9:00 am: Where Did My Inventory Go? Refining Gameplay in Mass Effect 2, by Christina Norman.

(Slides here; I’m a bit afraid to embed them because having that page open is making my computer swap uncomfortably. Though y’all probably have rather more memory than I do, so I’m probably worrying excessively! It’s the first time I’ve seen Prezi used live; it certainly does a better job of bringing out Levels of Scale than the vast majority of Powerpoints that I’ve seen.)

I am enough of a Mass Effect 2 fanboy that I went to two talks on the game during my last day at GDC; it didn’t hurt, of course, that the Mass Effect 2 talk I went to last year ended up being my favorite talk of the conference. And this talk gave me no reason to doubt that policy; it was a fascinating discussion of how she and her team dealt with design problems that Mass Effect 1, despite being an excellent game, had: how they figured out where the problem areas were, how they honed in on solutions.

They started by analyzing player feedback, both qualitatively and quantitatively, mapped out design goals (more satisfying combat, better inventory, better balance, among other things), and then started planning fixes to these. Design documents were generated; none of the features in the design documents shipped, however. They tried prototyping using the Mass Effect 1 engine; that helped a little bit, but really all they could do there was make the guns a bit more accurate: they weren’t able to investigate possible solutions for most of the areas at all. Though a useful lesson did come out of that prototyping: they learned that they had to rebuild major components of the gameplay system.

Their first focus was on the shooter gameplay: it was an area where BioWare doesn’t have a lot of experience, and where they’d turned up a fair number of flaws. So, to make sure that the team didn’t let the RPG mechanics carry week shooter mechanisms, they turned off the RPG mechanics!

Here, I should go back a bit in her talk, and discuss the ways in which Mass Effect 1’s shooter mechanics were flawed. Of which, to be honest, I had no memory; I’m not sure how much of that has to do with the time that had passed since I played it, how much had to do with my not being a shooter fan, and how much had to do with its being so much better in that regard than its predecessors. (In particular, than Knights of the Old Republic, which I played only a year and a half before playing Mass Effect 1.) But, like KotOR, there’s a lot of randomness in whether your shots hit in Mass Effect 1: the result is that the assault rifle, towards the start of the game, feels like it could barely hit the broad side of a barn. And you have to stop constantly to select which power to use or to wait for your weapons to cooldown; in addition, the cover system didn’t work very well.

Mass Effect 2 attacked all of these directly. Which, I’m a bit embarrassed to say, I didn’t notice: the truth of the matter is that I didn’t mind stopping frequently, to the extent that I never bothered to map the powers that I used the most to buttons on my controller! But I really enjoyed watching her examples of ME2 characters going smoothly through fights, mowing down enemies, popping in and out of cover and dodging as appropriate, combining powers with bullets all in a series of graceful moves; very impressive, I’m tempted to pick up the game again and try to play it that way.

Some of the improvements to the combat flow are obvious: you can do a lot more without pulling up a menu if you have five face buttons to map to powers than you can if you have only one. But some of them are a bit less obvious: for example, they switched from having per-power cooldowns to a global cooldown. I’d noticed that this improves the affordances of using powers (because your targeting reticule lets you know whether you can use your power), but it also means that it’s no longer an optimal strategy to constantly go through all your powers in sequence, so you can instead stick with your mapped powers much of the time.

They improved the affordances of enemy buffs, as well: once you learn a bit about the game, you can tell just by looking at the enemy’s health bar which powers will work on it and which won’t. They made the guns much more usable at low levels, but also made it easy to stick with your favorite gun over a long period of time, by switching the way weapon upgrades were handled. And they handled upgrades differently in general: you never upgrade your character or your weapons during a mission (other than picking up a new heavy weapon), instead you handle all of that on the ship once the mission is over. And they made lots of small improvements that really improve the fit and finish, e.g. preserving your aim point when you get out of cover.

The weapon upgrades bring us to another point. (One which Blizzard’s Rob Pardo had brought up earlier in the week, but not nearly as effectively.) To my mind, one of the great things that Mass Effect 2 got right is in its emphasizing of Strong Centers. On a broad scale, the last few paragraphs are all about strengthening the shooter gameplay as a center that can stand up to the RPG gameplay. But your improved interaction with weapons brings each individual weapon out an a center in its own right. The streamlined character upgrade system brings out your powers as centers. (The only exception being the “combat mastery” upgrade, which just sounds cool!)

They were prepared to cut classes if necessary to heighten them as centers; they eventually ended up with the same number of classes, but made them much more distinct. (I was very impressed with the two class-specific combat videos she showed; for the last few years I’ve had a policy to avoid game pre-release hype, but maybe I should have been paying attention to the Mass Effect 2 class introduction videos they produced!)

There’s a bit more in the talk, but I won’t go through it all here; watch her presentation if you’d like to see it. Suffice it to say that it was a great talk: a great story, with insights both specific and broad. And I’m very excited to see what Mass Effect 3 will bring: after last year’s GDC, it looked like the team had gotten their development process on a solid footing, and now it looks like they’ve got their gameplay engine on a solid footing, so they should be able to go at full blast when working on the third part of the series.

1:30 pm: Get Your Game out of my Movie! Interactive Storytelling in Mass Effect 2, by Armando Troisi.

This talk, unfortunately, wasn’t nearly as good as the other Mass Effect 2 talk that day. It started on a bad foot: the speaker and a technician spent a full fifteen minutes fiddling with the laptop’s video output before giving up and using a backup laptop. (Which they’d had ready all along, the speaker just didn’t think it would be powerful enough to show the videos well, but the videos turned out just fine.)

And the talk never really grabbed me once it got going, either. A lot of what he started with seemed vague or banal, unlike the concrete examples and story animating Christina Norman’s talk. He spent some time talking about how the Mass Effect series was supposed to be quite different from BioWare’s other RPGs, because the others are “subjective” (so you, the player, are the center), while the Mass Effect series is “objective” (focusing on a story that you don’t really control). The thing is, though, that, in the grand picture, all of their RPGs are “objective” by that definition in comparison to, say, a tabletop RPG: your role playing choices are severely constrained by what’s present in the game.

He then dug into an example of what it means to be “objective” in more detail, namely the fact that, in Mass Effect, you don’t choose the exact dialogue in dialogue trees: instead, you choose more of an expression of the general direction you want the dialogue to go in. But that’s a false distinction: a more traditional dialog tree selector still only has a handful of options, options that are exceedingly unlikely to represent exactly what you would choose to say at that moment, and not even particularly likely to represent more than the general direction in which you want to take the conversation! So maybe there’s more to the subjective/objective distinction than I’m seeing, but I left unconvinced.

He spent a fair amount of time talking about the meanings of the locations on the dialogue wheel, including showing examples of how they were misused. That would probably be interesting to somebody new to the series, but I didn’t see anything there that I hadn’t seen before.

The one part that was new to me was his discussion of quick time events in the game: I hadn’t thought about that very much. For example, you never get both a renegade and a paragon option at the same time: they’d tried doing that, but people were unable to make that choice satisfactorily in real time. (Whereas choosing between one of those options and doing nothing was a choice that people were willing to make, while feeling a pleasant amount of tension in the process.) Also, one problem with QTEs is that, unlike the dialogue wheel, they didn’t have a good way to telegraph to the player more or less what action Shepard would take (other than the very broad stroke of paragon / renegade); they solved this by adding visual telegraphing before the QTE. The example that he showed us was a situation where, right before the QTE, Shepard cracked his knuckles; after that, it wasn’t too much of a surprise to see Shepard deck the person he was talking to when you selected the renegade QTE.

The phases that the economy has gone through so far:

1. No in-game currency at all.
2. Emergent unofficial currencies.
3. A paid currency.
4. A tradable paid currency.
5. Dual official currencies.
6. An official secondary market.

The details:

No in-game currency at all.

When the game started, there was no in-game currency. If you wanted to buy an item, you paid for it right there with real money, by sending a certain text message.

This had some problems: for one thing, there were social engineering hacks (people convinced others to send plausible-looking text messages that ended up buying items for somebody else), but also there weren’t enough price points. There were only two prices; for the cheap one, the carriers took off a large chunk, while the expensive one was too expensive for most of the items in game.

Emergent unofficial currencies.

Perhaps in reaction to this second problem, players developed their own currency. From the beginning, players could trade items to each other after they purchased them; rather than trading desired items directly, they eventually settled on using a particular cheap chair as the standard currency. (So a player would sell you this thing for 7 chairs, that thing for 10 chairs, etc.) And, in fact, this unofficial currency system persists to this day, though the reference items have changed over time.

In 2001, they launched the game in the United Kingdom. Cell phone penetration wasn’t high enough there (especially among kids) to use it as the exclusive payment source, so they needed to do something else; but, again, they couldn’t afford to be bled try by transaction fees for the smaller amounts. So they need a way to split a 10-pound payment into smaller chunks, which led to:

A paid currency.

At this stage, they introduced credits, and switched item purchase to work in terms of credits. One credit cost about 15 cents; cheap items cost 1 credit, standard items cost 2–3 credits, premium items cost 4–15 credits.

Here is where the speaker started putting up increasingly complex diagrams explaining the economy; I’m not up for trying to recreate them myself, which is one of the main reasons why I’m hoping the slides will appear soon! But one of his main points was that their economy went from only having one pool (the pool of objects) to having two pools (adding the pool of credits, which drained into the pool of objects). This made it harder to predict revenue: people could either purchase items on the secondary market or purchase items from saved up credit without having to spend real money to purchase credit. (Also, as he pointed out here: all the goods in their economy at this stage were persistent, which makes them a great value proposition, especially in the presence of the ability to trade, but also led to item value inflation.)

