And it certainly wasn’t what I expected. I had a vague memory of what the Flash version was like, but my most recent thatgamecompany memory was of Journey, and I’d played Flower as well a few years back. The later two games have a lot in common; I’d remembered flOw‘s graphics as being quite a bit more simple (in a rather lovely way), but I was expecting the feel of the game to be somewhat similar to its successors.

It really wasn’t, though. In fact my first reaction was that the game didn’t make me feel very good playing it, and in particular didn’t make me feel very good about myself. The former was because of the sense of fear that I had after getting a bit into the game: I ran into a couple of levels in a row that were full of creatures that I wasn’t ready to deal with, so I ended up skirting around the edges, hoping that I’d find the red “descend a level” creature before those big creatures attacked me. And the latter was caused by the aggressive playstyle that the game allows: you can choose to be a sort of vegetarian, only eating relatively sedentary creatures that don’t seem to be eating anything else (and in particular won’t attack back), but you can also try to eat the creatures that are trying to eat you. Which, on its own, wouldn’t be so bad, but there’s also a cannibalism subtext where you can try to eat the same kinds of creatures as yourself.

Which I dutifully did: a large part of the game seems to be about exploring systems, and how to eat what (and what the effects of that consumption are) is the big system to explore. And the game’s major philosophical theme seems to be the circle of life (c.f. the capitalized ‘O’ in the game’s name); in general, that circle is a bit larger (the game is divided up into large stages where you play different life forms, and frequently you’ll be threatened by a life form in one stage and get to play that life form in the next stage), but the mathematician in me appreciates the degenerate case of a very tight circle of life where you’re eating yourself, or at least somebody that looks just like you. So yes, I explored those themes by having one playthrough where I tried to eat everything else that was available; at first, it felt creepy, then I became numb, then my numbness felt creepy.

I really wonder what I would have felt about flOw if I’d played before Flower. Because I play many other games that are filled with killing, including killing people of the same species as yourself; I’m starting to question that a little bit more, but in general I’m content enough with that, and I don’t think that flOw is asking me to do anything worse than what other games ask me to do? My guess is that I wouldn’t have noticed anything odd about flOw if I’d played it when the PS3 version first came out: maybe the feeling of fear would still have been there (I dimly recall that being present in the Flash version), but I wouldn’t have found that as surprising, and I expect I wouldn’t have thought that the omnipresence of death in the game was anything worth remarking about. Compared to its successors, though, it’s much more of distinction. (And not the only one: I mentioned the art style above, and in general the game’s style is quite a bit more abstract; it’s also quite a bit gamier than either Flower or Journey, with systems much more on the surface.)

I’m glad to have played flOw: the art style is lovely, the systems have enough to them to be worth a couple of hours of my time, and I’m finding my disquiet at the game to be interesting in its own right. But I’m glad thatgamecompany went in a different direction with their later releases, and I’m finding more to think about in their later games than in their first offering.

The choice I wanted to make, had it been allowed, would arguably have had horrific consequences within the game’s world. Showing those consequences could have been something very powerful in its own way, which in turn points at a weakness in the series’s storytelling: the good choices never hurt you. They don’t hurt you in the short term, they don’t hurt you in the long term. (Hardly a unique problem in video games, c.f. BioShock.) So perhaps the game’s developers had painted themselves into a corner here: the Reapers’ arrival was too important to be treated as anything other than an immediate existential threat, but without allowing real consequences, they in turn couldn’t allow the player a choice at all. And they resolved that conflict by taking a sharp tonal shift.

There’s also the political statement that’s implicit in Arrival: that when matters get serious, the only solution is to go macho and little the ground with corpses. And I’m not going to argue that solutions like that are never necessary, and indeed the hypothetical situation the game presents us with might be one. But I am a citizen of the United States in the beginning of the twenty-first century: it’s been two thirds of a century since my country (which is, of course, not BioWare’s country) has faced a threat to which such a response has been appropriate, and during those 65 years the United States has brought the capacity (and very real threat) of annihilation of human life to the world, we’ve invaded country after country after country, we’ve propped up dictatorships. And we’ve responded to a horrible attack that led to the deaths of thousands of innocents by invading countries and causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands (at the very least, much more likely millions), by attacking our civil liberties at home, by removing any pretense of judicial review of our government’s actions in that war. In that context, if a work of art uncritically suggests that our problem is that we’re not acting macho enough in our foreign policy, then that artwork is part of the problem, is abdicating its responsibility.

Still: until Arrival, I’d been quite impressed by the series. Especially when it wasn’t acting so grand and macho: it wasn’t until I wrote specifically about my Mass Effect 2 romance that I realized how strongly that part of the game had affected me. Also, the DLC raised the possibility that Shepard was going back to earth to be tried as a war criminal: perhaps the game wasn’t going to uncritically accept the necessity, the virtue of such slaughter? The series’s developers have done a lot of good, they’ve earned some goodwill. While Arrival made me a lot less excited about Mass Effect 3 than I had been, there wasn’t any realistic chance that I wasn’t going to play it, and indeed play it soon after release.

Those hopes were, of course, dashed as soon as I started playing the game. No directly addressing how to treat Shepard after her actions in Batarian space: instead, we jump to the Reapers’ arrival on Earth, lamenting only that not enough attention was paid to Shepard’s warning. And this machismo carried over to other aspects of the third game: in particular, the character models were significantly different, significantly more sexualized. (Jumping ahead a bit, I was quite unimpressed by EDI’s new sexy robot body as well.) Character models weren’t an area where the series needed change, needed improvement; and the changes they made definitely weren’t an improvement.

But even at the beginning of the game, there were touches that impressed me rather more. Even since I realized I wouldn’t be able to be with Liara in Mass Effect 2, I’d assumed that the game would set up some sort of soap opera choice between my Mass Effect 1 lover and my Mass Effect 2 lover, making me re-romance one of them while setting up some sort of showdown with the other. And I wasn’t looking forward to that at all: Liara was clearly my character’s love, but I certainly didn’t want to treat Thane badly.

To my surprise, however, the game got this out of the way right up front: Liara
appeared in the first mission, we talked after that, and got things squared up. Surprisingly cleanly; a little odd considering my behavior, but then again it’s not like she’d been pining for me over the last four years herself. So we’d both considered other options, we both came to the same conclusion: we were there for each other.

In a funny way, I actually missed the romance on the ship: I stopped by her office every time I wandered around the ship, and she was surprisingly distant then. Not that I wanted a full-blown romance, and I certainly preferred how it unfolded to going through a second courtship. But I wish that the game had allowed the underlying, unconditional affection that I felt to come out in our words, our greetings. Still, it let me believe that that affection was there, which is ultimately what was most important.

And, as it turned out, a real showdown with Thane was never in the cards: he was stuck on the Citadel, close to death. My first encounter with him was the only time in the series where I can remember intentionally not choosing a paragon interrupt: I didn’t quite trust the game’s designers to not have me somehow fall into his arms if I went that direction, and I definitely didn’t want that. So we got matters settled with no drama: not quite what I would have chosen, it felt like a cop-out (on my part? on the game’s part?), but much better than the soap-opera drama that I was expecting.

But again I was underestimating the game. Because, while Thane isn’t in any shape to travel with you, he shows up again in a sequence on the Citadel halfway through the game, helping you save the council from assassination. Shortly after which he dies, with Shepard and his son at his side, reading him a prayer that turns out to be a prayer of forgiveness for Shepard. It choked me up when I watched it; and Thane aside, I love the power of the compassion in that scene, forcing you to even be compassionate to yourself. (To acknowledge the need of acting compassionate towards yourself, of the stresses that are lurking behind she shell that you have to maintain! Much more so than in the prior two games, I frequently found it easy to make renegade choices: shit is going down, and despite my laments about the machismo at the start of the game, my Shepard has no patience with people who don’t recognize that. I won’t say that those renegade choices were an act, because that’s definitely how she would have behaved in such a situation: but behind that surface, there’s a part of her that would have been appalled at some of the actions she had to take. But there’s a still deeper core within Shepard behind that, one which is able to acknowledge that buried pain, to regard the person forced/choosing to take those actions with compassion.)

In many ways, the Citadel was the emotional core of the game for me. The scene with Thane was an outlier in that regard, because of the way in which it tied directly to the larger events of the game; but the Citadel was full of side conversations for you to eavesdrop upon, progressing as you returned to those areas of the Citadel again and again. At first they were mostly a sideshow to me—I was amused by how an early one tweaked my heterosexist assumptions in my misidentifying who in a triangle had two lovers—but they got rather more serious as the game went on. A half-dozen variations of families being torn apart by war, tragedies unfolding in slow motion, tragedies that were inconsequential in the grand scheme of the war but that were everything to those involved in them: bringing home the evils, the horrors of war in a way that statistics never do. And showing individuals making choices over and over again: in the face of war, how are they willing to act, what kind of people are they willing to be, what’s the bedrock that their morals rest upon?

Choices that you have to make, too: in particular, after the council attack, the Citadel is full of micro-missions where Shepard is asked to come down on one side or another of an argument. The first time I ran into these missions, I refused to do them: who am I to choose between a shopkeeper and a customer, between two cops? Ridiculous reluctance, considering the relative equanimity with which I decided the fate of species, the fate of an entire galaxy. But still: it felt wrong, those weren’t my choices to make, and even if I wanted to cast myself as a teacher, it’s the wrong way to approach the situation, part of teaching is letting other people make choices, even mistaken ones. I eventually gave in, though I’m not sure if that was the right choice or not: my justification is that, as a leader, I was helping other people find what was best in themselves, and if that was the clumsy way in which the game allowed me to express that, so be it. Still, questions I’m not used to asking about my actions within a game.

Those are the small-scale choices that the game confronts you with, but of course the ones that get the press are the big ones. And while, in the small and medium scale choices, I was frequently happy to make renegade choices, when it came to the large ones, I never did: I always made the “good” choices, the optimistic choices, the ones that expressed the way I wanted the universe to be. No throwing the Krogans under the bus, either overtly or behind their back: the Salarias can attempt to use the fate of the galaxy as blackmail, but I won’t go along. (Patricia Hernandez makes the case that I should have been at least as uncomfortable with that choice as with those choices on the Citadel.) No going along with the Quarians’ attack on the Geth, even though the latter were one of our main enemies at the start of the series and the Quarians are only attempting to regain their homeworld: there’s something going on there that doesn’t feel right, and it’s not just that it’s a distraction from fighting the Reapers.

Which is where I felt a shift in the game’s tone: it wasn’t a game about a species-threatening, galaxy-threatening war, it was a game about multiple perspectives on conflict, about the possibility of reconciliation, about a belief in the fundamental good within us. And Mass Effect 3 brought this home by attacking the conflict that leads off the series, namely the conflicts between organic and artificial form of life. It does this on the medium scale, by revisiting the roots of the Geth/Quarian conflict; it does this on the small scale of human relationships with artificial intelligence by EDI’s and Joker’s relationship. (There’s a lot more to EDI than I expected when I first saw her sexy robot body.)

And, of course, it does this on the grandest of scales, by reconsidering the Reapers’ conflict with all of organic life. The recordings of the start of the Geth/Quarian conflict make the Quarians look a lot less like blameless victims than they’d appeared; Javik teaches us that the Protheans are a lot less noble than we’d believed. (Than Liara had believed, certainly!)

Of course, it’s one thing to bring the Protheans down to earth (to Earth?), it’s another thing to make the Reapers look sympathetic. But the game accomplishes that, showing them as necessary to allow new species to flourish in the face of the Protheans and their ilk. The compassion that Thane and his son taught us returns in full force here.

This isn’t just a redirection of the game’s theme: the mysticism that’s always been present in the game (in the name Shepard!) erupts. It’s always been a series about salvation, but one that involved heroism of a fairly banal adolescent game nature. But the recurring nature of the Reapers harkens back to the eternal recurrence of another one of my favorite adolescent game series, namely Zelda; to Nietzsche, that favorite author among a certain type of adolescents (of people who haven’t yet escaped from adolescence, no matter their age; and yes, part of me is in this group); but also to Buddhist notions of recurrence of ages.

That recurrence is, I think, more of a Hīnayāna Buddhist theme; I see Mass Effect 3 as putting a Mahāyāna spin on it, with its insistence on the possibility of breaking the cycle of recurrence for all sentient beings. Which leads to the ending; though I enjoyed reading and respect both points of view, I’ll side with Kate Cox over Sparky Clarkson and end up satisfied, pleased, impressed by the ending.

That starts with the sequence on Earth. I came in wondering how I would feel about the final battle, wondering whether I’d be afraid of losing a companion in that sequence the same way I’d been afraid of that prospect in Mass Effect 2. As it turns out, though, I was at peace during that battle: too much was at stake there, any of us could die, I could die, it would be worth it. I can’t think of another game that had me facing death (my own and others’) with such equanimity.

And I also can’t think of a recent game that treated the final boss battle so courageously. My only comparison in that regard is Shenmue II glorious third act; that game went considerably farther than Mass Effect 3, and did so to great effect, but I don’t think the final game of a trilogy would have been able to carry off the same solution. Certainly the vast majority of games would have ended with a big battle against a monster; the final battles on Earth were difficult, but not in a boss monster style, and the final scenes on the Citadel were nerve-wracking, emphasizing your fragility, your vulnerability, the contingency of all of your actions while studiously avoiding undercutting that vulnerability with a boss battle that would have brought your martial powers back to the fore. As Roger said in this month’s School of Athens podcast, the Mass Effect thematizes gamespaces and the choices underpinning them in ways that few other games do; that’s the final fight the game ends with.

Which, perhaps, turns into a bit of a mess in the execution; and the adolescent grandeur in any game about a hero comes out full blast here, indeed levels up to reach new heights. But it’s a scene about transcendence in a series that has, in retrospect, focusing all of its powers for years towards that end; transcendence is impossible to represent faithfully, and (as with my feelings about Catherine‘s asking of questions), in a situation like that, perhaps missing the mark broadly is better than aiming more closely and having your failings leave less room for productive tension of interpretation.

It’s been four and a half years since the first game came out; I have the utmost respect to BioWare for bringing the trilogy to a conclusion in such a short amount of time and with such power and coherence. To all who worked on this series: I salute you, I thank you, I am in your debt.

This would not be a tragedy if it occurred. Video games have been important to me since we got our first computer back in 1982, but their importance has waxed and waned. Certainly books have been much more important to me than games over the years, I think on balance music has probably also been more important to me, and in school (undergrad and grad) I spent more time watching movies than playing games, though that was somewhat of an anomaly. (That’s what happens when you’re dating, I guess.) So perhaps the pendulum is swinging away from games; and, indeed, I’ve explicitly been making more time to read books, to make and listen to music, and ever since we got our new TV, I’ve been watching more movies. (And they look fabulous on it!) Given that, maybe I just don’t have time to play games other than Rock Band, and maybe I’m completely okay with that.

That was my tentative hypothesis earlier this year: I felt disconnected at GDC this March, and suspected that I wouldn’t be going back next year. (I now realize that this year’s GDC has had huge, unexpected benefits, so I’ll certainly be going back next year, but most of those benefits aren’t directly game related.) Thinking about it more, though, and in light of subsequent experiences, the situation is a lot more nuanced than that.

In retrospect, the main change may be that I freed up time to read books in part by cutting down on my web browsing, and in particular I stopped reading any daily video game news sites. For almost half a year, I’ve been quite out of touch with current video game releases, not reading reviews of the vast majority of games or even being aware that they’ve been released at all. I still hear about some new games through non-news blogs and through people on Twitter, but the volume is less; and those fora almost never expose me to preview coverage, and people talk about old games quite a bit as well on them. I’d thought of myself as abnormally good at avoiding the pull of the new, but in retrospect I underestimated how much I’d been affected by the novelty-driven news cycle.

Cutting down on browsing has freed up time to spend on other art forms when I want to; but the removal of that news cycle surface current has allowed deeper currents to manifest themselves, and some of those deeper currents are unquestionably video game focused. I recently played Mass Effect 3 and Journey; they’re both wonderful, wonderful games, and they are both very much what I wanted to do at that time, I wanted to play them more than read any book or watch any movie. (Though not, as it turns out, look at any painting.)

They’re also both new games; so I’m not as free from the lure of the release cycle as I’d like to pretend. I suspect, however, that they’ll largely be an aberration in that respect in my game playing over the summer. The games that I want to play next are Rez, Child of Eden, Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, probably Jet Grind Radio, maybe Dragon Age 2, maybe even Shenmue or Shenmue II or Space Channel 5. Some newish games, and nothing ancient in there, but generally older games, generally games I’ve played before and want (need!) to experience again.

