to sue a video game maker for the portrayal of Manchester Cathedral, a long-standing public building. I realize that England's protection of speech is likely different from the Constitutional protections we enjoy here; even so, it seems that it would be covered by the freedom of expression article in the European Convention on Human Rights. I almost wish Sony had just stood up and said, "You know what? Sue us, we'll defend under freedom of expression" to set a precedent, particularly given one impression I've read of the deeper meaning of the Cathedral gameplay. They have the deep pockets to do so, and thus, they can and should act as a vanguard -- if only to prevent such chilling effects on the industry in the future, and therefore help to ensure their long-term business.

I've been playing co-op games of Rainbox Six Vegas for quite some time now, and it's been interesting to see the advertising at work in that game. From what I've seen, the ads tend to be on the billboards outside the missions, in the helicopter-ride cutscenes. One night in particular I noticed an Axe ad on the billboard, which might fit in perfectly in Vegas, I have no idea, having never been. But I'm fairly certain that it wasn't the same ad that had been there the last time we had played; the art stood out like a sore thumb, since it was easily twice the resolution of the rest of the level (which gets all blurred out due to post-processing effects).

In cases like these, where the cutscene occurs at a particular time in the story, the changing of these ads is remarkably distracting. I mean, that's sort of the point, in a way... if I hardly even noticed the ad, or didn't notice it all, it wouldn't be doing its advertising job. But it works directly against the grain of the game, which is, of course, the thing I purchased. I am distracted from the game I'm playing by the sudden lack of realism in the environment -- the inconstancy (in time) and the inconsistency (in visuals) of it.

I expect advertising in magazines; they're set apart, though I don't like the ones that mask themselves as if they were articles (with a discreet "Advertisement" across the top or bottom). I expect previews before movies⁵; I can at least attempt to ignore them. But I don't expect ads in books. I don't expect them in the midst of television shows or movies, as product placements. And I certainly don't expect them in games. In these latter three examples, they almost always distract and detract. Advertising, even when well done and even in the service of authenticity, pulls me out of the game; it's an unwelcome incursion.

¹Cage does the occasional quirky performance, in things like Bringing Out the Dead, but oddly enough, it turned out to be directed by Gore Verbinski, recent headliner at DICE and director of the Pirates of the Caribbean films, the first of which I really enjoyed. (back)

²Until recently, the best show on television, but it recently finished up after 5 seasons. I can't wait until it turns up on DVD. (back)

³I was thinking of Battlestar Galactica as I jotted that down, which doesn't have any of that, but of course, Blade Runner featured an early, particularly egregious example of in-film advertising, which might have fit the setting but still came off as garish. (back)

⁴I had assumed that Philips was a German company, but as it turns out, it is headquartered in the Netherlands. (back)

⁵Even though there, too, they work against my needs -- watching most previews is usually enough to fill me in on the plot details. I'll never forgive Warner Bros. for the detail of Richard Kimble jumping... well, if you've seen it, you know. Of course, Chris Corry won't forgive me for giving away Half-Life 2, Episode 2, so who am I to throw stones? (back)

Posted by Brett Douville at 01:17 PM | Comments (0)

February 25, 2008

GDC 2008

I've just got back from the 2008 Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco, and it was again a great time. Great to see people who I generally see once a year now that I'm out here in Maryland, and great to get all energized about game development again. Last year I don't think I posted anything about the conference, but as I used to do at LucasArts, this year I'm going to go ahead and post little capsule reviews of the talks I attended. I'm not going to go into lots of detail on any of them, but these are what I saw for better or worse and the slides and such should be available on the Game Developer's Conference site eventually; some contributors post their slides and text to their blogs.

Wednesday

I arrived for 10:30 on Wednesday, not expecting there to be much that would interest me; what I didn't realize was that that would also be the time of the Microsoft keynote, which didn't interest me enough to have me pile into the big hall in which it was held. So, I ended up bumming around the West Hall expo, running into friends and generally getting a handle on what I was going to do that day. Onward to the talks...

Rules of Engagement: Blizzard's Approach to Multiplayer Game Design

This was a solid, practical talk by a VP at Blizzard, Rob Pardo. While I haven't myself spent a lot of time worrying about multiplayer game design¹, I appreciate the issues involved. While there were several good points that came out of this talk, the big one for me was to Overpower everything, at least at first. There are several reasons for doing this:

• Every strategy seems unbeatable, until it's beaten. The idea is, people feel really powerful with overpowered strategies, tactics, and all that, and what you need to do rather than super-balancing things and thereby making everything equally bland is making sure there are appropriate counters in place.
• It makes things get tested in beta. If you overpower things by a little bit, it will focus your beta testers on that strategy because they're competitive and want to win. If you simply bring something up to be on par with other strategies, it won't likely get the test time it really needs. Giving the impression that it's overpowered will cause more people to experiment with it, which will help you find the balance more quickly.

Design Reboot

I'm a huge Jonathan Blow fan, I'll go ahead and admit that right up front. I had listened to his Montreal Game Summit talk some time after it was given and was looking forward to seeing his further thoughts on that topic at GDC. Of course, since he was already happy with the talk and it had gotten plenty of press, he decided to give another talk, which turned out to be about ten ways of looking at games.

I didn't have a particular takeaway from this talk except that we should continue to re-examine our assumptions about what games can be. Jon gave ten different ways of looking at games, and only the first two were the common ways we look at games, as consumer products and as escapist entertainments. He presented eight more, and there are almost certainly others. Instead of attaching those two viewpoints to our heads as a pair of nicely matched blinders, we should only put those on when they're appropriate.

