malvasia bianca

This year, I’ve been a little touchier about games than in the past. I’m tired of violence in games: yes, it’s a classic theme, rich in narrative possibilities; yes, it lends itself to a myriad of success/failure conditions that are rich in gameplay possibilities; but even so, does it have to be quite so dominant? (And generally so unreflectively dominant, to make matters worse.) And I’m tired of adolescent games: sure, the transition from childhood to adolescence is a great theme, but it gets old, and it especially gets old when that transition doesn’t lead to a struggle with the question of what it means to be grown up, but rather leads to becoming an all-powerful manchild who saves the world from an evil daddy figure while dominating it himself. (These two, of course, frequently unite: saving the world involves leaving an endless stream of corpses behind you, as it turns out.)

I seem to be particularly interested in unpacking that latter problem, as I realized when I found myself defending Catherine fairly vigorously in a VGHVI symposium a couple of months ago. Because yeah, there’s a lot to complain about in Catherine. Vincent is nobody’s idea of a role model: he may not be an all-powerful manchild (aside from one of the endings which is at least entertainingly self-aware in its presentation of the situation), but he is a hapless loser manchild, somebody whom I probably wouldn’t enjoy spending time with in real life, whom I probably wouldn’t enjoy reading about or watching a movie about. So this is not a character or a game that I would normally think of myself as defending. (At least on a thematic/narrative level; the block pushing puzzle aspect of it is a different matter.)

But I nonetheless was: it turns out that, right now, I’m surprisingly grateful, embarrassingly grateful even to games that present me with a narrative that doesn’t end up with me becoming all-powerful and saving the world. I mean, yes, Dragon Age II is a legitimately wonderful game, but should I be quite so grateful for the fact that you only save a city from a crazed demon lord instead of saving the entire freaking world from a crazed demon lord?

So it would seem that I need some space from current conventions. Which makes me wonder: what if we try to further stretch the distance from conventions? Saving the world is clearly overblown, but maybe my problem is as much with the “saving” part of that statement as with “the world”. Maybe games have a savior complex; maybe I have a savior complex and I’m uncomfortable with that aspect of myself. Maybe what I want right now are games that present a world around you and people around you that are interesting in their own right, that are worthy of respect in their own right, and that don’t need you to validate them, let alone save them?

Now, I realize that games traditionally have externally prescribed goals, and that one way to combine external goals with a single-player context (and one that includes a narrative framework) is to present you as trying to win over some parts of that external context for the benefit of both yourself and other parts of that external context. If we step too far away from that, we have, what, Proteus? Well, as it turns out, Proteus is a great game, and I’m much happier having spent time playing it than yet another save-the-world fantasy.

There are other ways to frame those externally prescribed goals, though; one of my favorites is that games are about systems understanding, and the goals are vehicles for the rules that give structure to the games’ systems. If you focus on the systems, though, goals are merely one way to approach those systems, and the systems themselves can present a world, a work that is worthy of approach and appreciation on its own terms, with no need for external validation.

That systems understanding approach itself can, of course, be problematic; but it can also be beautiful. And beautiful in ways that aren’t threatened by goals and show how goals can be presented in ways that have nothing to do with a savior complex: go is an example here.

So: I’d like games that are less about saving the world, aspiring to become all-powerful; in fact, I’m curious about games that step away from aspiration completely. Having said that, that’s just me right now, not a general statement about what other people should be interested in or even what past or future me should be interested in.

One of the reasons for this is the social context of how aspiration is frequently presented in games. The games I’m thinking of aren’t just adolescent fantasy: they’re a particular kind of adolescent fantasy, one that generally harmonizes well with boys who grow up in a world that, at least in part, tells them that they are special, that they can go on to do great things, where that latter is identified in part with dominating and showing their superiority to others.

Which, in its own way, was a big part of my adolescence: sure, I was a geeky kid, but I was in an environment that was rather supportive of that geekiness, and if we’re talking about dominance, I did extremely well at math contests. That latter skill led to a fair amount of other rewards; I’m certainly far from dominating the world, but my career has put me in a quite comfortable place.

And following narratives that reinforce certain aspects of that, or for that matter that tell me that I’m still a failure because I didn’t dominate the world, gets kind of tired after a while: I’d like to learn from something different. And, worse, these aspirational savior narratives seem to resonate with some aspects of a culture around games (and around internet technology enthusiasm in general) that can be pretty horrible at times: an ideological fervor to demonstrate that you are Right, that those who have come to a different conclusion from you are Wrong and must be crushed under the weight of your righteousness.

If I’d had different aspirations growing up, or less support for my aspirations, though, my response to aspirational games might will be different. In that case, a game that spoke to my aspirations could turn into a beacon of hope; certainly there seem like a lot of games out there these days that have the potential to be that.

I dunno. I guess, having written this, I’m really not against aspiration in games. I am still against being a savior in games, at least to the extent that that others whom you are saving.

More than either of those, though, I’m actively for games that quietly observe the world around you. Games that don’t focus on the world as a vehicle for your actions on it: games that focus on the world as something in its own right, games that focus on multi-way relationships involving you and others, even games that focus on understanding yourself without a builtin assumption that that understanding naturally leads to adulation. Or games that set aside the world, removing that external narrative largely or entirely to instead carve narrative out of interactions within the mechanics of the game.

Fortunately, there are a lot of games out there that present a world that welcomes observation, now that I’m calming down enough to notice them.

If I’d played Trauma before Dominique Pamplemousse, I’d probably have ended up writing the same blog post, just about a different game. Because Trauma is also a very good game, and one that impresses me in a way that I wish I didn’t find so out-of-the-ordinary: it’s one person’s singular vision, it’s very compelling, it’s well done as a game, it made me sit up and take notice. Which is great and all that, but it’s kind of odd that seeing those characteristics in a game surprises me in a way that seeing them in a book or an album wouldn’t; not sure how much of the oddness is in me and how much of the oddness is in the environment.

Of course, once you get past the above (and past their shared point-and-click adventure nature), the two games have significant differences: Trauma is more experiential, has a more oblique meaning, doesn’t have the same sort of plot. There’s not the same musical focus, but there’s a photographic focus, which quietly works well. And I liked the gentle formalism of the four endings of the four levels. (I wonder why more games don’t do that sort of formalism? Or do they, and I’m just not thinking of examples?)

Trauma was the last game I played on vacation, and one of the best. So now I’m almost done with my backlog! I still have some non-game posts to write, though; those will take longer. And I’ve finished one game since returning, namely Proteus, which I’m still coming to terms with. Still, I’m getting closer to being able to return to my normal rhythms; feels nice.

I’d been a little curious about Versu ever since it came out, and a talk I heard at GDC this year did nothing to reduce my enthusiasm. So I figured I’d try it out on the plane ride to Japan.

Unfortunately, there was a flaw in my plan: when I downloaded the game, I realized that it wouldn’t play without a network connection. Now, maybe there’s a good reason for this: maybe the game does more computation than my iPad could handle. Or maybe Linden Labs didn’t think twice about doing it that way: that’s the way they do things. Or maybe they did think twice, but they decided it was best from a maintainability/portability point of view. Or maybe they have some economic reason for doing it that way. Maybe there’s even a reason why it’s better for users, I just can’t think of one.

Who knows; at any rate, not what I expected. And, to be honest, I felt a little bit like I was getting my own Sim City experience. My mood wasn’t helped when, a week later, I was playing the game, and I lost half an hour of play time because it couldn’t sync with the server on one turn. (Yes, I realize that text adventures have been training me for decades to save regularly, but surely that’s a bug, not a feature, especially in iPad games?)

Server interactions aside, what did I think about Versu? I’m glad to have spent a few hours with it: I went through all four scenarios multiple times. But I can’t say I felt too satisfied after that.

Not sure what’s going on there. Maybe it felt like a tech demo? Maybe the themes of the stories didn’t work for me? Maybe I just wasn’t in the mood? Maybe the mechanics need to evolve a bit more? Maybe I prefer either explicit narrative or else sandbox mechanics, whereas this middle ground of exploring a pre-existing narrative space doesn’t work as well for me?

Hard to say; and I certainly won’t swear off playing more stories that use the Versu machinery in the future. But I won’t spend time waiting for stories more to my taste to come along, either.

The iPad version of Mirror’s Edge seemed like a pleasant enough game: mostly good enough mechanics (albeit not ones that particularly excited me), good level design. I played through it once and then went through the first few levels again trying to get speed runs.

Having said that, there was one mechanic that I didn’t like at all: the people shooting at you. I didn’t enjoy it from a gameplay point of view, but, honestly, mostly it just bugged me. I’m getting more sensitive to violence these days, and if the game had avoided guns entirely, that would have been an active plus; it didn’t, though, instead having most levels full of people shooting at you.

And, to make matters worse, the enemies had a bark of “shoot to kill”. Which they manifestly weren’t doing: you got slowed down a bit by their shots, but you could absorb a lot of bullets before you died. (And no, your character wasn’t presented as having superhuman skills in that regard.) And I don’t think that the enemies were all crack shots who had the control to knick you while lying about your intentions: that’s not the way guns work, that’s not the way games work.

It’s just lazy game design. They got rid of half the gun violence, they didn’t figure out how to get rid of the rest, and they didn’t own that decision: you’re the same bullet sponge we see over and over again, just an asymmetric one. Having to listen to an annoying bark.

More options, please?

It’s been a month since I got back from Japan, and I still haven’t written about my trip here! Which isn’t a sign that it wasn’t a great trip—it was, I’m very glad we went. That silence is instead more a sign that I’m not a travel blogger; it’s also a sign that I’ve been busy recently. (That busyness I probably will blog about in a bit.)

But I did at least want to write about the trip in the context of learning Japanese. As I mentioned before, I started taking Japanese lessons a couple of months before we left. And that turned out to be a great idea: partly because of the content of the lessons, partly as calibration of what I could and couldn’t do, but mostly because of a mental shift it triggered. It made the question of speaking Japanese a much more real one, so it flipped a switch in my brain where, even before leaving the house, I’d find myself thinking about how I would say something in Japanese.

And, as it turned out in the trip: yes, I can speak Japanese! Not well, and not comfortably: I do a lot better in France or Germany. But well enough to make myself known whenever we needed that to happen, well enough that people I spoke to didn’t generally answer me in English, well enough that we never had any serious problems.

Essentially all of this speaking was in specific, focused situations: generally some sort of business transaction or ordering dinner or whatever. (And actually my reading practice came in handy as often as my speaking practice.) There was a grand total of one instance over the two weeks when I carried out an actual conversation, and a lot of vocal fumbling happened in general. But still: the point was for us to have fun and enjoy the trip, not to give me immersion practice. (And one conversation is more than zero conversations, after all.)

So: yay for language study, yay for us being able to relax and enjoy ourselves halfway around the world! And yay for lessons, too. Despite which I haven’t continued the lessons since I came back. In fact, they stopped a few weeks before I left: my teacher was selling her house, so she had to cancel several weeks in a row because she was holding open houses. And I was glad to have that couple of hours of my weekend back, as it turns out.

But I do want to change my approach because of this experience. To spend more time thinking about how to form sentences, not just reading them. Maybe not to spend more time on Japanese during the weekends (though that’s not out of the question), but at least spend more time on it during the week. (After all, reading a chapter of Hikaru no Go is a thoroughly enjoyable way to spend twenty or thirty minutes if I happen to have a bit of time between when I get home and when we’re making dinner.)

Or at least I want to tweak my approach: there’s a lot that I won’t change. (Because, after all: it seems to have worked!) Above all, just keep on going: I’m not going to make nearly the sort of progress that I would if I were immersing myself in the language, but if I just keep on working smartly at it, I’ll keep on getting better.

