malvasia bianca

My current (mild) bugaboo at work: agreeing on plans. “Bugaboo” is really too strong a term, but it’s something that I’ve been probing a bit. Like a lot of my coworkers, I’m not a big fan of hierarchy (actually, I actively dislike hierarchy, though I won’t speak for others in that regard); also, like a lot of my coworkers, I’m introverted and reasonably confident in my own technical judgment. This means that, a lot of the time, I, like a lot of my coworkers, will see something that I think is a good idea, and go off and do it.

But I also have an opposing desire, one for following agreed upon procedures. I’m actually not sure where in my psyche this comes from—maybe the same part of me that wanted to be a good student and do well in contests? Tracing back through my post-academia history, though, it’s possible that it first came when I became fascinated by the rules of TDD and by the specifics of refactorings, and more broadly by XP’s prescriptiveness. It’s certainly explicit in the agile tradition more broadly in the notion of a retrospective, and lean puts it front and center.

The result is that my anti-hierarchical bent comes out in a desire for consensus as much as in a desire for autonomy. And consensus in a specific way: explicit consensus as a foundation for experimentation, so we can all get on the same page for something to do now, see how it works, and then accept/change/reject it.

At least that’s the theory; I haven’t yet been particularly successful at accomplishing that. Which is fine: right now, I’m at the stage where my brain is reminding me that, yes, this is somewhat important to me, but that I need to brush off / improve my consensus-building skills. (And my communication skills more broadly.) In the short term, it’s leading to somewhat odd interactions, where I see something that I interpret as a plan that we’ve agreed on, and then I see signs that we’re not acting as if we agree on the plan. Right now, I’m behaving in a not particularly productive way when I see that, instead acting a little grumpier than I’d like; now that I’m aware of my own behavior, though, hopefully I’ll be able to stop that and redirect it elsewhere.

The first step to that end is communicating where I’m coming from; this blog post is an effort to get that straight in my own head! In particular, I think I should be more explicit that I’m not pushing plans of record in to have my point of view win, and in fact I’m not wedded to always having a plan of record at all. So I’m happy for us to agree to follow a plan in some area, but I’m also happy for us to be explicit that we don’t yet have a plan of record in that area, or for us to agree that we had one but we’re modifying it, or that we’re following it in general but making an exception in this instance, or that we had one but are rejecting it. Much of the time, all of those are fine outcomes for me, I’d just like to know which one we think we’re doing in a given context!

Also, the other thing that I should make clear is that I’m not interested in plans as rules, I’m interested in plans as experiments. (I think Taiichi Ohno once said, when confronted with a standardized work document that was old enough that the paper started changing color, that any group who hadn’t changed their standardized work over the last thirty days was stealing from the company.)

With that understanding in place, the next question is: to the extent that I do want to poke at this issue, how to poke? And, in particular, how do I want to position myself in that effort? For example, one relevant role that I enjoy is acting the part of the fool: adopting an explicit pose of lack of power, noting that I’m listening to multiple people in positions of greater power and that I’m hearing them say different things on a topic, and naively wondering which one of them I should follow.

That role of fool works well to tease apart latent disagreements between others in more power; it doesn’t work so well to set up plans in areas where we don’t have pre-existing discussions, and probably doesn’t work as well when dealing with disagreements between people who are my peers. In fact, working with peers may, in an odd way, actually make building a consensus harder rather than easier: the existence of hierarchy gives planning discussions a place to start, and you can use hierarchy as a lever no matter which end you’re on. Maybe the real lesson there is that there’s no point in worrying about plans if you don’t have some sort of lever that you can push or pull; hierarchy is one such lever, but it’s not the only one, so for example the existence of an agreed-upon problem is another lever that you can work with.

And, stepping back: the general goal is to promote an experimental mindset. Having me pushing towards coming up with plans in areas that I care about is one tactic to that end; but if I can help other people push towards plans in areas that they happen to care about more than I do, then that will be even more effective. I’ve seen some interactions recently where somebody has identified a real problem and proposed a solution which hasn’t gotten traction; I should be more alert to those situations and see if I can help people in such situations drive the team towards some sort of consensus, by stepping back a bit from the details and focusing on what we agree on (the general problem space), what we don’t agree on (the details of a solution), and figuring out what’s going on with that disagreement and where to talk next.