So, to help with predictable revenue, they added the Habbo Club. This is a monthly subscription; it’s paid for in credits, so it added another sink from the credit pool. It lets people customize their avatars; that way, subscriptions and item purchases don’t cannibalize each other.

In 2005, they noted that the number of players who were trading but not paying increased faster than the number of players who were purchasing new items: basically, there was too big an item pool in circulation. They thought about banning trading, but it’s great content for the game, so trading drives sales. Also, people who trade the most monetize the most. (At which point he made a side note: expect a power law in distribution of, e.g. paying players: metrics based on averages can give you very misleading guidance.)

So they wanted to continue to allow trading, but rethought it a bit:

A tradable paid currency.

At this step, they started allowing people to trade credits, not just trade items. The point here is that the most liquid currency is the most desirable currency: so you want people to be trading your currency, instead of trading chairs or rubber ducks.

And this, indeed, led to more buying of credits. I have some notes here that I don’t quite understand: they say that before, “buyers = spenders” (because you couldn’t spend credits if you didn’t buy them yourself), and that, before, “traders > buyers” (most of the action happened in the item pool). Afterwards, it remained the case that “traders > buyers”, but now, “spenders > buyers” (because there were more ways to get credits to spend). With the effect (this is the part I don’t entirely get) that there were more buyers. (I guess because the buyers were feeding not only the trading pool but the new pool of non-buying spenders?)

There were, of course, unanticipated side effects. Before this change, the smallest unit of currency was a rubber duck, which people had decided was worth about .1 credit; after this change, a duck ended up worth 1 credit. So the cheapest items went up in value, and the total value of the item pool went up significantly.

He also showed a picture of a room full of gold bars that was a problem; I don’t quite understand either why this happened (why wouldn’t rich people store their assets in credits?) or why it was a problem.

At any rate, they had inflation. Which raised the question: is there any way to establish a sink for persistent goods after the fact?

The answer that they ended up with was the “ecotron”: you could put five items in, and it would give you a random higher-value object back. This turned out to be very successful: players liked it a lot, low value items started disappearing, which drove more demand for high-value items.

But, even with that, inflation was a problem. The credit sales were still unstable, and new players had a hard time entering the market: the very presence of items that people were selling for $200 discouraged them from participating. Also, inflation served to discourage people from buying credits: because of inflation, their value dropped as soon as you bought them.

A side note on inflation: you have to be careful as to how you measure it: as the user base grows, the size of your pools naturally grows, so there’s a moving target here. The metric they ended up using was the ratio of liquid cash to the number of people trading in the secondary market. (Another metric he mentioned was a “consumer price index”: the value of a standard basket of items.)

At here, he also mentioned something about having inflation arise from giving away the paid currency for free. If I’m remembering correctly, Habbo Hotel never did this, it was something that they considered and rejected. But they still wanted to have something they could give to users as a reward. So:

Dual official currencies.

They introduced a secondary currency, called pixels. It had a different role than credits, the paid currency. Specifically:

Credits

• Get by buying or trading.
• Use to buy persistent goods, expendables and services. (I think, I can’t read that last word in my notes.)
• Its purpose is monetization.

Pixels

• Get by performing in-game actions.
• Use to buy expendable items, and for discounts on the credit market.
• Its purposes are user retention and conversion (? I can’t read that last word in my notes), and to support the primary market.

I don’t entirely understand this—in particular, if my notes are correct and you can use pixels for discounts on the credit market, then doesn’t that lead to inflation concerns?

One question that people sometimes ask: we only have one currency in the real world, why does Habbo Hotel have two? His answer is to reject the premise: aside from different countries’ currencies, we also have frequent flyer points, stocks, stock options, mortgages, and in general no end of financial instruments that can play the role of currencies. (Also, by his count, World of Warcraft has 39 currencies!)

The two currencies and the two sorts of items ended up working well together: e.g. players could build a race track out of persistent items purchased with credits, but to drive on the race track, people would need to purchase expendable items with pixels.

Anyways, continuing along the line of reasoning that led them to make credits tradable, they asked the question: if removing credit frictions leads to increased sales, and if trading correlates to sales, then wouldn’t we expect that removing trading friction would also increase sales? It should: removing friction increases participants, and participants correlate to sales. So:

An official secondary market.

The introduced an official market for purchasing items. Before this, to buy an item, you had to run around looking for somebody who could and would sell it to you; this was a pain for the buyer, and it also negatively affected the experience of players who didn’t want to participate in the transaction. In contrast, the official marketplace was a lot easier to use, and players felt a lot safer; the result was that a lot more people participated.

There was also quite a lot there for traders to love. The official marketplace gave you lots of information about the average sales price of each item, both right now and historically; players would spend hours just browsing the sales catalog, gathering information and looking for (and finding!) arbitrage opportunities.

They also used this this as an opportunity to introduce a further sink into the economy. Listing items wasn’t free: you had to buy a ticket to list an item (they came in packs of 5 selling for 1 credit), which let you list an item for sale for 48 hours. And, if the item sold, the company took 1% of the sale as a commission; but the commission was a minimum of 1 credit, so in practice commissions were actually quite a bit higher than that.

And, the final takeaways:

• Economics helps you create a sustainable virtual economy, which is necessary for a sustainable virtual world.
• Think of economics in a broad sense: don’t just focus on prices, also focus on making the world a safer place for players to invest time and money.

9:00 am: GDC Microtalks 2010: Ten Speakers, 200 Slides, Limitless Ideas!

I really enjoyed the microtalks last year, so I had to go again this year. It had nine people speaking in a slightly modified pecha kucha format; nobody was boring, some were quite interesting, and it seems to be a much more reliable multi-user format than panel discussions.

Some highlights:

• Kellee Santiago talking about the design of online multiplayer, and relating it to Stewart Brand’s New Games Movement. (Whose motto was “Play Hard, Play Fair, Nobody Hurt”.) One of Kellee’s points is that online multiplayer isn’t just a technical feature: it needs to be part of your design plan, you need to work to craft it to get whatever sort of behavior you wish to promote. Simply blaming the players is just laziness.
• Chaim Gingold talked about the trickster mythos; unfortunately, I can’t read my own handwriting, else I’d give a list of qualities here.
• Jane Pinckard talked about designing for the limbic system. (Favorite quote: “I really don’t care about the Citizen Kane of games, I want the Pride and Prejudice of games.”) Basically, current video games are good at triggering the reptilian part of our brain (fight or flight) and the neo-cortex (puzzle solving), but not nearly as good at targeting the emotions in the limbic system. Too often, they present love as a discovery process, uncovering a pre-existing story instead of participating in creating it; they should let players express themselves more, should allow vulnerability, should give you the feeling that the object of your affection is unique.
• I’m really not sure what I have to say about Ian Bogost’s talk, other than that I’m very glad that he’s planning to post the slides on his blog, because I’m fairly sure that they deserve a good deal more time and thought than I could give them in the moment.
• Jesse Schell: his recent DICE talk wasn’t presenting the future as 1984, it was presenting the future as Brave New World.

10:30 am: The Psychology of Game Design (Everything You Know Is Wrong), by Sid Meier.

This was the keynote; after Kojima’s keynote last year, I wasn’t particularly optimistic, but I thought it was pretty good. Interesting examples of how players interpret what look like mathematical calculations: e.g. if they see numbers giving them a 2-1 advantage, they accept that they might lose occasionally, but once they get to 3-1 or 4-1, any loss just feels wrong. But they’re happy to win occasionally at a 3-1 disadvantage; also, if they have a 20-10 advantage, they feel they should always win, unlike the 2-1 situation.

(Incidentally, it’s not entirely clear to me that players are behaving irrationally in most of those examples: if people mentally map M-N to M people fighting N people, then probably losing in a 4-1 situation really is hugely rarer than in a 2-1 situation, and a 20-10 situation is different from a 2-1 situation. But rationality isn’t the point, anyways: the goal isn’t to blame players for behaving irrationally if they don’t like our game design, the point is to make a satisfying game design.)

Also, in general, players want a game that works well in a story for them. They don’t want moral uncertainty: if you’ve invested 10 hours into a game, you don’t really want to find out that you were inadvertently working for the bad guys all that time. Players and designers work together in a sort of delusional alliance: if the designer pretends that the player is good at the game (both in terms of skill and morality), then the player is willing to suspend disbelief in the world that the designer has created.

Of course, those aren’t universal game design rules: for example, I certainly wouldn’t blame game designers for wanting to create games with rather more moral uncertainty, and I’d like to pretend that I would enjoy such games. (So I guess it’s true for me on a meta level: I want to pretend good things about myself!) But I agree with Sid that you should know what you’re getting into if you work against such forces. (And should, presumably, have a strategy for dealing with reactions, which may include resigning yourself to your game’s not being popular…)

I was planning to sort of wander off by myself for lunch; but then completely by chance I wandered into the same place where Ben was buying food, so I ended up having a pleasant lunch with him, Charles Pratt, Nels Anderson, and Wes Erdelack.

1:30 pm: The Nuovo Sessions.