And they’re generally games that have something in common. (Besides the obvious link, namely the Dreamcast!) I wish I had a better analytical category to put them in, but in the absence of one, I’ll just say it: most of those games are games that speak to something deep in my soul. They’re not just games I enjoy, games that I’ve learned something from, games that I will learn something from the next time I play them. They’re games that have their hooks deep inside of me, games where replaying them will feel like returning to home. But more than that: most of them are games where I suspect playing them will make me feel like a better person, and also feel more like me, letting me learn more who I am and giving me hope that the real me is a pretty good person.

So yeah, games are still important to me. That’s not exclusive to games: I can think of plenty of books, plenty of pieces of music that I feel the same way about, and I hope I’ll spend a lot of time oven the next year or two immersed in those art forms. But games aren’t going anywhere; I’m just going to do a better job of listening to the voices of games that are quietly calling me.

I guess the one mechanism that I realized (a hundred games in) that I should be paying more attention to is churn. E.g. there’s a one-point card called the Hectic Scribe that has you draw two cards and then discard two cards. In general, I avoided playing it, because you ultimately end up only playing four useful cards instead of five, which means that there’s a good chance that playing the card is a loss instead of a gain. What that doesn’t take into account, though, is that even if you don’t improve your current hand by playing that card, you’ll make it through your deck faster, so your discards will come back into play. And that’s presumably good, because with your purchases, your discards are on average more valuable than the current cards remaining to be drawn. Still not a great card, but it’s more valuable (or less actively harmful!) than I initially pegged it as.

Anyways: pleasant expansion, and I’m looking forward to the third expansion showing up next month. But, for better or for worse, Ascension seems not to be trying to do something as different with its expansions as Dominion does, so there’s not a huge amount of new material to grapple with here.

And: it was all right. I rather enjoyed it for a few hours, kept it up for a few hours after that, and then put it down. The basic gameplay is solid: a well-done one-button design, with some potential to get into a groove, and the vehicles are a good idea that is well executed.

The aspects surrounding that core gameplay, though, I’m not so sure about. It comes with a series of Tiny Wings-style challenges, and that was really useful for a while: it gave me different techniques to experiment with, different metrics to try to optimize for. That kind of mixing things up I generally approve of; I was happy to play through the game through the fifteen levels of challenges that it gave me.

And then I finished those fifteen levels, I got a badge, and the challenges started over again. I don’t think the new set of challenges were identical—there seems to be some randomness involved—but they had the same flavor, and I took that as a sign that I’d seen a good range of the challenges, that I wasn’t going to get more novelty there. This isn’t to say that restarting the challenges was a bad idea—better to do that than to have no more challenges available at all—but if the novelty of the challenges had been the main draw so far, then I’d need to look elsewhere for a draw.

I’d been hoping that the badge system would be a draw, a more advanced set of challenges once I’d proven myself to no longer need training wheels. That turned into an active disappointment, though: maybe I’m missing something, but as far as I can tell, you get a random badge every time you complete 15 levels. And I have zero interest in trying to get to level 1875 in the game: if that’s what I’m supposed to be going for, then I might as well stop after level 15.

But that isn’t necessarily what I have to be going for: like I said, the core gameplay is good. The problem, though, is that the core gameplay isn’t pure, and isn’t pure in a specific way. The distance you travel isn’t simply a function of how well you react to the random set of challenges the game throws at you: it’s that plus how well you do in the slot machine at the end of the game plus how many in-game coins you’d spent on power-ups to give you extra chances for advancement at the end of the game. So if I want to optimize my score, I don’t just have to hone my skills, I don’t just have to hope for a combination of honing my skills and being in a groove, and I don’t just have to hope for a combination of honing my skills, being in a groove, and being given a random level design that is particularly palatable to my strengths and weaknesses: I have to also hope that I get lucky draws on the slot machine. And if I really want to optimize, I should purchase some powerups and pick judicious times to use them. These last two aspects are something I have no interest in, and they reduce the draw of the core gameplay for me.

So: decent game, I’m happy to have put a few hours into it, and I’ll probably even pick it up when I have a few minutes to kill at random times in the future. But it’s not providing what I want out of games (out of art!) these days, I’m glad I stopped when I did.

This is Femme piquée par un serpent, by Auguste Clésinger; because, of course, we all know that, when a woman is bitten by a snake, her immediate reaction is to contort her body in a way as to make herself look as stereotypically fuckable as possible. You can see the snake in this view of the statue, which also demonstrates another classic male gaze aspect of the statue, namely the way she twists her body so the viewer can simultaneously get a good view of one of her breasts and her ass. (And we all love the way the snake harkens back to the Garden of Eden mythos, where women are simultaneously patsies and the source of the fall of humanity!) Admittedly, it could be worse: the artist has a rather better grasp on female anatomy than many video game modelers, and I suppose one advantage of nudity in this context is that it makes various clothing fails impossible. Still: not awesome.

This is, fortunately, in stark contrast to the rest of the museum, which is one of my favorite places on the planet. Not a contrast because of the nudity—there’s that everywhere you look in the museum—but much of that nudity is rather more interesting, and for that matter rather more foreign to the video game experience. Lots of straightforward, less problematic nudes; lots of nudes that are more interesting, too. Or more confusing; I still don’t know how to analyze Courbet’s L’Origine du monde, for example:

At least it’s something I don’t get from video games, for better or for worse.

I have rather fewer misgivings Manet, whose Olympia and Déjeuner sur l’herbe are two of my favorite paintings in the museum:

I’m not entirely comfortable with the politics of either of those paintings, but there’s a lot more going on there than in Clésinger’s statue. And while I’m not going to claim that male gaze considerations are absent here, in both examples the gazes that the women present are fascinating:

Which isn’t to say that I spent all my time in the museum looking at female nudes. Sticking with Manet, we have his portrait of Berthe Morisot au bouquet de violettes, and there are male nudes as well! (The one below being Antonin Mercié’s David.)

Though the most surprising nude of the day was this Académie d’homme âgé nu from a special exhibit of Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s work. (Or Axel Gallén, as he was known at the time that he painted this picture.)

Anyways: enough nudes, on to video games. The nudes, of course, remind me of character models in video games, and there are plenty of good non-nude character models in the museum: Corot’s La jeune femme à la robe rose, Amaury-Duval’s Madame de Loynes, Degas’s Petite danseuse de quatorze ans (also known as Grande danseuse habillée), Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer’s La Sorcière. (Certainly that last one would be very much at home in a video game!)

But games don’t just model people, they model buildings, they model spaces, they model everything that appears within them. Here are some models of buildings, both by Monet, namely his Gare Saint-Lazare and Rouen Cathedral:

In that last example, Monet shows the cathedral in various different lighting scenarios, and that sort of dynamic behavior is a very video-gamey thing to do. Some of the building models had an implicit dynamism of a different nature, however; my favorite example of that was Corot’s, Le moulin de Saint-Nicola-lez-Arras:

When looking at this picture, it’s impossible not to imagine yourself standing in the woods in the front, walking through them to the building in the back, walking still further to cross the bridge. This isn’t a static model in a video game, it’s a level that demands exploration. (And, of course, I’m doing this within the Musée d’Orsay, which is itself a space that demands exploration every bit as much as any video game I’ve ever played!)

So we’ve moved from models of people to models of buildings to locations to be explored. And, if we combine those, we get paintings with implicit narratives: Henri Regnault’s Exécution sans jugement sous les rois maures de Grenade (which, as a bonus, returns us to our video game theme of politically problematic positioning that we led off with, this time with Orientalism instead of male gaze!); Paul Huet’s Le gouffre, paysage; George Desvaillières’s L’Ascension du Poilu; Gustave Moreau’s Galatée. (Male gaze so strong that our lustful onlooker has three eyes! Male gaze was everywhere in this trip: even the Lion King posters in the subways were full of it.)

I’m sure Roger Travis will say it’s no coincidence that the paintings that I saw that gave me the strongest video game vibe were illustrations from epics: Adolphe William Bouguereau, Dante et Virgile aux Enfers and two Kalevala scenes from the aforementioned Akseli Gallen-Kallela exhibit, namely La Défense du Sampo and La Forgeage du Sampo. That last pair brings us closer to video games in another way: just as games are rarely about a single event, instead presenting a linked chain, here too we have linked scenes.

A couple of years ago, I took inspiration from musicals and proposed that narrative video games should present themselves as a sequence of set pieces that are as well-crafted as possible, with just enough connective tissue to let you go from set piece to set piece without being jarring. And my experiences in the Musée d’Orsay gave me a new perspective on that argument: each of those set pieces should have the unity and impact of a painting. There should be a vision, a scene, an interaction at the core of each set piece with the rest unfolding from it.

I’ve been playing Journey recently; it’s a beautiful game, a powerful game, and that power comes in large part from this focus. Imagine a sequence of paintings: your first jump after receiving the scarf, looking up at the broken bridge with a companion, investigating a ruin in a desert, surfing the sand together with your companion through a sequence of gates, going through a blue tunnel and trying to hide from the searchlight of an overhead terror, looking up at a tower to climb, huddling with your companion for warmth against the cold and wind, soaring gloriously through the sky. That’s what each level is, and each level does nothing more than what is necessary to bring life to those visions, ending just as you’re feeling satisfied with that experience. The levels never drag on; energy that might be devoted to extending the levels or connecting the levels more broadly is instead devoted to making each level more beautiful, to make each level speak to something surprisingly deep inside of you. (Not that they neglect the connective tissue between levels: as with the musical example, connection is necessary, and the tapestries do a beautiful job of that.) Scene after scene in that game emanates from a vision that would absolutely not be out of place in my favorite museum in the world.

The converse is not, however, true: there were several pictures in that museum that are showing me something that I’m not yet getting from video games. I’ll close with Millet’s Gleaners and Strindberg’s Vague VII, in hopes that one of these years I’ll encounter games that hit those parts of my soul.

10:00am: George Fan, How I Got My Mom to Play through Plants vs. Zombies

The tutorial was the most important factor in helping his mom, so he’s going to focus on that. A player isn’t going to enjoy minute 30 of your game if they can’t get past the first five. So:

10 Tips for Making Your Tutorials Better:

1) Blend the tutorial into the game

Separately labeled tutorials look unfun. Learning in games is actually fun, but people react badly if it’s called out. (Also: separate tutorials often aren’t as fun!)

2) Better to have the player do than read

Try things out in a safe environment. E.g. the one-lane, one-plant-type, one-zombie-type level that the game starts off with. From that, you learn that zombies move right to left, that peas kill them, and about how many peas it will take.

Or: introducing the shovel. Don’t just tell. The place where they were planning to introduce the shovel was also a place where they were planning to stick in a minigame; they thought about a weed-clearing minigame, but that misses the point of using the shovel to swap out useful plants. Tried with wall-nuts instead of weeds, but wasn’t much fun, repeated digging was problematic. They eventually had a bowling minigame where shovels were irrelevant, but was fun, and had the player use the shovel clear out pea-shooters at the start. (Editorial: I’m not convinced that was a great idea, because it doesn’t get at why you’d use the shovel, though I don’t have a better suggestion.)

3) Spread out the teaching of game mechanics

The shovel shows up 5 levels in; money shows up 10 levels in; there’s only one thing you can purchase until the 25th level. The Zen Garden shows up 45 levels into the game, 5 levels before the game is over! That last example is a three-minute tutorial focused on an optional mode of the game; you need to get people invested before presenting them with that sort of thing.

Let players play with their toys before introducing new ones. They were originally shooting for one new zombie every level, but it worked better alternating levels, with new zombies showing up on easier levels.

In-game stores can teach: e.g. put advanced concepts like power-ups there.

4) Just get the player to do it once

Sometimes, a single arrow or flashing button is all a player needs.

Sunflower dilemma: they’re the backbone of the game, but not everybody understands economy. They sound frivolous, less important than getting in defenses. Maybe people would plant peashooters and wall-nuts instead, and would even have initial success with that. The target audience has never heard of RTS games.

Suggestion 1: make it more like traditional tower defense, giving resources from killing enemies. But that removes a differentiator and an iconic character.

Suggestion 2: add more tutorial messages: “sun is like fuel”. They did a little of this, but it alone isn’t great.

Suggestion 3: start with a column of sunflowers. Gave an indication of how many people would need, but would players adapt when the game stopped doing that?

Suggestion 4: reserve spaces for sunflowers. Decent idea, but adds complexity.

Their eventual solution: before, sunflowers and peashooters cost 100 sun, you start with 200, and have choices as to how to spend it. A player with RTS experience will buy two sunflowers; a novice player, in contrast, will plant two peashooters instead, which is exactly the wrong choice. So they changed the numbers: sunflower costs 50, and you start level with 50. This means that almost anybody would buy a sunflower at the start. And a sunflower would be the only choice more often in the game, so that would reinforce the tendency to buy it.

This helps guide the novice, but doesn’t feel like “easy mode” for experienced player. But it alone isn’t good enough: wall-nuts cost 50 as well. They tried bumping wall-nuts up to 75, but it didn’t feel right. Solution was to add an initial charging period for wall-nuts (and potato mines), so you couldn’t buy them at the start.

This was great; the down side was that he had to rebalance the entire game because of this.

5) Use fewer words

Goal is max 8 words on the screen at any given time. And use as few sentences as possible. Tell people what to do, don’t give lengthy details and explanations. Think of it as “the sophisticated caveman”.

Break it up into small chunks, clicking through one at a time.

Crazy Dave was initially intended as a tutorial character. But if he shows up in level 1, he needs to introduce himself, and speak in character. That makes the tutorial less direct. So they delayed his introduction until level 5.

6) Use unobtrusive messaging if possible

Don’t break flow; don’t use popups unless absolutely necessary. Put info on the screen, but let people keep on playing while reading it.

7) Use adaptive messaging

There’s a message that comes up suggesting that people plant peashooters further to the left; you only see that if you plant your peashooters too far to the right, so players who don’t make the mistake don’t feel talked down to.

Another example: in early levels, if people have fewer than three sunflowers a minute into the level, they get encouraged to plant more.

But: leave room for exploration, don’t handhold all of the strategic ideas. Example from a fish game: a carnivore fish eats small guppies; you get hints the first two times it dies, and get told exactly what to do the third time it dies. People who figure it out earlier feel good.

8) Don’t create noise

Don’t cry wolf: only put words in front of players if they’re required info or entertaining.

9) Use visuals to teach

Rule #1: you should be able to look at a plant/zombie and know what it does instantly.

E.g. three-peater.

Rule #2: if you can’t achieve rule #1, it should be clear after seeing it in action once.

E.g. jalapeño pepper, pole vaulter. Repeater does double damage; experimented with alternate ammo (shoot swords!), but eventually hit upon: send twice the peas, and send them in a burst so you can see the doubling in a single glance. Or puff shrooms: wanted something less effective, communicated that by limiting the range of its attack. (As opposed to trying to design a projectile that looked weaker by an understandable amount.)

10) Leverage what people already know

Plants chosen to get stationary towers (it was in the tower defense genre) while allowing room to inject personality. Zombies chosen because they move slowly and because they’re bad and you don’t want them to get into your house.

Other examples: coffee beans to wake up nighttime plants; normal zombies \< zombies with cones < zombies with meal buckets; sunshine to grow plants. Plant names are purposely descriptive, e.g. peashooter, squash, consistent -shroom suffix for nocturnal plants.

Teach the player so well that your help section in your menu can be made into a joke.

11:30am: BURN THIS MOTHERFATHER! Game Dev Parents Rant

Graham Devine

Veterans have laid waste to the industry. Only kinds of large games: FPS, RPG, RTS, anything else is too risky. Indie devs get a risky first game published, but steered towards traditional areas for seconds games. Mobile space full of freemium, giving away stuff sucks. Bring back the 80s!

Toby Saulnier

As a parent, I rant a lot. “Get off the computer! Stop playing Minecraft!” Once she thought it as cool that he understood games, gave her powerful metaphors to use. But it doesn’t work, her son doesn’t do his homework.

Monetization problem? How much does she have to pay him to work in the real world instead of a virtual world? Misses the baby boomer work ethic.

Jason Della Rocca

No training wheels for games: e.g. racing games are really hard to pick up. Our kids don’t start with Pong the way we did. How to learn game literacy? Do so in a nutritious way?

Perrin Kaplan

Role playing as woman graduating in 2020 with a degree in video games. Just a dream; schools aren’t going to do that, people in the industry need to help nurture the next generation. Kids always dream, including dream about making video games. We have an obligation to teach, mentor, guide.