Structure vs. Style

Chris Hecker gave an interesting talk² about how to view programming problems, and AI problems, as a differentiation between structure and style. (His canonical example was that the programmatic data structure encapsulating a polygon or a triangle is structure, whereas the actual model data is style). He thinks AI is the big problem for games coming up and for the near future, and he thinks that this is largely because we haven't found the structure/style distinctions in AI yet. I'm sympathetic to the view, but I need to think about it more before I can say I think he's right or not. Anyway, interesting food for thought.

Thursday

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed

I largely went to this talk because this product is what I would have been working on had I decided to stay with LucasArts several years back and not moved to Maryland. I still have a lot of friends at LucasArts, and it was nice to finally see a bit of the game running. The takeaway: you can't afford to build a game, a team, a studio, and a technology pipeline at the same time unless you have the backing of someone like George Lucas.

I-fi: Immersive Fidelity in Game Design

Clint Hocking is another one of those guys who I have lots of respect for -- I've made it to his talk each of the last three years and always find them interesting. Clint talked about two types of immersion, sensual and formal, and how they work in games -- taking Trespasser as a touchstone for much of his discussion. While I had some minor quibbles with some of his specific non-Trespasser examples (in particular, Guitar Hero), I thought his final points about how being able to explore things like emotions through formal systems could allow us to reach out and touch people by presenting games and other interactive experiences which actually explore the human condition. Look for his talk to be posted on on his site in the not-too-distant future.

Experimental Gameplay Sessions

This was another Jonathan Blow session, though he's primarily there as the organizer in this case. This year, I actually almost sent something in for these, but I don't think I would have had enough time to get either of my ideas finished for the show. There's always next year, I suppose. In any case, about a dozen interesting games were shown, mostly small web- or downloadable games, around a few different topics, such as Obfuscation or Two Worlds. I'm hopeful that Jon will put up the full list and links over on his site.

The Game Design Challenge

Hmmm... this is another one I go to every year. Perhaps I'm getting into a rut. In any case, this year, returning champion Alexei Pajitnov faced Brenda Brathwaite and Steve Meretzky with the challenge of designing a game for humans and one other species. Personally, I found Brenda's superior, though Meretzky's delivery was hard to beat.

The IGF Awards/Game Developers' Choice Awards

The IGF Awards remain great largely due to the energy and eccentricity of the indie developers themselves. Lots of good titles were shown up on the big screen, and some truly interesting games won.

Regrettably, the Choice Awards were presented by Jason Rubin. Admittedly, it would have been difficult for anyone to top Tim Schafer. And perhaps, in their desire to be "presentable" for a G4 audience or something, perhaps the writers of the show simply stayed away from anything... funny or meaningful or really of any substance whatsoever. Message to CMP and IGDA: Bring back Tim Schafer, let him do his shtick. He almost certainly won't have a crab or octopus or other form of marine life in his chest next year.

Friday

Treat Me Like A Lover

BEST OF SHOW

I dragged myself out of bed Friday morning both to be there in time to meet someone and to attend this talk, about which I knew nothing but the title. I am so glad I got there in time to see it -- it was a presentation by British journalist Margaret Robertson (whose blog, Lookspring, has been added to the sidebar). The hook of the talk was looking at games (and designing them) through the lens of a romantic relationship with the player. Though this was useful, what was particularly great was the specificity of her examples -- she pulled out little bits of games that did things right and wrong for each point, and her analysis seemed spot on. An absolutely terrific talk; I hope she'll come back next year.

What's Next for God Games

I generally really enjoy Ernest Adams' talks, much as I generally enjoy his GamaSutra column. But this year's talk, which was essentially the God game Adams pitched to EA years ago (and which was never built, though it was prototyped), fell entirely flat with me. While I agree with his main thrust, that exploring different areas such as actually addressing religion in a God game is interesting, telling me so would have taken about the 5 minutes it took me to write out this sentence. I have high hopes for the return of a more interesting talk next year. Perhaps it was simply that he didn't have his usual top hat.

Game Designers' Rant

Hmmm... yes, another I attend every year. I was particularly moved and motivated by Jane McGonigal's talk, and to a lesser extent, by Clint's. I suspect Jonathan Mak has simply always wanted to get a huge room of people playing with balloons, so I'm glad he got his wish here. McGonigal pointed out that game designers are the smartest people on the planet at making people happy -- it's time to get out there and solve reality, since in her view, "reality is broken". A terrific talk, well presented, and thought-provoking, although the problem is probably just that game designers looking to fix reality just haven't met up with the right programmers... :)

Three 20 Minute Sessions

I attended an hour comprised of three 20 minute sessions. One was by my friend and former co-worker Tim Longo, who tried to present 10 keys to working with an established IP in 20 minutes... which was about half an hour too short. I worked on most of the projects whose examples he cited and still had a hard time following him -- perhaps you can bring it back next year as a full hour, buddy? I think it would work that way. How to Create the Greatest Boss Battle (and Why Not to Do It!) and How to Pick a Lock: Creating Intuitive, Immersive Minigames were a bit better-suited to the time allotted, and presented good examinations of those topics. If you're working on either minigames or boss battles, I recommend tracking down those slides to see what those guys had to say.

Dynamic Cinematic Gameplay

This was a talk addressing the specifics of issues the speaker had in creating Stranglehold's "Tequila Bombs", which were cinematic moments in the midst of gameplay. While I think the idea of the topic was a good one, I felt like the presentation got mired in details about the specific elements in that game, which I haven't played. A slightly higher-level talk would ha