A bunch of relatively experimental games. All of which looked interesting; I’m rather curious what Hazard: The Journey of Life would be like to play (could be wonderful, could fall flat on its face), I really liked the cover art for A Slow Year (especially in the context of the grand tradition of Atari 2600 cover art), and I’m glad to see that somebody has apparently picked up The Unfinished Swan. (And that they’re keeping it a game about curiosity.)

3:00 pm: The Connected Future of Games.

I really should learn not to go to (non-microtalk) panels one of these years. It wasn’t bad or anything (though too much of the moderator asking questions of individual panel members instead of letting a discussion develop), but I just skimmed my notes again and I’m not seeing anything I feel like writing down here.

4:30 pm: The Evolution of Habbo Hotel’s Virtual Economy, by Sulka Haro.

The most interesting talk of the conference so far for me; I’ll split it off to a separate blog post.

After which was the second annual blogger’s dinner, where I talked to too many people to be able to link to them here; many thanks to Michael for doing almost all of the organizing legwork!

9:00 am: The 4 Most Important Emotions for Social Games, by Nicole Lazzaro.

Her slides:

First, she gave some preliminary talks about some of her other conceptual frameworks, and talked about about social tokens (using a mango that’s a shared joke with her sister as an example). This is an inside joke, a symbol that represents a shared experience and increases its value with use. (On which note, she thinks the term “social capital” should die: the scarcity model is completely inappropriate in the social area.)

Then, she moved into the emotions:

• Amusement – laughter

You feel closer when you’ve shared a joke with somebody. A social game example is the brown cow in FarmVille that gives chocolate milk.

• Amici – chumminess

Make things round and cute; examples are “likes” in Facebook, pets, orphan quests (including FarmVille lost cows). Make it easy to be friendly with one button. Also, the idea of stroking gestures on the iPhone is brilliant: you caress it every time you want to use it!

• Amidar – admiration

(She made that word up.) Epic armor in World of Warcraft (since the whole guild works to earn it, but only one person can get it), the horse stable in FarmVille (where you can buy the frame but need friends to help you build it). Players are willing to pay for this.

• Amiero – social bonding

(I think that one’s made up, too, but I’m not completely sure.) It follows naturally from the other three, but can be crafted directly. Make sure your mechanics link together, to create reciprocity. (E.g. items you find that you can’t use yourself, so they’re useless unless you give them.) Also, have players ask for help: the possibility of rejection makes acceptance that much more powerful.

In general, it seems like an interesting set of lenses to look at social games through.

10:30 am: Creating Successful Social Games: Understanding Player Behavior, by Mark Skaggs.

He’s a Zynga bigwig. If he were titling the talk today, he would have called it “developing a metric mindset”. And, indeed, it was a talk about metrics, most of which should be familiar to people who work in the web space; he went out of his way to try to talk to boxed game makers about how they could use that thinking in their development process, too. In general, try to make your expectations and desires precise, and then measure them; not only will you be more successful, but, in a nice side effect, a lot of arguments will go away, since there’s no point in getting worked up defending a position when you can just as easily run an experiment to get the answer!

You still have to think about how to interpret the metrics, of course. E.g. the early Mafia Wars tutorial led to a steep player dropoffs; they tried removing some steps, and the good news was that 25% more people made it through the tutorial, but the bad news is that the players who made it confused were pretty confused.

Also, he talked about fun. No, you can’t measure fun; but you can measure what people do, and try to correlate that with other ideas of fun. E.g. when testing Command and Conquer in a previous job, they measured how much time players spent on gathering, building, moving, and attacking at different points in a level. They got a feel for what patterns looked like players having fun and what patterns didn’t: e.g. a bunch of building followed by a bunch of moving followed by a bunch of attacking was typically a sign of players beating their head against an unsuccessful attempt to seize a location.

After that, I had a delightful lunch with Michael Abbott, Ben Abraham, Nels Anderson, Wes Erdelack, Manveer Heir, and Kirk “the burrito fairy” Hamilton. (I hope I’m not forgetting anybody?)

1:30 pm: Crushing The Overhead: Case Study of A Microstudio Start-Up, by Randy Smith.

Seemed like good business advice if I were planning to go indie. Which I’m not, for the forseeable future, however. Nice to see him succeeding by focusing on trusting and acting trustworthy.

3:00 pm: Making a Standard (and Trying to Stick to it!): Blizzard Design Philosophies, by Rob Pardo.

My first choice was full, the book with descriptions was badly organized, and I forgot my notes on what my second and third choices were. It’s a topic I care about, but that I also got my fill of last year. Some nice Blizzard-specific ideas: “make everything overpowered” and “concentrated coolness”.

4:30 pm: Are Women the New Hardcore Gamers?, by Shanna Tellerman, Wanda Meloni, Jessica Tams, Morgan Romine, and Amy Jo Kim.

Interesting enough, but I’m not sure what to write down from the discussion.

The other thing I discovered today: if you want to zoom when taking pictures on your iPhone, you have to buy a third-party application. It’s only digital zoom, of course, but it’s still convenient to be able to do that right on the phone so you can read pictures of the slides easily right there.

Today’s notes:

10am: How Friends Change Everything, by Gareth Davis

He’s Facebook’s platform manager; mostly Facebook boosterism and stuff that’s not too surprising to those in the social games business, but pleasant enough. As he notes, Facebook is interesting because it puts front and center the possibility of game interaction with people who aren’t essentially anonymous / pseudonymous (as is the place when playing strangers on XBLA); the idea of games being social in that sense goes back thousands of years, so in that light maybe Facebook games should be considered normal, while video games’ relatively brief history is the exception?

To that end, he thinks that the iconic Facebook game is still ahead of us, and that we should expect to have multiple games with over 100 million players; both of which I quite agree with (there’s certainly no reason to think that FarmVille isn’t going to be surpassed multiple times over. And, of course, he thinks that Facebook will be at the center of social gaming; hard to argue with him, for the time being.

11:15 am: The State of Social Gaming: Industry Overview and Update, by Justin Smith

He’s from Inside Network, which publishes web sites like Inside Social Games and Inside Facebook. The talk was what the title suggests; so, for better or for worse, nothing here that I noticed that I wasn’t already basically familiar with.

11:45 am: Open Source Secrets: The Software Architecture Behind a Successful Virtual Goods Business, by Timothy Fitz.

He’s the technical lead at IMVU, and I found this talk hugely refreshing: an ode to continuous deployment and the testing and refactoring that makes this possible. They have a thick client that they push new versions of once or twice a day, and they update their website 35-50 times a day (though only pushing changes out to ten percent of users); so their cycle is “commit, go green, push, repeat”.

They learned this lesson the hard way; they once worked on a release for two and a half months. Fortunately, they did A/B testing when they did finally release it, which revealed a serious problem in chat functionality; it took them an additional 6 weeks to figure out what went wrong, because two or three minor changes interacted in unexpected ways to produce a bad effect. Oops. So they don’t want to have to go through that again.

Their heavy emphasis on automated testing doesn’t mean that they don’t like manual QA: instead, they want the QA people to use their brains, instead of acting as robots. So QA people think about how to test features (which engineers then automate), and they work to understand the impact of planned changes in interfaces; automated tests work to catch unplanned interface changes.

The title comes from the way they build their client: they realized that they have a lot of good UI experience on the web, so they build on that by embedding Firefox in their client, with custom C++ code only in one narrowly defined area. They have significant amounts of code in each of C++, Python, and JavaScript, and they find this works better for them than a single-language strategy.

1:45 pm: Why Are Gaming Veterans Flocking to Social Gaming?

This was a panel discussion between Steve Meretzky, Brenda Brathwaite, Brian Reynolds, and Noah Falstein. Quite pleasant to listen to; two themes that repeated themselves were: 1) they all missed times when games could be developed quickly by small teams, and see social games as recapturing some of that, and 2) if you’ve been in the industry for more than two decades, you’ve gone through a lot of changes, and this is another one of those; so having veterans around is valuable for that reason alone.

They didn’t have any crystal balls or anything, just a pleasant chat. One of the more amusing lines: Brenda Brathwaite saying that, now, with the emergence of metrics, game design has finally become a game for game designers!

3 pm: What Social Games Can Learn From Virtual Worlds, by Mike Goslin.

He’s the VP of product development at Hangout, and also has Disney theme park experience. His first claim is that retention is key: it increases lifetime value in obvious ways (lifetime increases) and slightly less obvious ways (people get drawn to status items and subscriptions), and decreases cost of acquisition (virality works better over time, better to invite fewer people over a longer time than to spam everybody you know at once). He thinks that concurrency leading to a sense of community is important; it certainly seems to be something that Hangout is betting on, and something that Facebook games so far have generally stayed away of. (Wild Ones being an exception here.) They actually use Unity instead of Flash, another exception, and they have games that are gateways to a chat / community area.

As to the title: social games have the advantage that player registration is very easy (because Facebook handles that), but getting players to monetize is harder than in virtual worlds. To that end, he made a push for subscriptions: not as requirements for players (the way World of Warcraft does it), but as an additional layer on top of virtual goods to increase core players’ commitment and to give them a way to get VIP accessories. (Hangout has a fashion show theme, so the latter probably works well there.)

4:15 pm: Increasing Our Reach: Designing To Grab and Retain Players, by Randy Smith.

I really enjoyed the talk he gave last year on “helping your players feel smart”, so I figured I’d see what he had to say this year. And it was my favorite talk of the day, though I certainly won’t be able to do it justice here: basically, making the point that games have to work at immediacy (make the first 10 minutes awesome to draw players in) as well as depth (to keep players satisfied over time). And he went through a bunch of games (which I want to play now) showing how they did well or badly on one or both of these.