I can’t say that I understood Starbloom. It’s nice enough to look at and to listen to; there’s a bit of gameplay there, but that gameplay didn’t grab me in terms of the game’s explicit goals. (Either in thinking about how to approach those goals or in the mechanics of carrying out that approach.) Which maybe means that I should think about Starbloom as a toy, with implicit goals (make the music sound how you would like it to?), but I couldn’t find a way to approach it in that direction that worked for me.

I dunno. Probably I’m missing something; but probably it’s also just not for me.

When I first heard about Dominique Pamplemousse (or, to use its full title, Dominique Pamplemousse in “It’s All Over Once The Fat Lady Sings!”), it sounded charming: what’s not to like about a claymation musical adventure game? Even so, I was blown away how much I cared about the finished product. And I wasn’t the only one: as soon as I showed a bit of it to Miranda, she immediately started nagging me to be able to play through the whole thing—I hadn’t previously realized how much of a bagpipe fan she apparently is—and Liesl had a good time with it as well.

I’m having a little bit of a hard time articulating why the game had such an impact on me, though. (Aside from its general awesomeness, of course.) I think that maybe what’s going on is that I unconsciously pigeonholed it in advance as probably being a little too far on the skeletal DIY side of things. Which is an asshole thing to say, and I realize that I’m looking stupid by typing it: over the last year, the zinester scene has been as much where the action is as any place else in game development. (Not that Dominique Pamplemouusse is necessarily a zinester game, or for that matter isn’t, I’m not up enough on that sort of distinction to say.) Still, I have my biases, and for better or for worse I still mostly play games from traditional game studios. Don’t get me wrong: I was expecting to genuinely enjoy the game, but still, I figured I’d play through it but that I’d then go back to more traditional games where I would feel more at home, or where I would at least enjoy the increased polish of the experience. (Well, actually, I’d go back to playing Rocksmith all the time, but never mind that.)

And then I started playing the game: charming decor, but also low-rent, a room whose walls are built out of corrugated cardboard. And shot in black-and-white: what’s up with that? At any rate, ten seconds in, I had something that I was still managing to slot into my prejudices. Those prejudices may have lasted for another ten or twenty seconds, but no longer, because I started listening to the music, to the singing. And, let me tell you: I love the music in this game. It’s well crafted, it’s a lot of fun to listen to, Deirdra does a great job performing it (I assume she did all the composing, singing, and playing herself, though I could be wrong), it’s witty, it works great in a game context (which requires a choice of responses to be sung over a scene’s background music).

And the music is also very much its own thing: a Deirdra Kiai production. But being its own thing doesn’t make that music free from referent: just turning it on, you hear scratching sounds over the soundtrack, imitating a record player. (Or before turning it on, there’s the game’s subtitle!) And this combines with the black-and-white visuals and the detective setting to make the low-rent nature of the production (Deirdra raised $9950 for it on Indiegogo, so not no-rent but also very much not a lot of cash to work with as game production budgets go) into an affirmative choice. (And one that actively reinforces the narrative of the game, which starts off with the protagonist worrying about being kicked out of their office because they couldn’t scrape up enough money to pay the rent.) I could add on to the examples of this sort of active affirmative choice: the characters in the game are claymation figures for example, so they don’t even have polygons, but if they did, there wouldn’t be a lot of polygons in them or rich textures on them; but those claymation figures have as much visual personality as any character in any game that I can think of.

So, throughout the aesthetics and the traditional presentational aspects of the game, you’ll find ample evidence to bemoan the AAA rush towards more and more photorealistic graphics: not because the latter is more expensive, but because the latter is worse. Not that the big-budget games don’t have their own charms, but still: here’s a one-person game that I would rather watch and that I would rather listen to, and setting that aside, creative monocultures are never healthy.

And it’s not just the music and visuals that are great about this game. It’s a very solid adventure game indeed: I enjoyed figuring things out, I also enjoyed not getting frustrated (three of us played it, and one of us got a little stuck in one place in the game), I enjoyed the length of the game and every moment of the time I spent with it. So: yay for game design. But also yay for narrative that goes beyond what’s necessary for game design, and that does so in a way that’s mercifully free from the save-the-world bombast that is so dominant today: it’s a personal narrative, a narrative that contains sharp commentary on economic issues, on gender issues, on issues of choice and freedom and interpersonal ties, approaching all of these issues from multiple directions.

So: more like this please. Where by “like this” I don’t mean “stop-motion claymation musical adventure games” (though if I could trade a video game scene dominated by first-person shooters for one dominated by musical adventure games, I would do that in a heartbeat): I mean games that show a craftsperson and an artist working at top form to give me something new.

On which note, it’s actually a little ridiculous that fact about this game is such a breath of fresh air. If I read a novel by an author showing me things I’d never seen before, been swept away by an album from a band that I’d never heard of before hitting play, I would be pleased and surprised by the details of the artwork, but I wouldn’t spend time calling out the fact that such things exist at all. After all, that’s the great thing about art: it lets one or a handful of people show something new about the world to other people. At least in many other media it does; in games, though, something (cultural hegemony? studio culture? studio sizes? cost structures?) puts barriers in the way of that.

Or at least there have been barriers over the last decade or two. (Or maybe it’s just my own blinders: I obviously have them, it’s becoming more and more likely to me that I’m not looking for great games in the right places.) It’s gotten a lot better over the last year, though. And right now I’m not sure I can point to a game that does a better job than Dominique Pamplemousse at showing one path forward.

One of the better talks I went to at the first GDC I attended was by Randy Smith, so I was curious about the studio he co-founded. Unfortunately, their first game didn’t grab me; their second game, Waking Mars, sounded like it might have mechanics that were a bit more to my taste, so while it never quite managed to bubble to the top of my stack, I was happy to give it a shot when I was on vacation and only had an iPad to play games on.

And I liked Waking Mars quite a bit more than Spider. Mostly on the level of mechanics: a pleasant set of plants, animals, and substances to investigate. The gates to make it past each level weren’t particularly difficult, but that’s the way I prefer things: I can poke around trying to figure out what’s going on without being too stressed. And there was one interaction of mechanics that surprised me, the way the plant that changes terrain types plays out. I also appreciated the non-violent nature of the mechanics: I’ve gotten a lot more sensitive to that over the last year or so, so I was glad to be helping aliens instead of shooting them.

I liked it more than Spider more on a narrative level, too: having a mansion that invites you to figure out its history sounded potentially interesting, but in practice I wanted more narrative hand-holding than that game provided. (I’m curious how I’ll feel about Gone Home when it comes out.) Waking Mars had people (and robots) talking, an alien mystery to try to figure out, and enough questions unanswered about that alien mystery to leave some room for the player to insert their perspective.

So: pleasant game. Not enough to vault the studio to the top of my must-play list, or anything: I enjoyed the mechanics, but I don’t think there’s huge depth there for me to keep on digging into.

It was also watching my internal snobbishness play out: the images for your character and for the cut-scene discussions were well drawn, but without a lot of presentation beyond that; that worked great for the cut scenes, but something was unexpected for me about the animation of your character’s movements in game. Which I wouldn’t even mention were it not for my playing Dominique Pamplemousse shortly thereafter: that game was more aggressively lo-fi, but in a way that felt a little more coherent? Still, I wasn’t at all actively put off by Waking Mars in this regard, it was just an interesting data point in how small studios pick and choose where to put their energy.

I played The Dreamhold on the plane ride to Japan. I guess these days the genre label that the game fits within (or the mechanics label—I’m not entirely at peace with how the term “genre” is used with games) is “parser-based interactive fiction”? Which is something I played a lot when I was growing up; not so much these days, though I still considered myself basically favorably inclined to the mechanic.

After playing The Dreamhold, though, I’m not so sure. Not that it wasn’t a good game: it was well written, it showed snippets of a potentially rather fascinating world, and the puzzles seemed well done. (It’s designed as an introductory game, for what that’s worth.) But I just wasn’t feeling it: I ran into some difficulties, I got annoyed, I asked for hints.

Maybe I wasn’t in the right mood, I’m not sure. But I don’t think it was just my mood: I’m not sure in what contexts now I would prefer to play parser-based IF over games that went in a different direction: the puzzles in parser-based IF have a particular obtuseness that, these days, seems gratuitous.

Of course, parser-based IF has changed a lot over the last three decades. For example, I hear that there’s a fair amount of it out there that doesn’t depend on puzzles: maybe I should spend time investigating that? Though there are so many other text-based IF platforms these days, I’d be curious what the parser brings in a non-puzzle context over, say, Twine.

“Should” is a funny word, though. I don’t play that many games these days, and I generally play a game because there’s something specific that’s drawing me to it. That means that investigating the current state of the art of a mechanic is unlikely to be enough of a hook on its own, even if it’s a mechanic that I’m very nostalgic about.

Though maybe I’ll play more parser-based IF for the same reason (or at least one of the reasons) why I played The Dreamhold: when I’m on vacation, I have time on planes and during downtime during days and nights to play games, and I only have my iPad with me. Probably just as well to have time to experiment a bit and broaden my horizons; and it’s a platform that works well with text.

Who knows; we’ll see.

While I was on vacation, I only played iPad games; I’ll write a post about each of them, but they were mostly short, so I don’t always have a lot to say.

Hundreds is a good example. (Though actually I really played it during GDC.) It’s a puzzle game; I’d heard good things about it when it came out, but it didn’t work for me. The game’s core mechanism just didn’t grab me: you wait until circles aren’t near other circles, then you touch them so they grow, and you stop when other circles get closer. You can try to arrange things so that you’re likely to have more time to grow the circles; but you don’t have much direct control, so you spend a fair amount of time waiting. Which leads to frustration, which leads to pushing boundaries, which leads to messing up and having to start the level over.

The game adds mechanisms as you go along, but they didn’t make the game feel richer; and, in fact, sometimes they made the game more annoying, because some of the mechanisms create active setbacks. And then there are these unrelated word puzzles to unlock; I did the first few, but when I hit a roadblock I didn’t feel like figuring more out.

I guess I went through a third of the puzzles? Certainly not half of them. It wasn’t as actively unpleasant as I may be making it seem here, but I’m definitely glad I stopped when I did, and the basic mechanism never clicked.

I don’t normally blog about Flash games or Twine games that I play (for no particularly thought-through reason), but I was thinking I should make an exception for Grow Maze: it’s wonderful and it’s as long as some iOS games that I’ve played recently that do fall into the bucket of “games I blog about”. Before I got around to writing that post, though, the 11th anniversary of EYEZMAZE came along, so I decided to expand the scope.

Because: the EYEZMAZE games are amazing: I’m not sure that there’s a game designer who works by himself whose work I enjoy more. (I really wish he would do a Kickstarter or something that would let him devote more time to his games!) They are fun, they are charming, they have a mechanical and stylistic consistency that underpins all eleven years of his work. (Actually, I don’t know if “his” is the appropriate pronoun: the designer’s name is ON, but even finding that takes a bit of poking around, I’m not sure of the designer’s gender.)

The first EYEZMAZE game that I played was Grow Cube, and it made enough of an impression that I still remember where I heard about it. And it’s still a great introduction to his work, because it’s wonderfully charming and an excellent example of his favorite mechanic. The mechanic that Grow Cube uses (and that maybe half to two thirds of his games focus on) is of elements that you can add in various orders, and that level up more or less depending on the order in which you add them. And the leveling up gets more and more alive, with hidden secrets popping out: if you manage to find the sequence to get all of the elements leveled up, you end up with a wonderfully animated small world that’s just bursting with charm and secrets.

I think the mechanic is a surprisingly good one (in particular, there’s more game play there than it seems – I remember keeping notes on the experiments I’d run while trying to find out the complete sequence for one of his games), though it wouldn’t be nearly as powerful without the charm of the world he built. For the first half of his career, he experimented with that mechanic over and over again; I always enjoyed it, but I was starting to wonder what else he could do.