Chris Hecker

Duct tape award goes to Scott Jon Siegel. Who laments his overtalking and underacting in his acceptance rant. Don’t tell people to take risks if you aren’t; don’t tell people to make something personal of you aren’t; don’t give many talks and ship few games.

Back to Chris: dysfunctional three-way. Developers, players, press. Players playing/talking about same games over and over again. Press: bizarre focus in previews and reviews, focusing on minutia instead of big picture. Developers: making same games. Appetite for sameness: not just tolerance, actively seek it out. He doesn’t get it to the extent he feels slightly insane.

Dragon speech by Chris Crawford, GDC 1992. Left the industry. Don Quixote.

We are all simply reactive. We all need to be proactive. Players: request and purchase true variety. Press: provide context, hold players and developers accountable. Developers: “we make games we want to play”, so want to play more varied games!

Jade Raymond

Grow up! Stuck in our smelly teenage years. Games have evolved amazingly quickly from a technical point of view, but so many topics are taboo. There are some games that address taboos, but they’re very much the exception. Where are games touching on the Arab Spring, the class divide, internet freedom? All in the news this year, all relevant to games. Circle of life; economic justice; religion.

She’s a studio head; not going to make one of these the core of a $60M new IP. Weave into existing games, though: GTA could comment on penal system, Call of Duty on sexism, Splinter Cell on ethics of interrogation.

Manveer Heir

Stop making broad proclamations about what is/isn’t a video game. There is no one right way.

(Excellent, excellent rant that I won’t begin to do justice to. Don’t be driven by fear.)

Christina Norman

DLC. Can be bad, can be good, players shouldn’t judge in advance.

James Lantz

Against branching conversation systems. Yawn.

Frank Lantz

Ambition, specifically the lack of it. People architect cities around games, e.g. basketball. Video game designers should dream of operating on that same scale. Games living for thousands of years. Too accustomed to thinking of video games as products with shelf lives. Most ambitious targeting Citizen Kane; but that’s inconsequential compared to basketball, go. (Mini-rant re U.S. government shutting down online poker.) Bridge, specifically the development of contract bridge. Chasing after metagame scores, DAUs is embarrassingly modest.

He loves small, personal, idiosyncratic games, too. He’s just speaking to the egotists in the room. How can I make a game that can be seen from space?

Don’t let chess lap us.

2:30pm: Brian Sharp, Concrete Practices to Be a Better Leader: Framing & Intention

My favorite talk of this year’s GDC, I broke it out to its own blog post.

4:00pm: Andy Nealen, Minimal vs Elaborate, Simple vs Complex and the Space Between

New title: What and how I think about game design.

Einstein quote: not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.

Likes designing very small experiences, but plays all sorts of things. Question: what does it mean to label any of them as “complex”? None of what follows is scientific, all anecdotal, a hypothesis.

What is complexity? How to measure, where does it start and end? Why would we want to use it?

Some answers to the latter: emergence, surprise, depth. (Another laden term.)

What is complexity? Size of state space? Number of choices per second? Pieces of information that influence these choices? Number of links between elements? Size of state space / decision tree?

There are recurring themes when traversing a state space: e.g. ladders in go. The texture of traversals of playing the state space is its depth. Influenced by players: if nobody plays (nobody traverses), no depth.

Stuff. Things we can count; things we can’t count.

Chess: large state space, even larger decision tree. Go even crazier.

Drop 7: large, but more manageable.

But: we prune the decision tree when playing. We perceive complexity differently than we measure it.

Influencing perceived complexity: creation, reduction, addition. Tools for these three: procedural generation, simplification, coupling.

Texture. Regions that adds stuff without adding additional complexity: different parts of a textured region aren’t fundamentally different. Use procedural generation of texture to generate complexity.

Simplification. Cannabalt: people always want to move right, whereas jumping is irregular; so get rid of controls for the former, only allow control of the latter.

Coupling. Link one entity to another, or interpret a resource differently: doesn’t add entities. E.g. souls in Dark Souls: use to buy a better sword or to level up your stats? Osmos: food -> size -> momentum -> food. Dangerous: coupling is frowned upon in software engineering for good reason.

Part two: design example, Grow21.

Jonathan Blow: “Do not make the player feel smart. Make the player smart.” Andy: make a game that makes him be smart!

Standard deck, split into two shuffled piles, one for each player, divided by color. Lay cards alternately, pulling off groups of one color that add to 21. Only allowed to be one connected component, so if it splits, smaller one gets taken off.

Constraints: knowledge in the world; spatial, no board required; one simple mechanic, few choices; readable; compact; deep.

Solutions to constraints: two player card game, symmetric; adjacent card placement; draw a card and build stable groups; all cards are hidden, no hand; single connected component; set packing is NP complete.

Sarah Elmaleh on Grow21: “I mean, I’m pretty sure I saw the pattern of the universe laid out in front of me last night.”

Procedural generation (by players?), simplification, coupling. Suddenly addicted to physical things, bought 40 board games over last month.

Takeaways: designers can influence and direct perceived complexity. But each version is a different game. (Which is amazing!)

Use generative procedures and leverage texture similarity. Simplify and reduce degrees of freedom. Think of adding links, not entities.

Sol Lewitt: “The idea becomes the machine that creates the form.”

Or at least not a great day for me in terms of talks: I had a lovely lunch with Jorge Albor and Richard Clark (the latter of whom I’d never met before), and a lovely dinner with many people. I think I’m more talk-focused at GDC than most bloggers, but still: it’s always great to see people in person.

Anyways, here are my notes; I haven’t bothered to particularly polish them this time, they’re more or less straight off of the iPad into here. (With, of course, appropriate <cite> tags added…)

10:00am: Timothy Cain, Classic Game Postmortem: Fallout

Development began in early 1994; shipped in October 1997. Team size of about 30 people when it shipped; total budget of around 3 million dollars. Doesn’t know exactly: he never went through a formal budgeting process.

No license; no engine; no budget (he didn’t have to go to producer meetings); no staff at the start (he’d talk to people over pizza in the evenings); no plan/specs.

Amazing team. (Once he got a team!)

Influences:

Computer games: XCOM; Crusader (one of first 640×480 games, graphics looked super sharp); Wasteland (huge influence; no morality, no restrictions); Ultima series.

Paper and pencil / board games: GURPS (classless, skill-based RPG); WizWar (shuffle board pieces every time you play); Gamma World

Books: A Canticle for Leibowitz; I Am Legend (and the movie Omega Man: last normal person on Earth); On the Beach (movie, too; group thinks they’re the last survivors of a nuclear war until a sub shows up)

Movies: Road Warrior; A Boy and His Dog; The Day After; Forbidden Planet (technology based on what the 50′s imagined the future would be like); City of Lost Children (huge art influence); La Jetée

Challenges:

Team: no resources. Just him for the first six months. 1 artist and 1 scripted for the next six months. (Both named Jason…). Couldn’t tell the artist what to do: he hadn’t picked a genre yet, he just had an engine. In year 2, they went up to 15 people. 30 people in year 3.

Early development was rough. They had a hard time conveying the idea of the game (once they got the idea!), to new people, to marketing, to administration. It was very bleak, sounded not fun. And they worked nights and Saturdays, even from the start; for the last half-year, for six months they’d work 12-14 hours every day of the week. They were in their twenties and didn’t know any better. QA volunteered to work on weekends for free, even though they could get paid overtime.

Setting: considered fantasy at the start, but there were a lot of a fantasy games coming out at the time. Second idea: epic time travel, dinosaurs to space. Seriously considered it, but another producer convinced him it was crazy. Then: invading aliens, taking over the entire planet except for one city. (That one city home base morphed into the vault.) Finally: post-apocalyptic, initially hoping to use the Wasteland license.

Threat of cancellation: Interplay acquired the D&D license, with Forgotten Realms and Planescape, in 1994. Fallout was considered as a B product, competing with those others.

View: 3rd person, isometric with 30/60 degree angles. (“Cavalier oblique”.) Chosen because it worked well with a hex grid that underlay he tiles.

Game timer: for a sense of urgency, players had to finish the first quest in a limited amount of time. Controversial within the team, and removed in the first patch; he wished they’d removed all timed quests.

Cultural references: there were a lot, but he was worried about losing players and feeling dated. So the rule was: people who don’t know the reference don’t even notice that a reference is being made.

Naming: started with Vault 13. Marketing didn’t like it, because it didn’t explain what the game was about. Alternate ideas: Aftermath, Survivor. Came across the final name 6 months before shipping. Also wanted to name the system; attributes’ intials spelled out ACELIPS, rearranged to SPECIAL.

Diablo: released late 1996; realtime, multiplayer. Spent a while seriously considering that, but ultimately decided not to.

Technical Challenges:

Flat memory: chose a linear memory model. No expanded/extended memory, no near/far pointers. Easier to work with, but couldn’t use old code.

Super VGA: 640×480 with 256 colors. Art assets started off as 16 bits, reduced to 8, color cycling reduced it further. Until VESA in 1994, each chipset was separately coded.

Sprites: polygons weren’t detailed enough. But sprites led to lots of memory.

Talking heads: fired a clay head in a kiln, used a 3D scanner to get a point mesh, added polygons/color/lighting. And then phoneme matching for talking! Took about 4 months per head.

Followers: not in initial spec, no time to code, so done through scripting. Lousy AI, full of bugs, but very well received.

Win95: failed certification because it worked on Windows NT, instead of failing gracefully. He recoded the installer to detect NT and fail; hand installation still worked.

Simultaneous Mac version: OS calls were isolated in a library, Mac version was written in a weekend. Interchangeable save games, which was stupid in retrospect.

Legal Challenges:

GURPS: originally based on this license. They didn’t like the violence and the art style; too late to change these, afraid they were going to be cancelled. Instead, they tore it out: redesigned/reimplemented the combat/skill system in 2 weeks, were allowed to survive.

Music: chose Inkspots. Wanted “I don’t want to set the world on fire”, negotiations took forever before falling through, picked “Maybe” mostly at random, worked well.

Ratings: went for T initially for some reason, but was inappropriate; ended up M, which was fine. Also allowed child killing (at a penalty); had to be removed for Europe.

Legacy:

Shipped in October 1997, seen as a big risk that paid off. (Though it didn’t cost that much, so maybe not a big risk?)

Open world / sandbox, with a non-linear story. Multiple solutions to quests/story: at least two of fight, talk, sneak. Quest and story endings based on your choices; sideshows reinforced this. (Consequences were sometimes horrific, people replayed to get a new ending.)

No morality: grey-area quests, player can be good or evil, but you have to live with consequences.

Perks: wanted more than skill raises, invented/implemented in two days, players can grow and differentiate. Influenced a lot of subsequent games.

Called shots: added variety, allowing multiple reactions to the same attack. And a place to fit in humor.

Faces / voiceover: detailed faces, famous voices. People really liked it; expensive, though.

Ambient music: don’t actively listen to it, just hear it, miss it when it’s not there. Reinforced bleak environment.

Reusable software: OS abstraction, scripting engine.

The game as experience: box, survival guide manual, logo, interface, splash screens, web page.

Amazing team: talented, worked crazy hours, egoless, focused on the same goals, the same game.

11:30am: Luke Muscat, Depth in Simplicity: The Making of Jetpack Joyride

Chapter 1: A Game in 4 Weeks

Fruit Ninja doing great; Monster Dash doing okay. Liked the machinegun jetpack in Monster Dash, decided to make a 1-button game based on that in 4 weeks, release it for free.

1 button, super accessible, play session fits in an ad break, depth for the hardcore.

Put together a prototype in one day; whoever gets the high score the next day gets a free candy bar. People tried really hard, so there’s enough there to support interest.

Next: jam stuff in, rip stuff out. (Got that term during GDC last year.) 3-day prototype looks better, has more stuff: coins, lasers.

Decided to try procedural levels: only one designer across two projects meant that they didn’t have resources to do lots of levels. Procedural levels take a lot more time at front, but pays off. Came up with an interval system, with every type of entity having a chance of fitting in the next slot. But how to design the intervals? Regular is boring; totally random is occasionally crazy. So random with minimum and maximum interval length. Really easy to change, which has dramatic effects on the difficulty of the game.

Minimum intervals let you decide how unfair the system will be. All their games are deliberately designed to be a little bit unfair: e.g. in Fruit Ninja, the bombs sometimes overlap somewhat with the fruit. Works well with high score games: place some of the blame on the game, “if only that bomb wasn’t right there, I’d have done a little better”.

Costs of failure: time lost; feeling of failure; friction in retry loop. Help with feeling of failure by rewarding on failure: happy results screen, fruit facts. Fade the end of failure by having your corpse bounce along for a couple of seconds, hoping to collect a few more coins. For restart friction: every single thing in the game involving progressing is in the bottom right corner, can start a new game without thinking.

Internal playtests; but learned a lot by handing it to people on the street and asking them to play it for two minutes.

Christmas: already spent more than 4 weeks. Fruit Ninja was picking up steam, didn’t want to release a half-assed game after that. Really intense and simple, but intensity ramped up too fast, and it was too simple. Tried moderating intensity with hearts, but it didn’t feel right. And tried regenerating health; but could only kill the player by making the game too hard.

As to too simple: need variety. Brainstormed ideas for powerups, but it was really hard to come up with good ones. Maybe change the controls; but takes a while to learn the new controls, players die too fast. Solution: powerups are vehicles, so if you get hit, the vehicle explodes, putting you back to your original state. So vehicles are special bonus segments, and you can ramp up the difficulty in those segments. Also helped inject character into the game.

Last year’s GDC was the first big playtest. People often made critical mistakes right after control changes; added explosions when entering/exiting vehicles to give breathing room. Then added coin sequences, as mini-tutorial playground area to explore the controls.

How many vehicles? Everybody has a favorite; want it to be rare enough to feel special, but frequent enough that you don’t go too far without getting it. Tweaked probability to not have long gaps before getting vehicle needed to complete a mission.

That’s a good foundation; what are next goals/experiments? Make an ultra-sticky game; try out in-app purchases; learn something.

Shop: provide incentive other than beating friends. Allow players to express themselves. First started with a standard costume shop, but it felt too dry. Added flavor text, but didn’t fit together well. Screens were too busy, too many words. Pulled categories out to top layer; gave more space.

Mission system: inspired by Tiny Wings. But don’t want to get stuck on a mission. They’ll come up with something in a week, right?

Tried a few different ways to structure this. One, daily system: each day, get easy / medium / hard missions. Always something new, something you can succeed at. Second option: optional system. Always have two missions, one of which can be done through grinding. Third option: progressive system, always three missions available. (I think the main difference is that the missions you didn’t complete would stay instead of going away after you completed one?) Progressive is closest to final version.

Mission rewards. Originally had a choice between coins and a random box, but it was very hard to tune the box as people completed harder missions.

Eventually, missions turn into a crazy surprise mega feature. Massive draw, many many layers of goals, crazy addictive.

What about really hardcore players? Borrow a prestige system from Call of Duty, but with mixing and matching parts, allowing 125 different medals. (Even a single medal was supposed to be very hard to get.)

Getting the game out the door. Wanted it to work at 60 frames a second on all machines, and look good on retina screens, iPad, all fitting under the 20MB limit. Ends up upconverting sprites on the fly the first time you boot it on a retina phone! And scaled down to get smooth performance on old devices.

Change the game from Machine Gun Jetpack to Jetpack Joyride right before the end. Old name not quite causal enough, and got truncated inappropriately on the app store.

Final result was great: took forever, but instant success, worth the extra effort.

2:30pm: Adriana Lopez, Ownership – Dragon Age Style

Games are great, starting with a wonderful idea; if you’re lucky, you have talented people working with you. But it’s also a business: you need to get something done in limited time with limited resources. How do you get the best result?

One typical idea: ownership. Let people do what they’re best at. But it can be lonely. (Not sure I entirely understand what she was saying here.)

Metaphor: pirate ship, adventuring into unknown waters together.

What is ownership? Passion meets skill. Not just hard skills: they’re necessary, but need soft skills, too. Strongly caring about something; ability to drive to success; being accountable; taking decisions; communication. It is not: being territorial or possessive; being a lead or a scrum product owner.

An owner can be anyone, independent of their title and level. And they can own anything: an asset, a feature, a part of a project, a vertical slice or demo, a project, a platform. Any portion of development that requires special attention.

Ownership and delegation: you are fully responsible for your area, but someone has your back.

Make it formal! Ownership behind the scenes is useless. Announce it broadly; define area of responsibility and expectations; provide training and mentoring.

Expectations: what is your job? Formulate a clear vision. Define the scope. Prioritize features. Accept or reject work results. Work with the rest of a team.