For immediacy: provide a “game-toy” as a player’s initial experience. This should package up the game’s core ideas in a way that’s as fun to play as possible: have simple, intuitive controls; have strong, juicy affordances; and make it hard to fail, lowering the pressure. For depth: provide it on demand, so players can go into games as deeply as they wish but don’t have it forced on them; provide hints to players for depth that they might not otherwise notice (e.g. completion stats on a level, achievements suggesting things to try out); and have both low-level tactical gameplay loops and mid-level strategic loops.

He talks fast. I hope he’ll put his slides up somewhere?

5:15 pm: AI Developers Rant!

Insufficiently ranty; a bit of completely gratuitous guy culture, and a Bourdieu reference that might lead to something interesting. I napped through parts of it.

Tuesday:

• 10:00–10:30: Indies and Publishers: Fixing a System That Never Worked
• 10:30–11:00: Abusing Your Players Just For Fun
• 11:15–11:45: The State of Social Gaming: Industry Overview and Update
• 11:45–12:15: Open Source Secrets: The Software Architecture Behind a Successful Virtual Goods Business
• 1:45–2:45: Why Are Gaming Veterans Flocking to Social Gaming?
• 3:00–4:00: What Social Games Can Learn From Virtual Worlds
• 4:15–5:15: Rapidly Developing FARMVILLE: How We Created and Scaled a #1 Facebook Game in 5 Weeks
• 5:15–6:00: AI Developers Rant!

Wednesday:

• 10:00–11:00: How to Manage an Exploratory Development Process
• 11:15–11:45: Kids and Parents Playing Together Online: the Next Frontier of Casual Gaming
• 11:45–12:15: Lessons Learned building Moshi Monsters to 15m Users
• 1:00–1:30: Mythbusting Fireside Chat
• 1:45–2:45: The Convergence of Flash Games and Social Games
• 3:00–4:00: Devs vs. Cybercriminals: Protecting your MMO from Online Crime
• 4:15–5:15: Indie Gamemaker Rant!
• 5:15–6:00: Who’s Got Game?

Thursday:

• 9:00–10:00: The 4 Most Important Emotions for Social Games
• 10:30–11:30: Creating Successful Social Games: Understanding Player Behavior
• 1:30–2:30: Crushing The Overhead: Case Study of A Microstudio Start-Up
• 3:00–4:00: What Happened Here? Environmental Storytelling
• 4:30–5:30: Micro or Massive: It’s Fricking Tough to Achieve a Vision

Friday:

• 9:00–10:00: GDC Microtalks 2010: Ten Speakers, 200 Slides, Limitless Ideas!
• 10:30–11:30: The Psychology of Game Design (Everything You Know Is Wrong)
• 1:30–2:30: The Nuovo Sessions
• 3:00–4:00: The Connected Future of Games
• 4:30–5:30: The Evolution of Habbo Hotel’s Virtual Economy

Saturday:

• 9:00–10:00: Where Did My Inventory Go? Refining Gameplay in Mass Effect 2
• 10:30–11:30: Motivating Casual Players: Non-Traditional Character Progression and Player Retention
• 1:30–2:30: Get Your Game out of my Movie! Interactive Storytelling in Mass Effect 2
• 3:00–4:00: Metaphysics of Game Design

So I dutifully arranged my gameplay schedule so that I could get a copy of Mass Effect 2 on launch (which is rare for me, I only do that a couple of times a year); and again: great game. Possibly with a bit more to think about this time; we’ll see whether or not my brain returns to the game much over the coming months.

My first question: what effects of the aforementioned talk can we see in the final product? On a basic level, they seem to have executed solidly: the performance problems from the first game are gone (there are twisting corridors in some of the levels that exist only to allow upcoming areas to stream in, but they’re never long enough to be annoying), and the sequel was released two years and two months after the original, which suggests that they only had a slight slip in their schedule. In fact, they may not have slipped at all—BioWare released Dragon Age in the fall 2009 release slot, and they certainly wouldn’t have wanted to release two games right at the same time, so for all I know both games were in a releasable state and they just went with Dragon Age. I certainly never believed originally that all three games were going to appear on the same console, but now it seems quite likely that I was mistaken: this console generation is in no hurry to end, the Mass Effect team is getting a lot of mileage out of having your character’s decisions persist from one game to the next, and they’ve shown that they can produce a game in the series in a couple of years. So: chalk up one success for lean!

I also suspect that the iterative process that they use affected this game at a fairly basic plot level. If I wanted to make sure to hit a schedule in a video game, I would put in levels with the most important plot points that my best guess was that I could implement in half of my time budget; and then I’d add smaller (but still substantial!) chunks of additional material to fill up whatever time was left after I actually got done with the key parts. They didn’t do this with the original game, with the result that the game didn’t run smoothly and they had to make a substantial cut to their original vision in the world where you find Liara. In the sequel, in contrast, much of the game involves picking up a sequence of new characters, any of which could have been cut without leaving a noticeable gap; indeed, the presence of areas on the Normandy that should contain rooms but that are instead sealed off strongly suggests that they’ve plotted out further characters, though I don’t know whether they were part of the original vision or were always planned as DLC.

Furthermore, each of the characters contributes two missions to the plot: the mission where you originally recruit them and their loyalty mission; so, if they ran short on time, they could have jettisoned one of those missions without leaving a huge hole. Which is, I assume, what happened with Zaeed: he only has a loyalty mission, but no recruitment mission (and he also doesn’t have a full dialogue tree on ship), so my guess is that there’s a document somewhere describing a planned recruitment mission, but they simply didn’t have time to finish that for the launch date. So they put in the loyalty mission and packaged him as free-for-new-game-buyers DLC to serve as a way to get money from used game buyers. (I wouldn’t be at all surprised if one further character shows up as DLC, filling in a hole in the ship’s map.)

And, happily, the resulting plot worked well for the middle game of a trilogy. My guess is that they’ll resolve this iterative implementation tension in a different manner in the third game, because they can’t very well do another game that’s quite as heavily focused on recruitment. But manage it they will; and with two years of information about their rate of progress under their current system, maybe they’ll feel confident going back to slightly larger chunks.

Which I would be grateful for. The rhythm of Mass Effect 2, while pleasant enough, got to be a bit monotonous for me. I’m not sure that I wish that individual missions were longer (and, incidentally, I thought that they showed admirable restraint in the length of the final Omega Relay mission), but I wish that multiple missions had combined a bit better better into larger arcs. (To use a Nature of Order lens, they had Alternating Repetition down pat, but weren’t so hot with Levels of Scale.) They did, of course, group the missions into chunks (e.g. the initial recruitment missions versus the latter ones versus the loyalty missions), and there were several hub worlds which contained multiple missions, but neither of those forms of grouping really cohered for me: they felt more like loose aggregations than wholes that were greater than the sum of their parts.

What I most wished for along one those lines was for one of the city worlds to be larger (in the way that the Citadel was in the original, if my memories of it aren’t excessively rose-tinted): like the missions, I wished there’d been more levels of scale in the cities. Here, I am a bit nervous that, if I got what I wanted, I might not entirely like the result—certainly some of my desire for larger-scale city exploration stems from wanting anything good I’ve seen in any video game to be in any video game where that makes any sense at all, and with my recent appreciation of focus, I realize that that’s a dangerous path to follow. (And Mass Effect 2 is a great data point in that thesis: they cut out a large number of tradition RPG trappings and traditional shooter trappings, to very good effect!) In particular, the Mass Effect series has its focus, as I see it, to be a sort of homage to the space opera tradition in written and film science fiction; the best works in those traditions always make you feel that there’s a rich wonderful world to be explored if you could just stop and look around, but they don’t stop and look around, they continue on with the plot!

But, games aren’t books, games aren’t movies; and in games, I have control over where my character is going, so I’d like to be able to stop and look around a bit more. At least if doing so is feasible without pushing too much of a strain on development: if the team had decided to, say, make one of the cities four times as large, how many of the characters would they have had to cut out? If it’s a couple, and if they could find a way to work missions into that expanded city in a fashion that worked well with the plot, I would say go for it. Who knows, maybe that’s one of the ways that they’ll slice the third game into chunks that they can include or exclude depending on development time: get the core plot lines finished, and then spend half of their remaining time just making the Citadel be as awesome a place as it can be.

So: that’s some speculations about the game’s structure and development process, let’s move on to the characters. I recently talked about juvenile and adolescent games, ending by complaining about games that are childish in the stereotypical sense of the word, that are steeped in guy culture. And there’s certainly a fair amount of that in Mass Effect 2—Shepard is so badass that even getting killed barely puts a dent in her, and large explosions remain one of her key problem-solving strategies.

But there’s also a fair amount in the game that moves beyond that. As others have noted, there’s an awful lot of family going on in the loyalty missions, and there’s a fair amount of nuance there. Adolescence in particular, is a big theme, but adolescence treated respectfully and maturely: Jacob and Tali both realize that their fathers aren’t everything that they thought (or at least hoped) they were; Grunt was created fully-formed but still needs to experience adolescence; Jack’s childhood is horribly ripped from her, and she has to rebuild herself. Most poignantly for this parent, in Thane’s loyalty story we see this adolescent conflict from the opposite point of view; returning to the game development process theme from earlier in this post, I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to see Thane’s absorption in work while his son is growing up as a parable for the human consequences of a traditional game development process.