But, as I played more of his games, I also started to appreciate his repeated design elements. This started to hit me when I played Grow ver. 1: that uses a much simpler mechanic (though one that remains focused on growth, and that retains all the charm of his more elaborate games), but there’s one path in particular that made me take notice, because it shows the development of an underground world full of secret chambers that are a backstage version of bits of his other games. That brings out the consistency of his games (it’s not just thematic and mechanical consistency, but judicious use of characters and items that link the games without being repetitive), and it does that while bringing one aspect of his thematic consistency to the fore, the idea that everything is part of a living, growing world with riches lying just beneath the surface (of the ground, of shapes and objects and creatures and people) working away and waiting to burst forth if you do coax it out.

Fairly soon after that, he came out with a game that was a significant break from his tradition: Dwarf Complete. (There’s an iOS version if you prefer.) It was contract work, and perhaps because of that it has a noticeably different art style; still charming, though. And noticeably different mechanics: you move around instead of just selecting items, there are a wide range of puzzles to work on. So: he’s definitely not a one-trick pony.

Since then, the games have slowed down; sometimes, he’s returned to the original mechanic, sometimes he’s branched out more. His latest game, Grow Maze, is a lovely example of where’s he’s come: it’s similar in many ways to Dwarf Complete, in that it’s exploration based with a wide range of puzzles, and takes a decent amount of time to go through. But it’s as charming as ever, and touches back enough to some of his familiar design elements and ideas of evolution to reassure you that yes, this is an Eyezmaze game.

ON has made so many games that I cherish; I only wish that he could devote himself exclusively to game creation. But still: once every year or so, my feed reader tells me that he’s published something new, and that’s a wonderful present to receive.

And now I think I’ll go and play through Grow Cube again. Or maybe Grow RPG?

The Friday talks. Bringing a fine GDC to an end; this is the first year where I haven’t gone to a single talk that I felt was a mistake for me to attend, and several were excellent. And powerful: two or three of this year’s talks brought me to tears.

• 10:00am: Turning Comedy of Manners into Gameplay: Versu Postmortem, Emily Short
• 11:30am: Mad as Hell: Hothead Developers Rant Back, Anna Anthropy, Naomi Clark, Jason Della Rocca, Mitu Khandaker, Anna Marsh, Margaret Robertson, Kellee Santiago, Karen Sideman, Eric Zimmerman
• 2:30pm: Rethinking How We Build Games and Why: The Papo & Yo Story, Vander Caballero

10:00am: Turning Comedy of Manners into Gameplay: Versu Postmortem, Emily Short

The initial slide renamed the talk: Versu Post(partum). “We’re going to be raising this kid and putting it through college for a while.”

Versu superficially looks like a Choose Your Own Adventure game. But the state space in Versu is much larger. Versu offers options based on a social simulation: in a given context, you have various options, as do the AI characters. (Some options are more expected, some are less expected.)

This all adds up to a “social physics” system: it models states and behaviors, and doesn’t require the designer to map out paths and choices in advance. This lets the player take relationships in the game in directions which the author didn’t envision. (A story about a player’s experience flirting with a footman during a dinner party; then, the other guests moved to another room, she was left alone with the footman, realized she didn’t really want to pursue a relationship with the footman, and awkwardly left. That awkwardness is quite possibly how this would play out in real life…)

(An example from a dinner party game, showing different interactions between your character and other players in the party, and even allowing you to choose to play it through from multiple points of view.)

She showed an earlier version that played out in real time: NPCs would keep on acting even if you don’t do anything. That emphasizes the autonomy of the other characters; in fact, one of the playtesters of that version thought that the game was multiplayer!

They wanted to give players context for the choices, which means exposing state to some extent. There are images of the NPC’s, which change according to the mood of the characters, but the player often didn’t see that because they were watching the text; so they moved the images to the bottom of the screen, which is near where the player’s eyes were.

They also used to embed the action choices in links in the text itself. But that meant that players were constantly scanning for links making sure that they didn’t miss things; that got players thinking about the wrong sorts of things, and also further obscured the underlying systems. (And the fact that the prototype was advancing on its own during this time raised the stress level.)

So they moved to a stepwise turn-by-turn setup; you can still choose not to take an action, letting the NPCs continue to act, but it’s an active choice.

Moral: scrolling interactive text is hard to get right.

Narrative design and the simulator:

Not a lot of prior art. (She mentioned games called Prom Week and Facade.) They divided the content into episode files and character files. The character files talk about how people behave and evaluate others (e.g. they don’t mind being around unintelligent people but wouldn’t hire them), dialogue lines that they’ll use in multiple contexts, and story arc info for that character.

The episode files contain information about extrinsic events that matter for everybody in the story. The basic premise, the scene structure, the transitions between scenes.

They started with a set of gates and keys, albeit with many options for how to make it past the gate, and in a more social context. E.g. find evidence by making friends with a suspect or helping a fellow guest stop crying or searching the victim’s papers directly. (Each of which can lead to further subproblems, e.g. the host might confront you if you decide to search.)

She found that, whenever people took an option that allowed the player’s character to go off by themself (e.g. searching papers), then the fun level dropped dramatically. So she avoids doing that: if you’re alone for an emotionally fraught reason, that can be effective, but in general don’t do that.

You want to allow players to express themselves in the choice of a solution: e.g. maybe you don’t like one of the other NPCs, so you decide to antagonize that character. That’s good; as an author, try to not only allow multiple solutions but also don’t make judgments on whether the player found the “right” solution.

Also, people may make the same choice for different reasons: unlock a given choice in multiple ways, and have the payoff support those motivations.

Austeniana:

They spent a lot of time digging into Jane Austen. In particular, they would take scenes from her work, chop it up into sections, and mark it up in terms of motivation that might cause a mythical AI to react that way. That helped point out ways to expand the system: is it powerful enough to model these interactions and responses through underlying motivations?

They have a testbed where they throw together characters over a game of Whist, including characters from different stories. So she gave an example where a character from an aristocratic story and a character from an office comedy were playing together; the former told a veiled off-color story, and the latter responded by saying that it was work-inappropriate, please don’t make him tell HR. Which is great: that expresses understanding about the situation and aspects of personality (e.g. prudishness) that transfer across centuries, while expressing it in a locally grounded manner.

They want to expand the system to allow more authors and more contexts, moving in a UGC direction. And that example gives hope that it will work.

Her final point: this GDC is about authenticity; and there’s something critical about game design, namely whether or not you are telling a truth. Austen was useful for her in grounding this: she would spend some time trying to get a funny interaction work, say, but then she would return to thinking about Austen to make sure that that interaction was coming from somewhere real.

11:30am: Mad as Hell: Hothead Developers Rant Back, Anna Anthropy, Naomi Clark, Jason Della Rocca, Mitu Khandaker, Anna Marsh, Margaret Robertson, Kellee Santiago, Karen Sideman, Eric Zimmerman

The most solid rant session I’ve seen: not a weak one in the bunch, and several were excellent.

Karen Sideman: I’m not really a psychopath, but I play one in my favorite games.

In games, you’re manipulating game pieces. These days, there’s frequently a lot of narrative overlay there, but still, you’re manipulating NPCs as pieces. If you were doing this in other contexts, you would be labeled as a psychopath. Let’s raise an army! (as though they were our children)

Anna Marsh: You don’t have to work 18 hour days sleep under the desk and shit in the corner to make games.

Long hours are not productive. Managers who rely on crunch are incompetent. But: is it just the management’s fault? Lots of this comes from a lack of planning, which we don’t like. Where’s the pre-production? Other creative industries do a lot of it. We have this myth that the only way to make good games is to be 100% committed to games, and that we have to express that in our work practices.

The raw material for our creativity is our experience; if we spend all our time immersing ourselves in games, we’ll get more and more incestuous. Artists in other fields don’t shut themselves out from experiences that aren’t part of their craft. Work efficiently, not obsessively, and you’ll make a better game.

Mitu Khandaker: Everybody deserves to be treated equally! It doesn’t matter if you are black or yellow or brown or normal!

She’d originally wanted to rant about something other than race; but, while thinking about that, something race-related came up, she thought “I don’t want to be the angry minority talking about race”, and that thought made her angry. So here she is, being angry, talking about race.

A couple of years ago, she thought that race representation in games wasn’t much of a problem. You can identify with people who don’t look like you. But: she grew up having to do that over and over again, while white male friends didn’t have to do that.

As creators of content, we are the ones who get do define what normal is. Excellent rant about the concept of political correctness; I didn’t get all of it, but: IT’S ALL FUCKING POLITICAL. If you’re afraid of making missteps, ask questions.

Kellee Santiago:

A myth: as a developer, you can have a great idea, work hard, sacrifice everything, and at the end you’ll have success and be rich! Didn’t happen for the folks who worked on Journey; didn’t happen for lots of people. There are a lot of distribution option and funding options, but still: people with money want retreads, all too often your only choice is working on nothing but dreams.

But: we sit on the precipice of an exciting time, if only we handle it properly. A few indie developers have worked for nothing but a dream, and have lots of money. So right now a few people have money who also have a vision beyond doing more of the same.

Consider the Renaissance. A lot of traders in Italy suddenly were rich, and spent their money as being patrons of art. Patronage is a dirty word, but without it, a lot of important art wouldn’t exist. Maybe this model doesn’t resonate with you; but a revolution is possible that can lead somewhere different and better. Porpentine: it’s not that better and different games aren’t being made every day, it’s that they aren’t being covered.

So: once you’ve shipped your amazing game, remember the people who get back to work.

The Duct Tape Award: awarded to Scott Jon Siegel, last year’s Duct Tape Award winner!

Last year: less talk, more rock. But, sadly: 2012 was less talk, but he didn’t ship a single game for almost all of the year. The stakes felt too high, he felt he was failing everyone. A critical voice in his head was taking too much of a toll; so he decided to start making bad games. And he made 16 games in December 2012!

We make games for ourselves as much as for others. I hope we can make bad games together.

Chris Hecker: Fair Use

A video montage, with Chris not speaking at all; he put it up on his website.

Anna Anthropy:

Read out a version of Cara Ellison’s Romero’s Wives. Here’s the video.

Naomi Clark: (Bring Back) Cinema Envy

New Hollywood (1967-1982). Major directors and studios made films addressing major social issues. The Spook in the Door: this is the sort of thing you want to get in trouble for, not for being potty-mouthed pre-teens obsessed with boobs.

Violence can be problematic – this is only “edgy” in games.

“Washing one’s hand of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.” – Paolo Freire

We need more angles on how to approach political issues in games. One suggestions: Games from anger. 1) Look around the world, get pissed off. 2) Organize, get pissed off together. 3) Deconstruct the systems. 4) Shape systems into a compelling experience of meaningful choices. (Game design!) (I missed steps 5-7)

Margaret Robertson: I Hate People

I Hate You. I hate each of you. You are everywhere, an infection, a disease, leeching and creeping into my game. I don’t want you there. Fuck you Game Center. Fuck you Xbox Live. Fuck you Ascension noise.

I Hate GDC. That was going to be my rant, but you people ruined my rant, saying brave, intelligent, expressive things. Now I have to do the same thing or I’m an asshole. You guys are impossible!

I react so strongly to multiplayer games because they’re so so powerful, so emotionally revealing. In front of people, I’m going to have to lose or win or let myself down; they’re there with their unpredictable meat brains. And games make me do stuff with their systems and mechanics.

That means that the whole rest of my identity is this constructed, mediated thing; the whole rest of my identity gets revealed when playing games. I love making games, but there’s something weird in my head that stops me from accessing them.

2:30pm: Rethinking How We Build Games and Why: The Papo & Yo Story, Vander Caballero

This looked like a great talk: Papo & Yo is a great game, Vander Caballero is clearly a thoughtful guy, and he had a wonderful presentation style where he edited pre-existing sketches on Paper on an iPad in real time. Unfortunately, my sleeping habits caught up with me: normally I fall asleep during one talk a day, and while I’d been doing surprisingly well on that front this year, I couldn’t quite make it through the whole conference…

35 years old, had a good job at EA, a family; but not happy. He wanted to make a game to help struggling kids; an indie game that could compete with big ones.