Vision should be clear and concise, should be aligned with the main vision, should be inspiring.

Scope defines what’s in, what’s old. Shoot for the moon, but start with something attainable. And keep other areas in mind: it’s not about you, it’s about the game.

Prioritize: if you don’t decide what the priority order is, someone else will decide it for you!

Seek feedback. Create a culture around feedback.

Work with other owners. Delegation means you’re not working in isolation, you’re part of the team. Guest speakers, wiki pages, ownership meetings, dependency charts. When in doubt, talk.

How many owners do you need? As many as the number of risks, ideas, features, other that you have in your game.

Ownership keeps top talent engaged. Delivers great games. Ensures a lasting franchise.

Editorial comment: she and I have quite different ideas about what the term “agile” means, I think. And she never gave a clear view of what she saw as the alternatives to ownership, and why she preferred an ownership culture; in particular, I like collective ownership a lot more than individual ownership, and I don’t think she even addressed that as a possibility.

4:00pm: GDC Microtalks 2012

The speakers: Richard Lemarchand, David Sirlin, Erin Robinson, Cliff Bleszinski, Alice Taylor, Mary Flanagan, Brandon Sheffield, Heather Kelley, Dan Pinchbeck, Amy Hennig.

By far the weakest GDC microtalk session that I’ve been to. I expect several of the microtalks to be more poetry than talks, but none of them reached that this year.

Most of the speakers were given 45 seconds to pitch their talk; it was well run, people did a good job. I learned a little bit more about why the schedule seems a bit more meh than normal to me this year: it’s because the schedule turns out to be full of talks about Uncharted or Saints Row, neither of which I particularly care about!

Which raises the question of what I do care about this year. Ideally, I’d be listening to my soul, but I think I’m not quite there yet. Still: panels bad, vague translated talks bad, geeky technical talks good but I’m not involved in those details enough for them to work for me this year. (Geeky team organization talks, though…)

And Flash Forward did change my plans for two or three time slots this year. So that’s something. And last year’s Nintendo keynote was quite disappointing, so I’m happy with this as an experiment.

11:00am: Margaret Robertson, The Gamification of Death

My favorite talk of the day; I’ve broken it out to a separate blog entry.

12:05pm: DB Cooper, Take That 2.0: Techniques and Skills for Exertion Sounds for Video Games

I went to this one on a lark after hearing about it in the Flash Forward session, and I’m glad I did. It was great to see a live demonstration of voice acting, and I imagine (and Sarah Elmaleh, who would know, agreed) that the advice given was very practical.

When hitting somebody: your jaw is shut, since you’re in control. There are some exceptions involving yelling (e.g. a kiai in a martial arts attack). You put consonants at the front, vowels at the end. There are choices for the consonants at the start; you use violent vowel sounds at the end. (I didn’t copy them down, but she gave specific examples.

When you’re being hit: jaw falls open, you’re surprised, it hurts. Your tongue is relaxed. You make different sounds depending on the hit: during a body hits the air comes out, whereas hits on extremities lead to sounds of pain. This time, the consonant goes at the end. It’s hard to imagine being hit, so she had the voice actor hit himself with a 2-pound weight. Now she’s hitting him on his arm: extremity strikes are an insult to that part of your body, and it stings. A-sounds.

To get a big sound, you need a big lungful of air. So shout with your arms open! But your arms get tired when you do that. Solution: use a stretchy thing, so you get resistance to help you make a loud sound without getting your arms as tired. Sounds come from lower down instead of just up in your throat; also, you can feel the stress in your body.

Grappling sounds. This time, she grabbed the voice actor from behind and asked him to make sounds like he was wrestling. You don’t generally have a partner when recording; again with stretchy thing, this time something he could step on and pull up on.

Agony: make a “bloodcurdling barf”.

She closed with a dying in a fire demonstration: wow, I’m amazed nobody came running in.

2:00pm: Caleb Howard, Asking the Impossible on SSX: Creating 300 Tracks on a Ten-Track Budget

Another talk I wouldn’t have gone to if I hadn’t heard about it in the Flash Forward session; this time, though, I wasn’t so happy with that choice, and in fact almost left in the first five minutes, because it was way too slow to get started.

It was about generating the mountains and tracks for the new SSX game. Which they wanted to do a lot of! The traditional method: lock the pipeline. This prevents fast iteration.

In early 90s, he did procedural generation for films. Now: games. In SSX, Todd Batty asked for the impossible, namely 300 tracks. Previous iterations started with ribbons, built a mountain around it; he started with one of those old ribbons this time, and generated a mountain around it procedurally.

Generating the mountain took around 2 seconds. So lots of iteration possible: could fiddle with sliders and run it again over and over. People bought into the idea almost immediately, despite the significant change from what previous versions of the game had done.

The procedural approach:

Start with the simplest possible modular loop. Path → terrain → instances → mesh → lights → audio → effects → iterate again. Start with very simple tools in each bucket, get them in the hands of the artists ASAP, improve as you discover which limitations matter. (Went through 4.5 major revisions of the tools.)

First workflow: Start with 2D manifolds. Specify the kind of track you’d like (turns, steepness), feed into a search engine driven by NASA data. Next, find paths. Find gully lines down mountains. Analyze for curvature and slope. Wanted to be able to tweak, e.g. add tunnels and bridges; hard to fit onto the topological data.

This was a problem, but they decided to press forward. 2D manifolds were causing problems; switch to 3D voxel sets. Very memory-intensive, but easy to work with. Added editing tools: trace out curved rods (e.g. subtract to dig a mesh); 3D model → voxels; add in noise (to fill in details beyond the 30m data that NASA provides).

This was rich enough to let them make progress, and for the art department to use and give feedback to the tool makers.

Next problems: uniform voxel sizes means high memory usage (or low detail) everywhere; noise led to floating islands. 130GB of memory usage for a single track, and designers want to make bigger tracks!

Third version of workflow: hierarchical volumes, sometimes with high-resolution voxels and sometimes with low-resolution. This let designers make full tracks, but they wanted to make still bigger ones.

A new surfacer is crucial now; fortunately, he found a paper that explained how to write one meeting their constraints. One person could build an entire game-worthy track providing 3 minutes of gameplay within a single day.

Then lots of newcomers showed up to help finish things. But the newcomers were used to the old, non-procedural ways. They couldn’t build tracks as fast; more importantly, they were used to building handcrafted tracks. Eventually, used procedural tracks to get 80% of the way, handcrafted the rest; good results, but took significantly longer.

Fourth workflow: still too memory intensive. Went from hierarchical voxels to point clouds. Different samples given different significance, so could still start in low res and then add fine touches as necessary.

Final workflow:

• Path generation driven by difficulty curve + branching probability. Add attributes, some derived and some specified.
• Then sweep out the curve. The tool for this allows for a varying profile to be used as you sweep down the mountain.
• Skirt generation: flesh out the world around the path, build a mountain around it.
• Surfacing from that plus hints as to where more gameplay detail will be needed.
• Place instances: rocks, trees, lights, … Procedural plus manual tweaks.
• Surface alteration, e.g. snowdrifts against rocks.

3:30pm: Eric Zimmerman, Let the Games Be Games: Aesthetics, Instrumentalization & Game Design

I suspect this was a rather interesting talk, but it turned into my nap of the day. Pity that didn’t happen during the previous talk instead. What little notes I took:

Motivated by a problem that’s bugging him: instrumentalization. Solution is thinking of games as an aesthetic form.

He reread Art in Theory, a book filled with manifestos and writings on the meaning of art. Art was never just about itself. Random samples from the book were always relevant.

Why games? Ludic century: games will be the dominant cultural form of the next century. Industrial age → information age → ludic age. Systems, play, design, will focus on the first of those.

Pickup artist culture: models important parts of human nature as systems, people are reduced to instruments. Instrumentalization.

Guitar Hero as a vector for learning guitar. Latter inherently good, former not: games are being instrumentalized. Latter good because they’re an aesthetic form; if we think of games as an aesthetic form, that will be an antidote against the instrumentalization of games.

“We don’t have to be apologists for games. We should be snobs, connoisseurs.”

5:00pm: Randy Smith, Landing On Mars: Our Rocky Path to Inventing New Gameplay

This was a postmortem for Tiger Style’s new game, Waking Mars. Exploring Mars in a jetpack. Primarily growing rather than shooting. Throwing stuff, e.g. seeds. (Lots of plants.)

He started off by showing three prototypes that they experimented with after finishing their previous project; the one that provided the seed for Waking Mars was an idea called Descent where you go deeper and deeper into a cave. They built a prototype; their conclusions were: Tomb Raider already exists, and caves are boring: too few goals / rewards / etc.

They thought an SF theme would help with the latter, though they also feared it might alienate the potential audience. Next version: Mars Descent. Hard SF; the book Our Universe was an inspiration. Wanted an environmental theme (alien plants), added a jetpack.

Started in a broken outpost, need to explore nearby cavern. Oxygen collecting mechanic to survive; headlamp mechanic kept from earlier version. Throws rocks. Eventually find a jetpack; fuel limited, but refills after landing. Lunar Lander style flight.

Plants: light plants, oxygen plants, latter affects the environment. Weeds eat oxygen plants, repelled by light. Water plants. Progression gated by growing plants.

This wasn’t much fun. People liked the concept; not so much the mechanics. Time pressure and oxygen collection made people reluctant to explore. The headlamp was touch-native, but it took a small screen and filled it with black. Lack of inventory meant that missing a throw really hurt, requiring backtracking.

Doing your chores. Natural enough in a garden game, but: information density = meaningful choices divided by time (or by number of actions). And growing a plant was one meaningful choice that required lots of actions: low information density. Not inherently bad, but they thought not great for iOS: screen too small, audience too ADHD.

Needed to pin down core gameplay. They decided to start by looking at the mid-level design: how to work with the terrain? Gate areas by growing plants? Different areas only grow certain plants? Interrelationship between plant types? (The latter made them wonder: do they need the player avatar, maybe it’s better as a god game?) Environmental conditions: different plants only grow in different oxygen / nitrogen / carbon dioxide mixes?

Second playable. Still headlamp, still Lunar Lander jetpack, no fuel limit. Seeds show up quickly, can only grow in fertile terrain, happens much more quickly. (Oxygen plants grow automatically, water plants need headlamp.) Have airlock plants, inventory. Light plants: help you see, but fire projectile. Idea is the you’re designing our own level, out of components that help and hurt you. Headlamp repels certain types of creatures. Escorting seeds to top of a level while dodging a bat.

This mid level focus didn’t solve their problems: shift to the low level. Ideas: cup and ball plant; cave fisher; pests; …

Why combat works: high stakes drama, clear feedback on win / loss / intermediate progress, nuanced input is meaningful (leading to depth and mastery). Meaningful = contributes toward a result a player cares about. Combat, racing, platforming often has these categories; he saw it in Thief, too.

With that in mind: Lunar Lander gameplay and missing throws don’t help towards this, because failure just means a bit of repetition. So there’s ultimately a predictable outcome with no choice. Whereas seed type/location choice gameplay involves choices between different meaningful results. (Maybe that’s the wrong example – he also talked about actions involving physics, e.g. seeds/stalactites falling.) In general, simulations are interesting, and our brains are wired to work with them.

Decided to focus on meaningful collisions. Works: player has nuanced input, physics is unpredictable but acceptable, meaning is clear. Collisions lead to further interactions (seeds drop, they don’t explode), leading to chains of events and emergent gameplay possibilities.

Third playable worked well, focusing on the low level worked right. Ended up keeping a similar mid level; simplified by getting rid of oxygen/nitrogen/carbon dioxide mix, instead just gating levels via biomass.

One focus: not caving, not gardening, yes ecosystem. Made it easier to be innovative.

(Side note: I like Randy Smith’s talks, but it sounds like Richard Lemarchand’s talk at the same time was something rather special; I guess I’ll have to put him on my “must attend” list in future years.)

Her takeaways from the project that this session was about:

1. Your work is flawed.
2. Your career is doomed.
3. Your life is shit.

In other words: the bleakest GDC session ever!

She wasn’t working on a project about death: instead, it was a project about a death, which turns out to be a much harder thing. It was associated with a movie called Dreams of a Life, about on a woman named Joyce Vincent whose body was found in her flat 3 years after she died.

The film was by Carol Morley and Film 4, but they wanted something more interactive to go along with that, so they contacted Hide & Seek. Margaret thought it was a brilliant idea; it really wasn’t.

Things that were hard:

• Aesthetics. The game had to sit next to a feature film, a documentary: what will feel right next to that?
• Timing. They want to be ready when the film comes out, which means that they had to stop development before the film was finished. That’s hard enough for a film that’s a known quantity; this film is based on interviews, so new information was appearing up until the last moment. Hide & Seek didn’t have access in advance to that information, or indeed to the team working on the film.
• Joyce. The film was presenting her story; the game doing that would be unnecessary, impertinent. You need to start there, maybe by recreating the environment; but if you create a replica of the flat, do you include Joyce’s body or not?
• Budget. It was probably the best funded art house digital transmedia project ever. Which isn’t saying much.
• Compliance. Touches on issues of suicide, domestic violence, potentially on drug use, people going missing, people being left behind. Film 4 isn’t worried about taboos, but they do have compliance guidelines (e.g. triggers for self-harm in viewers) and legal issues (e.g. questions of libel and negligence).
• Not Being an Asshole. You’d like to learn about who people talk to, maybe scraping the machine-readable portions of their life, e.g. Facebook profiles? But of course that’s a very bad representation of who somebody is; and even if you don’t do that sort of thing, it’s not a game’s business to ask how long it’s been since you’ve called your mother. But if you step farther away from such details, you end up with something way too wishy-washy. And: maybe people “go missing” because they want to: they like solitude, they want to manage their relationships.
• Mission. Joyce’s body was found completely by accident; how can we express this lack of mission in finding her within a game design context? It goes directly against the way games are traditionally designed.
• Systems. There were systems that underlay the events of Joyce’s life and death: domestic violence had led to her being helped to move; that’s good, but it led to her being separated from her friends. She’d been in the hospital and listed her bank manager as her next of kin, which in retrospect was a big warning sign. (She had a father and siblings alive when she died.) There are lots of details in her life and death; if you boil them down, you’re not being faithful to the reality of the situation, but if not, there’s not enough of a system to make it a game. (And you want the game to be very accessible, too!)

How on earth to represent this as a game? Maybe a sort of interactive fiction locked room game where you have to use objects from your own life as keys? It’s hard to imagine non-banal realizations coming out of that, though; and the gating/progression structure led to people second-guessing their responses instead of answering naturally.

Another idea: the floor labyrinth from the Chartres Cathedral. It’s one continuous line: no choices, no possibility to get lost. The goal is right there, just a few feet away, but you don’t know how long it will take you to get there. While walking there, you might meet somebody who seems to be going the other way, but you don’t know if they’re going in or out, are ahead of you or behind you.

Still: completion / goals led to people feeling less honest. Maybe add lots of ending conditions, lots of personas players can adopt? Or let players define the goal? (But players still say what they think they’re supposed to say, not what they really believe, even when setting their own goal.) Or maybe don’t have a win condition at all?

Her conclusion: this can’t be a game: games can’t do this. Arse. They ended up making a pretty good thing that wasn’t a game, see Dreams of Your Life. Which worked! And that’s great, but she really likes making games.

Did they have too many constraints? Did they overlook their design process? Maybe, but this isn’t the first time that’s happened to her. A laboratory project that is still under NDA but where an external game would work against the real-world goals. A science project, The Milky Way Project, where you’re looking at structures in space; but if you layer goals over that, it corrupts the result. A secret music project; but if listening habits have game effect, it makes you hate music, which is awful.

(Side note: I really wonder what Roger Travis would say about the mismatch that Margaret sees between games and the sorts of learning in The Milky Way Project and in the unnamed laboratory project.)

Things that might be true:

• She might just be rubbish at this. She’d love to hear better ideas.
• Or it might be really hard.
• Or it might be a contradiction in terms.

Oh boy.

Games are more like Agro from Shadow of the Colossus than the horses in Skyrim. Can’t go everywhere, but you care about them more. So learn what about games makes them special!

And: she’s trying again with a live game based on Joyce’s life and death at SXSW. And, of course, she’s talking to people at GDC.

She’s put up her slides; I highly recommend looking at those, both to see the changing backgrounds and to read her rather detailed speaker’s notes.

Wednesday

9:00am: Flash Forward

11:00am: Margaret Robinson, The Gamification of Death

12:30pm: Lunch

2:00pm: Alexander Lucas, The Automation Trap and how BioWare Engineers Quality

I’m not super excited about that one, so I might go to the Game Design Challenge instead.

