GDC Day 5

The final day of GDC is always a quiet one. Instead of going out with a bang, GDC slowly empties over the course of the day, as hung-over game developers find they lack the patience and will to continue going to lectures and roundtables. By the end of the day, only a few attendees walk zombie-like from lecture to lecture, like some scene out of Dawn of the Dead.



Requirements for a Next Generation Massively Multiplayer Online Game: Gordon Walton
Description: Gordon Walton goes over what he thinks are the 9 things a next-generation MMOG needs to succeed.
What I Expected: Gordon Walton is famous for his no-holds-barred lectures that get right down to the core of the subject, no matter how dirty it gets. I went for the entertainment value of the lecture.
What I Got: Gordon has been getting nicer and nicer as time moves on, thus his entertainment value has dropped. However, I’m sure this has made getting along with him a lot easier. Of his 9 things, only one was thought provoking, which was having an audience mode for games. With this, people who weren’t playing the game could watch the activities of the people who were, and get enough voyeuristic thrills that they would become players, as well. At the time, that sounded pretty interesting. In retrospect, it reminds me of what happens after you die in Counter-Strike. If you die late in a game, and have a lot vested in the outcome, it’s pretty interesting to try to see how the game is progressing. If you get killed early in the game, then being stuck watching people go down halls is nothing short of boring. Without context, watching other people playing games is probably not the great selling tool Gordon made it out to be.

His other points boiled down, basically, to two things: players are expecting more quality from their games, and are expecting those games to suit their play styles. So, I guess it’s actually one thing: players want their expectations met, which is, basically, what they have always wanted. Otherwise, the talk was pretty good, and it woke me up enough to go to the next thing.

Triangulation: A Schizophrenic Approach to Game Design: Will Wright
Description: Will Wright talks about his design process.
What I Expected: Will Wright is pretty much the smartest guy designing games that can actually talk to an audience. There may be smarter people, but they aren’t nearly as entertaining. I’ve missed Will for the past two years, and have regretted it, so I decided to go this year.
What I Got: Will, once again, did a highly entertaining lecture that ranged from film clips of robots calling for help to a Russian Space Minute that showed how a solid interface can win over a more complex one. His design method looks a little like the way David Bowie writes songs using a random word generator. Lots of laughs, and really entertaining. On the other hand, duplicating this process requires the mind of Will Wright, which not many people can approach.

SciFi MMPs: Lessons from Star Wars Galaxies and Earth and Beyond: Chris Klug, Raph Koster, Jesse Schell
Description: Chris Klug of Earth and Beyond, and Raph Koster of Star Wars Galaxies constitute a panel led by Jesse Schell of Carnegie Mellon University talking about Sci Fi MMOGs.
What I Expected: I was unsure what I would get from this panel. However, a few friends were going, so I tagged along.
What I Got: Basically, this turned into a post-mortem of both Galaxies and EAB. It was interesting that Chris admitted that not having avatars in a real sense was a really bad decision. There was also some good talk on the fact that MMOGs no longer have the same growth pattern that the early MMOGs like UO and EQ had when they started out, meaning that the audience is more experienced, and has an easier time letting go than previously. It seems MMOGs are more like a virus than an addictive drug. Once you kick the habit, you are pretty much cured, and new games must now overcome your resistance to get you to play as much as you did previously.

Game Credits: Towards Industry Guidelines: John Feil, Dave Weinstein
Description: Our second roundtable on establishing credits guidelines.
What I Expected: More of what I got on Wednesday.
What I Got: Lots more problems with how companies credit games, such as: Small teams often don’t have leads (so who is the lead designer if you only have two designers?); how do you credit contractors; how do you credit cross-department contributions; what about international outsourcing for localization or software development; what about programmers who have built a C++ library that is used by the company in game after game, are they credited as a developer for each game; and, what about crediting people working on a live product, like a MMOG? All in all, this session was a bit more valuable than the first one. Now comes the fun part, where I get to collate the problems and also create a document with all the basic roles developers have in making a computer game. Whee!


Thus ends GDC 2004. I liked this one better than 2003. The lectures were better, and the networking was amazing this year. I collected as many business cards as I had in the four previous years combined. Pretty amazing. Looking forward already to GDC 2005.

GDC Day 4

Sorry I'm posting these behind schedule... but at least I'm posting them!