And then there’s the game’s meditations on race, even going so far as to visit the concept of genocide from multiple angles. I don’t feel particularly comfortable with my understanding of what the game is doing here, so I’ll mostly leave it to others to talk about the matter, but I will say that the series seems to be making a better effort than most to problematize the notion that killing aliens is okay if they look like the bad guys, and that the second game works to add perspectives.

The Paragon / Renegade distinction continues to work reasonably well, as far as binary morality systems go; while I still maxed out my Paragon score, I found myself making more Renegade choices in the sequel than I remember making in the original, which fits the sequel’s darker tone. But there’s certainly more to be done along these lines; I’d like to see somebody take a cue from Jane Jacobs and instead present a conflict between two positive moralities. (The game’s treatment of facial scarring in this context is bullshit, though.)

So: the first game in at least a year that I’ve finished within (approximately) a month after release, and I’m quite happy with that choice; and Mordin’s Gilbert and Sullivan parody is awesome and pleasantly unexpected. (His assistance in your romance is pretty great, too.) Now I just have to wait until the third game comes out! Maybe I’ll just pretend that Dragon Age didn’t come out last year, and treat it as BioWare’s Fall 2010 release?

A by no means comprehensive list of other posts on the game:

• Jorge Albor on its handling of Paragon / Renegade decisions and on its sentimentality.
• Justin Keverne on Living with your mistakes.
• Chris Dahlen on family and on moving beyond simple morality.
• Tea Leaves compares it to other BioWare games.
• Denis Farr on the game’s lack of gay male romance options.
• Michael Abbott puts it in a broader RPG development context.
• Trent Polack on character.
• Evan Narcisse on the Negro/Injun/Krogan Problem and on the Asari.
• Tom Francis just goes through it point by point.
• Matt Allmer does a design analysis.

We launched Tiki Resort last month, and it took me a few days to come to grips with it. I was dutifully doing what the game told me to—placing buildings, gathering coins, clicking on messes to clean them up, feeding my tourists—and leveling up apace. But I was starting to get a little bored—just why am I doing this again?

And then I upgraded one of my existing buildings (I can’t quite remember what, maybe turning the Art Stand into the Island Art Emporium), and I thought, “you know, that upgraded building looks kind of neat!” And then I upgraded another, and thought, “this one looks pretty neat, too!” By the time I’d upgraded my Mini Golf into a Putt Hut I was really quite curious about further upgrades to that building would look like; and now, when I look at the level 1 Waterslides and Carnival buildings, I don’t say “that’s a meh waterslide”, I say, “wow, I bet my resort is going to look awesome once those are at level 3!”

Though, even after that, my brain wasn’t quite at ease—these upgrades are just eye candy, right, their effect on gameplay is ultimately pretty minimal? At which point I had flashbacks to my experiences playing Burnout Paradise and reading other people fail to appreciate the game because of the direction in which they approached it. Yes, if you see Burnout Paradise as a race game, then billboards and smash gates seem like “the the obligatory inclusion of hidden collectables [that] make no sense in the context of Burnout [because they] reward stopping”. But when I stopped coming at Burnout Paradise from a race game perspective (and I’d never played the previous games, so I didn’t have the series’s legacy weighing on me), that completely stopped mattering—finding stuff to smash is cool, and the strategic planning required for billboards is a plus instead of a minus! And it’s the same for me with Tiki Resort—the traditional counters of levels, money, etc. are all well and good, but ultimately the reason why I’m enjoying the game is because I want to see what the buildings look like, and what the island as a whole will look like with all the buildings working together.

So this game turns out to be an ode to tech trees. And not tech trees in some sort of utilitarian sense of tools to develop your character to overcome external challenges: just tech trees that are neat to explore, where the branches and leaves are pleasant objects in their own right. In fact, playing Tiki Resort at the same time as I was playing Mass Effect 2 got me wondering: the latter game is also full of tech trees, in the form of your characters’ skills and the weapon/ship/armor/etc. upgrades that you can research. And yes, I dutifully researched those, but now I’m wondering: how much of my desire to do so had to do with the rest of the game play, and how much had to do with my just feeling compelled to follow tech trees? I liked the idea of upgrading my powers, but the truth is that I generally used the same power over and over again (Incinerate!), and upgrading those powers didn’t reveal any significant new aspects to them, they were just the same basic idea with slightly higher stats. (With a slight exception for their fourth levels.)

I blogged about combat fatigue recently, and I’ve also started to feel a sense of narrative fatigue. Not that I think that either combat or narrative are bad things: in particular, I have quite a bit of respect for games that are really focused on combat, and I’m happy to be swept along by a game that is more interactive cinema than anything else. But there are too many games that don’t know the virtues of restraint, that throw in gameplay devices because they are expected rather than because those devices strengthen the impact that the game is making. So it’s refreshing to see games that take a step back from such trappings, that take less prominent aspects of video games and focus on strengthening those. With the result that you end up with a game that just worries about using tech trees to build up a neat space (Tiki Resort; for a more extreme focus on cool tech trees, see GROW ver. 1), or a game that focuses on the joys of mapping (Small Worlds; it’s not a coincidence that I gave up on Etrian Odyssey as it was insisting on rubbing JRPG conventions into my face).

So hey, focus, let’s go with that as a virtue. Another thing to keep my eyes open for as I try to spend more time playing and talking about short games.

A couple of points that didn’t really fit into the flow above, but that I won’t find time to expand on elsewhere:

• The idea of having animals that ask you to pet them on quite frequent intervals (once a minute?) turns out to be a very effective mechanic to get you (or at least me) to not just leave a game open in a separate window to accumulate money but to return to it constantly. (And hence, presumably, get more and more invested into it; which petting virtual animals also fosters directly, of course.)
• For another example of a game with stuff that just looks cool, check out Social City. We only launched it yesterday, but I’m totally in love with all the animations.

• If I post about Playdom games, I have a conflict of interest.
• Anything I talk about is strictly my own opinion; in fact, I’ll try to avoid talking about matters where my employment at Playdom gives me some extra insight into what I’m saying about the games in question.
• While I’m at it, in general the details of my posts about Facebook games may age more quickly than those in my posts about other sorts of games. The games change all the time; for that matter, because of A/B testing, different people may even have different experiences playing the same game at the same time. Also, I may occasionally post about Playdom games fairly soon after their public launch, when they’re in an even larger amount of flux than normal.

On that second point: I haven’t been part of a game team at Playdom, so I don’t actually have deep knowledge about the details of individual games! Instead, I’ve been on the Business Intelligence team, which is a cross-game team whose job is to get insight about players’ behavior. That will be changing soon, though—I’ll be transitioning over to our RPG team around the middle of the month. Which I’m looking forward to, though I’ve also really enjoyed my time with the BI team: for one thing, I’m curious to see game making from the inside, and, for another thing, I’ve been a C++ programmer for long enough that it’s time to try something new. Which makes it ironic that the BI team is starting to explore Hadoop (with a corresponding switch to a Java-based infrastructure) just as I’m leaving them; a pity, it would be interesting to see that technological transition through.

My transitioning to a game team has been the plan since before I joined Playdom; it’s very much to the company’s credit that they’ve gone out of their way to fulfill this bargain, since I’m sure there are many companies out there that would say one thing to get you on board and then change their tune after you’ve joined. One of the many reasons why I like working there; on which note, we are, as always, hiring. Lots of interesting things to do, whether you like making games or processing and understanding huge volumes of user data.

Small Worlds is the first in what I hope will be an irregular ongoing series of short game posts. And, as such, it leaves me nervous: while I imagine many of y’all will be just fine with me not writing 1500 words every time I post here, I am worried about going in the opposite extreme with these games. And I’m dipping into a vibrant culture, as an outsider who is only faintly aware of that culture’s history and discussions.

For an example of the latter, take the view that confronted me when I started the game: pixels, and very large ones at that. I hear that big pixels are all the rage in the indie scene, to the extent that some people feel that they’re rather overdone these days. Am I supposed to be viewing the game through such a lens, as commentary, as part of a conversation, as (given their excessive size) satire? Beats me; I shrug and start moving around.

At which point I get my first delightful surprise: the pixels shrink, and rather than being a ridiculously oversized yet ill-definied avatar only able to see a small portion of the map at any given moment, the map instead resizes so that the parts that you’ve uncovered are all visible on the screen.

Indeed, the word ‘avatar’ proves to be rather inappropriate. Formally, the game acts like a platformer, but its feel is different. You’re not a character trying to make it through hostile terrain, to overcome hostile enemies (in fact, there are no enemies in this game): instead, you are a player trying to uncover more and more of the map.

This dual role of actor / mapper has a long history in games, of course, from the maps that every player of Colossal Cave Adventure drew to 2007’s Etrian Odyssey. As somebody who enjoys the mapping at least as much as the other aspects of gameplay in such games, it’s refreshing for the mapping to be front and center; and, as you play, you find that the map as an object is much more aesthetically appealing than it is in dungeon crawlers. It becomes clear as the map gets more detailed that you’re traveling through some sort of ruins, largely underground but with domes on the to; the expansion of the map is always giving you glimpses of adjacent rooms, but you have to take a spiral route to be able to get to their interiors. (And the pixels turn from large blocks into something much closer to their traditional usage of points on a monitor.)