3:30pm: Eric Zimmerman, Let the Games Be Games: Aesthetics, Instrumentalization & Game Design

5:00pm: Randy Smith, Landing On Mars: Our Rocky Path to Inventing New Gameplay

Evening: Might stop by the Playdom party.

Thursday

10:00am: Timothy Cain, Classic Game Postmortem: Fallout

11:30am: Yasuhiro Wada, Classic Game Postmortem: Harvest Moon

1:00pm: Lunch

2:30pm: Adriana Lopez, Ownership – Dragon Age Style

4:00pm: GDC Microtalks 2012

Friday

10:00am: George Fan, How I Got My Mom to Play through Plants vs. Zombies

11:30am: BURN THIS MOTHERFATHER! Game Dev Parents Rant

1:00pm: Lunch

2:30pm: Jamie Griesemer, Design in Detail

4:00pm: Andy Nealen, Minimal vs Elaborate, Simple vs Complex and the Space Between

One point which the discussion brought home: to me, the term “motivator” (in the context of intrinsic/extrinsic) is more useful than the term “motivation”. And the reason for that is that motivation is internal: so it’s hard to know what really motivates somebody else, it’s too easy to even be unsure of your own motivation and/or to recast that motivation after the fact. Whereas motivator is external, and in particular suggests something that I have more direct control over as a teacher: I can choose from a set of possible behaviors towards my students, and I think it’s not as hard to label some of those as extrinsic motivators. (Though admittedly the boundary between extrinsic motivators and non-extrinsically-motivational feedback is extremely blurry.)

Even that isn’t why I like Punished by Rewards, though: I like that book because it steps back one further level from the concept of intrinsic / extrinsic motivation. It grounds itself instead with studies that divide test subjects into two groups, has the experimenters behave towards test subjects in two different ways, and measures how the test subjects act along dimensions that the experimenters are interested in. That’s much more concrete; if a specific such experiment is replicable, it’s valuable data, and if multiple experiments following similar protocols lead to similar results, then it starts to make sense to come up with a label for the common aspects of the behavior in those protocols. (In this specific case, the label is “extrinsic motivator”.)

And yes, you can try to use that (along with other ideas, e.g. psychological insights) to then come up with further concepts (e.g. “intrinsic motivation”, which is much harder to get at directly with an experiment), and you can (as I did) try to apply that in your own teaching. But still, if you can’t touch back to experiments periodically, then it’s not surprising if you get rather different results. So if Roger and his colleagues are having success (which, I repeat, I’m convinced he is) applying techniques that I would tend to label as extrinsic motivators (which I’m less convinced is the case, though that is still my tentative hypothesis), then there are several possible explanations for that:

• The original studies are not replicable after all.
• Roger’s practomimetic teaching techniques aren’t similar enough to techniques used in those studies for generalizations from the studies to be relevant.
• The state of students when practomimetic techniques aren’t applied isn’t similar enough to how students behave in the non-extrinsic side of the original studies to expect extrinsic motivators to cause problems.
• Practomimetic teaching has benefits that are significantly greater than the comparatively small drawbacks from extrinsic motivators.
• Practomimetic teaching has aspects that actively innoculate against the drawbacks of extrinsic motivators.

There are probably other explanations that I’m not thinking of, too. And certainly none of those five explanations would surprise me at all in practice; in fact, I’d be surprised if the bottom three weren’t all true.

Still, this is all not so relevant to me, given that I’m no longer actively teaching in a classroom; given how last time went, I doubt we’ll get any further if we continue that line of discussion, so I’d just as soon drop it for the next Symposium.

What I will propose instead is a different line of discussion: how do practomimetic teaching techniques change as teachers leave more space for students to explore? For example, if we draw a spectrum between a situation where students are told what to do every minute and a situation where students are given a vague goal with opportunities for feedback from teachers once a week or less, do practomimetic techniques lend themselves to one portion of the spectrum? I would think not so much the “every minute” portion, because the nature of role playing already carves out some amount of space for freedom of action. (Though, then again, I’ve played enough computerized RPGs that got in my face every minute…) But I would also expect that, as students get more familiar with the interplay that underlies the subject they’re learning (a language, an instrument, …), the benefits of external systems become less important. Certainly as I progress in learning guitar, I’m finding my actions somewhat more driven by what I’m seeing in the instrument and in the music I’m playing and less exclusively by the game, though the latter continues to be important to me. I’ll throw in a link to the concept of Shu-Ha-Ri here, too.

I’d also like to talk about this broadening of options in the context of games themselves, leaving learning (or rather: learning about something other than the game) aside. The fact that I love go so much is very much linked to my progression from its being a bit of a blur at the start to me learning about concrete techniques I can study to having those techniques link to more abstract ideas that I can play around with to another higher-level round of concrete techniques, repeating itself at several different scales: it’s great being able to go back and forth between concrete drills and conceptual experimentations. And I suspect that’s the way Patrick feels about Starcraft too. It isn’t, however, the way I feel about many games: e.g. adventure games by their nature fight against this, I think, and while the battling and leveling systems of role-playing games sometimes can take you a bit in the direction of exploring the games’ systems at different levels of depth, they don’t generally have enough layers to go really far. Which isn’t to say that role-playing games aren’t great: it’s just that the ways that they are great are, to me, not linked to their mechanics of their systems in the absence of any referents external to the games.

Hmm, actually, I’d be curious to hear what Roger thinks about that last sentence, too, given that he’s thought so much more about role-playing games, and in particular their non-combat systems, than I have.

So, of course, I thought: I’d really like to be able to meet her at GDC and hear her thoughts about the event; also, she’s working on joining the game industry, and the industry could definitely use a dose of her style of subversion. Chatting with people over Twitter, I discovered that I’m not the only person who feels that way, so we decided to launch a fundraising effort to help pay for her plane fare and hotel.

And, if you feel the same way, please donate! Or, if money is tight, please spread the word on blogs / twitter / facebook / plus. I’ve been absolutely floored by the response we’ve gotten in the first twenty-four hours of this effort: I knew the game blogging community is a wonderful bunch, but this is really above and beyond the call, enough so that it looks quite likely that Mattie will be able to attend not only GDC but also PAX East and maybe even GDC Online. So, to those of you who have already contributed, my most heartfelt thanks; and to those of you who contribute in response to this, I thank you as well. I’m really glad to be a part of this.

• I haven’t been in a classroom at all for a couple of years, I haven’t been the primary instructor in a classroom for almost nine years, I haven’t seriously experimented with new ways of structuring courses for about eleven years.
• The symposium in question took place three weeks ago, I don’t trust myself to remember the details of Roger’s position, and he didn’t actually put a concrete position statement on the symposium blog post. (See the Pericles Group website for some information about his approach, though.)

So, in other words: what I’m about to do is talk about a woeful misrepresentation of somebody else’s point of view based on knowledge and experiences of my own that are equally woefully ill-informed and/or out of date. (Alternatively: I’m about to write a blog post! *rimshot*)

Roger sees a close tie between games and teaching, and had some sort of pithy phrase that he used to express that tie. I can’t remember what the phrase was, but I believe its gist was that classrooms are always a game, and that students are going to perform according to the rules of that game: so make active, conscious use of that fact, designing as good a game as possible and one where success in the game is as closely tied to your learning objectives as possible. And, as far as I can tell, he and his co-conspirators are extremely successful in this—I can’t imagine reading some of Kevin Ballestrini’s posts from last school year and not getting the feeling that something special is going on there. So I’d like to understand it, to relate to my own experiences and philosophical predispositions, and see what I can learn.

On which note: my philosophical predispositions towards teaching are strongly shaped by reading Alfie Kohn. His book No Contest had a huge effect on how I structured my classroom time; his book Punished by Rewards had a fairly strong effect on how I structured my assignments and grading, contributing to my feeling that I wasn’t a misfit in academia solely for research reasons, I ultimately was probably more of a misfit for teaching reasons, even though (because?) I cared about the latter more than the former.

And certainly there are many ways in which Kohn agrees with (my interpretation of) Roger’s point. For example, Kohn rails at length against standardized tests, and one of his main points is that standardized tests encourage students, teachers, entire school systems to do well on those tests even if that comes at the expense of learning; to me, this dovetails quite nicely with Roger seeing classes as games, because you’d better make sure that the rules of the game enforce the behavior that you want! Standardized tests are, of course, a lousy game with lousy goals; Roger does much better on that end, and I’m sure that Kohn agrees that the sort of richer feedback mechanisms that Roger’s methods provide are a huge improvement.

Where I suspect the two would disagree (or, more concretely: my reading of Kohn gives me pause) is on the nature of the motivators that are involved. The point of Punished by Rewards is that intrinsic motivation is much more powerful than extrinsic motivation, and that the latter drives out the former. Now, classes are already chock-full of extrinsic motivators (grades in particular); if you accept that as the basis that you’re starting from, then sure, craft your extrinsic motivators to promote learning in the areas that you’d like, and overlaying role-playing game mechanics may help with that. But if you start from an environment that’s trying to work with and nurture intrinsic motivators, then while role-playing sounds good, I get nervous about game mechanics: it’s hard to do that without bringing extrinsic motivators into play.

Looking at this from a slightly different angle: I like learning. I think feedback is inextricably bound to learning. But I’m a lot more dubious about certification: its coupling of feedback with extrinsic motivation can be actively counterproductive. And that coupling is often very strong, and is expressed as a refusal to give feedback without submitting to those extrinsic motivators: e.g. most colleges will kick students out of school if they refuse to engage in actions that lead towards them getting graded.

(Tangent: in my last year and a half in academia, I taught calculus. Those courses were full of pre-meds; as far as I can tell, the course served much more of a weeding out role than a thoughtful attempt to ensure that those students learned mathematical concepts that would help them be more effective doctors. Most of the students put in a decent effort to learn the material—you generally don’t get into Stanford without such habits—but not all were particularly interested; from my point of view, not being interested was a perfectly reasonable possible choice, indeed one that probably more of the class should make, and I did not enjoy working within a system with strong forces pushing against students making that choice, or even being aware of the possibility.)

So the question that that raises is: are games simply feedback mechanisms that can be used in a variety of ways, or are they certification mechanisms? I was going to say that, whenever you bring in scoring, you’re already moving in a certification direction, but upon reflection that’s too strong: if a game really is about itself (go or, I assume, Starcraft), then the scoring mechanism is feedback pure and simple.

But if the game is about something else (as classroom-based games always are, though Roger’s approach works at narrowing that gap), then scores make me very nervous. For one thing, if the score is tied to something else (e.g. a course grade that is necessary for getting a degree) then it’s certification, not simply feedback; for another thing, the distance between the score and the broader topic means that you aren’t getting feedback about aspects of the topic that aren’t covered by the scoring mechanism. I see both of these all the time in video game RPGs: if you don’t fight and level up, RPGs will refuse to give you access to the game’s content, and even if you are willing to go along with that, that focus on combat and leveling encourages you to neglect other aspects of role-playing. (Fortunately, there are people whose drive is strong enough to withstand such discouragement.)

If you’re sensitive to these issues (as I’m sure Roger is), you can design your games to open up as wide a space as possible for learning. Take Rock Band as an example; in this context, we’ll think of it as a tool to learn about music, e.g. by introducing you to a range of music, to help you pick out the different parts of a piece of music (Paul McCartney’s bass lines), even to teach you concrete physical and mental skills involved in playing music. The first iteration of the series was relatively prescriptive: it wouldn’t even let you try to play harder songs until you’d performed adequately (according to the game’s criteria, not your own!) on the easier songs. I suspect no-fail mode existed in the first game, but I felt that its use was discouraged; in contrast, the second game turned no-fail mode on by default if you’re playing in easy mode, so if you want to listen to music with a bit of guidance from the game as to the shape of one of the parts, you can do that without having the game punish you if you don’t conform properly.

By the third game, the amount and range of possible feedback has expanded enormously; because of that feedback, I’m finding the experience much more powerful as a teaching tool, with my actions being much less driven by the scoring mechanisms of the game. I almost always have no-fail mode turned on (and I wish there were a way to turn off the missed note sound: frequently I find that sound to be useful feedback, but in some circumstances it’s actively counterproductive to my learning goals), and while the game’s scoring system (and other metrics, e.g. streak length) can be a useful feedback mechanism (e.g. breaking a streak while playing Outer Space last weekend pointed out that I was missing a bass line transition), the extrinsic motivation aspects of that feedback, while still relevant to me, is no longer as dominant as it once was.

And with Rock Band 3 in particular, there’s feedback that’s provided outside of the game context, that your ears and hands give you. That game is, admittedly, a quite special case, but its nature may make it particularly well suited to provide examples for how to design games to work in a classroom situation.

Returning to what I said earlier: I’m convinced that Roger’s methods are effective, but I’m not sure I really understand the sources of that effectiveness. Continuing the theme of talking about areas that I’m ignorant of: how much of the effectiveness of these methods is due to a magic circle effect? Bringing in an explicit game mechanic (instead of the implicit mechanic that’s provided by grades and testing) may serve as an inoculation against extrinsic motivators, as an explicit acknowledgement of those motivators coupled with a refusal to give them undue power. And role-playing mechanisms in particular may be a particularly strong inoculation, with the dual role allowing for one of those roles to be motivated by intrinsic motivation while the other role goes along with the more certification-y aspects of the feedback systems.

Which, in turn, raises the question: what would a classroom look like with magic circle effects but without game mechanics? That puts an unexpected light on some of my own teaching experiences. One of the most powerful such experiences that I had was in the very first course I taught at Stanford: it was a differential equations course, and I’d spent a lot of time thinking about how I wanted to design the course. I balanced student work and lecturing in a very different way than in courses I’d been in as a student, and had a quite unusual homework / exam policy. I continued feeling this out as the quarter went along; I had a great time, the students seemed to be enjoying it, and the students seemed to be learning something.

So I was ready to declare the methods a success, and indeed I think the methods I used were good ones; but subsequent iterations of the class didn’t have the same feel. Part of that is doubtless chance (e.g. the specific students involved), and part of that is that I was less actively investing mental effort in the later iterations. But I bet that the fact that I was clearly experimenting had an impact on how the students saw the course, and did so in a way that’s similar to a magic circle effect, treating it as an explicit alternate space that muted the impact of certification on their learning.

Interesting stuff, I wish I understood the interplay of forces here better. I hope we’ll talk about this more in future VGHVI Symposia (of which there will be one this Thursday); follow the VGHVI blog if you want to participate!

I was really addicted to SpaceChem when I started playing it, and I wasn’t the only one: both Liesl and Miranda had moments when it kept them glued to the iPad. It’s a very good game: I like the programming that’s at the core of it; I like the way challenges build on top of one another; I like the sense of accomplishment when you start a puzzle, realize your standard bag of tricks don’t work, and have to invent some sort of new technique to solve it. And, within each puzzle, there’s a pleasant enough range of possibilities: frequently multiple approaches to a solution (it was quite interesting comparing Liesl’s solutions to my own), and you could go back and try to optimize your solutions if you so choose.

The iPad is a good platform for it. Though the iPad version wasn’t executed perfectly, and there were some real head-scratchers, most notably the lack of a mechanism for resetting a puzzle. It’s bad enough being frustrated enough at a puzzle that you want to start over from scratch, but having to spend a couple of minutes getting to where you can start over is pouring salt into your wounds. So, in comparison to the iPad game I’d been obsessed with over the previous months, it definitely had its warts, but that’s pretty stiff competition.

So: why did I stop playing SpaceChem? Part of the answer is that it didn’t fit so well with my playing schedule: I was doing a fair amount of my iPad game playing in the middle of the night while looking after Zippy, and SpaceChem isn’t nearly as good a fit for that time as Ascension was. I would say that I thought the challenges were excessively linear, except that they built on each other, forcing you to discover new ways to approach problems, in ways that were rewarding and that would have turned to frustration with a less linear approach.

Though puzzles didn’t always strictly build on each other: new puzzles removed possibilities as well as adding them, by removing possible implementation choices. That frustrated me at times, though I’ll also freely admit that it was necessary to make the challenges workable.

I also didn’t always enjoy the constraints of the playing field itself, finding ways to fit my wiring into the space provided. Also, I often didn’t enjoy the puzzles involving multiple reactors: sometimes, that was an interesting challenge (on more than one occasion having me take an approach for quite some distance before realizing that my strategy simply wouldn’t work at all), but often that made puzzles drag on, and just finding ways to place the reactors and pipes was boringly annoying.