This problem has been solved before, in movies. E.g. movies approaching war: big studios approach it from a perspective of heroism, independents look at it from a human point of view.

He compared movies in terms of budget, box office, Oscars. Big movie costs $80M, makes $280M; indie costs $15M, makes $50M. (Similar profit ratio.) And the indie movie wins more Oscars. So: being indie is potentially a profitable business.

So: quit the job and form your studio! Forming a studio seems complicated, with a lot of stuff to do. (Find people, develop, market + publish, pay people, business development, HR and retention, legal.) Think of this like a strategy game: people are troops, development is time, payment is wood, HR is barracks, legal is walls, etc.

When you leave a big company, you’re risky, it’s hard to get money. There are lots of sources of money; and money needs you as much as you need money. You can get money either with a business plan or a product pitch; he went with the latter. He needed to put the tiger on the table: make a prototype! But an alcoholic father would freak out investors, so he needed to work on metaphors. (Metaphors are especially important in the North American market, he says.)

So: his alcoholic father becomes a monster addicted to frogs. Partners loved the product: got their wallet and brains. Also, there’s a fund in Canada that can help with independent art works, so asked them, too. And some from publishers. Getting money from multiple sources spreads the risk; it’s a useful technique from movies.

Games are good at fear, ecstasy, rage; movies are good at love, grief. Love and grief depend on empathy; games suck at empathy.

(And here I drifted off…)

The talks I attended on Thursday; all were good, but the Walking Dead one was particularly enlightening.

• 10:00am: Our Games, Our People, Our Community: What Do We Owe Each Other?, Dustin Clingman
• 11:30am: Saving Doug: Empathy, Character, and Choice in The Walking Dead, Jake Rodkin and Sean Vanaman
• 2:30pm: Sex in Video Games, David Gaider
• 4:00pm: Designing Journey, Jenova Chen

10:00am: Our Games, Our People, Our Community: What Do We Owe Each Other?, Dustin Clingman

10 people in the audience as the talk kicks off.

This talk is the result of a conversation with himself. (He tends to win most of those arguments!) And it’s the result of years of frustration and disappointment within the industry.

We join our story after a crazy couple of years. Established franchises aren’t doing well, over a hundred studios have been shuttered in the last five years, social gaming didn’t turn out so well, piracy, etc. And there’s new hotness on the horizon. But of course this is all part of a cycle, we’ve seen this before.

And a big part of this cycle involves mistreatment. (I didn’t copy down the examples, but he had good ones.) So: why is this a cycle? Because the developers remain, we persist, we’ll ALWAYS be here, we ALWAYS TAKE IT. (Caps in the original.)

Aspects of this are like the worst relationship you can imagine. You always tell yourself that you’ll leave, but you don’t. Because when it’s great, it’s great, but the awful keeps on coming back.

Thinking about this more: the common thread in all of this is himself. What can he do to extract himself from these loops? Where to begin? He saw two paths: a personal/cultural path, and a community path.

Personal/Cultural:

Game developers come out of nerd culture, which is a fringe culture. This, in turn, leads to an abdication of responsibility: bad stuff is happening, but it’s not our fault, it’s stuff that other things are doing to us. In other words, blame culture: you’re part of a large organization, but you don’t feel obligated to do anything, instead you suffer and go along with it.

You might go along with it while loudly complaining, pointing out the dysfunctions around you. But that’s still blame culture, that’s abdicating responsibility. (Hmm, I wonder if Dustin is familiar with Christopher Avery’s way of thinking? I asked him about that afterwards, and the answer is no.) So: don’t use “it’s my job” as an excuse for going along with something bad. It’s unhealthy, and you’ll burn out after a few years anyways if you do. If things are so bad, don’t bitch and moan, do something about it. (Which quite possibly involves “go fucking find another job”.)

Triple Town / Yeti Town cloning example. This is bad for so many reasons. But also: what are they saying about you when asking you to clone a game? They’re showing a complete lack of respect for your own creative abilities. And it’s well below any reasonable ethical threshold.

Work against passive aggression. Where did we forget that being honest is actually something that we can do? One of the rules of his studio that you don’t talk about people that aren’t there: that tamps down on passive aggression, and leads to developing a skillset that lets you be honest without being an asshole.

Community:

There is a determinedly irresponsible perspective of game developers about their role in the community. We need to stop waiting for someone else to stand up for us. The ESA does not represent developers. We are not as protected in the US as we might think. Are we going to be the next medium to be smooshed into a box, to be forced to be plain vanilla? Stop being a punching bag, blamed for society’s ills.

What can you do? Be vigilant on the local laws that impact your area. Go on record at public meetings to discuss the benefits of games to entertainment and education. Don’t expect someone else to do it. And also: understand how the game is played. It’s not fair that money and connections influence politics, but wishing won’t make that go away. Get involved in local school; mentor; donate to charities.

And leave things better than they were when you found them. Organize: creative people are not necessarily good business people, you need to work together. Yay unions; would an organized labor union work in this industry? (The IGDA is a trade organization, it’s not a union.)

Founding a union is not easy: you’ll be blacklisted, you’ll be pushed away, you’ll be made to feel like you’ll never work in the industry again. Up above, he said: if you’re asked to clone a game, you should quit. Are these costs worth it? Also, are game developer attitudes compatible with union bureaucracy? He doesn’t know if we can do this, but it’s a question worth asking.

The game you’re working on might be your last game. Who takes care of people who have been driven out? (E.g. by health issues, carpal tunnel.) Should we?

Nothing is normal right now. For a few years, it has felt like something is wrong, but he’s excited: we’re about to reinvent ourselves in a very serious way. So let’s do that in a thoughtful way, and leave the industry in better shape than we found it.

(Audience question about young game developers who already feel shut out. Dustin says: maybe the indie game movement is a union, of sorts.)

11:30am: Saving Doug: Empathy, Character, and Choice in The Walking Dead, Jake Rodkin and Sean Vanaman

The Walking Dead is an adventure game, but one that focuses on dialogue and choices, not on inventory-style puzzles. (The inventory-style puzzles are some of the easiest in the studio’s history.) They took a lot of the traditional game elements out; what’s left? In The Walking Dead, game design is character design.

How do you play a story? Here, character and story are the actual game. Are games at a disadvantage here compared to movies?

A question that motivated The Walking Dead: what does a person do with the time they have? This led to lots of choices. And, to make the choices matter, the game never gives you qualitative feedback about your choices: no light/dark meter, etc. “The game players played in their heads was more dynamic than any system we could have built.”

In most games, you poke at the game, to see what effect your actions have. The Walking Dead has a much more limited set of systems, so it ends up flipping this around: the game pokes you.

Proaction versus Reaction. Minecraft is an example of the former: the player has access to a huge toolbox that lets the player make stories happen. (And who the characters are is almost irrelevant.) Spec Ops is an example of the latter: you have a predefined story that happens to you. The Walking Dead is also on the reactive end of the spectrum; to help players react, context is important. What is happening, whom is it happening to?

What is happening?

They needed to give people time to absorb the context. So they left a lot of space before the important choices happen. This took a while to learn: in particular, more branching choices does not equal more meaningful choices. In an initial version of Episode 2, they had tons of choices in the first half of the story. But it didn’t work with The Walking Dead: all of those choices meant that the meaning actually fell away. Instead, what’s important is spending enough time with the world and characters until you feel that you know them well; only then do you add choices into the mix.

They prioritize emotional outcomes over victory states. And players generate their own meaning and their own emotional goals. There’s a context / reflection loop going on here.

They knew they wanted a big choice in the first episode; having somebody die seemed like a good candidate for that. So: Doug and Carley. You meet them in the drugstore; the idea was to get to know them both as people, and then be forced to choose. Carley is a very competent journalist; good with guns, but she also knows stuff, in particular Lee’s back story. Doug is a web developer, more of a tinkerer type, who had already saved Carley.

You work with both of them: with Carley to go to the lodge on a rescue mission, with Doug to get keys to break into the pharmacy. So you get to know both of them. But what turns out is: 75% of people saved Carley, and this felt off-kilter.

On surface: Carley is an attractive girl with a gun, while Doug is a dorky guy who knows controls to remote controls? This seems like a pretty obvious choice.

Going in deeper, though: they’re both people. As developers, they liked both of those characters as people. Maybe that didn’t come out?

When you first meet Carley, she risks her life to say a boy. Later on, she tells you she knows your secret and will keep quiet. And the two of you talk about keeping a child alive in an apocalypse. Also, she has your back in a mission; at the end of that mission, you share a horrific experience (the woman in the motel who was bitten and wants to kill herself), and talk about its effect on both of you.

Doug, in contrast, is a passive observer during the initial rescue of you and your friends. Then you make a plan to get the keys; but it’s predicated on you passively lying to Doug, because otherwise he’d know you’re a murderer. And there’s very little shared context with Doug beyond that.

So, regardless of the details between the two, there are many fewer opportunities for context building with Doug; given that, players will naturally gravitate towards Carley. The experiences the player has with other characters in the story is what shapes the choices they make.

Who is it happening to?

Who is our player character? A blank canvas, they needed to put some stakes in the ground. Not the camp leader: that nullifies too much of the potential tension. (You’d be making decisions instead of asking why a decision is correct.) He’s old enough to want a family but not have one. (They weren’t prepared as designers to make you care about a pre-existing family in a way that a parent would.) He’s physically able but not imposing. And he has a difficult past the player could build their own relationship with. Someone you root for, but who has major personal flaws.

Lee’s race is not on that list of attributes. It’s informed by the social facts of the region they’re in, though. White is the default choice for video game characters; that creates a context, and they needed to figure out what they wanted to do with that context. Also, because of the number of mechanics that they stripped out, everything about the context has outsized weight. (A phrase they use when thinking about new characters: “what rocks do they have in their backpack?”)

With Clementine, you pick up a fair amount of context before really meeting her. The treehouse, her family’s house, the fact that she was staying with a babysitter.

A basic question that she helps with is: why don’t you leave this group of assholes? Because, without Clementine, it might be a lot more natural for Lee to want to leave the group. But with Clementine there, staying with the group seems more natural.

In general, being around tense/annoying people is stressful. So they needed a way to manage that in a way that helped the player to stick with the game. Their main tool was empathy: helping you feel other people’s experience at a conscious and subconscious level. So they needed to build empathy, even towards people who are acting like assholes at a given moment.

E.g. Larry. He never says a nice thing about Lee in the game; most players did not like him at all. Players don’t really end up empathizing with him too strongly, but at least they can see Larry and Lilly’s relationship as a mirror of Lee’s and Clementine’s.

Players get frustrated with the nature of their relationship with Larry (there are no good solutions for players in the game, really), but this doesn’t get frustrated with their progress towards game goals.

Graph of food: 42% of people feed Larry, which is fourth on the list, behind the two kids (96% and 95%) and Mark (58%, a new character in episode 2). So people are more likely to feed Larry than any adult you knew from episode 1.

The job of the game: empower as many different player stories as possible. Lee can’t decide to negate the player’s story, though re-examination and re-articulation is okay.

If games can expand how we feel about other people and do good business, that could mean something pretty special to us as an industry.

2:30pm: Sex in Video Games, David Gaider

He’s actually not talking about sex: he’s talking about how BioWare, in its approach to romance, has had to approach questions of sex and sexuality. They first approached romance in Baldur’s Gate 2 – at the time the idea of romancing your party members and embedding that into the plot was new. (He wrote three of the four romanceable characters.) Only one of the four romanceable characters was male; female players complained that this was unfair.

At the time, he thought that those complaints were unreasonable – romance options are expensive to implement, they didn’t think they had many female players. Still, he had that in mind. For their next game, Neverwinter Nights, he’d gotten tagged as the romance guy; he wanted to write a male romanceable character, but wasn’t sure how to do that best. He went to one forum that was home to many female BioWare fans; by Knights of the Old Republic, Carth was relatively successful, and BioWare was known for their romances.