And the map’s ruined nature naturally lends itself to forks and dead-ends. But there’s never significant branching; as with the main game I’m playing now, Mass Effect 2, you never have to go too far before figuring out which direction is the main path forward and which are the side areas. Which makes my brain happy: I like exploring, I like having nooks and crannies to stick my nose into, but I don’t want to either miss any or waste my time with lengthy backtracking / uncertainty.

So I happily explore, making sure to do all the side routes. And then I go to the back of one room with a particularly shiny bit, and all of a sudden everything changes.

My first reaction: annoyance, I didn’t get to see all the nooks and crannies! My second reaction: oh, I’m back to big pixels; looks like another map to explore, neat! My third reaction: this music is really rather lovely. Was there even any music in the hub world? (Not really, as it turns out: ambient noises / sounds that served more to emphasize the “exploring ruined station” theme than as a real soundtrack.)

And that second world was delightful in a rather different way. I can’t actually remember which world was the next world: it turned out that there are four worlds off of the original world (so phew, I got a chance to make up my missed exploring in that first world), but they’re all much more organic, much more embedded in nature than the original spooky space station world. One has a spring feel with water, one has a winter feel, with snow; one feels like the ruins of an egg, one is perhaps a cavern but with more of an earthy feel than a ruined feel. And each world’s soundtrack complements it nicely.

The details of the gameplay expand a bit, too. You’re frequently spiraling, but not always, and in one case you’re spiraling in rather than out. Alternate routes occasionally appear as well. And the goal has a different flavor: the game plays with flickering lights even in the original world, but, in the other four worlds, the gate is a pulsing, glowing ball. Sometimes, the glow coming off of it is visible from the start, pulling you in as you revolve around it; sometimes, you go through almost the entire level before catching a glimpse of it.

And then you go through all of the levels, and you end up in an escape pod in the original station, blasting off. (So I guess it was a space station, despite the trees at the top?) Which raises the question: what to make of these levels? The title of the game suggests that they’re different worlds, and they’re all quite different from each other; but they all share a wistful, ruined aesthetic, making me wonder how to put them together. The post-distaster aesthetic of the original level and the rockets present in one of the later one hint, to me, at a post-nuclear-war environment, but who knows; maybe the different but related world that goes by in the background of the title screen would help me figure this out if I were to stare at it longer.

A delightful mechanic, and a lovely aesthetic. Not, perhaps, a deep mechanic (though, perhaps, a deep aesthetic); it, like the Grow games, makes me wonder whether or not the mechanic has been copied elsewhere? I imagine so; I also imagine that copies of either game’s mechanic would lead to much less satisfying experiences, but I’d like to see other people prove me wrong.

Playing through this game has certainly given me confidence in the virtues of this experiment: I’ve been wanting denser game experiences more recently, and a game that shows me a couple of new things and finishes after 15 minutes (while having me still thinking about it weeks after I first experienced it), is a great example of that. Much better a game like this than dozens of hours of repetitive grind.

(Many thanks to The Game Critique for pointing out this game to me; I’m sure I would have eventually reached it going through Chris Hyde’s list, too.)

I do this because I’ll be less likely to be able to talk about what really interests me if I avoid spoilers, and because I think scrupulous spoiler avoidance urges us inappropriately to take a standard review approach. And I don’t worry about spoiling things for my audience because I generally play games rather later than the curve, and because there are enough other web sites out there to do spoiler-free reviews that, if you’re particularly worried about such things but still need information about a game before playing it, you’ll have more than enough places to find such information. So I figure that people who read my posts on games have either already played through the games in question or are unlikely enough to do so that my spoiling some aspect of the game won’t bother them.

With short games, though, the tensions change. There isn’t a massive industry dedicated to reviewing such games; there isn’t huge release date hype pressuring us to play the games as soon as they’re launched; and they’re more likely to turn on one surprising design element that players might prefer to uncover for themselves. But, on the flip side, the reasons for not avoiding spoilers are at least as strong for short games: in particular, if they turn on one surprising design element and I don’t talk about that, than what am I supposed to talk about?

Fortunately, the short length of the games themselves give me an out: if a game only takes five or fifteen minutes to play, and if people don’t want to have their experience of the game spoiled, then they can just go and play the game! So what I am planning to do is this: in the first paragraph of discussions of such games, I’ll give a link to where you can play it and an estimate of how long it will take. If you don’t want to your experience of the game to be spoiled but still are curious about what I have to say, then click on that link; I’ll be there when you come back.

Of course, this is all a bit academic while Mass Effect 2 has me in its clutches…

I am a big Shenmue fan, to the extent that hearing Yakuza 2 compared to Shenmue made me nervous rather than pleased: I was fairly sure that I was going to be disappointed if I thought too much about that comparison. So I decided to keep that comparison out of my head as much as possible, to try to appreciate the newer game on its own merits.

Which, for a while, I managed to do. Yakuza 2 started off with cut scene after cut scene after cut scene (and why did the game need to load between cut scenes instead of streaming them seamlessly off disk? Were they not prerendered?), but the back story seemed interesting enough, so I was willing to give that a pass. I liked the plot just fine—an odd couple of gangster and cop, warring clans with an old wise man and a changing of the guards, past events coming back to bite you, and all the twists and turns that you’d hope for. The Japanese voice acting was rather good, and, as a bonus, helped my studies: I wouldn’t have wanted to play the game without subtitles, but I could pick up enough from listening to make me happy. (And also enough to notice that, in some situations, they picked different readings for names in the subtitles than were used in the voice acting; oops.) There’s a lot to do in the cities, and many of the side quests seemed pleasantly quirky. And Goro Majima is one of my favorite NPCs ever.

Despite which, the game started to go sour, at two turning points in particular. In the first, I was wandering all over town trying to trigger a cut scene so I could progress the main story line. I had no idea where to go, and ended up looking everywhere; eventually, I stumbled past a male host club, where I was more or less forced to take a job that I had no interest in, and that made no sense for me right then, given that I was in the company of a female cop. And, adding insult to injury, that side mission left a big green directional symbol on my map. I was all for quirky side missions when I started the game; but I wasn’t in the mood for one right then, I doubt I would have particularly enjoyed that one even in better situations, and I was actively annoyed by having the map tell me where to go to do something I didn’t want to do while refusing to tell me how to make progress in the actual story!

The second (much worse) one was when I was wandering around Osaka with Haruka, the main character’s daughter-figure. She was great: I loved the way she was all gangly arms and legs, the way she had to run to keep up but was full of energy and happy to be going anywhere as long as she was with you.

And then you ran across some creep from a talent agency; Haruka, being a sensible child, wanted nothing to do with him. I was willing to write this off as a tone-deaf sidequest, until it became clear that this wasn’t a sidequest at all: the game was going to insist on my meeting with said creep again, and, to my horror, to my character agreeing to sign up Haruka with him. Fortunately, she protested enough to get my character to back off of that, but really: is anybody who worked on this game a parent? When you are confronted by a creep, when your daughter clearly and repeatedly expresses no interest in having anything to do with said creep, then what you do is stay far far away; you do not sign your daughter over to said creep’s care, especially only a couple of hours after meeting him for the first time!

After that, whatever bloom was left on the rose had gone away for me. I played through the rest of the game (including another outing with your daughter, that managed to turn a potentially delightful interlude into a boring-though-mercifully-creep-free grind through the city waiting for a cut scene to trigger), and actually basically enjoyed it. But whatever magic others had seen in the game just wasn’t there for me.

And while I tried to keep the Shenmue comparisons out of my head when I started the game, they had come back in full force by this point. And my opinion on that matter is doubtlessly clear by now: Yakuza 2 is no Shenmue, and it is (perhaps even more strongly) no Shenmue II. Or at least it’s no match for my nine year old memories of Shenmue, but I’m fairly confident that, while the latter game may have warts that the haze of memory has softened, I would still find it far superior if I were to play it for the first time now.

Take the cities that you can wander around. I’m almost positive those in Yakuza 2 are significantly larger than those in the Shenmue games, though I’m not sure that they grew more than you’d expect from the general march of technology. But Yakuza 2’s are much more homogeneous: the game presents you with sizeable chunks of two cities on opposite halves of Japan (which the game tries to emphasize with the plot and the Osakan dialect), yet it all has a much more homogenous feel than you get simply walking down the hill from Ryo Hazuki’s house to the local shopping district at the start of Shenmue. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for a consistent visual style where it fits, I certainly wouldn’t want change for the sake of change, but in the Shenmue series the changes in scenery were never forced, the game simply presented different regions that had naturally evolved differently in their different contexts. (Which we saw even more spectacularly in Shenmue II than in the first game.)

That’s the cities at a macro level, but, more importantly, Shenmue had Yakuza 2 beat at a micro level hands down. I’ll never forget the way Shenmue starts you off in a house where you can look at everything; it didn’t manage that level of loving modeling throughout the game, but it continued to have its share of places where you just wanted to stop and take a look around you. I never felt that way in Yakuza 2, and indeed I didn’t have the camera control much of the time to let me look around even if I’d wanted to!

This theme of less sprawling but richer experiences in Shenmue is present in the combat, as well. Yakuza 2 is a brawler; the fighting system is pleasant enough, but (despite all the leveling up options) nothing to write home about, as far as I was concerned. This shallowness doesn’t stop the game from insisting on having you fight all the time, however: that’s great in the sequences in the game where you have to go through enemies for a focused goal, but the last thing I want when wandering around a city and trying to drink it in is to be accosted by punks every block or two. (Yakuza 2’s atmosphere may have a less complex flavor than some, but there’s still enough there to make it worth experiencing!) It’s the same sort of combat fatigue that I blogged about recently in the context of BioShock: games that have clearly put in a lot of effort into building up a world, but constantly jerk you out of it to beat up somebody.