Which is something that I thought about a fair amount when I was at Sun, and not so much since then. Probably time to revisit the relevant bits of the lean literature: in particular, I should take another look at the A3 report book. And I’m also tempted to use this as an excuse to revisit the Theory of Constraints thinking processes.

Though I’m not completely sure that the latter are directly relevant for this: I can’t remember how much they’re directed at groups coming to consensus versus individuals finding unexpected solutions to problems? Probably a bit of both; and to the extent that they’re focused on the latter, I should be able to get some personal benefit out of them right now even if they won’t suggest strategies for dealing with this specific issue.

I’ve had a few experiences recently (e.g. at one of the GDC talks that I attended) where somebody uses the word “agile” to describe a process that doesn’t sound particularly agile to me. So I figured I’d take some time to try to understand that difference, and in particular to think about what attributes will cause me to label a process as agile.

I’m trying to make these descriptions neutral, to treat “agile” as a label rather than a value judgment. I won’t claim to be successful in that, because the truth is that I prefer the agile approach in everything that I list here, and I’d be surprised if that isn’t coloring the list at some level. But it’s also true that I’ve happily worked on projects where any one of these is missing. So this response is, I hope, mostly coming from the mathematician side of my brain instead of the pro-agile side: definitions are important, and it’s more important to use a definition correctly than to use a word that you like to apply to a situation that you like.

With that aside, here are some attributes that I see agile processes as having:

• Iterative and incremental development. You release software no less frequently than once a month or so; more frequent than that is better, with releasing multiple times a day not being a crazy idea.
• Business / Engineering split. The business side decides what features are the highest priority and what it means for them to be done; the engineering side decides how many of those top priority features they can do in any interval of time. There’s a preference for stack ranking instead of priority buckets, and for the stack to be as small as possible.
• Team focus. Decisions (e.g. about team processes, about estimates) are made by the team instead of individuals. Code is owned by the team instead of individuals.
• Focus on quality. The team tries to write good code, code that won’t be a burden on them in the future. They have a fairly stringent definition of what it means for a task to be done. They care about testing and refactoring.

I’m sure there are times in my life when I would have come up with a much more philosophical approach: you can map the above to the manifesto if you squint hard enough, but the manifesto is much more abstract. (And I’m not sure what to make about the fact that, if you do that mapping, my “Team focus” maps to “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”: “team” and “individuals” are rather different words!) I think what’s going on there is that recently I’ve been reacting to descriptions of how teams work rather than reacting to philosophical treatises: so when people say “agile” in one sentence and talk about individual ownership in another sentence, my brain does a sort of pattern matching, hits upon a mismatch, and responds “why are you using those words together”?

And, of course, I could go more concrete as well: test-driven development, pair programming, etc. It’s possible that the main reason why I’m not doing that is that I don’t actually like pair programming (though I love TDD!); I hope that’s not the reason why I haven’t picked that level of specificity, though. Certainly I don’t want a definition of agile that nothing but eXtreme Programming can match; I guess, though, that I am happy enough with a definition of agile that Scrum alone doesn’t do a particularly good job of matching.

(Hmm, how does Scrum compare against this list? Certainly Scrum has the first item on the list; it should have the second, but my guess is that teams labeling their activities as Scrum are less likely to be good about the second item, though that’s probably a sign that they’re not doing Scrum well. And still less likely to be good about the third, and my vague memory is that Scrum is essentially silent about the fourth item. It’s been way too long since I’ve read the Scrum primary literature, though, so I could easily be wrong. Which makes me wonder if the reverse ever happens: what would a process be like that cared a lot about the fourth item but less and less as you went up the list?)