GDC Day 4

Today was, if possible, more crowded than yesterday. They say that this is the biggest GDC ever, and I believe it.

Here’s what I attended today:


Would The Real Emergent Gameplay Please Stand Up? Harvey Smith, Randy Smith
Description: Harvey and Randy of Ion Storm talk about emergent gameplay. Emergent gameplay happens when game mechanics interact with one another to create more gameplay than what you would get if they couldn’t affect one another. An example would be that bullets rupture barrels, barrels contain poison gas, poison gas kills humans, when humans die, the guns they carry drop on the ground, when guns drop on the ground, they have a chance of accidentally going off. In this example, if the player shot a barrel near a guard, the poison gas would kill him, the guard would drop his weapon, and more guards would die from either weapons fire or more ruptured barrels.
What I Expected: I’ve watched Harvey’s talks about emergent gameplay for a couple of years now. I wanted to see if they had found out anything new.
What I Got: They didn’t find out anything new.

Toward Relevant Research: Collaboration 101: Mark DeLoura, roBin Hunicke, Raph Koster, Michael Van Lent, Will Wright
Description: Academics and Developers want a relationship: The Universities want money, free source code to play with, and for game companies to hire their students. The Game Industry wants universities to research new ways of making better games, and to give that research to game developers the results for free. They are currently trying to meet somewhere in the middle.
What I Expected: I wanted to hear about new research that might have an impact on how we can make games.
What I Got: The academics asking for money, free source code, and jobs for their graduates. The industry guys trying to say, in a nice way, that academia is unprepared to interface with the much faster paced game industry. It was an interesting panel, but ultimately not very valuable.

IGDA Annual Meeting
Description: During GDC, the IGDA holds a face-to-face meeting to go over what has happened over the previous year, to address concerns, and to have the candidates for the board of directors gives a short campaign speech.
What I Expected: As a member of the board of directors, I expected to sit behind a table and address questions asked by the audience about the business of the GDC.
What I Got: Usually, these meetings are fairly long and onerous. This year, it went very smoothly and it felt like we got through it without too many people falling asleep. I don’t know if this is because I was behind the table and have an insight into the IGDA now that I didn’t have before, or if it was actually better. I do know that we managed to bring food in to the meeting, and that helped me out a lot, since previous years have been a battle versus long-winded speeches and hunger. The board candidates are very impressive this year, and I look forward to seeing how that goes.

The Secret Of Pac-Man’s Success: Making Fun First: Toru Iwatani
Description: Toru Iwatani was the designer of Pac-Man. He gives his insights on classic arcade games and the secret of Pac-Man’s success.
What I Expected: I followed a friend blindly into this one, so I didn’t have any real expectations.
What I Got: This was a translated talk. Everybody in the audience got a pair of headphones with which a translator whispered in English what Toru was saying in Japanese. It felt like I was in the UN.
One of the problems of translated talks is that anything the speaker says is filtered by the knowledge of the translator. This filter generally reduces the relevance and insights of what the speaker is saying due to an unfamiliarity of the technical lingo in one or both languages. Also, cultural differences reduce a lot of the meaning of what the speaker is saying. Usually, I avoid translated talks for this reason. When I saw the nifty headsets, though, my gadget-geek instincts kicked in and I decided to stick around. Unfortunately, the lecture still suffered from this filtering effect.
The talk, given the circumstances, was pretty interesting. Toru, like many Japanese designers, believe in simplicity as a core design element, and said that Pac-Man’s strength was in that simplicity of form and function, which I really can’t disagree with. He also talked about his design method, which is heavily based on the observation of systems and trying to get to their core functionality in order to replicate them in games. An example he gave was a pair of escalators. His interpretations of these escalators were that they were a perfect system, because even when not functioning, they still retained their function. In other words, an escalator works extremely well at moving people up and down the levels of a building, and, if their power is turned off, they still retain their function as stairs. Admittedly, I can’t see the beauty he is seeing in this system, but I think that this is a clue as to the difference between Japanese and American designers. Personally, as a level designer, I see escalators as a choke point where I can reliably predict where players have to go in order to ascend levels.
All in all, this talk would have been much better if I understood Japanese.