Jade Empire had a same-sex romance (and apparently there was one hinted at in KotOR, I didn’t catch the details?); he didn’t work on that game, but his next game, Dragon Age: Origins, had four romance options, two of whom could be romanced by players of either gender, and included the first BioWare sex scene between two men.

For Dragon Age 2, all four romance options could be romanced by either gender. After all, why not? Each romance option was relatively expensive (lots of dialogue), but once you’ve gone to that expense, having the option romanceable by either gender is cheap. There was a surprising number of people who were bothered by this, but also a lot of people who greatly appreciated this.

So that’s where we are: BioWare has sex in its games, they’re not the only company who does that. What’s the problem?

Well, people who don’t play games think: games are for children. And, sadly, the industry itself thinks that games are for men ages 18-25, or maybe a bit lower. Both of those are very out of date: these days, the gender split is close to 50-50, and the average age is 30. You can hypothesize that the older, female players are playing “casual” games; in Dragon Age, their metrics suggest that 30% of the players are female, and that, depending on the character, up to 24% of the romances are same-sex.

One reaction to this: great! Lots of women playing games, lots of women playing our games, we don’t have do to anything! But development costs keep on rising, so we need more and more sales. Is there an untapped market out there? Quite possibly: the industry isn’t actively trying to appeal to large swathes of the market; women, adults, minorities still play, but maybe they’d play more.

Sexy may be good; but sexy isn’t the same as sexualized. And there’s a lot of bad sexualization out there. BioWare isn’t immune to this: you can make a good argument for Isabella being positive sexuality, but even there there’s room for both sides, and moving over to Mass Effect, Miranda’s ass shows up in ways that aren’t so defensible.

And, honestly, what the “right” answer is isn’t the point: we’re coming under increased scrutiny, we’re a maturing industry, and people are going to form opinions about us based on what we see.

So why isn’t this a bigger deal? One claim you hear: “This is what sells.” Which conflicts with the earlier desire to appeal to untapped markets; but conventional marketing wisdom is that proven techniques are what matters. But there are so few big-label titles out there with female protagonists, and no clear bar to overcome here. And conventional industry wisdom has been wrong over and over again.

Conventional wisdom is a manifestation of privilege. If you’re part of a group that has always been catered to, then this catering is fine and is unnoticed. For people outside that group, though, it’s not so great.

And when some people see their privilege exposed, they get really annoyed. Because some straight male fans really didn’t like it that Anders made a mild pass at their characters. They still have the same number of romance options, but the fact that other people now got as many romance options as straight men really bothered them. And those fans aren’t alone: see the abuse that Anita Sarkeesian had to put up with. The game industry is complicit in this.

So what is he suggesting we do about it? As a first step, don’t even worry about attracting women: worry about not actively repelling women. And worry about the influence you currently have: the game industry’s choices has an effect on how people think.

Ask yourself: could this character be female, black, gay? If they already are, how are you using them: are they awesome on their own, or are they there only for the male fan, to forward a male-centric plot?

If you don’t know how to make female characters awesome, or just not male-centric, then ask for help. Maybe through consultants, but also hire people with different backgrounds on your team, and listen to what they say! The Dragon Age writing team is majority female; even so, the men on the team have blind spots. He brought up a specific example from a discussion among their writing team, of content that was offensive in a way that wasn’t intended by the person who wrote it; offense by itself isn’t inherently bad, but if you’re going to do that, do it intentionally, for an artistic purpose.

Different viewpoints on a team are an asset. When you’re hiring, assets are what you want; this is one to keep in mind.

4:00pm: Designing Journey, Jenova Chen

What parts of the emotional palette do games explore? Early games, arcade-style, explored achievement. Then games for teenagers explored empowerment: sports, action, shooting, driving. More recent games: social aspects: Sims, Wii Sports, Rock Band.

In college, he played a lot of World of Warcraft. But players he encountered on it were interested in different things from him, so that made him feel lonelier. He wanted a game without violence, and where everybody is the same (no distinctions of age, gender).

A vision of standing next to somebody on a bridge, overlooking a waterfall. Another vision of standing quietly with people in a snowy field, with colossal figures walking around, trying to avoid their attention. (He’d just finished playing Shadow of the Colossus.)

They formed thatgamecompany, with Sony’s help, and made Flow and Flower. He felt it was time to try online gaming now. Social games were on the scene, but they were about numbers going up, more like arcade games than his social vision.

He met many astronauts; they felt that being on the moon makes you mystical. On the moon, there’s nothing, and the earth is so small that you can cover it up with your thumb. So: why are we here?

These days, they’re so much we can do, we’re so empowered. And games reflect this concern with empowerment. So, if in a game, you have power, then rather than being about survival or connection, the game is about power. (In Left 4 Dead, he only feels a connection when somebody is patching him up.)

So: reverse the relation between the player and the world. Make the player less powerful, the monster more powerful. Or, in multiplayer, make the other player more powerful, more important to you, the monster and world less important. (I missed some of the argument here, so some of the above is probably wrong.)

How can we keep the focus on other people? Get rid of noise; get rid of weapons. So that’s like in a lobby waiting around. To heighten the focus shrink down to two people, in a hazardous environment: if you’re in a desert, a lone person on the horizon is very interesting to you.

That’s the emotion he’s trying to evoke; how do we get there? There aren’t a lot of example to look at, after all.

So prototype; they started with music. He showed a concept trailer they made four months in; the music is there.

But there were problem; the trailer is the only thing that worked well! He showed a rope-based prototype; it only worked in multiplayer, though. Also, their 2D prototypes ended up not translating to 3D – e.g. a 2D prototype that depended on trails and on strategic movement/collaboration didn’t work nearly as well with 3D cameras.

They think of graphics as gameplay. The distance of the mountain posed a problem with that; so they added trails and dunes for local variations, and then sliding down dunes to make that traversal more fun.

How will the mechanics of setting up multiplayer work? Usernames take you out of the world. Voice chat adds its own set of problems. Sony recommended friend invites; but playing with friends whom you can’t chat with is frustrating, while allowing chat interferes with the integrity of the game. So: no friend invites, and usernames only show up in the list at the end.

They also experimented with four-player groups; but that set up 2 vs 2 and 3 vs 1 narratives. (A single player who wanted to explore slowly caused particular problems.)

Flow for collaboration: too much me is alienation, too much we is conformity, flow is “coliberation”. Give the player a choice for how to navigate that; the result is Journey‘s seamless online lobbies. The first few people you match up with might not work, but eventually you’ll find somebody who is a good fit, and you’ll have a stronger connection.

What about resource consumption? At first, they had the player taking resources, but dropping the ones they’ve used behind them. Psychologically, this feels like somebody else taking advantage of you: stalking behind you, picking up your stuff. So, to eliminate this problem, they got rid of possession: infinite resources, everybody can pick up from that pool, but limited pocket size.

The next question is physics. They wanted to let people help each other; but the physics necessary for that had darker uses. (“For quite a while, I was disappointed by humanity.”) Morality doesn’t carry over to game worlds, and players want feedback: killing somebody gives much stronger feedback than helping them over a rock. So eventually they gave up on collision, but standing next to the other player gives them money. That removes feedback for trying to harm people, increases feedback for being together and helping.

Once the mechanics are figured out, the next step is: pushing for catharsis. For Journey, they’re pushing for feelings of awe and mystery; he read some Joseph Campbell to give him ideas about how to heighten this. He liked this, so he created areas that mapped to Campbell’s monomyth.

When working with musicians or visual artists, it’s easy to talk about emotions like sadness; but we don’t have experience mapping that to mechanics. At the end of the first year, they actually had the world mapped out, but the emotions were flat.

By the end of the second year, it was working a lot better: they thought they were matching the emotion curve pretty well. But playtesters didn’t like it, they said the game was bad. In particular, they didn’t like the end, and recommended cutting it. (That’s where the emotion curve didn’t match what was desired.) There was one interesting experience, though: a game crashed, the playtester didn’t realize what was going on, and spent a couple of minutes staring at a white screen figuring out what was going on.

So they worked on the last level, to heighten the effect there. There’s a wind requiring struggling, the scarf can freeze, monsters seek you out and can crush structures. They added a rest area, a fortress wind area, and the walk of death; the player’s movement slows down more and more there. (Finding the right length for that walk was a challenge.)

And then the summit: you have to make it much more exhilarating. Initially, the final area looked great but was on rails; they opened that up a lot more, and added a surfing area to make it more fun. The final area was very free; even at the end, walking into the light is your choice.

At the end of the third year, three out of twenty-five playtesters had tears in their eyes. That’s a success. (Playtesting for emotion, not just usability, is crucial, but you don’t get it until the very end.)

He was nervous about the launch. But in the forum, he saw people thanking and apologizing to each other; he couldn’t imagine a Call of Duty player doing that, but it’s the same person!

Fan art reflects the most intense emotion: he saw drawing hearts at the end of the game, the joy of surfing, the fear of being hunted, and struggling together through the snow. And the fan mail: they knew they’d changed peoples lives for the better.

My notes for the Wednesday GDC 2013 sessions:

• Ideas per Second: How Double Fine Optimizes for Human Performance, Nathan Martz
• Empowering the Player in a Story-Rich World: Co-Directing Dishonored, Harvey Smith and Raphael Colantonio
• #1ReasonToBe, Brenda Romero, Robin Hunicke, Elizabeth Sampat, Mattie Brice, Leigh Alexander, and Kim McAuliffe
• Strange Love: Game Theory vs. Game Design, Frank Lantz

11:00am: Ideas per Second: How Double Fine Optimizes for Human Performance, Nathan Martz

This is probably the talk that I’m going to this year that will be the most relevant to my day job. Seems like good advice, though I’m not sure there’s anything here that was much of a revelation to me.

He says agility is important, where by ‘agility’ he means: exploring the ideas you care about as quickly as possible, and the ability to change quickly when things don’t work out.

Double Fine went from producing 2-3 hours of gameplay a year (during the years when Psychonauts and Brutal Legend were in development) to 16.

Goal of the talk: discuss simple, practical ways to explore the ideas you care about more effectively and more sustainably.

The Team:

A formative experience for him: being part of a dysfunctional programming team, where that dysfunction showed up every day, every meeting. Their fundamental (mistaken) belief was that there’s One True Way to write software.

A good team is: any team that works well together. How do we do that?

• Unifying vision

• Hiring is the most important decision you’ll ever make

Never hire unless you’re really confident that they’re the right person. (Double Fine believes in long-term “career hires”.) Don’t hire jerks. Candidates interview with the entire department, plus a cross-section of related disciplines, and Tim. Group discussion after the interview.

Personal(ized) interviews: equal parts fit and ability. Ask about problems, not puzzles. Tailor the interview to the candidate. Questions should demonstrate the intelligence of the applicant, not the interviewer.

Scaling for larger orgs: meet with entire (sub)team; schedule cross-functional interviews; discuss afterwards as a group. And provide a basic level of interview training.

• Code ownership

Very powerful; very dangerous. Leads to pride of ownership and continuity of vision; downsides are territoriality, needless drama, and concentrating risk.

To get pride without selfishness, think of the codebase as a communal garden. It belongs to everyone, but most people focus on a few plots they like. And ask before digging up something you didn’t plant.

• Architecture and improv

It’s always hard to know when to go big or keep it simple. The goal should always be the simplest software that solves the problem. A heuristic they use: go for big plans when you have clearly defined goals, but iterate and keep it simple when you don’t.

The Technology:

Their codebase optimizes for human productivity. So how can we make everyone more effective?

Focus on the interesting problems. Iterate as quickly as possible. Leverage your past investments.

For their native (C++) toolbox, they’ve invested in: templatized containers; a reflection/introspections system; componentized entities; a task/threading framework; multiplatform abstraction; an aggressive focus on physical dependencies.