I guess that’s really the issue that the linear progression had: it meant that I didn’t have control over the game’s pacing. So if I wasn’t in the mood for the time investment (and, perhaps more importantly, mental investment) of a multiple-reactor puzzle, then I didn’t have much choice: either struggle through it, or put the game down. And one day, I chose the latter, and never picked it up again.

I still think SpaceChem is kind of a great game in its own way. But it’s also one of the very few games that I’ve played (at least since my Apple ][+ days) that has a well-defined endpoint that I made a fair amount of progress towards but stopped before reaching it.

Games, like most media, have the ability to let us explore what it’s like to be someone other than ourselves. While this experience may only encompass a character’s external circumstances–exploring alien worlds, serving with a military elite, casting spells and swinging broadswords–it’s most powerful when it allow us to identify with a character who is fundamentally different than ourselves–a different gender, sexuality, race, class, or religion. This official re-launch of the Blogs of the Round Table asks you to talk about a game experience that allowed you to experience being other than you are and how that impacted you–for better or for worse. Conversely, discuss why games haven’t provided this experience for you and why.

The problem is, I disagree quite strongly with the premise here: I have a very hard time accepting the gloss of “fundamentally different” with “a different gender, sexuality, race, class, or religion”. My gut feeling is that there’s a core to myself—the way I think, the way I relate to people, the way I approach problems, what fascinates me—that would persist if I were of a different class, religion, race, sexuality and gender, and that this alternate David would be much more similar to me than a random atheist upper-middle-class white male who isn’t entirely sure whether bi or straight is a better label for his sexuality but leans towards the former. (Though, if we accept the third possible labeling of my sexuality as “besotted with Liesl Bross”, then yeah, that narrows things down quite a bit.) I have a hard time even typing the following, given the considerable amount of respect I have for Corvus, so I’m sure I must be misunderstanding him, but I think I find that gloss to be actively offensive on a political level: am I supposed to accept the notion that somebody else would be fundamentally different from myself by virtue of being Muslim? I don’t see any good arising from that line of argument.

Which does raise the question of what I think “fundamental differences” really means. The contrast that the theme gives is kind of interesting: it contrasts “fundamental differences” with “external circumstances”. And that contrast I’ll agree with; it’s just that I think of class as an external circumstance, religion as largely an external circumstance, and race as only important because of external circumstances. Gender and sexuality are more interesting, but for both of those the weight that society places on them has a huge impact on how they affect us. So what all five of those have in common (and are different from the examples of exploring alien worlds and swinging broadswords) is that they’re all categories that have a strong impact on how the societies we live in view us, how people treat us before getting to know us (with that impact continuing after people do start to know us as individuals), that that impact makes itself known from the moment we’re born, burying into our own psyches.

So, in particular, I certainly don’t want to get genetic deterministic: who we are is strongly shaped by external factors as well as genetic traits. But there’s a lot more to external factors than broad societal divisions—one’s friends and family, for example—and there’s a lot more to genetic traits than whether one of 23 pairs of chromosomes falls into the broad bucket labeled XY or the broad bucket labeled XX. (Or into neither of those buckets at all, and of course not everybody’s gender is best expressed by those chromosomes.) I realize that I live in a society where the checkmarks that I get in Corvus’s classification mean that I don’t get actively reminded of how society treats differences in that classification as frequently as people who get a different set of checkmarks in that classification do, so if somebody who gets a different set of checkmarks wants to make a case that those checkmarks really are what I should associate with the idea of fundamental differences, I will do my best to listen with respect and an open mind. (I’m certainly curious what the friend whom I had coffee with this afternoon will think about this post—she has a rather more informed insight into how fundamental a difference gender is than I do.) But right now the idea seems pretty strange to me.

Setting that aside, I’ll try to play along with the theme a little more. Though then I run into another possible difference: are games really most powerful when letting us identify with somebody fundamentally different from ourselves? That’s not implausible, but on reflection I’m not sure I agree: maybe games are most powerful when they allow us to learn something new about ourselves. I’m not sure which way I go on that, and upon rereading I’m probably misinterpreting that statement: I guess it’s saying that, when games are exploring differences, then that exploration is more powerful the more fundamental the difference is. And that sounds plausible enough.

So: what games have allowed me to “experience being other than you are”? That’s kind of an easy question to answer: I have a hard time thinking off the top of my head of any games that did any sort of fleshing out a character where I felt that the character was particularly similar to myself. Looking through the last 25 games I’ve played, Professor Layton was the only one that had a character that I particularly identified with; I was just watching Miranda play Portal, and it’s also not a bad example of a game where I feel a bond with the main character, albeit one whom we don’t learn much about. (I realize that, above, I haven’t given any specific examples of what I actually do consider to be fundamental differences or similarities; as those two games suggest, though, my enjoyment of solving abstract puzzles feels more important to me than my class, race, religion, or gender, though I would never suggest that other people should feel that way about themselves.) Actually, non-narrative games often speak to me more strongly than narrative games do: in some sense, I feel more myself when playing go or Tetris than basically any narrative game, and the same goes for Rock Band. And that last example has an interesting relationship to Corvus’s list of characteristics, given that, when I’m playing myself in Rock Band, my avatar is sometimes gay and sometimes straight. (Always myself, though; and yes, my relationship with music also feels more central to myself than my class, race, religion, or gender.)

But there I go again, refusing to answer the question at hand. Hmm, if I’m looking for game experiences where I felt rather different from the character I played in game, I guess Catherine was the best recent example? Which was a fascinating game, and my fascination was indeed driven in part by that difference. Not so much because of the specifics of Vincent’s nature, though (and certainly not because of any of the characteristics from Corvus’s list, where Vincent actually lines up well with me), but because of the way of dividing up the world that the questions in the game revealed: what an odd list of dichotomies to present, what a strange set of priorities it implied!

And what a strange topic for the BoRT. But it’s gotten me to write something; is that the covert goal here? Which, actually, makes it similar to Catherine: in both places, much of my interest is being presented with a foreign set of dichotomies, one that seems so misguided to me that I’m actively forced to think about something else. And there’s good in that, certainly.

Update: I felt uncomfortable enough about this post to follow it up with another where, I hope, I step back in several ways.

In particular, I Wanna Be Sedated starts off moving between the fifth fret on the E string and the seventh fret on the A string; so there’s our I-V, I guess IV is left out? It stays in that vein for a while, then mixes things up a bit: we see the seventh fret on the E string (II, or ii—it’s an open fifth, I guess I’ll go with II), has an excessively transparent key change that slides your hand up a couple of frets, and also spends time on the second and fourth frets as well (another key change, I guess?).

At this point, my readers who know the song and know a bit of music theory are laughing at me. (I was expecting yesterday’s post to be the one this week to lead to the most feelings of lingering shame for me this week, but nope: turns out that music theory is a more powerful force of shame for my brain than sex.) Because the above is quite incorrect; I figured that out eventually, but it took three or four times through the song before I realized that I’d made a mistake. The first curiosity was wondering about that II in the absence of a IV; and I also was trying to figure out why the shift down to the second and fourth frets didn’t actually sound like a key change. And, as my subconscious was pondering those issues, I realized that the song started on the 7th fret of the A string rather than on the 5th fret of the E string; if we go with my prior analysis, that would mean that we were starting on V.

Which, of course, the song isn’t: it’s starting on I. So if the chord that I’d previously (mis)labeled as V is actually a I, then the chord that I’d previously alleged was I is actually a IV, and that alleged II is really a V. In other words, instead of the song spending a lot of time going between I and V, it spends a lot of time going between I and IV, building up a rather pleasant amount of tension before finally throwing a V in there. (In fact, the fifth fret on A is an E chord, the fifth fret on E is an A chord, and the seventh fret on E is a B chord, so we have the same E-A-B progression that we saw in I Love Rock and Roll, just on different strings/frets, and with the E chord an octave higher.) Basically, there’s another pattern that you can use for power chords to get the I-IV-V progression: I is fret N on the A string, IV is fret N-2 on the E string, and V is fret N on the E string. I guess you use this if you want the I to be on the top, whereas you use the pattern I talked about in the first paragraph if you want I to be on the bottom.

The one thing I got right: yes, there is a key change halfway through. (That one is so ludicrously exposed that even my brain is unable to misinterpret it.) So we get the same pattern but shifted up two frets, on the seventh/ninth frets instead of the fifth/seventh. The stuff on the second/fourth frets isn’t a key change at all, though: the second fret on the E string is an octave down from the ninth fret on the A string, so that’s just I reappearing, on the bottom this time instead of the top. (And the fourth fret on the A string is the exact same chord as the ninth fret on the E string—V in both cases—with the position presumably being chosen to minimize the amount of vertical distance that your hands need to travel.)

Fun stuff: I enjoyed playing the song, I enjoyed learning something in the process. The main technical deficiency that it pointed out was my alternating strumming abilities: Dan Bruno confirmed my suspicion that I was supposed to be alternating strumming those power chords, and while I’ve been practicing alternating strumming individual strings, I haven’t been practicing alternating strumming power chords at all. Something to work on (and something I can practice outside of game), which is good; I imagine I’ll return to the song regularly over the next few weeks to if/how I’m improving.

And if my brain can get more consciously attuned to how familiar chord progressions sound (and feel!), rather than having me depend on mathematics plus lingering doubts from my unconscious, that will be awesome.

It’s a very simple song, built around the three simplest chords possible: I-IV-V, where I is an E power chord (open E string, index finger on the second fret of the A string, middle finger on the second fret of the D string), IV is an A power chord (open A string, index finger on the second fret of the D string, middle finger on the second fret of the G string), and V is a B power chord (index finger on the second fret of the A string, ring finger on the fourth fret of the D string, pinky on the fourth fret of the G string). So you move your hand between those three positions, with the occasional flourish thrown in.

And it’s the details of those hand movements that got to me. The I-IV transition is performed by shifting your entire hand up a string, reflecting the fact that each of the bottom four strings on a guitar is a fourth up from the next lower string. (Or, alternatively: the tuning on a guitar is chosen exactly to express that I-IV power chord shift; this is different from a violin, for example, where adjacent strings are separated by a fifth instead of the fourth.) Also lurking in this transition is the fact that you play the second fret on the D string in both chords: the chords in question are open fifths, so this expresses that if you go a fifth up from IV, you get back down to I, meaning that an E shows up in both of them.

Next, the IV-V transition. Here, the chords are a whole step apart from each other; that’s expressed in the simplest way possible, by shifting your left hand up two frets while playing the same strings. (So, in particular, the two chords have no notes in common.)

Finally, we go from V back to I. Power chords are open fifths, so the the two notes that make up the I are simply the E that’s its root and the B which is the root of the B power chord that’s the V in this sequence. (In any of these chords, the third note is repeats the bottom note an octave up.) In particular, B shows up in both chords, and in both chords, you’re playing that B with your index finger: and when making the V-I shift, you keep that index finger in place, but shift the positions of the other fingers. (Actually, when you make that transition in the song, it throws in a G (third fret on the E string, which in that context I play with my ring finger) between those two chords, but you can leave your index finger in place while playing that G as well.) This gives that transition a different feel from playing the I-IV-V power chord sequence in keys other than E: if you weren’t starting from an open string, then the V-I transition would involve sliding your whole hand left and up, so none of the fingers would stay in the same place.

So: your hands move less than you might expect, and that fact reflects something about the relationship between the chords involved, that they’re rotating somehow around the B. It’s not the only place where my hands moved less than I might expect: there’s a little flourish that you perform several times, and when I first ran into that in practice mode, I was a bit stymied by it. Eventually, though, I realized how little my hands had to move when performing that flourish, and it became much easier. (This unfolding of quiet simplicity happens to me all the time when learning bits on pro keys; not as often in the past on guitar, though I imagine that will change as I get better and have to deal with more notes.) That flourish sometimes comes after a I and sometimes after a V; in both cases, though, it’s approximately as easy to play, and in both cases that B you’re playing with your index finger is a key note.

Some other bits that struck me while going through the song:

• The flourish mentioned in the previous paragraph involves a pull-off; I can go through the motions well enough for the game to score me as playing it successfully, but when I play it unmuted and plugged in, I sound a lot worse unless I’m very careful and crisp with my finger movements. So clearly something to work on.

• Sometimes, when the guitar part comes in after being quite for a while, you play I, and sometimes, you play V. Which I hadn’t really noticed when listening to the song (my pitch recognition can clearly use some work!), but once I was aware of that possibility, I could tell which chord to expect: not so much because I recognized the notes but because my brain could feel that the V-I resolution was coming up. Which gave me a lot more appreciation for the Suzuki practice of listening to songs on CD over and over again before playing them: that’s what I’ve effectively been doing by going through every on-disc Rock Band 3 multiple times on multiple instruments before I first started playing them on expert pro guitar, and it’s seeping into my understanding at a subconscious level of how the songs are put together.

• The song has two sections involving lots of alternating strumming. In one of them, where I had to shift which note I was strumming, I had to practice at slower speeds; I eventually managed to play it successfully at 95% speed but not at full speed. Close, though, and I’m glad I’ve started practicing hard bits slowed down and going through the whole solo separately. (I’ll need to do that more and more to have any chance at not embarrassing myself as the solos get less straightforward.)

  In the other (much longer but much simpler) alternating strumming bit, though, I managed to keep my streak going for quite some time; listening to myself plugged in, I wasn’t quite as regular as I would have liked, but still: progress!

• One of my disappointments when playing Beatles Rock Band was how hard it was to play guitar while singing: those are songs I know well, songs I should be able to sing on autopilot, but I generally couldn’t manage that while playing expert guitar. I was curious how much that had to do with the fact that doing two things at once is hard and how much had to do with the artificial nature of Rock Band fake plastic guitar.

  As I started to get comfortable with the guitar part for I Love Rock and Roll, however, I noticed myself singing along with the song during easy sections and breaks in the guitar part; so once my guitar playing got decent, I pulled out a mic stand, turned on a second controller, and had the game score me on both simultaneously. I got 90% on pro guitar and 95% on vocals (expert in both cases), and while I can do better playing either side of that by itself, those scores are more than good enough to support the hypothesis that the structure of real guitar playing allows my fingers to work more on autopilot so I can devote more of my brain to my singing. Which isn’t to say that the two didn’t interfere: it was definitely a good thing that I didn’t have to sing during the aforementioned flourishes, and when alternating strumming bits showed up I generally stopped singing while my brain focused on establishing the rhythm, though I did manage to get back to singing after a few measures of the alternating strumming.

A great way to spend half an afternoon. And I’m only three songs in! I can’t wait to see what the rest of the songs are like in their full glory.

Of course, with that richness comes challenges: hard difficulty asks you to learn much much more on a technical level than previous difficulty settings. Looking back, I started playing pro guitar around March 12th; I started medium on April 3rd, so easy took three weeks to complete. I started hard on June 19th, so medium took two and a half months to complete. Which is longer than anything else I’d tried to do in Rock Band other than my attempt to ascend the pro keys leaderboards, but I didn’t make it to expert until December 4th, meaning that I spent five and a half months on hard, learning quite a lot along the way.

The first thing that I learned was the very existence of power chords: not having any real knowledge of rock guitar in advance, I didn’t realize that, in a lot of rock guitar, you’re playing three note chords that are open fifths instead of major or minor triads. In retrospect, I’m a bit embarrassed that I’d gone so long without being aware of that fact: clearly my ears need a lot more training! But now that I’m aware of them, I’m finding power chords rather fascinating: open fifths are, indeed, powerful to listen to (a fact that is getting reinforced by the current piece I’m learning on the piano, the 6-Part Ricercar from the Musical Offering, in which the entries of the second, fourth, and (amazingly) sixth voices all have open fifths that are simply glorious), and on a physical level power chords give my fingers something interesting to do (and in particular force me to be comfortable moving up and down the fretboard) without requiring too much in the way of precision.

I was aware of the existence of barre chords, and expected them to be a bit challenging at first; they proved to be a pain, both metaphorically and literally. The game’s training mode has a set of barre chord exercises, and the first time I tried them, it hurt too much for me to make it past the halfway point of the set. I made it further the second week, but even then I couldn’t finish the last of the exercises, which asked me to shift between barred E major and minor and barred A major and minor chords, on at least two different frets. Also adding to the difficulty was my uncertainty as to how to play barred A major chords: the game tells me to use my top three fingers to hold down the non-barred notes, but I had a hard time getting that to work. (My guitar consultants on twitter said that playing all three notes with your ring finger was more common, and that worked better for me.)