Adventures In Character Design: Tim Schafer
Description: Tim Schafer is the well-known designer of Grim Fandango, Full Throttle, Day of the Tentacle, and other LucasArts adventure games. His talk covered his thoughts on how to create interesting characters.
What I Expected: An entertaining talk on making funny characters.
What I Got: I got pretty much what I expected. Tim is a funny guy and makes very interesting and funny games. His talk had a lot of interesting tips on how to create deep characters for computer games. The best part was his using a Freindster-style information screen to develop character traits.

GDC Day Three: Wednesday

Today was the first day of the regular GDC conference. The first two days are usually less populated, with the conference consisting of all-day seminars or tutorials. While these are very valuable, the last three days of the conference is when the bulk of the attendees arrive. At this point, GDC becomes a full-on carnival, with endless lines of people looking to be entertained while trying to learn how to entertain others.

Here’s the roundtables and tutorials I attended today:

User Interface Design Roundtable: Garner Halloran
Description: Developers getting together to talk about user interfaces and usability design.
What I expected: Some discussion on how to approach and design interfaces for games.
What I got: I was pretty dead this morning, and this time slot had more things I wanted to see than any other time slot during the conference. Luckily, I’m at a game conference. During breakfast in the speaker’s room, I asked the eight people who were also eating if anyone had a six-sided dice, and, wouldn’t you know, someone did. One roll later, and I’m going to the roundtable on User Interface. This ended up being a good thing, as the discussion woke me up, and reintroduced me to many of the Microsoft Usability team.

As an aside, one of the best things Microsoft has going for it in the game department is its usability team. Made of around 15 post-graduate psychologists, these guys make sure Microsoft’s games are user-friendly. This type of thing is absolutely necessary, in my mind, to give game developers a reality check when they try to produce games that only other game developers can understand.

As for the roundtable, it was pretty good. No epiphanies or really any new information, but it was good to see a packed room filled with people convinced that a good interface is necessary to make a good game.


Keynote: Microsoft XNA: J. Allard, Robbie Bach
Description: Microsoft making a mysterious, huge announcement.
What I expected: Nobody tells me nothin’, so I was successfully mystified.
What I got: Microsoft announced their new initiative to bring a bunch of new tools to help game developers build games faster and better. I think. It was technical and had a lot of an acronyms, and I get confused easily. Alex Pfaffe says it’s a good thing, so that’s good enough for me.

MMO Communities: Fans and Flames: Kevin O’Hara
Description: Roundtable discussing MMOGs and their relationships with the online communities that gather around them.
What I expected: A discussion about online communities.
What I got: This was a pretty good roundtable. Almost every MMOG was represented, from There.com to Pirates of the Burning Sea to Dark Age of Camelot to Star Wars Galaxies. And Mythica, of course. We talked about whether developers should be allowed to talk to the community (answer: most people think “no”, because some developers have given the rest of us a reputation for bad spelling, worse English, and a tendency to react poorly to flames) about how to deal with griefers (information gathering and banning) and about the development of the community from announcement to beta to live.

Overall, this was a fun roundtable. There’s a lot of thought going into this subject on the part of the developers, and it was good to share notes and discover we’re all pretty much on the same page.


Game Credits: Towards Industry Guidelines: Dave Weinstein, John Feil
Description: Dave and I are trying to get together a paper standardizing the titles and roles of who does what in the game industry.
What I expected: Dave to ask me to take notes.
What I got: I ended up having to take notes. We talked a lot about what merits a mention in a game’s credits and what title should be attributed to that work. We talked some about the actual roles, but, mostly, we talked about how to create the standards and what they might mean to the industry. The guys from Moby Games were there, and they’ll be a big help in getting this stuff standardized.


The Negotiation: Tom Buscaglia, Barry Friedman, Lee Jacobson
Description: Barry Friedman, a business manager who deals with publishers on the behalf of developers, and Lee Jacobson, a development manager for Midway Publishing, square off and roleplay a negotiation between a game studio and a publisher about retaining IP rights. This discussion is moderated by Tom Buscaglia, a lawyer who, I kid you not, takes no shit from anyone.
What I expected: I went in to this one blind. I met Tom a couple nights ago and found him to be a pretty entertaining fellow who is the exact stereotype of someone who doesn’t take shit from anyone. I figured it would be fun to see him speak.
What I got: This was the best thing I went to all day long. The discussion between Barry and Lee, once they got into their negotiation, was great! Filled with details about the contractual demands that publishers make of developers, and the demands that developers make of publishers, I came away from this event with tons more knowledge about the motivations of publishers and their relationships with their developers.