Their main approach to memory and dynamic allocation: don’t let allocation stop iteration. (They are “memory libertines”.) They only optimize reactively, in areas that prove to be performance/memory bottlenecks (and they do have stricter standards for low-level systems); don’t be so cavalier that you crash, but don’t worry too much in advance. Also, the majority of memory in games is used by assets, not the engine.

They rely a lot on dynamic languages: Lua for gameplay, Python for tools and build system. Finding the right balance is tricky: Psychonauts was 70% Lua, which turned out to be too much for that game (partly because that was their first game, so less good tooling). Brutal Legend was 10% Lua, that was too far in the other direction. Modern games in their Buddha engine: 10% – 25% Lua; in their Moai engine, 50% Lua.

They learned a lot from Moai/Lua: C++ code is services for Lua. Make it easy to move code back and forth. Co-routines are very important, as are debugging tools.

Continuous integration, yay. Which requires a good build infrastructure; that’s been one of their best investments, and has been critical for multi-project development.

Tools are also important in content development; a constant struggle to do them well. Investments are precious; make them count. Put them in game whenever possible. Make them everyone’s responsibility.

(Later, in response to an audience question, he said that hot reloading of assets was very important for them when iterating.)

Middleware: they can be a huge accelerator, but they can end up owning you. So: know your core competencies; and check out open source libraries.

Reap what you sow. Software is electronic knowledge; throwing away software is throwing away knowledge. In particular, stick with a common set of frameworks/languages, don’t chase the flavor of the year.

Sustainability:

This is vitally important. We want to build great organizations with repeatable successes; we want lifelong careers, we want to like our jobs. (And if we’re managers, we want our employees to like theirs!)

Double Fine made big mistakes with this when developing Psychonauts. (During the peak of its crunch, almost 40% of the code was checked in between 8pm and 8am.) Significantly better since then, even as they’re doing more checkins in total.

What does “sustainable” mean? From a personal level: I can do this job my entire life, even with kids, without living at work. And from a company: I can stay in business indefinitely, remaining profitable while preserving your core values.

To do this: prioritize focus and intensity, not hours. Overtime must be elective. Let individuals contribute in ways and at times that make sense for them. Use overtime to take the game from great to exceptional.

Think about the bus factor. This is a major cause of stress for everybody: for the manager, but also for individual contributors. So prioritize generalists over specialists: you don’t want concentrated knowledge. And document and disseminate your knowledge. (Hire people who like each other!)

Play the whole team. Don’t lean on the same high performers for everything. (This is hard, because high performers volunteer too often.) Force yourself to find opportunities for other people to contribute.

2:00pm: Empowering the Player in a Story-Rich World: Co-Directing Dishonored, Harvey Smith and Raphael Colantonio

I haven’t played Dishonored, but they seemed to be thinking interesting things from a systems point of view, so I figured I’d give the talk a try. And I enjoyed it, and now I’m a bit more likely to play Dishonored.

Here are the speakers’ slides.

They want to enable player improvisation in a story-rich environment: balance player creativity versus narrative constraints. Guide/attract instead of dictating the player’s path. Pull-based narrative.

General Purpose Systems:

Entities influence each other though an input/output system. E.g. a grenade puts out a certain kind of damage, and a door listens for a certain kind of damage, so if a grenade happens to land near a door, the door will blow open. So game mechanics listen to each other. Or arrows send a “pierce” stimulus, candles send a “fire” stimulus, fire arrows send both, and different objects (guards, barrels, oil barrels, oil slicks) respond to one or both of those stimuli.

Downsides: sometimes there are non-dramatic moments; players are responsible for creating fun, but can instead get lost. You need enough entities with relationships, and you can get bugs.

Process:

1. Plan general purpose rules
2. Implement
3. Play for a while
4. Add specific rules

Take note of 3: let systems live together for a while even if they feel unfinished. Specific rules might support interesting interactions (“possession fall”) or fix bugs (“wall of light” exploit – wall of light killing 1 NPC following you is okay, but killing 10 following you doesn’t make sense).

Avoid excessive map markup: e.g. don’t mark climbable walls explicitly, instead have the game figure that out dynamically. And design entities with multiple input/output relationships: rat swarm + guards, corpses, possession, rat tunnels, escape combat.

The Play-Path Matrix:

Multiple gameplay tools / approaches, complemented by multiple adjacent pathways. So, the player can choose: which tool to use, the tactical approach, how to interpret it morally, and the pathway to take. That lets them own more of the experience.

Support key play styles everywhere; do it consistently but not predictably. Also, randomize the goals / mission objectives: not only does this help replay, it means that level designers can’t overscript. Feels more dynamic, not like a “Jerry Bruckheimer moment”. And leave space for player-driven goals, too: e.g. where on the stealth/slaughter continuum you want to fall, the pace of play, the story/action balance. (The “Heart” tool helps giving access to optional story and goals.)

3:30pm: #1ReasonToBe, Brenda Romero, Robin Hunicke, Elizabeth Sampat, Mattie Brice, Leigh Alexander, and Kim McAuliffe

Update: This is available to watch for free in the GDC Vault.

This panel was stunning, a real emotional gut-punch. My notes here are awful: it really didn’t lend itself to good note taking. But this session by itself may be enough to get me to want to come to GDC again next year.

Robin Hunicke:

A curious kid who did lots of things when growing up; didn’t want to choose one of them in college. Did an interdisciplinary major involving too many categories for me to type here; still had no idea what to do when she graduated. So: grad school! (In AI.) Started considering being a game designer.

Joined EA in 2005 (Sims 2, MySims, Boom Blox), then Journey.

Cab driver calling her the hottest nerd he’d ever seen. Which she is tired of: she’s a curious person, but doesn’t want to be a curiosity.

Embrace the global reach that we (games) have, create a global community. Either actively work to broaden our community or you’re in the way.

Evangelize; and don’t just talk about juggernauts. Consider building a game yourself, maybe start with something small about a personal experience you’ve had.

Leigh Alexander:

She’s in the media: relatively big megaphone and high visibility. Something about gamer culture. Empathy hard to learn, but important.

Even people who aren’t jerks don’t always understand the point of feminism. Sexist jerks don’t exist in a vacuum; and they don’t think they themselves are sexist jerks, either. So we need to keep up conversations. Not about policing sex and appearance but … (I missed details here).

In her work: practice what she wants to see in others. Try not to always be on a soapbox: take feedback from others, learn how to help them.

(too much good stuff going past too fast with bad audio quality…) (Great bit about tone policing.)

Kim McAuliffe:

Backstory. Then things that bother her:

“What about female players?” Sims 2 DS: female players had many fewer desirable flirting options than male players did.

Being the “girl game designer”.

Imposter complex. Felt uncomfortable working on games where you shoot other humans. Wanted to work on areas outside of what is currently labeled as “core”. Minecraft helped a lot: the gaming audience is a lot more diverse than we think it is.

Positive experiences: her most recent game, Kinect Nat Geo TV, is her favorite. Not a conventional game; traveled to lots of places (“exotic Montana”) to film; actors, animals. But, most exciting, watching kids play it for the first time.

Looking forward: the assumption that players are male makes female players feel like they’re on the fringes, and makes female developers feel like that. But they’re not, they’re part of the core. Make girls expected as players: then they’ll naturally grow up to be part of the industry.

Elizabeth Sampat:

Back story: wrote huge amounts of SEO spam for almost no money while writing pencil-and-paper RPGs in her spare time. Then moved into digital games.

Ridiculous, contradictory, sexist expectations presented in advice articles. (Very funny rant here, I won’t pretend to do it justice.)

The costs of assertiveness: men telling you to fight back don’t see the backlash, the hate mail, the death threats, the shunning.

She could make it in here, but she’s “kind of fucking crazy”.

If women who love game haven’t made a game, it’s probably because it’s never occurred to them. Invite them.

Mattie Brice:

Back story. Then: systems! “Life is a game”; so what are the rules? Assumptions about who gamers are, what a game is, what games writing is mediate our experiences. Non-gamers react in a much more open/inspired/affected manner to Mainichi than gamers did – the latter generally just saw how it didn’t fit into their expectations.

(Imagine how different our industry would be if every shooter were replaced by a Sims spinoff.)

Vision: be adamantly inclusive. Remove traditional gamekeepers. Be an ally.

Brenda Romero:

Got into the industry while smoking a cigarette in a high school bathroom. Wow.

E3: way too many booth babes. Felt like walking through a construction site. Went to GDC dressed in “the closest thing to a burqa” she has. Thought: “Why am I doing this? I founded this fucking industry.” Behavior she experienced at E3 would be sexual harassment in any other industry.

(Lovely male eye candy slides.)

E3 has refused to change their policy despite public complaints.

(Making me cry again. This time with something about her daughter.)

5:00pm: Strange Love: Game Theory vs. Game Design, Frank Lantz

This talk was full of pleasant enough math stuff, but not really for me as it turned out.

By “game theory”, he means the branch of mathematics. Not that useful in the day-to-day work of most game designers. So not a lot of overlap between the two fields on the surface, but he thinks there’s something interesting behind the scenes.

Game theory: the mathematical analysis of situations where multiple parties are making choices, and the outcome of those choices is dependent on the choices made by the other parties. E.g. picking a costume at a party: how striking yours is depends on what costumes other people choose.

Simple example: cutting a cake with two players, one person cuts, one person chooses. For the chooser, the strategy is obvious: pick the larger piece. So the cutter can assume the chooser will take that strategy and act accordingly. In fact, every two-player zero sum game has a solution like this, the “minimax”. (Might be a mixed strategy, where you pick different options based on probability.)

Applied to economics, biology, foreign relations, philosophy, not always with zero-sum games. (E.g. chicken.) There, visibly limiting your options can improve your outcome: throwing your steering wheel out of the car means that you will win in chicken, because the other person will swerve. Seems to happen in international relations. Does it happen in biology? Are some irrational involuntary reactions actually rational responses to games?

Prisoner’s dilemma. Game theory experts: both defect. Game theory ignoramuses: both cooperate. So the ignoramuses get a better outcome; whoops.

It got more serious with nuclear weapons: John von Neumann and Bertrand Russell thought that we should nuke Russia before they would nuke us. RAND came up with a different solution; maybe setting up Mutually Assured Destruction was the right approach? (“Maybe poker saved the world.”)

You get different solutions if you assume that you’re iterating a game. So Axelrod set up “iterated prisoner’s dilemma” tournaments. The most successful was “tit for tat”: cooperate in first round, then imitate your opponent after that. Though recently, Press + Dyson discovered a larger family of strategies that tit for tat fits into that lets you set your opponent’s payoff. The only solution to that is to always defect; but to do that, you need to recognize that your opponent is behaving in an extortionate fashion.

That starts leading towards a theory of mind – you need to model and recognize something about your opponent’s approach.

Applications to Game Design:

Legacy: this branch of math/science arose out of thinking about poker. Probability, computations, information theory also all have their roots in the study of games.

Formal analysis: in multiplayer competitive games, try to avoid allowing dominated strategies into your games, strategies that are strictly worse than other strategies in all contexts. Moving beyond that, there are questions of greed and negotiation that appear in both fields.

Inspiration: game theory has a lot of games that are thought experiments, maybe we can bring them over. Paradoxes give examples of scenarios that are simple but not trivial.

Reconciliation: explore the relationship between different aspects of game design that are traditionally seen as opposed.

Final thought: The rational is not incompatible with the sublime.

Here’s my best guess at my GDC 2013 schedule; I’m sure I’ll end up at some talks not on the list (am I really going to skip the microtalks this year?), but it’s a start. In general, I’m pretty free for lunches and dinners, so get in touch or grab me at the conference if you want to get together.