If I’m remembering correctly, Shenmue didn’t have such random battles at all: if you wanted to wander around the city, you could do so, with interrupts driven much more naturally by the clock instead of by combat. (I may be over-romanticizing this in hindsight, judging from my notes at the time, but the use of forced street fights as a source of money in Yakuza 2 gave me a lot more respect for the job system in the Shenmue games.) And, on the flip side, the combat system in Shenmue was much richer than that in Yakuza 2: Shenmue contains a fully-fledged fighting system, so if you want to take the time to hone your combat art, that game will give you the means and space to do so.

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of my Christopher Alexander analyses (hmm, I really should get around to reading the fourth volume of The Nature of Order, shouldn’t I?); I suspect that Shenmue would come out well in that regard. In comparison to Yakuza 2, it does much better with Levels of Scale (going down to smaller levels, in particular), which in turn leads to Strong Centers, and its gameplay has more Positive Space and Contrast, developing (especially in Shenmue II’s final act) into The Void and Simplicity and Inner Calm. Is it time, perhaps, for me to replay those games, if I can get my Dreamcast to cooperate? I wonder if I could get other Vintage Game Club members to go along.

Other discussion of Yakuza 2 (including some linked to above); I only wish I could include an archive of the relevant Twitter chatter:

• Steve Gaynor’s segment on the 2008 Brainy Gamer Holiday Confab.
• Michael Abbott on “A cutscene offer you can’t refuse”.
• Mitch Krpata asks if it was the most overlooked game of 2008″.
• Duncan Fyfe on Osaka.
• Two from Daniel Primed: “The Cultural Dynamite” and “Institutional Knowledge and The Virtual Classroom”.
• And finally, Iroquois Pliskin labels Yakuza 2 “The Game About Nothing”.

With the Light is a comic book (a manga, specifically), rather than a game; in this country, both art forms are similarly marked as juvenile/adolescent, though I suspect that isn’t as true (especially for comics) in Japan, where With the Light comes from. (I could easily be wrong, however.) This series isn’t juvenile literature, however, though my daughter can attest that at least one kid finds it accessible, even engrossing.

And I’m very impressed by the book. A few reasons:

• The variety and realism of its characters.

The book’s subtitle is “Raising an Autistic Child”, and the most prominent characters are Hikaru, the child of the title, and Sachiko, his mother. Which goes some way towards breaking the characters out of cookie-cutter mode, but runs the risk of setting up cardboard characters of a different sort. To me, though, the book never fell into that trap: Hikaru in particular isn’t presented as some sort of generic autistic child, he’s got his own specific characteristics, weaknesses, and even (as seems to be somewhat a theme of the second volume) impressive and idiosyncratic strengths.

• Its focus on interactions and interaction pitfalls.

Over and over, we see the book seeing people who are talking right past each other, acting at loggerheads; if and when they finally manage to understand what the other side is doing and get a glimpse of the other side’s perspective, everything about the pair’s interactions improves. The book is filled with compassion, but compassion in a hard-nosed sense: not “just try to understand the other person and things will magically get better” but “here are some of Hikaru’s triggers, here are some specific perception differences between autistic kids and non-autistic kids that can lead to behavior that you may misinterpret, here are some strategies that have been known to help bridge communication gaps in these contexts, give them a try and keep your eyes open as to what’s working and what’s not”. (There seems to be quite a lot of detailed research and experience informing the book’s descriptions of strategies and perception differences, incidentally.)

And the interaction problems aren’t just between Hikaru and non-autistic people: most of the characters in the book have their quirks and issues that cause them to behave badly at times, understanding what’s going on helps a lot. This was the part of the book that hit home the most to me—I’m sure that if I’d been in a slightly more maudlin mood while reading it, I would have broken down crying—because I’ve certainly been known to put a less-than-gracious mental spin on what I label as recalcitrant behavior from my own daughter when all that’s going on is that she’s tired! It’s a lesson that I still need reminders of; popping up the stack a bit, it’s a mistake that I probably make most frequently when I’m tired or upset for some other reason, so I should probably also use these tools to improve my interactions with my own mind…

• The way goals change when they meet reality.

The book doesn’t focus on Hikaru’s father Masato as much as on his mother, but he’s certainly there, and portrayed none too flattering at first. He has a goal for his life; it’s a lot more focused on his business success, with his family playing a fairly distant second fiddle, and Hikaru’s diagnosis throws a rather large wrench into those plans. Which Masato reacts badly to (to put it mildly); eventually, though, he comes around, and is much the better for it.

Which is, perhaps, a fairly banal plot point; I bring it up for two reasons. The first is that it’s a banal plot point that games don’t typically manage: while sudden disruptions are common in the start of games, games usually have characters react by attacking the disruption rather than by working with the disruption. (Though Passage did a wonderful job of handling having your plans change because of the presence of another person.) The second is that I’ve gone through one major career change in my life that wasn’t initially particularly of my own volition; even though my disruption was much less profound than Masato’s, I can sympathize with him, and I can very much relate to ultimately ending up in a better situation than I was in before that career disruption.

• Its balancing of contingency and personal efforts.

Hikaru and Sachiko go through a lot, but much of the time things end up turning out pretty well. Their own hard work is very important to that end, but equally important is the fact that they run into some pretty special people along the way. And, again, this matches my own life: I try to work hard to put myself in a position to succeed, but over and over again I’ve gotten extremely lucky with the people I meet and the situations I’m in. (There was certainly a good deal of both in the last two jobs that I’ve gotten, for example.) So I appreciate it when I see a book that doesn’t attribute good outcomes solely to one factor or the other.

It’s a really special book, and thoroughly engrossing to boot. I’ll certainly happily cite its existence as an example of the contingencies that have enriched my life: I’m very fortunate to be living in an era when manga featuring an autistic lead character is being translated and brought over the ocean so I can read it, because I can imagine many many worlds where that would never happen. And I look forward to a world where games’ conception of understanding interactions more regularly goes beyond finding the weak spots in a boss monster’s patters so you can attack it and instead moves on to lower key but much more profound appreciations of differences in perspective.

But it’s also thrown me for a bit of a loop, because it’s undeniably a juvenile game, in the same way that, to pick a random example, Comet in Moominland is a juvenile book. Which is absolutely fine, even delightful—I read ten books by Madeline L’Engle during the last month alone, so I’m certainly not one to shy away from books intended more for my daughter than myself! But I’ve studiously avoided thinking about video games in those terms, avoided trying to distinguish between games intended for kids and games (e.g. Wii Sports) that are accessible to a wide audience but not targeted specifically at kids.

The main reason why I’ve avoided classifying games in that fashion is because I see that classification made far too often around me, in the context of polemics that I disagree with; it’s usually used to support claims that I consider both wrong and boring, leading me to head in the other direction when I run across such discussions. But given the existence of MySims Agents and the usefulness I find in the distinction for books, it’s time for me to take another look at the idea of juvenile games.

For example: are the Mario games juvenile games? What about the Zelda games? Honestly, I’m at a bit of a loss here. The Mario games certainly have something in common with juvenile literature, in that they’re quite happy to not locate themselves in the real world—see the aforementioned Moomintroll series for a delightful literary example. I’m loath to make too much of this particular distinction, though: aside from the existence of many many fantasy and science fiction novels for adults, I tend to think that the insistence of the importance of the fantastic/realist distinction in adult literature is more of a bug than a feature, and a bug that’s localized to my particular location in space and time at that.

And juvenile novels are written in a language that kids can read, and frequently features child protagonists. But I’m loath to make too much of those distinctions, either: we don’t have to use fancy words to prove how adult we are, and surely we can all enjoy books that feature protagonists that differ from us in one way or another? So, while I can come up with ways to tell that a books isn’t juvenile literature (because of the style of language, because of sex, because of certain other topics), I found it surprisingly difficult to come up with a positive and non-banal description of what it means for a book to be juvenile literature. And that carries over to video games as well: to return to my examples above, I still don’t know if the Mario games are juvenile games or not. (And I am apparently not alone; though, if I had to come down one way or another, I suppose my gut would agree with Stephen Totilo’s in labeling the series as juvenile. It’s less clear to me than MySims Agents, though: in the latter, having kids acting out adult roles in a non-realistic context is a marker.)

The other series I mentioned, though, is a different case: the Zelda games are, at their core, adolescent games. Not in the sense that adults or children wouldn’t enjoy them, but in the sense that they’re about boys growing up (literally, in the case of Ocarina), forced to be men a little earlier than they’d like to, but rising to the occasion, finding out who they really are, finding unexpected depths inside themselves. As with juvenile books, I want to emphasize: this is in no sense a criticism, I love bildungsromans enough to have copies of most of Herman Hesse’s books on my shelf in both German and English. (And one could claim that I’m still trying to figure out what it is that I want to be when I grow up!) But a coming of age story is, to me, a strong indicator of adolescent literature.

And it’s one that you’ll find all over the place in video games, present in a deep structural sense. In every role-playing game, your character starts out weak, but becomes more and more competent over the course of the game, with his or her capabilities consciously guided through your choices. And these elements are popular enough to have gotten grafted onto other genres—BioShock, for example takes RPG elements and melds then with an FPS core foundation.