Some stuff to know: It’s very hard to retain the rights to your IP unless you, as a developer, come from a very strong position. The first contract a publisher gives you is always unfair. If you’ve never done anything like this before, you should hire Barry to do your deal for you, the guy is amazingly learned. The actual costs of a publisher are much higher than you really expect, but they stand to make a huge amount of money if your game succeeds.



10 Tricks From Psychology for Making Better Characters: Katherine Isbister
Description: A discussion on how to use tips from psychology to enhance your game’s characters.
What I expected: I met Katherine a few years ago at GDC, and she had a lot of good ideas to make games better through using psychological research. I wanted to see what she had to say.
What I got: This lecture did a good job at showing how people perceive the world and one another. If we can trick a player into seeing the psychological cues in a game character that they usually pick up on in other people, those characters will be more convincing, and, therefore, the game will become more immersive. Some of these methods include showing facial reactions and postures, establishing status in social situations, and testing for usability. I liked this lecture, but wished it could have covered how to adjust these tips to make sense in different cultures.

GDC Day One and Day Two

As I mentioned last week, I’m here at the Game Developer Conference in sunny San Jose California. Here’s my report of the first two days.

IGDA Developer Business Summit:

The Business Summit is a two day seminar meant to have the movers and shakers of the game development industry meet to discuss the various concerns of running a successful business. Various events include lectures by Ray Muzyka of Bioware, Bing Gordon of EA, Michael Gartenberg of Jupiter Research, and Kathy Schoback of Eidos. There is also a panel with Rob Huebner (Nihilistic Software), Karl Jeffery (Climax), Tamra Nestler Fionda (Tri Synergy) and Greg Richardson (EA), moderated by Eric Zimmerman (Gamelab).

What I expected: As a member of the board of directors of the IGDA, I felt that it would be helpful to the other IGDA folks if I could be around to show support. Also, the business side of the industry fascinates me, and I always welcome a chance to learn more about that side of things.

What I got: All of the lectures were excellent, especially Bing Gordon’s talk on marketing and Michael Gartenburg showing chart after chart of extremely interesting demographic information. I felt the panel was a little unfocused, but was also pretty good.

Some Thoughts:

If you are going to sign a contract, research every aspect of what you want out of that contract, and make sure that you know everything your publisher will own if you sign the contract as-is. To do this, it’s best to hire a lawyer that specializes in this stuff. This will be expensive, so budget for it. A number I heard was $10,000.00 in legal fees. Also, I heard that the negotiation period can last up to six months. Budget for this, as well.

The casual gamer, who plays mostly puzzle and parlor games, represent more than half of all gamers. However, the crowd in this summit still weren’t too interested in dealing with that aspect. On the other hand, the casual gaming tutorial down the hall was packed to standing room only, so someone obviously cares.

Starting a new studio in the fashion that other, moderately successful studios have in the past is now unfeasible. Getting publishing deals in the old-fashioned manner is now so hard and requires so many contacts and so much previous experience as a studio, that it has become nigh-impossible to succeed. However, the good news is that there are new vectors to enter the industry that weren’t present 5 years ago. Outsourcing and alternate funding methods exist to help the new developer succeed and thrive. Further, more experienced developers can be approached to give out much-needed advice on this subject.

All in all, a very valuable time. Look to the IGDA website in the next few weeks if you are interested in the content of this seminar.

GDC Next Week

The Game Developer’s Conference is next week, and I plan to attend. I have this dream of blogging my experiences there, but, knowing how hectic the conference is, I might have to just settle for an overview afterwards. In the meantime, I found an old overview that I wrote a few years ago when I went to GDC 2001. It was my second GDC, and I convinced my wife that we should load up the credit card so that I could attend, since LucasArts wouldn’t pay for a junior Level Designer to go.

It’s an interesting read. There are some predictions in there that haven’t come true, some opinions I’ve changed. When you’re in your late thirties, it always comes as a surprise when you find out that you were both more mature and more immature only such a short time ago. Of course, this was written pre-September 11th. A lot about everything has changed since then.

So, enjoy! Maybe my dreams will come true, and you’ll be reading a blow-by-blow from the floors of GDC next week. More likely, expect a deafening silence.