I confronted that difficulty head-on, practicing barre chords every night unmuted for a few weeks. And, sure enough, they became less of a disaster: the next week, I managed to make it through that problematic lesson, and fairly soon after that I managed to make it through barre chords in actual songs without too much trouble. Though, in retrospect, I stopped practicing barre chords outside of game too quickly, and should get back to them: they’re a core technique, they needs to be rock solid, and when I tried those lessons today, I made it through them all acceptably but not flawlessly and my hand hurt. So clearly there’s quite a bit of room for improvement.

The other technique that I’ve been practicing outside of game is alternating strumming. I haven’t been doing anything fancy there, just spending two or three minutes strumming as quickly as possible on each of the strings. And it’s made a big difference, though there’s still room for improvement: I’m not as fast or as regular as I’d like, and I suspect my muscles are way too tense. Definitely glad I’ve been doing that.

And there are other techniques that I’ve been exposed to, all of which have quite a lot of room for improvement. I’m better at non-barred chords than barre chords, but not wonderful, and there are many more chord variants out there for me to learn. I enjoy scales when I run into them, but I’ve only barely begun to memorize them. I’m still a lot worse than I should be at playing arpeggiated chords. I don’t get the point of dropped-D tuning: it never feels easier to me. (It probably doesn’t help that it’s most heavily used in metal, which I don’t enjoy listening to and wouldn’t enjoy playing even if it used a standard tuning.) I need to experiment more with how hammer-on/pull-offs sound when plugged in.

But at least I have been playing songs plugged in. Not all the time, and rarely for very long, but if a song is in a standard tuning and isn’t solo heavy, I’d generally give it a try unmuted and plugged into the amp. (After practicing it a couple of times in the standard game mode, of course.) Sometimes, it sounds okay; sometimes it sounds dreadful. I haven’t been diving into playing unplugged, but that’s going to change with Expert.

In fact, a lot is going to change with Expert. You’ll notice in the above that there’s a lot of talking about techniques that I need to get better at, and very little talk about actual music. Which, in its own way, is actually a sign of how rich the game is: it asks me to do enough that I have to concentrate on the details of what my hands are doing, even performing abstract exercises outside of game, instead of going with the flow of the art of the music. And I’m willing to do that exactly because I can now see the art of the music in front of me, and I’m learning quite concretely what I’ll have to do to be able to bring out that art.

And, when I get to Expert, I’ll be asked to play the full guitar parts for pieces. At that point, it will (I suspect) no longer feel satisfying to me to treat the game as a game, to play each piece well enough to get three or four stars and then to move on to the next piece. So what I’m planning to do is pick a subset of the available songs (whether on-disc or DLC, I’m looking for suggestions for the latter) and really dive into them. Play them until I can get the notes right; play them unplugged until they sound good; play them unplugged until they actually sound like they sound in the recording. (I know essentially nothing about how to produce the range of available sounds from an electric guitar.)

If I can get to something I’m happy with after playing a song after an hour, that’s fine, but I’m imagining, even hoping, that there are songs that will reward me practicing them for weeks, that I’ll occasionally return to for months on end. And songs that suggest specific techniques that I should practice outside of game; my next-door neighbor is a guitar teacher, maybe I’ll sign up for lessons with her?

Actually, I’ve already dipped my toe into playing songs on Expert, trying out the first two songs on the disc, and the experience has been wonderful. They’ve already suggested more techniques that I need to master, and brought home just how little I know about producing sound on an electric guitar. They threw extra power chord variants at me, and it made a huge difference being able to hear what those variants sounded like; I ended up playing through each song several times experimenting with different strumming variants, trying (and failing, but learning!) to mimic what I was hearing coming out of the speakers. (And the one time I went back to a song muted after playing it unmuted was a bizarre experience indeed.)

Also: I was pleased how quickly I was able to learn the songs I was playing. Don’t get me wrong: they were both simple songs, each made out of perhaps three basic building blocks. But each building block had its variants, and I had to recognize what harmonic cues meant that I should switch building blocks and memorize what variants appeared when. A very rewarding experience, much more so than the simple effort of trying to get a not-embarrassing score on a song in game before moving on.

So: that’s Rock Band. What about the rewiring, though? For one thing, my taste in what I do in the game has changed. In past entries in the series, I’d mostly concentrated on (non-pro) guitar: I went through songs on the other instruments, but only once per song/instrument combo, and generally stuck exclusively to guitar for DLC.

And I still play non-pro guitar at times—it’s how Liesl and I go through new DLC, there’s been a ton of good songs showing up recently, and I fully support non-pro guitar as a way to listen to new music. But, in general, there are three other ways that I prefer to play the game: on pro guitar, on pro keys, or, to my surprise, on vocals. (Both solo and harmonies.)

There’s a lot going on with that latter choice. Part of it is that vocal harmonies are something that I can share with Liesl, and they’re rather more intimate than playing non-pro guitar/bass together. And part of it comes from psychological triggers. But what all three of those modes have in common is that they’re a lot more musically richer: and I’m finding that I really appreciate that. I want a deeper experience, I’m seeing musical forms that I’m not familiar with as a way to experiment and grow, and, well, I’m breaking down my sense of shame more broadly (those psychological triggers again!), and it turns out that singing is an area of my life where I’m happy enough to perform badly in public. (Or in private, I’m not actively seeking out exhibitionism.) It’s definitely an area where I have a lot to learn: I’m not taking singing as seriously as I am guitar, but I start to actually feel antsy if a couple of weeks go by without me singing at all.

These increased desires to make music have spread beyond the game as well. We bought a piano a couple of months after moving into this house, and it hasn’t been rare for me to sit down at it and play something (usually show tunes, but sometimes Flanders and Swann, sometimes Studio Ghibli music, sometimes classical music) on it. But it also hasn’t been uncommon for me to go for months without touching the piano, and I certainly haven’t put in concerted effort to work on pieces.

More and more over the last few months, however, I found myself sitting down at the piano; and, at some point, I decided: I’m enjoying this, I used to be a not-completely-incompetent harpsichordist, let’s get my fingers working again. So I decided to work on a piece that I used to actually be rather good at, namely the 3-Part Ricercar from the Musical Offering: I haven’t practiced it every day, but I’ve done so often enough to make steady progress.

And wow, am I glad that I’ve been doing that. It feels so good to get a somewhat thorny piece back into my fingers, to be able to play another page or two a week without tripping up multiple times a line. Then there’s thinking about phrasing while I’m doing that, playing around with different conceptions of what the music should be.

But then something quite unexpected happened: just when I got to where I was making an acceptably small number of mistakes and was thinking it might be time to move on, the way I was listening to the piece completely changed. All of a sudden, I became much more able to pick out the voices aurally and conceptually, and a lot more possibilities appeared than I’d been aware of before.

Which, honestly, scared me a bit, and I’m still poking at the piece somewhat gingerly. And, in the meantime, I’m working on learning the 6-Part Ricercar, so I have the more straightforward challenge of getting that piece into my fingers while dealing with the musicality of the 3-Part Ricercar. Though “straightforward” is the wrong word for getting the 6-Part Ricercar into my fingers—there’s way too much going on at once in that piece for that to be an accurate description of what’s going on there! And, for that matter, it’s not like I’m not paying attention to the musicality of the 6-Part Ricercar: as I mentioned in the power chords paragraph above, I’m fascinated by places where open fifths show up in that piece. Still, it’s different, and I’m glad I have both sorts of challenges right now. (And I should go to Paris this spring to visit my harpsichord teacher!)

So I’m making a lot more music than I had been. Which is part of a broader manifestation that I want to be surrounded by music. Every once in a while over the last few years, I’d read an article talking about how multitasking is impossible; those articles would frequently bring up listening to something while working, I’d note that I have a lot harder time listening to music while working than I once did, and I’d idly wonder whether that had always been the case or whether my brain had better reconciled those back when I was in school. (I listened to music all the time when working when in college.)

And now, I will say: my brain had changed away from being able to listen to music while working, and it has recently changed back. Not that I never find music distracting: lyric-heavy music poses problems, and it’s certainly the case that I’m not getting as much out of the music as I would if I weren’t working. (And we really should get symphony tickets, or tickets to some other local concert series. Both in general and for Miranda’s sake: she’s getting a good exposure to show tunes and to opera, but I think she’d enjoy chamber and orchestral music if given the opportunity.) But in general I’m finding that, these days, I prefer my life to have a soundtrack, and I’m very much enjoying both diving into the hundreds of albums I have lying around and discovering new artists. (And I’d love recommendations on the latter front, please leave some in the comments!)

Except that sometimes I am finding music distracting in startling and unexpected ways, to the extent that there are several albums that I quite like that I’m finding are quite unsafe for me to listen to work. The first albums that I recognized as such are Mika’s albums; they make me want to break into song (break into falsetto!), which my coworkers would rightfully be dubious about. But, rather worse, listening to them also makes me want to kiss somebody. And that’s something my coworkers would be more than just dubious about, and (given that she’s not one of my coworkers) “dubious” would not be the word that Liesl would choose to describe such actions even were they interested!

I’m trying to figure out what’s going on with that latter effect. It’s not the thematic content of the songs themselves: last week proved that Brasta Ghibli (a fabulous fabulous brass rendition of Studio Ghibli themes) has the same effect on me, and there aren’t any lyrics there. It’s more that listening to that music fills me with joy, and an overabundance of affection (?) is one way that my brain decides to interpret that emotion.

Three months ago, I went through a manic phase; there were plusses and minuses to that experience, but I’m very glad it happened and, on balance, I miss it. I’m still not at all sure what caused that to happen or why it went away, but, in retrospect, it’s almost certainly not a coincidence that I was writing about Rock Band in the blog post where I first mentioned it. (And also not a coincidence that I was blogging about sex; I’ve got one or two more of those posts queued up too.) So if music can help me turn that switch back on when I want it, that’s great: it would make me very happy to have access to that mental state in a more controlled fashion.

Phew. And I’m only done with hard pro guitar: just imagine how I’ll be feeling when I’m in the throes of expert! Maybe I’ll get inspired by Taeyang and start dancing (I’m quite glad that ash-panic’s tumblr has been turning me on to K-pop), maybe I’ll stop blogging here and spend more and more time singing or at the piano. (Actually, I hope I won’t stop blogging, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all if I dialed down my video game playing soon, about which more in a bit.) Hopefully I’ll manage to stay productive enough at work to be happily employed; we’re a musical bunch, fortunately, and programming is also a creative outlet, so I’m not particularly worried on that score.

It took me quite some time to get around to writing the post, however; and, when I started typing, I realized why. To dig into Apple’s place in my psyche, I had to explain my history with Apple products, and indeed with computers in general. And, as it turns out, that takes a while. The result is a post where the tail is rather wagging the dog; interesting to me, at least, but one that could most charitably be described as ungainly. (Feel free to skip ahead to the Apple bits.)

At any rate: the computers I have owned, and why I am fascinated with Apple.

Prehistory

My parents bought us an Apple ][+ in May 1982; I was in fifth grade at the time. That was the only computer we had at home through at least 1989, when I went off to college (my brother got a computer when he went to college a few years earlier); hard to imagine these days. I'm not sure when my parents got a second computer, and I know they continued using the Apple ][+ for several years after I left home, at the very least to run a program they wrote to help manage their finances.

I programmed some on that Apple ][+ (the high point being a text adventure that I wrote), but my memory is that I didn't program particularly seriously on it. I used it to write papers (and for some other writing projects, I went through a phase when I wrote short stories and a novella). And I played quite a few games on it, high points being various Infocom games and the first four Ultima games, but I also think fondly of Robot Odyssey, Le Prisonnier, Lode Runner, and Wizardry.

In 1987 (my junior year of high school) I started hanging out more at Oberlin College, and I spent quite a bit of time in the various computer clusters in the school library. I got to be a rather fluent VAX/VMS user, and (presumably through some of the math courses I was taking?) started hanging out with some computer science majors. They got me interested in learning to program in C and Scheme, and in the 1988–1989 school year I started using Unix more. I also remember helping one of them install GNU Emacs on that VMS cluster. (At the time, the computer science’s Unix cluster actually had Gosmacs installed instead of (or at least in preference to?) GNU Emacs.)

Oberlin College could send e-mail to other institutions via Bitnet, and had a DECnet connection with a half-dozen or so other colleges. (DECnet was pretty cool.) It also had Usenet feeds. It was not yet on any of the TCP/IP-based networks that became the internet.

College

When I went off to college in the fall of 1989, my parents brought me a Macintosh SE/30; I used it to write papers in non-technical subjects, play games, and do some amount of programming. (I wrote my papers on technical subjects in LaTeX; I’m honestly not sure whether I mostly typed those on my Mac or on one of the clusters mentioned below.) Continuing my habits from the last two years of high school, however, I spent much much more time on the various computer clusters around the college. I begged an account on the math department’s Sun workstation cluster, though the sysadmin and I had an iffy enough relationship that I didn’t spend very much time there. I begged an account on the computer science department’s Sun workstation cluster as well, where I spent more time. (There were probably Ultrix machines in that cluster, too?) And I got a part time sysadmin helper job on the general school cluster. (Mostly Ultrix machines, initially with dumb terminals but X terminals showed up fairly soon.)

I probably spent most of my time on the general school cluster: programming, playing around, and doing system administration work. Coming out of that, I was much more comfortable on Unix than in any other computing environment, and had installed various bits of free software (mostly GNU tools of various sorts) over and over again. I also had a friend from Oberlin who was then working at the Free Software Foundation, so I was getting a strong free software philosophical dose from him as well.

I took a couple of computer science courses (an intro theory course, a compilers course), but not many: mostly because I could learn how to program computers just fine on my own, partly because I had enough other interests competing for my course time. Also, at that time Harvard’s computer science department didn’t have the buzz that I’d gotten from Oberlin. (Though there were students and faculty members that I learned a lot from, don’t get me wrong.) I was into programming languages and compilers at the time: I did some sort of undergrad research project on compilers, I was a course assistant for a few courses on programming languages and compilers, and I spent three out of my four summers during that period doing programming-related work. (One summer at MITRE, one at DEC, one being a course assistant at Boston College; the fourth summer was spent at a math research program whose main benefit was that I became a not-hopelessly-incompetent cook.)

During this period, I had access to TCP/IP-based networks: ARPAnet had evolved into NSFnet, with the internet coming. The web poked its head out right at the end of this period, but it certainly wasn’t clear to me that it was anything more than a peer to the various other network protocol that were floating around at the time.

Life as a Mathematician

Then, after a year’s interlude, I went to math grad school in 1994. I still had my old Mac, Jordan bought a new Mac (that I played Marathon on), Liesl bought a 486 machine running Windows 3.1 (I played Myst, System Shock, and Dark Forces on that), and at some point I was given an X terminal that I could use at home. Most of my computer time was spent on the math department machines, though; and I essentially wasn’t programming at all during this time period. Also, a friend of mine gave me an NES, which started me on a spiral of depravity that I still haven’t emerged from. (One of the first things I did after getting my postdoc acceptance letter was to get a Nintendo 64; good thing my thesis was almost completely written by then…) Actually, though, my dominant leisure activity during that time period was reading books, I averaged more than a book a day over the course of grad school.

I can’t remember if I moved my old (9 years old at the time!) Mac with me when we went to Stanford in 1998; we moved Liesl’s computer, but I’m not sure if we ever turned it on. In general, I did my computing on the machine in my office at the math department; I can’t remember its specs (though I believe it had 4 GB of hard drive space?), but it was running an early Red Hat Linux version. I still wasn’t programming significant amounts: I was busy being a mathematician and a parent (Miranda was born in 1999), trying to figure out how to teach well, and playing video games, doing the latter almost exclusively on consoles instead of computers.

Returning to the Apple theme that triggered this post: during this period, my interest in Apple was quite low. I had a Mac, but barely used it; I certainly wasn’t going to use Windows machines, but really my focus was on Unix. (So, in terms of recent computing deaths, Dennis Ritchie’s is a lot more relevant.) I was at least partly anti-Apple at the time: the Free Software Foundation and the League for Programming Freedom had boycotted Apple because of their use of user interface patents, and that had an effect on me.

Transitioning

In 2002, academia and I came to a mutual decision that we weren’t as good a fit as I had thought. Fortunately, the Stanford math department was willing to let me hang around for another year; so I spent half my time that year teaching calculus and half my time brushing up my programming skills. I learned C++ and Java (object-oriented programming was far from dominant when I was an undergraduate), and contributed a fair number of patches to GDB.

It also became clear that I wouldn’t be able to depend on my employer to provide my computing resources; so I bought domains to use for my various internet presences, and, for the first time since 1989 (13 years!), acquired a new computer. It was a Dell Inspiron 8200 laptop, a behemoth that was barely portable (and that, fortunately, I rarely needed to carry anywhere); we set it up to dual-boot Windows and Linux, and I spent the vast majority of the time on the Linux side.