Wednesday

• 11:00am: Ideas per Second: How Double Fine Optimizes for Human Performance, Nathan Martz
• Lunch: Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Ferelden, Heidi McDonald (poster)
• 2:00pm: Empowering the Player in a Story-Rich World: Co-Directing Dishonored, Harvey Smith and Raphael Colantonio
• 3:30pm: #1ReasonToBe, Brenda Romero, Robin Hunicke, Elizabeth Sampat, Mattie Brice, Leigh Alexander, and Kim McAuliffe
• 5:00pm: Strange Love: Game Theory vs. Game Design, Frank Lantz

Thursday

• 10:00am: Our Games, Our People, Our Community: What Do We Owe Each Other?, Dustin Clingman
• 11:30am: Saving Doug: Empathy, Character, and Choice in The Walking Dead, Jake Rodkin and Sean Vanaman
• 2:30pm: Sex in Video Games, David Gaider
• 4:00pm: Designing Journey, Jenova Chen
• 5:30pm (30 minutes): Why Virtual Reality Is Hard (And Where It Might Be Going), Michael Abrash

Friday

• 10:00am: Turning Comedy of Manners into Gameplay: Versu Postmortem, Emily Short
• 11:30am: Mad as Hell: Hothead Developers Rant Back, Anna Anthropy, Naomi Clark, Jason Della Rocca, Mitu Khandaker, Anna Marsh, Margaret Robertson, Kellee Santiago, Karen Sideman, Eric Zimmerman
• 2:30pm: Rethinking How We Build Games and Why: The Papo & Yo Story, Vander Caballero
• And then stop by the second half of the Experimental Gameplay Workshop

On a couple of instances, most recently on his thousandth blog post, Jordan has brought up some advice that I gave him when he was starting his blog: that you should have low standards. Jordan phrased that advice more articulately than I did at the time, I’m sure:

What he meant: to blog you have to be willing to to write things that are inarticulate, or not fully-thought-through, or which still have pieces missing; otherwise blog entries (like some math papers!) end up languishing, invisible and unfinished, forever.

The funny thing is that I don’t actually remember giving this advice, and if one were to ask me today what the secret is to writing a blog that sticks around for a while, that probably isn’t the first thing that would come to my mind! Though I do still think that low standards are a good idea: the fact that Jordan’s blog has been going on for almost six years and has over a thousand posts gives anecdotal empirical support for that claim (not that Jordan’s blog isn’t wonderful, but if he has found the advice useful, I’m not going to argue with him), and this very post is evidence that my own standards continue to remain low.

Still, if that isn’t the first answer that I would give, what answer would I give? First, I will freely admit: there is absolutely no reason why anybody should want a blog like mine. This blog is extremely self-absorbed and doesn’t have particularly high readership (high in volume, that is, my readership is wonderfully high in quality), it really exists largely to get ideas out of my head so I can start thinking about something else. But if you, too, are in the situation of wanting to get ideas out of your head and onto a blog, then this is my best guess as to what has been helpful in allowing me to continue to do that:

Develop at least one trigger that will cause you to write a blog post.

For me, the trigger is: every time I finish a video game that isn’t a short flash game, I write a blog post about it. I don’t write the blog post before I start the next game—I frequently need a little bit of time to come to terms with the game, and I usually start playing my next game while that happens—but I definitely avoid starting a new game if I have two games that I’ve finished that I haven’t blogged about. Games aren’t, of course, the only thing I blog about, but they serve a useful role by regularly leading to content here.

From a queuing theory / networking theory point of view, this is a backpressure mechanism, and it leads to:

Don’t let too many blog posts be floating around in your head at once.

There are usually two or three topics that I’m thinking about writing a blog post about: maybe something about a specific game, maybe something more general about games, maybe something about work (related to organization or programming), maybe something about how I run my own life, maybe something a little more random. (Once I’ve gotten this post finished, my list will consist of “Blog re aspiration in games” and “Blog re Grow Maze“.) Two blog posts that I’m thinking about is a good number, and three or even four is perfectly fine; but, for me, five is a bad number. So if the list gets too long, then I’ll write a blog post during the next evening when I have enough energy to write.

Don’t let a blog post float around in your head for too long.

If you have an idea for a blog post, then write that blog post. Not that day, not even necessarily that week, but that month. The longer blog posts sit in your head, the farther you get from the initial spark that motivated it: for me, at any rate, letting ideas bake will start hurting more than it helps after a couple of weeks, sometimes sooner. And even if a blog post never bakes fully, I find that I far prefer writing it in a half-baked form than either waiting indefinitely for it to bake or pretending that I’ve forgotten about it and moving on to other things. (When I do the latter, I find that my brain generally doesn’t move on to other things, with the result that I don’t blog at all until I’ve gotten that half-baked post out.)

Always have at least one blog post floating around in your head.

This is one of the harder rules here: what are you supposed to do if you don’t have anything to write about? And it’s true: I can’t just sit down at a computer and force inspiration upon myself. But what I’ve gotten a lot better at over the years is noticing when something about an idea catches my brain’s fancy: if that happens, onto the list it goes. (I actually do keep a real list, but a mental list is okay, too, as long as you keep it short and drain it regularly; I don’t usually write down details on my list, just topics, though I have a notebook for writing drafts on the extremely rare occasions when I feel that would be useful.) And then my brain will chip at it a little bit in the background, and I’ll be able to produce a blog post on it at some point soon.

Try to write at least one blog post a week.

This isn’t a hard-and-fast rule: if a week goes buy when I’m just too busy or nothing has quite come together, it’s not the end of the world. But if a week has gone by without me writing a blog post, it is at least a sign that I should ask myself what’s going on. Am I just too busy or too tired? Am I not listening enough to the ideas that are in my head? Am I letting a half-baked blog post block me? (It’s usually that last one.)

This recommendation is different from trying to keep on a regular schedule: some people recommend that, but I personally do not. Instead, it’s a diagnostic tool to detect inappropriate blockages and keep things moving.

Rereading the above, I’m coming too understand why Jordan went out of his way to point out the importance of low standards, because that’s really a prerequisite for all of those suggestions. Without low standards, it’s hard to develop a trigger for regularly writing about a topic: there are tons of games that I had nothing interesting to say about, but I wrote about them anyways because that’s what I do, and by doing that I improved my ability to occasionally find something interesting to say. Without low standards, more and more blog posts will float around in your head, because you won’t let enough of them escape. Without low standards, a blog post will float in your head for too long, because you’ll want to polish it too much or not accept that you’re unlikely to be able to polish it well. Without low standards, you’ll find yourself without any ideas floating around in your head, because you won’t pay attention to ideas that strike your fancy but that you don’t feel like you really have anything special to say about. And without low standards, you definitely won’t write at least one blog post a week, because I can guarantee that you have weeks where there’s nothing that you think of that you’re proud of.

With low standards, though, you just might find yourself looking back at your blog five or ten years later, a thousand posts later, and being glad that you’ve taken that journey.

The Experience Points folks suggested replaying Journey on the anniversary of its release; I did that, and I enjoyed the experience enough to return to it again a few days later.

Journey is a wonderful game for many reasons, of course, and its short length lends itself very well to this sort of return. I continued to enjoy just being in the world, I had some lovely interactions with my companions, and there’s something viscerally joyful about the experience of jumping and flying in that game. But it’s also a game that I’ve played few enough times to still be experiencing it in different ways each time I play.

Or maybe it’s that I’ve changed since the last time I played it: because while I love flying around in the game, I have a lot more appreciation for the simple act of walking than I used to. I did my first playthrough in a relatively normal fashion; for my second playthrough, though, I tried to avoid getting scarf segments (it turns out that the game will give you one little bit of scarf whether you try to get it or not), and I stayed on the ground whenever possible.

That isn’t something that I’ll necessary make a habit of in the future, but I’m glad I did it once. It felt more solitary: when other players came by, I would chirp at them a bit if they seemed like they wanted to be friendly, but I was also content to let them soar on away from me if that’s what they wanted. (Which they almost always did!) But it wasn’t solitary in a lonely way: it just turned the experience into something that was mostly about me and the environment; or about me and acceptance; or about introversion; or something. (Journey has never been the sort of game that projects a singular meaning, after all!) I didn’t stop and linger, I didn’t rush; I just kept on going.

Now I’m wondering what other experiences there are for me in the game. If I wanted a traditional gamey experience, I could finish my trophy collection. Alternatively, I could go out of my way to try to think about and stitch together the narratives that the game gives us. And I’m sure there are interactions with my companions that I could try to foster.

Who knows; I’m in no rush. I’ll come back next year; maybe I’ll try out one of those approaches, maybe the 2014 version of myself will have a new set of ideas that he wants to reflect upon with the game.

I am not into stealth games. In fact, before its recent resurrection, the only Vintage Game Club game that I didn’t finish was Thief. I was excited to play that game, but when it actually came down to it, the experience was just too much for me. Some of that has to do with personal issues that have nothing to do with the genre (let alone that specific game); but I also have personal issues that do hit at the genre. I don’t, in general, like waiting around in games (at least when I have a plan in mind); and I’m also extremely loathe to use limited resources. That latter meant that, rather than being creative about using water arrows (for example), I’d hope that a more straightforward plan involving sneaking and knocking out guards would work, and I’d spend a lot of time boring myself either waiting for guards to be in the right place or retrying.

So: my dislike is totally self-inflicted, my default assumption is still that Thief is a great game, and maybe I’ll even come back to it at some point in the future. But it wasn’t a great game for me then. And, in general, I’ve been staying away from the genre. Nonetheless, when Mark of the Ninja came out, I figured I had to play it given Nels Anderson‘s and Chris Dahlen‘s involvement.

And, actually, I was somewhat glad to have the excuse. For one thing, I don’t like writing off entire genres. For another thing, the game was quite well-received, including some amount of comments from people who enjoyed it even though they think of themselves as not liking stealth games. And, for a third thing, some of Nels’s comments in podcast interviews made me take notice (and my apologies for not including links to those podcasts: he was on a bunch, and I didn’t keep track of where he said what on them): I remember some interesting comments about 2D environments being more readable than 3D environments in a way that helped stealth gameplay (particularly relevant since the specific thing that pushed me over the edge on Thief was my failure to notice an aspect of an environment for something ridiculous like two hours), the explicitness of the information the game gives you seems like it would help in terms of making it more a game about playing around with systems than a game of trial-and-error retries, and it didn’t sound like it leaned too heavily on resource limitation. Plus, it’s an XBLA game, with the brevity that generally comes with that: it’s not like I gave up on Thief immediately, I went through several levels, and if that game had been more of an XBLA length, I probably would have finished it.

So I gave Mark of the Ninja a try. And I’m glad I did! Not only did I finish the game, but I was curious enough about the systems to want to dip into it again, so I started a New Game Plus, and ended up going through it a second time. I doubt I would have finished my second playthrough if it hadn’t been for some achievements that seemed in reach; but I’m happy enough to have finished the second playthrough, and as it turns out the game became the only Xbox 360 game that I’ve actually gotten all the achievements on. (Admittedly, that’s not much of an accomplishment: XBLA games have fewer achievements, and none of this game’s achievements are all that hard.)

I’m still not at all converted into a stealth game fan, but I think I have more of an appreciation for the genre now, and I certainly appreciate Mark of the Ninja for not getting into my way. Being in 2D doubtless helps read what’s going on, as does the clarity of detection radii and darkness and what-not; and checkpoints are frequent and restarts are fast. And many of your abilities are unlimited use; some aren’t, but the ammo limits for those are generous enough not to be too much of a problem, even for people with my psychological quirks. There were bits of the game that I liked that didn’t have much to do with the stealth gameplay, too, e.g. the puzzle rooms or the existence of the haiku.

And there is one aspect of stealth gameplay that I actively like, namely the concept of ghosting. I’m more and more tired of killing in games these days; so it’s nice to have games that are explicitly designed to allow you (or even reward you, assuming you care about points and the like) for not doing that. In fact, in a funny way, my only complaint is that they almost made that too easy: you get a teleport ability towards the end of the game that becomes available throughout the game on a replay, and doing that allows you to bypass a fair number of problems. (Not enough to make the game boring, though, don’t get me wrong.)