You can find the overview here.

New Work!

On the work page, you'll now find my attempt at creating a pen-and-paper roleplaying game for the Mythica world. The excitement never ends at Gamefeil.com!

Great Link Found! News at 11:00

Found this presentation by Mark Terrano that was given at the Australian GDC. It's work clicking through all 180 slides to see his ideas on immersion.
You can find it here.

Whoops!

Looks like the blog entry for "When Gamers are Wrong" got sent a few times when I uploaded it. Serves me right for not testing my own site. Bad Feil, no Toblerone!

Teenagers From Middle-earth

I've added an old RPG supplement I wrote to the work page. Enjoy!

When Gamers are Wrong

Last week, in a spat of writer’s block, I asked the moderators at MythicaHQ if they had any suggestions as to what they’d like to see me write about in this blog. Moloch came to my rescue and gave me oodles of topics to write about. Here, in the first of a series, is a post detailing when gamers are wrong.

Moloch asked:
“When gamers are wrong. Explaining (if) when and why there are times when the gaming public doesn't know what's good for them.”

This is a question that is pretty hard to answer. If I’m interpreting this correctly, this question seems to be concerning the opinions and expectations of gamers on internet forums, and whether their suggestions, if implemented, would actually be detrimental to a game, rather than beneficial.

The reason this is hard to answer is because opinions are hugely subjective, especially when they relate to entertainment products like video games.

To further complicate matters, I can’t see when either side is actually wrong. Everybody is trying to make the game better, by trying to sculpt it into a shape that seems the most fun.

However, there are times when gamers can fail to understand the implications of their suggestions.

The main error that I’ve seen in player forum posts is that the gamer fails to recognize the scope of how difficult his suggestion is to implement.

For example, many posts, usually off-handedly, assume that game developers can program in some sort of conversational ability that allows NPCs to completely understand and respond to player communication. A specific example would be to talk to a guard and con him into opening a door. With current technology, this is not a feature that could be implemented easily or well. Further, if the player could do it with one guard, they would want to be able to communicate as easily with all other NPCs, with each NPC having its own personality and resistance to being smooth-talked. Although conversational AI has come a long way since ELIZA , a world full of these things would be incredibly difficult and expensive to make, and probably would still feel very fake and pre-programmed.

Another example of misunderstanding scope is the assumption that, when one game has a certain feature, that all other game companies have the ability to instantly implement that feature in their games. For instance, a fighting game like Soul Calibur 2 has very realistic, very quick one-on-one battles between extremely detailed models. The reason these games can be as good as they are is that they basically take place in a limited space between only two combatants. To implement a Soul Calibur-level fighting ability in all the NPCs and player characters in even a moderately-sized third-person action-adventure would be extremely hard, and would definitely take away from other features, like vehicle driving, communication with and between NPCs, pathing AI and a host of other concerns. To try to implement this in a massively multiplayer world would be nearly impossible using today’s technology and internet speed.

A final example of misunderstanding scope would be when players suggest scenarios that cause an imbalance in the game’s mechanics. A lot of these suggestions have their basis in real-world physics. For instance, in the real world, it would be very hard for a fighter armed with a sword to win in a fight vs. a competent archer starting at 50 feet on a level field. Give the archer a barrier, like a tower, for protection, and he’s nearly invincible. In a fantasy game, however, you would want the fighter to have a good chance at being able to close against the archer to be able to attempt to defeat him. Otherwise, everyone would be carrying ranged weapons and no one would be carrying melee weapons (much like the real world, today.) To have realistic combat physics would defeat the game maker’s ability to create a world simulating a Dungeons and Dragons experience, or a Conan novel.


There are, of course, other examples of when player suggestions are not feasible to implement. Always remember the golden triangle: The Feature List, The Schedule and the Budget. If one of the corners grows, the other two will be affected, as well. In other words, adding to the feature list is expensive!

So, are players ever wrong in their forum suggestions? Once again, they are not wrong if the game is being built specifically for them. The error comes across when the suggestion is measured against the fact that the game has to be balanced (even if that balance doesn’t make sense compared to real life physics), has to be made with today’s technology, has to be made within a certain budget and within a certain time frame, has to be fun for the bulk of the people who play it, and has to be as profitable as it can realistically be.