Also, befitting my academic nature, I started reading books and going to talks. A lot of the books that I read were C++-specific (and I learned a lot from them, C++ is an extremely interesting language); in terms of non-language-specific books, the refactoring book had a big impact. The talk that had the most impact on me was one that a couple of researchers in a local corporate think-tank (?) gave about their experiences with something called “eXtreme Programming”; that was my first exposure to Agile software development.

The GDB work led to consulting work at a startup called Kealia, and I started working there full-time when I left academia in the summer of 2003. We got acquired by Sun a year later; soon after the acquisition, I became a manager, albeit a manager who spent a lot of time programming.

Agile

I spent a lot of time trying to understand Agile software development over the next five or seven years. At first, I was just trying to do this on a personal level, practicing refactoring and trying out test-driven development. Kealia’s legacy code provided some interesting challenges on the former front; the company also already had a bit of a testing culture when I showed up, and we experimented with going farther in that direction. And becoming a manager got me interested in other aspects of Agile: the more explicitly people-focused aspects, the planning aspects. And, as part of planning, the idea that programmers don’t make all of the design decisions (which was quite a change from working on GDB!): other people have a better idea of what the end users really value, what will work well in their context.

As an academic, I’d been quite ivory tower (at least aside from my interest in teaching); that changed. I was working at a startup which got acquired by a larger company that had suffered a lot over the last few years; part of startup life is trying to figure out how to make your business work, and Sun was trying to figure that out at a larger scale. Sun also put enough resources behind StreamStar (Kealia’s video server project) that we had quite a lot of room to experiment with different business strategies, trying to find one that would stick. (Far too much room: the fact that Sun didn’t cancel StreamStar years before I eventually left was a sign of Sun’s own management problems.)

My boss was a big fan of Clayton Christensen’s disruption theories, and I got to see both sides of the difficulties of disruption first-hand. Sun was a large company that was already far along the path of being disrupted by commodity hardware running Linux, and was trying to figure out how to deal with that; StreamStar was trying to disrupt the existing broadcast television infrastructure, replacing it with IP-based solutions. In neither case did we navigate the difficulties well, but I have quite a bit of sympathy for both sets of difficulties: surviving being disrupted is extremely difficult, and when it comes to broadcast television, you have to deal not only with the existing technological infrastructure but with the existing broadcasters and existing content providers. So it’s not surprising that we failed to disrupt broadcast television delivery, whereas Youtube was much more successful with its end run around the last two issues.

During this time, I won an iPod (one of the hard-drive based models), and a couple of years later, an iPod Nano at company raffles. I wouldn’t have bought the first iPod on my own, but its presence made my jogging a lot more presence; I probably wouldn’t have bought the iPod Nano on my own, but I was quite surprised how much more I liked its small size, the lack of skipping, and the general elegance of its design.

Our Dell laptop died in 2006, and had been showing its age enough by then that I was already planning to replace it. For my own Linux use, we got a Sun Ultra 20; to have a computer that Liesl could use and that I could run iTunes on, I got a MacBook Pro. This was the first model after the Intel transition; I felt more comfortable going back to the Mac instead of having a Windows machine around, and the fact that there was now Unix underneath MacOS was a real bonus. (Incidentally, back in 2003 I’d turned down a job offer working on GDB for Apple: I like Unix and the GNU toolchain, but I wasn’t really interested in specializing in the latter.)

At some point while I was at Sun (probably in 2008), I got an iPod Touch. That was really a revelation to me: it was wonderful having a little computer in my pocket, one that was already fairly versatile and was becoming more so every year; I had Wi-Fi access most of the places I spent time (there was even spotty Wi-Fi available from Google when wandering around Mountain View), but I could tell that having a phone network provide almost constant network access would be so much better.

But more than that: Tweetie made me sit up and take notice. That was the Twitter client that eventually became the first-party Twitter client; and despite running on this quite small device, I far preferred using it to any Twitter interface I had available on computers that didn’t fit in my pocket. That didn’t make much sense to me; clearly there was something going on with design that I didn’t understand and that could make a real difference.

At this time, I was also getting more and more tired with having Unix on my desktop. I love Emacs, but it’s stuck in the stone age in so many ways: what really drove that home was once when I fired it up on a machine where I didn’t have my standard .emacs file and realized that, by default, Emacs put the scroll bars on the left. That may have been a perfectly reasonable decision when it was first made, but it wasn’t any more and hadn’t been for at least a decade; did I really want to be working with tools that were so willfully ignorant about design conventions? GNOME had helped civilize X Windows, but it had only brought the experience up to a minimally acceptable level, and even so there were too many non-GNOME applications around.

Reaching the Present

So, when I started work at Playdom, I asked for a Mac for my work machine: that way I could have a Unix command line and tools combined with a GUI that accepted the idea that design was a virtue. Which the IT department was oddly hostile to: you’d think that a company with a large contingent of graphics artists that deploys software to Unix servers would be a natural fit for Macs, but Playdom had its quirks, and its IT department was definitely one of those quirks.

At around this time we got a second Mac laptop at home, and I got an iPhone. (My first cell phone; I am a luddite at times.) The Ultra 20 died; I decided that I wanted to continue to run a Linux server (e.g. to host this blog), but that I would prefer to interact with it through an ssh connection, so I got a virtual machine at Rackspace. Also, I was getting older, and carrying around a laptop during GDC 2010 put a surprising strain on my back; the iPad had been announced, so I decided I’d get one the next time I went to a conference. Which happened sooner than I expected, since I decided to go to GLS later that spring.

My back thanked me for the iPad purchase; but my psyche thanked me as well, to a surprising extent. I found that I preferred reading e-mail on the iPad to reading e-mail in a web browser, and that I far far preferred reading blogs in Reeder than through Google Reader’s web interface, whether I used the latter to go to the blogs’ web pages or stuck with the RSS feed. In both cases, the iPad acted like a wonderfully adaptable piece of paper: the words I wanted were right there, with enough style to be pleasant (unlike the Google Reader web interface) but without any surrounding crap (unlike blogs’ web pages). Having a screen that was much smaller than computer monitors that I was used to, and that was in portrait mode instead of landscape mode, turned out to be excellent for letting me focus on what I was reading. (As it turned out, I even slightly prefer reading blogs through Reeder on my iPhone over reading them through a web interface on a standard computer, despite the rather-too-small size of the former’s screen.)

In early 2011, one of our laptops died; rather than replace it with another laptop, we got an iMac and a second iPad. Our current technology roster is an iMac and a MacBook (one of the white plastic ones); two iPads (one from each generation); three iPhones (one from each of the last three generations, though the oldest one is being used by Miranda as an iPod Touch instead of as a phone); a virtual machine located elsewhere running Linux; and half a dozen game consoles. (My rate of technology purchases has increased enormously since 1998.) Also in 2011, I started working at Sumo Logic; as is typical in startups around here (at least judging from the ones I’ve interviewed at), it’s largely a Mac shop for development (with deployment happening on Linux virtual machines), and my coworkers generally prefer various Apple products for personal use, though there’s more variation on the personal side.

So: that’s the computers and other technology that I’ve used over the course of my life. Apple played a large role when I was young and more recently, but in the middle there was a long phase where my norm was Unix + GNU toolchain, with a strong free software ethos. Why did I shift out of that, what’s behind my recent fascination with Apple’s products and, increasingly, Apple as a company?

Habitable Software

The first is the concept of “habitable software”. I talked about this last year: the idea is that there is software that my brain shies away from using, and there’s software that I actively look forward to using, where the thought of using it relaxes me or brings a smile to my face.

I actually think that console gaming gave me my first nudge in this direction. You stick the cartridge into the machine, you pick up a controller with a relatively constrained set of inputs, you turn on the machine, and it just works. Note too that a console controller, unlike a mouse and a keyboard, is explicitly designed for the task at hand: yes, gamepads may have a few too many or too few buttons and sticks for a given game, but at least it’s focused on the domain of playing games. (Hmm, maybe the controller/game match is why I think back on text adventures with so much fondness?) I keep on installing Windows on machines with the thought that I’ll finally play the many important PC games that are missing from my background; and I keep on deciding that no, I really don’t want to put up with the crap that PC gaming makes you deal with.

But shifting from X Windows back to the Mac also gave me a huge shove towards being sensitive to habitable software; and going from the Mac to iPhone/iPad software like Tweetie and Reeder was, in its own way, just as large a leap. Every time I use X, I find something that feels wrong; a Mac feels neutral, but I don’t generally look forward to turning it on; Tweetie and Reeder make me actively happy. It’s not just software that I’m learning from, either: I was surprised how much happier I was with the iPod Nano because of its small size, light weight, pleasant screen, and lack of skipping.

The Unix command line also makes me actively happy. It’s wonderfully coherent; for certain tasks related to writing and, especially, deploying software, it’s just what I want, I love the interface that it presents to me. So it’s no coincidence that I do my programming on machines where a Unix terminal window is one key combination away, and that I use virtual machines running Linux to deploy software on: I feel completely at home in those contexts when working on those tasks.

Designing Software

Habitability is how I like to express the importance of design in software to me as a user. But I’m a programmer as well, so I see design from that side as well.

When I was younger, I spent much of my programming time concerned with tools for programmers: thinking about programming languages and compilers, working on GDB. In those contexts, I didn’t have to think too hard about design: I was an acceptable proxy for the end user for the software, so if something felt good for me, then that was good enough.

That’s a relatively unusual subset of software, however; as I started to work about other kinds of products, I realized that my design instincts wouldn’t do a very good job. And, at the same time, I got interested in Agile: and one of Agile’s main tenets is that design concerns (personified as the “Customer”) are paramount when deciding what to work on. Not that the technical details aren’t important as well—you get great benefits from keeping your code flexible and well-architected—but ultimately it’s not programmers’ jobs to decide what’s important to present to the users.

Even though it carves out a space where design can happen, Agile isn’t actually very good at giving you advice at how to design well: specific recommendations are much more focused on the programming side of things (e.g. refactoring, test-driven development) or the programming/design interface (estimating, iterating) than on the design side of things. Also, my talents and instincts are much stronger on programming than on design: I still have a lot of room for improvement, but I’ve got some understanding of what’s involved in writing code that’s clean and functional from a technical point of view, whereas I have much less understanding of what’s involved in developing a product that people are actively happy to use.

And, to produce really great products, I’m not convinced by Agile’s engineering/customer representative split. The Lean concept of a Chief Engineer who’s immersed in both worlds seems much more powerful to me, and I see around me wonderful pieces of software written by single individuals, or startups (including Sumo Logic!) run by people with both a vision for what they want to produce and the technical chops to help bring that into existence.

Apple can probably be argued as providing evidence on either side of the argument about that split, but there are clearly individuals who made a huge difference in its products. Apple also points out how ludicrous it is to label the designer as the “Customer” if you really want to produce something new and great, and at the limits of the analytics-focused mindset that I saw so much of at Playdom; in general, Apple’s approach to iteration seems interestingly different from yet related to Agile norms. And their systems approach gives Apple many more design knobs to turn than they would if they were exclusively a software company. (Or exclusively a hardware company, of course.)

Business Success

Back in my academic days, I didn’t care about practical applications of my research. When I started working for startups, though, that changed: if you don’t have your eyes on how you’re going to make money out of your startup, you’re doing the wrong thing. (Not that startups don’t have a heavy dose of ego satisfaction in them, of scratching your own itch.)

Once I started paying more attention to making money, it turns out to be totally fascinating: if you like complex systems, capitalism is full of them. Just figuring out cash flow: where money is coming in, where money is going out, the difference between those two in quantity and in in time. So many possibilities there!

Apple’s business success over the last decade is staggering, of course. But they are fascinating far beyond their simple profit figures: the consequences of their systems approach to design, their use of their savings to buy vast quantities of parts from their component vendors (and even to allow those vendors to purchase tooling!), the role of their physical stores, the list goes on and on. There’s still a stereotype of Apple as making overpriced products, but their competitors are finding it very difficult to build products with the hardware quality of the iPad or MacBook Air while maintaining any sort of profit margin at all.

Of course, lots of startups aren’t focused on being profitable: Silicon Valley is full of company that are trying to get eyeballs, hoping that profitability will come somehow, and perfectly happy to sell the company to somebody else who can worry about that problem. We see echoes of this in the Android / iPhone fight, and these days I’m generally more interested in making money than having users without a good business model; but the iPod shows that you don’t always have to compromise, that you can win on both fronts.

Disruption

I mentioned Clayton Christensen’s disruption theory above: living in Silicon Valley, there’s no end of startups trying to remake an industry, no end of once dominant companies that stumbled, got bought, died.

Apple looked like it was following that latter trajectory; it pulled out of its decline like no other company. And did so in a very interesting way: not only did it disrupt other industries, it also disrupted itself, with the iPhone cannibalizing iPod sales and with the iPad cannibalizing laptop sales. This is extremely difficult to do: existing successes almost always lead to institutional antibodies that attack new products, leaving that success to newcomers.

Over the last decade, we’ve all become aware of disruption; the companies that can figure out how to repeatedly harness the powers of disruption will be the ones that flourish (the ones that survive at all!) over the next few decades. They will have to learn from Apple. And if I’m going to continue to build a career working at exciting companies, I’m going to want to learn from Apple, too, to help me figure out what sorts of qualities to look for the next time I’m on the job market, to pick employers that will disrupt successfully!

Repeatable Creativity

Disruption aside, though, there’s something amazing about Apple’s run of products over the last decade: one interestingly new product after another. I wish I knew how they did that.

It’s easy to ascribe this to a solo genius theory; but, while I don’t want to minimize Steve Jobs’s contributions, I don’t think that’s all that’s going on here. Pixar is another relevant datum: they’ve also managed to be consistently creative, and they continued to do that after Jobs sold the company to Disney. Perhaps because of the domain, people don’t credit Jobs with the same influence on Pixar’s repeated creative success as they do with Jobs; but, to me, the two companies suggest that Jobs has learned something about helping groups to innovate repeatably in a way that goes well beyond his personal contributions.

Over the last couple of years, stories have come out about some sort of Apple University, which seems to be trying to systematize those ideas. This reminds me of Toyota’s conscious efforts to improve themselves as a learning company; Apple is, sadly, much more secretive than Toyota, but I hope more of Apple’s methods will become public over the next decade. And, of course, I hope that Apple will be able to continue to innovate over the next decade, that their innovation really is due in part to a systematizable process.

Bad Apple

During the mid-90′s, I was down on Apple. I hoped that had gone away with the new decade, however: their user interface patents had gone away, and they were active open source contributors, though that clearly wasn’t the company’s main focus.

Unfortunately, those problems have come back in spades. By far the one that I find most distasteful is their aggressive use of patents: I think software patents are bad for the industry, bad for the world, and while I’m more and more bored by other companies that seem to largely be trying to produce knockoffs of Apple’s products, I very much support allowing those companies to do so.

Apple’s recent systems are also much more closed than computing platforms I’d used before then. I would expect that to bother me; for whatever reason, though, it actually doesn’t particularly. Certainly it would if I didn’t have ample access to other computing platforms, or if the tools to develop for iOS platforms weren’t so readily available; and while Apple teeters on the edge of behaving in a manner I find unacceptable in their application approval process, for whatever reason I generally think they’re okay. (I’m actually more worried about Amazon’s behavior in that regard.)

I’m being ungenerous in saying this, but: these days, when I read Richard Stallman complaining about Apple’s closed systems, part of my brain interprets that as RMS wanting it not to be his fault if other people don’t have software they want to use: RMS has made an open system, it’s other people’s fault if they don’t take advantage of that. These open systems are, in all serious, a great good: but actually having good software on your computer is also worthy, and having software that’s a joy to use is a great good. It’s fine if having well-crafted software for the non-programming public isn’t RMS’s concern, there’s no reason why it should be; but I see him as a single-issue voter whose issue is no longer dominant to me, and who is willfully blind to other issues that are important to me.

To those of you who have read this far: I salute you. And to those of you who don’t like Apple’s products, who don’t care about what Apple has done as a company: that’s great, there’s no reason why others’ interests should be my own. And there’s no question that company has flaws, does things I really don’t like. But I’m fascinated for many reasons by what Apple has done over the last decade, and I fully expect to be trying to sort out the implications for much of the next decade.

Some Jobs-related posts that I particularly enjoyed:

• John Shook asking Was Steve Lean?
• Another lean-focused post, this time from Evolving Excellence
• Horace Dediu on what Steve Jobs didn’t do.
• A podcast reminiscence from John Siracusa.