I tried to be good about exploring the systems in the game, since my understanding is that that’s a big part of what stealth game is about. Having said that, I didn’t go into the systems as deeply as I could have: on my replay, I generally played through each level twice, once in a straightforward way and once in a teleport-heavy ghost way. Maybe I should have experimented with more options; I’m actually not sure I did a full level in most of the “paths” that the game gives you. (I particularly wonder if I should go back and experiment more with the terror path, having frightened guards seems like it opened up interesting interactions.)

So, really, a somewhat tentative approach. And I’m not yet sold on stealth: I like the idea of exploring interactive systems in theory, but in practice there remain aspects of the genre that aren’t a good fit for me, so I’d rather spend my systems exploration time on, say, Android: Netrunner right now. (I’ll bring my decks to GDC if anybody is up for a game!) As to the aspects of the game other than its stealth nature: the game turned out to be a surprising outlier in that regard. In past years, I wouldn’t have thought twice about a game that’s full of violence and adolescent rebellion / daddy issues—that’s what video games are like, right?—but looking at the games I’ve played over the last year, I’ve been dialing down on that a lot recently, so seeing that in Mark of the Ninja was a little more jarring than I expected. But not in an actively unpleasant way; certainly I’m glad that I played Mark of the Ninja, for multiple reasons.

My guitar playing—my relationship to/with my guitar, really—has continued to change over the last few months. A lot of that is a steady drip of improvement, but my feelings towards bending strings have been a bit more of a state change.

Bending strings was probably the most significant technique that Rock Band 3 didn’t model but Rocksmith did: some of Rock Band 3‘s behavior made a lot more sense once I understood why what I was listening didn’t seem to match what I saw on screen. It took me a while to get used to bends in Rocksmith, too; part of that was that the guitar I was using at the time actively fought string bending, but I suspect that part of that is the novelty of the technique compared to other instruments I’d played. There’s nothing like it on a piano; it would perhaps be possible to some extent on a violin (though I’m not convinced that a violin’s strings could take the abuse), but, vibrato aside, it’s not something people actually do on a violin. And it’s not something I’d seen in other instruments I’ve dabbled with.

Rocksmith‘s modeling of the technique is surprisingly distant, too. They show you a sustained note, and tell you to bend it; they have a hidden requirement for a minimum amount to bend it, but they don’t actually show you what that minimum amount is, and they don’t care when in the sustained note you do your bending. This all combined to leave me in a quite uncertain state: I didn’t know how much to bend, I didn’t know when to bend, I didn’t really know how to bend, and I was afraid that I’d break the string if I went too far.

After a month or so, though I started to calm down: I got a guitar that wasn’t fighting me, and I got used to the idea that yes, moving strings sideways was a reasonable thing to do. So I got less and less shy about shoving the strings around; this helped me be more successful score-wise when playing the game. Still, there was something missing: I could do what the game was asking me to do, but the game honestly wasn’t asking me to do very much.

Two songs in particular helped me get over that hump. One was a version of The Star-Spangled Banner: in one bit, one of the notes in the tune was missing. I assumed for a while that that was simply something that they left out in the easier difficulty levels and that the extra note would appear as it got harder, but they kept on not adding that note. And then I realized that the string bend in that section wasn’t for emphasis: it was a larger bend (a full step) that was there to serve as part of the tune. The other song was Are You Gonna Go My Way: it has a very distinctive riff that it plays over and over again, one that includes a string bend followed by a pull-off. At first, I just played it however I wanted; but listening to the song more, I realized that the notes and timing involved in that combo are very distinct and very precise. (I’m still not good at playing it accurately, but at least now I know what I’m listening for!)

So, with those, I started to appreciate string bending more: it’s not just a flourish, it can work well to carry the melody. I’m listening a lot more to the music: figuring out what notes they’re playing, and what the timing is for the bends. But I don’t want to be ruled by that, either: I want to acknowledge the fact that this is a string bend, not a hammer on or a pull off or two distinct strums.

The upshot is that I have license to play around: to go with what sounds good, and to go with what feels good. (One of Rock Band 3‘s surprisingly strong reminders is how important the physical and tactile aspects are of making music; here’s yet another example of that.) At first, I was a little frustrated that Rocksmith had an idea of how far it wanted me to bend but wouldn’t show me; now part of me is glad of that, because the game is explicitly constructing a safe space were I have to play around a bit on my own.

It’s a very small safe space, of course. But it hints at the existence of a much larger realm of possibility.

This is going to a hard post to write. Normally, I play a game, finish it, and write about it here; but I’ve been playing Rock Band 3 for more than two years, and I’ve been playing one game in the series or another constantly since the first game came out back in 2007. So it doesn’t feel so much like I’ve finished playing the game as that I’ve broken up with the game. Fortunately, the break-up is amicable (and, as it turns out, mutual), but still.

And, to make matters worse: I’ve written quite a lot about the game over the years. So I don’t know if I have anything to say about the game (or the series) that I haven’t already said multiple times before!

Nonetheless, I have a tradition to uphold. So: once more unto the breach, dear friends. (Or: I come to bury Rock Band, but also to praise it in all of its ambition.)

One of my favorite bits of Rock Band 3 wasn’t part of the game itself but rather one of its pieces of DLC, namely the album London Calling. I’ve only listened to rock radio (or any sort of pop radio) for approximately three or four years of my life; this has given me an extremely spotty pop music background. My musical background is relatively strong in other ways, but still: it’s a gap, and one that I don’t actively want to be there.

So one of the things that I’ve always appreciated about the Rock Band series is having an extremely well-curated selection of music; generally the older half of the music on the disc is stuff I’m reasonably familiar with, the newer half is stuff I haven’t listened to, and I’m glad both halves are there. And that curation continues with the DLC, of course.

But, while the biggest gaps in my education start in the 90’s (I’ve never listened to Nevermind, for example), there are significant holes earlier as well: if it wasn’t being played on Cleveland-area radio stations in the late 80’s, chances are I haven’t heard it. And it turns out that London Calling is an example of that.

London Calling is a staggeringly good album, of course. But the nice thing about coming to it first via Rock Band is the way in which I got to experience it. I actually first listened to it while playing through it in a VGHVI gaming session, and going through it with friends is a wonderful way to be introduced to the music. Liesl and I played through it that weekend as well.

Listening to music has always been (at least optionally) a social experience, of course. But still: Rock Band is one sweet spot in that regard. I don’t want to minimize the joys of experiencing a concert with hundreds or thousands of other people, but there’s something nice about doing something with one or two or three other people. And with Rock Band, while you’re not directly focused on your fellow participants, the activeness of your interaction with the music (and with your specific role in that interaction with the music) reflects back into interactions with the people you’re playing the game with. It’s not as tight an interaction as, say, playing chamber music together (or playing in an actual rock band together, I would imagine), or as playing a two-to-four player competitive game together, but it’s more of an interaction than sitting around in a room listening to music together. And, at its best, it can really be something; going through London Calling with friends and loved ones was Rock Band at its communal best.

But London Calling showed off Rock Band at its solo best as well. When playing it with the VGHVI folks, I ended up on drums; I don’t normally play that instrument, but I really enjoyed it, it turns out that London Calling on hard drums is a great level for me, keeping me engaged and (on many of the songs) feeling like I’m overcoming a challenge without ever sliding into frustration. Then, when playing through the album with Liesl, I took the guitar; later, I went through it by myself on bass and on vocals.

And I really appreciated having all of those lenses to approach the album through. It’s a great album through any of those lenses: I’m glad I tried instruments that aren’t in my standard comfort zone. (Something similar happened with The Beatles: Rock Band: I didn’t appreciate Paul McCartney’s bass lines until I played that game. Though I liked London Calling‘s drum parts more than Ringo’s…)

That’s not the only way in which the game combined strong social experiences with new ways to appreciate music. Vocal harmonies, in particular, stand out in that regard: it’s one thing to be playing fake plastic instruments sitting next to somebody, but it’s a significant step up to be sitting next to somebody singing together. And not singing the same part (which is fun enough!): singing different parts, forcing you to figure out how you relate to each other and to the rest of the music. At first, we couldn’t hit the harmonies most of the time; but when we succeeded, it felt great.

Great from a social point of view (I assume harmonies the mode that Liesl and I will be most likely to return to in the future), but great from a musical understanding point of view as well. Which points at another area in which Rock Band 3 has showed me something about myself, in my approach to systems.

One frequent complaint about the Rock Band series is that it doesn’t let you go off script: you can try to throw in extra beats while playing the drums, say, but not only will the game not let you hear those extra beats, it will actively punish you for doing that. I can see where these complaints are coming from, and ultimately I share them to some extent (I was surprised how much of a relief it was to have Rocksmith not chastise me for playing extra notes), but in general I’m much less bothered by that than many people.

The more I thought about that, the odder it seemed: comparing it not just to performing music on real instruments but to other video games, Rock Band is very prescriptive indeed. I generally think of myself as liking to have choices; why am I so happy to have so few in this context?

Part of that is my classical music background, I think: I’m used to sitting in front of a piano, looking at a score, and trying to figure out how to play those notes when I’m supposed to. There is, of course, a lot more to performing classical music than just playing the right notes at the right time, but that remains a key aspect of classical music performance, and one which I’m happy to accept as an unquestioning default.

But that’s not the only thing that’s going on in my psychology with respect to the game: it’s also revealing something about my approach to complex systems. I like complex systems, at least if they’re elegant enough, in fact I can get rather obsessed with them. This shows up in my love of games, but it’s also why I ended up getting a Ph.D. in mathematics. And music is, of course, a gloriously rich, complex, elegant system.

Different people have different approaches to complex systems; my approach is often one that’s focused on learning and appreciating them. I can frequently get a visceral understanding of the guts of a complex system much faster than most people; but the joy of that understanding is the main thing that drives me, I’m less strongly moved by a desire to go off and extend it further. You can see this in my math career, for example: I could pick up math very quickly, but I didn’t end up putting in the effort to be a really good researcher. My current career has put me in an interesting sweet spot: programming by itself involves enough complex systems that being good at learning those gives me a significant leg up, but working effectively in a startup ends up throwing several more interesting complex systems into the mix, e.g. ones involving interpersonal relationships and business goals, and the combination of all of those turns out to be super fun to explore and try to deepen my understanding of.

Returning to music: I’m happy enough listening to music, but actually playing music lets me see more of the underlying systems, as does breaking apart the different strands of the music. Rock Band has always done some of the latter (though Rock Band 3 improves on its ability to let you see different strands, with vocal harmonies and keyboards); it’s been somewhat weaker on the actual “playing” side of things, but with pro keys and pro guitar the gap there has narrowed significantly.

Pro guitar, in particular, was a huge advance over anything else the series had allowed in terms of systems appreciation. In some sense, it’s only going from a 5-button controller to a 132-button controller; but that increased numbers of buttons allows a vastly richer view of the systems that are present within the music that I’m listening to. Especially because those 132 buttons are arranged in a meaningful way: the physicality of playing Rock Band 3 surprised my in many aspects, but none more than what my hands were telling me as they moved along the fretboard.

So yeah: I can’t make whatever music I want within the context of the game, I can’t even do much to chose my approach to that music. But I can see the music that the game is presenting to me in so many different ways than I could before; that is a tradeoff that I was happy to take for two years solid.

I could keep on going; but this is probably as good a stopping point as any; instead, I’ll just link some of my favorite posts on the series. And I will conclude by saying: to those of you who read this who have worked on Rock Band 3, or any of the other games in my series, I offer you heartfelt thanks. You have done good work; you have done important work.

• the beatles, rock band, and genre
• bohemian rhapsody as video game
• my gay avatars
• the psychosexuality of rock band vocals
• the tactile experience of rock band
• i love reifying relationships
• rock band driven development
• games and guitar learning