Questions and Answers

So, I’ve been getting a lot of traffic from the Mythica Community sites, so I wanted to write something for the Blog that you guys might like to read. I asked JonnyG of MythicaHQ for a good topic, and he gave me three questions instead. While they aren’t specific to game creation, they remind me that sometimes players want to know what kind of people developers are.

Question 1: What does your day as a developer consist of?

My days at Microsoft went something like this: I get to work earlier than most of the other guys, around 7:00am. Between the time I get to work and the time the cafeteria in my building opens up, I read the email that’s been sent in the 8 or so hours I haven’t checked it and respond accordingly. Then, I read my daily comics, like PvPOnline and Penny Arcade , (I always look forward to Thursdays, as that is Nodwick and Full Frontal Nerdity day) and then go to Frictionless Insight , Slashdot Games , Shaknews , and then read the Mythica Community News pages , to see if there’s any new articles I need to read.
Then, I get a bagel for breakfast, read anything I haven’t got to yet, and then start writing lists of things I need to accomplish that day. These lists are somewhat cryptic, like “Create Paths for Corrupted Guards” or “Script response of boss” or “fix floating house” or “Create Patrol Generator” or “Go over terrain with Prem”.
For the rest of the day, I attempt to accomplish my list. A lot of things crop up to kick me off my goal, like meetings, urgent emails, tools that crash, assets that aren’t there, bugs in my script, impromptu meetings discussing specific design, and more crashing tools.

I do this for 8-12 hours, and then I go home.

Question 2: Does it ruin the game playing experience to be in the industry?

This is a question that would be answered differently by each person in the games industry. I don’t think anyone would say that “ruin” is a good word for how you see games differently after working on them. The first thing you notice is that you begin to have a different vocabulary when you talk about games. You speak in more specific terms. You talk about particle effects, the textures and the lighting, the combat AI vs. the social AI, the dialog, the scripting or lack thereof. You might talk about sorting, or farkling, or anti-aliasing and jaggies. Sometimes, this new vocabulary allows you to deconstruct and criticize games more, but it can also allow you to see past the game and understand the work that went into it. You can see the blood and the overtime; you can see the elegance and grace of simple answers to complex challenges. Little things that no one else would notice impress you: much like a professional athlete understands the deeper game underneath the superficial scoring of points.

Does being in the industry ruin games? No. It enhances them. It makes the beautiful gorgeous, the ugly vomitous, and the invisible visible.

Question 3: Do you play games besides computer games?

I’m going to go all philosophical on this question. The answer to this question is another question: “When am I not playing games?” Part of that answer up there to question 2 is the answer to this one. When you make games for a living, you begin to see game elements in everything you do. You begin to see efficient paths through bookstores. You have a timed puzzle: Get to work on time. You see a “B” bug in the door: The door won’t close completely shut: suggest sanding side of door to counter swelling due to moisture. You have a social puzzle: How can I convince my wife I need a new computer?

Ok, so maybe it’s not that bad (except when you’ve been doing a lot of overtime). For a literal answer to the question, without all the gobbletygook, I try to play a lot of pen and paper RPGs. Actually, I prefer running them, but I like playing them, as well. I was planning to start a “Mythica, the RPG” campaign at work, using a variation of Jonathon Tweet’s “Everway” rules, but that never came to pass. If I have time, I’ll upload the materials I created so people can adapt it to their own games.

That’s it. If any of you readers want to see anything specifically covered here in my humble Blog, feel free to write in and ask. Saves me the trouble of having to think up topics myself. :-)

Game Over: The TV Show

There's a new video-game related TV show on UPN called "Game Over". Was anybody going to watch this thing? Since it's on UPN, hopes are not high for its... how shall I put it?... depth of character,.. but it has me excited as yet another attempt by mass media to drive the point home that computer games are now part and parcel with what we perceive of as popular culture. On the other hand, as it takes up the time slot occupied by Enterprise for a while, will a non-geek even hear the splash it makes before the weak-kneed executives at UPN pull it for reruns of America's Top Nearly-Naked-Starving-Bitchy-Backstabbing-Watch-It-Because-There-Will-Be-A-Catfight-We-Swear-It-Model or episodes of Unfunny-Racially-Stereotyping-Offensive-Comedy?

Check out the website and hope for the best:

http://www.gameover.tv/home.html