Thursday’s talks were rather meh, but Friday started off with my favorite of this year’s postmortems and just got better from there; a fabulous way to end the conference. My notes:

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

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

10 Tips for Making Your Tutorials Better:

1) Blend the tutorial into the game

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

2) Better to have the player do than read

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

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

3) Spread out the teaching of game mechanics

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

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

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

4) Just get the player to do it once

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5) Use fewer words

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

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

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

6) Use unobtrusive messaging if possible

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

7) Use adaptive messaging

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

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

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

8) Don’t create noise

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

9) Use visuals to teach

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

E.g. three-peater.

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

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

10) Leverage what people already know

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

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

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

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

Graham Devine

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

Toby Saulnier

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

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

Jason Della Rocca

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

Perrin Kaplan

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

Chris Hecker

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

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

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

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

Jade Raymond

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

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

Manveer Heir

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

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

Christina Norman

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

James Lantz

Against branching conversation systems. Yawn.

Frank Lantz

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

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

Don’t let chess lap us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drop 7: large, but more manageable.

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

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

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

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

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

Part two: design example, Grow21.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I wasn’t planning to go to this talk until I heard his pitch in the Flash Forward session; something in that pitch reminded me of a Gerald Weinberg / AYE approach to personal interaction, so I went. And I’m very glad I went: certainly my favorite talk of this GDC, but perhaps one of my favorite talks ever.

And that’s despite the fact that I missed the first ten minutes or so, because I had a very long lunch with Michael Abbott! About which I have no regrets: that lunch was both quite pleasant and sorely needed for personal reasons. Fortunately, I came into the talk just at the end of the intro (as far as I can tell); judging from the slide I saw, the intro probably said something about (awareness of and conscious use of) frames being important but able to be used for good or evil, but I could easily be wrong. As a partial substitute for the intro, I’ll quote the talk’s abstract:

This talk is about leading well by doing two things: communicating effectively and maintaining perspective. Conversations obviously bear meaning on many levels beyond explicit words; here we’ll talk about frames, the assumptions and context we bring to our interactions. Skillful framing is worth the practice, as it can inspire, motivate and energize, help you navigate the shores of professional power dynamics and strengthen relationships of all kinds.

Of course, it only does those things if you want it to, which brings us to intention, the motivation behind your every action. It’s deceptively easy to believe we’re acting for one reason, often a noble one, when our true intention is something else. When we do that, our behavior often ends up causing harm and sabotaging our true goals. We’ll talk about the work involved in staying aware of your intention and steering it in a direction that’ll yield the right results.

(Edit: Brian Sharp was kind enough to leave a comment with a summary of the part of the talk that I missed.)

Archetypes

The place where I came in was a section of practical tips. These are based on archetypes of situations that he’s collected over the years: so he’ll run into situations that remind him of these archetypes, and that will give him a suggestion as to how people are interpreting the situation and how to proceed to improve communication.

Archetype #1: Collaboration

Specifically cross-discipline collaboration, where you’re working with a member of a different team because there’s something you need to get done together.

First, keep in mind that both of you are trying to solve constraints. Framing the interaction this way helps because it leads to thinking in terms of “you and me versus the problem” instead of “you versus me”.

Still, the water can get that rough. To help navigate that roughness, he brought in an idea from Deborah Tannen: you can plot people’s views of their relationship with somebody else on a two-dimentional chart, where one axis is hierarchy vs. equality and the other is closeness vs. distance. Your view (conscious or not) of where the two of you are on the chart is a framing; you then make moves (again, conscious or not) trying to get the relationship to a place on the chart that you’d prefer. Problems arise when you see the other person as moving you around on the chart in a way that makes you feel uncomfortable.

In cross-team collaboration, he has a strong preference for moving quite far towards the equality side of that axis. But anywhere on the closeness/distance axis could well be acceptable, depending on how he views his relationship with the other person. And, in this situation, that latter axis is more likely to create mismatches in how the two of you are framing the situation: so if one person sees unexpected/unwelcome closeness, then they might act more coldly than they otherwise would to move the interaction to a more distant place on that axis. Conversely, if one person sees unexpected distance, then they might act unusually friendly/chummy.