And, of course, BioShock is an adolescent game in other ways—its core conflict comes down to, basically, “Son, do this. No, dad, you can’t tell me what to do! Yes, son, I can! No, dad, you can’t!” This is repeated with a second father figure, just in case you didn’t get it the first time; if that’s not a sign of a game about adolescence, I don’t know what is.

Actually, BioShock grabs me in this context for a second reason: Andrew Ryan’s “these are my toys, and if you don’t like that, I’m going to take my forest and go home” speech. I was going to say that that’s not just adolescent, it brings us back to our “juvenile games” theme, but, actually, most kids I know wouldn’t behave that way, either; it’s using the term “childish” instead in the sense of an anti-child prejudice that adults bring out when discussing aspects of their own behavior that they’d prefer to ignore.

Which brings me, in turn, to another context in which the word “adolescent” has come up recently in video game criticism, namely Heather Chaplin’s GDC 2009 rant. I didn’t attend it in person, but I have listened to the audio, and in general I think she’s spot on. She’s not using the term adolescent in the positive sense of growth, of figuring out who we are: instead, her complaints are with game designers and players who are childish in the sense of my previous paragraph, who refuse to grow up and take on real responsibilities, who are instead mired in “guy culture” despite being grown men, who “fear responsibility, introspection, intimacy, and intellectual discovery”. And, as she continues, “when you’re talking about culture makers, this is a problem.” Indeed.

(And, just in case you might think that her concerns about the omnipresence of guy culture in game design are overblown: the very next speaker in the rant, when needing to fill some time while fiddling with his computer, decides to joke about blow jobs. And yes, I realize that the GDC rant panels are situations where one might reasonably say things that you wouldn’t say in the more polite sessions in the conference, but he wasn’t doing this for any sort of polemical or oratorical reason, he just thought that such joking was a great way to spend time in a professional conference; and the next two voices we heard after him, both also male, thought that this was a good enough idea that they both took the joke and ran with it. Really, guys, what the fuck?)

Returning to my previous themes: while I have a hard time carving out distinguishing characteristics of juvenile literature, I have an easier time carving out distinguishing characteristics of adult literature. Heather’s list of guy culture fears gives some candidates; parenting is one candidate that I’ll nominate from my own life, as is moving beyond romance and the initial falling in love and instead making a life with your partner through thick and thin, through excitement and banality. And these are, in general, sorely absent in video games, or present only in a distorted form. (I just finished Yakuza 2, and the one bit of hands-on parenting in that game rang horribly false.)

There are, perhaps, glimmers, of hope—I hear that Dragon Age: Origins handles relationships in a more nuanced fashion, and there’s always Jason Rohrer to give me hope. (In that same GDC rant panel, Clint Hocking warned that AAA game makers were having their butts kicked by indie game makers, which is all to the good.) But there’s an awful lot of adolescent guy culture to make our way out of, first.

And of course, as with my discussion of the term “childish”: the examples that Heather gave of responsibility, introspection, intimacy, and intellectual discovery aren’t things that real adolescents avoid in general, or even that children avoid in general. They struggle with the weight of those terms, as we all do, but frequently that struggle is done positively, rather than by running away from them, or hollowing out a facade behind them. (As we see in every game that blows up a bildungsroman plot into a chosen hero saving the world; I love the Zelda series to pieces, but it bears little relation to the way responsibility plays out in my own life.)

In fact, in juvenile and adolescent literature, these concepts (especially responsibility and intellectual discovery) are often front and center. So maybe that’s a more positive way to look at the appearance of overtly juvenile games? Maybe overtly juvenile games will have a harder time pretending that they’re grown up because they have a big hero who can order other people around or kill them if those others don’t obey, and will instead have to confront responsibility in a more honest fashion? Maybe (I write just after having learned that our neighbors of six and a half years, who are closer to Miranda than anybody outside of her mother and myself, are moving to Cyprus in a week) replacing the romance subplot of your favorite RPG with the poignancy of your neighbor moving away in Animal Crossing is the first step towards a real treatment of intimacy?

Something to hope for; something to open my eyes and look for.

But I was also sad, especially in the initial bathysphere descent. That descent is a wonderful reveal, a magical view of the city. And it’s teeming with life; much of that life is aquatic, but there are buildings glowing with lights, it looks (a few flickering neon signs aside) very much like a vibrant, functioning city.

And then you arrive, and find that matters have taken a turn for the worse; soon enough, you’re in traditional FPS mode, where everything is trying to kill you, and you’re trying to kill everything. Which, on second viewing, raised the question: with such pervasive violence, how on earth would a city under the sea continue functioning at all? Where is the power to the lights coming from, who is fixing the leaks?

I think the game largely sidesteps those questions (though, if I’m remembering correctly, we do see some Big Daddies outside doing maintenance, adding yet another twist to your slaughtering them), and I don’t claim to have answers to how the game could have been designed to avoid that. (FPSes are a known design space to work within, after all.) But I would have liked to see the game try to answer those questions, and answer them not in the form of audio diaries but in the way the gameplay was structured.

On a similar note, somebody on Twitter (whom I won’t identify here since she keeps her tweets private) commented that she wished Ico had no combat at all. And I’m sure that Shadow of the Colossus would have been much less powerful if you’d had to fight enemies while traveling between colossi instead of just being free to soak in the landscape.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against combat in games per se (though it does sound like I should try out the new Silent Hill game)—genres that focus exclusively on that (fighting games, multiplayer FPSes) have a quite pleasant singularity of purpose. But as a game starts to move away from its combat, trying instead to get me hooked on its atmosphere and the worldbuilding, I wish I could actually spend my time having the world soak in, to play with where the world came from, where it’s going, how it works. Which means, among other things, less violence or even no violence.

So it is time, I think, for the mechanics / world-building scale to tilt the other way. And I hope that, when it tilts back, the genre will have found a wider range of mechanics in the process.

• We’ve just started a playthrough of BioShock; we’ll follow this up with a playthrough of BioShock 2 when the sequel launches.
• The less-than-vintage nature of those games accurately suggests that we’re considering changes; we’ve opened up a discussion thread where we welcome your suggestions.

And this, in turn, poses a bit of a problem. I imagine that I’ll be spending more time with short games than I currently do; and I’m frequently at a bit of a loss when writing about shorter games. When writing about longer games, I have some rules to guide me: only write about what specifically interests me, and don’t write something because I’m unconsciously following a review model. (I still break that last rule a lot, alas.)

At times the results are better, sometimes the results are worse; but at least I generally manage to pull off something that I’m not to embarrassed about. If I’m playing a game for ten hours, probably something will catch my eye, and I’ll be able to link that to something else that I’ve been thinking about. If I’m playing a game for five minutes, though, that may well not happen.

And, of course, if it really doesn’t happen, that’s fine: I try to write about every larger-scale game that I play, but I’ve already passed over many Flash and Facebook games in silence, and I will continue to do so if nothing about them catches my eye. The harder case, though, is what to do about games for which something does catch my eye, but where I’m having a harder time putting that something into a broader context. I’m really not sure what to do in such situations; maybe I’ll experiment with a more impressionistic approach, but I’m not sure I can pull that off well.

Also, some of the reasons for consciously avoiding review tropes won’t necessarily hold in this case. In particular, if I’m playing a game from a traditional publisher, I can be quite confident that it’s easy to find many other people who have done a much better job than I could of giving a general overview of the game. Whereas, for smaller games, it’s not so clear to me that that’s the case. (Though that could have more to do with the tunnel vision in my choice of sites to read than anything else.) Having written that, it’s not clear to me that that it’s important to give an overview of such games: if a game is a click away in your browser, and only takes ten minutes to finish, then there’s not much point in my writing anything beyond what will get appropriate readers to click on that link, aside from my personal perspective.

(One thing I will certainly try to avoid doing in the future is apologizing when I don’t feel I’m writing well about a game. I should either write or not write; either is fine, but there’s no point doing the one and acting like I should be doing the other.)

I’m looking forward to this. And, unusually for me, I’m kind of wishing that I had a Windows PC to broaden my choice of possible games. (I have a VirtualBox installation, but it has some serious sound problems and can’t run recent games.) I’m not wishing that enough to actually go out and get one, but I may well set up Boot Camp on the next Mac I buy.

This year is special in that it has also brought ‘games of the decade’. About which I have fewer misgivings: while part of me finds that sort of ranking ridiculous, at least the passage of time gives some amount of distance. And there’s also the pleasure of being reminded of an old friend that you haven’t thought about for a while.

But I don’t really want to write one of those, either, for various reasons. Instead, I’ll present you with a different list, or rather three different lists. I’m not going to say anything about the games here, though many of them are good candidates for me to replay and say more about in the future. I’m sure there are many other games created over the decade that are as good or better than these, and even other games that I’ve played over the decade that are as good or better; there are not, however, other games that I’ve played that have grabbed me in such a deep and direct fashion.

First: games that have lodged into my soul. These are games where I shudder when I see them, that filter up from my brain at unexpected moments.

• Passage
• Shenmue
• Shenmue II
• Shadow of the Colossus
• Killer 7
• Majora’s Mask
• Flower

Next, games that delight: games that bring a smile to my face just thinking of them.

• Katamari Damacy
• Space Channel 5
• Okami
• Grow Cube

And finally, a trio of games that, in their own ways, try to push onto both of the above lists.

• Animal Crossing
• Rez
• Jet Grind Radio