Again, he sees any place on the closeness/distance axis as acceptable; relationship damage comes from misalignment in how the two of you reed your actual and desired positions on the chart, multiplied by the length of time that you let that misalignment fester. So try to read the situation accurately at the start, and to respond quickly to changes.

(Reflection: thinking about this has helped illuminate some of my own interactions. I can see the tension arising from people changing their mind about where the two of us should be on the closeness/distance axis, and working to change that positioning; I can also see different people as having a wider, narrower, or simply more mobile band of desired positions on that axis, leading to additional opportunities to surprises arising from framing mismatches.)

Archetype #2: Hierarchy

This is about collaboration between people at different levels of the org chart.

Hierarchy reinforces perception: if you hire somebody as a junior team member, you’ll see him as junior. Perception reinforces hierarchy: if you see him as junior, you’ll be less likely to give him advanced work, and hence give him fewer opportunities to move up the org chart. We’re all prone to confirmation bias; this loop reinforces that.

To become more senior, you need to do more senior work, of course. But that alone isn’t enough. People near you (your team members, your immediate supervisor) already know what you’re doing; senior people who are more distant from you have no idea of what you’re doing, however. It would be nice if they then had no feeling about you (since, after all, they have no high-quality data about you!), but in practice they have a hierarchy-mediated opinion of you, and will need active convincing to think otherwise.

So, to change a more senior person’s perception, you have to change that person’s framing. Most people accept the frames they’re given; and, in particular, both you and he will tend to go with his frame.

For example, say a more senior person sends you an email like this: “Sounds like things are running behind a bit. I need you to send me the current schedule so I can figure out how it impacts my team.” This sounds reasonable enough: it’s not rude, it’s not an active power play, it’s a request for relevant information. But implicit in it is a power dynamic: his view is accepted as correct (that’s the first sentence), and he can tell you what to do (that’s the second sentence).

If you want to change the relationship that the two of you have, you need to change his frame, e.g. to one where he treats you as a peer. The first step is to convince yourself, to internalize that frame yourself. The second step is to act like a peer would act, to project that frame outward. When doing this, you might even act a little patronizing.

So, one possible response to the above e-mail is something along the lines of “that’s funny, I was about to ask you the same thing. I’d be glad to make some time to help you understand this side of things. Maybe we can grab coffee this afternoon?” This actively works to change the power dynamic, to project both of you as peers: his view isn’t accepted as correct, he’s not the only person who can ask for information, and you’re suggesting a meeting on more level footing.

This is hard. And people reject frames that are wildly different from their own. For example, don’t treat the CEO as a buddy!

(Reflection: interesting thinking about this one in terms of my own experience. I have a fairly strong preference for sticking my nose in lots of places, for believing that I can contribute to any part of the code base and that I’ll be able to say something worth listening to when discussing, say, team organization. I don’t generally see this as an explicit ploy to change my position in the hierarchy (and, indeed, I’m not a big fan of hierarchy in general, I’m perfectly happy for everybody on the team to stick their nose all over the place!); but, in hierarchical contexts, I am projecting a view of myself as not on the bottom of the hierarchy, at the very least.)

Archetype #3: Caring

Many people claim to care, but act like they care about your work result or care that you’ll be happy so you don’t quit. In contrast, caring is caring about you. As frames, these views are mutually exclusive: one or the other is what is important at any given time. You don’t want the latter to be perceived as the former.

To this end, carve out a separate space for personal caring. If you’ve just been working on a project with a colleague who is frustrated, expressing caring right then will be interpreted as caring about work. So put a bit of distance, both temporally and physically, so you can express personal caring and be interpreted as doing such.

This is why it’s important for a manager to have one-on-ones with the people who report to him/her. But don’t have them be status updates, other than as a jump starter for further conversation: talk about the other person as a person.

(Reflection: definitely useful to keep in mind. When I’ve held one-on-ones in the past, I’ve generally left them fairly open. (At least I think I have, it’s been two and a half years.) Which is good in that it at least doesn’t convey an active view that I see them as status updates or that I see the other person through a purely instrumental lens, but I should be more aware of the options and subtexts here.)

Wisdom

That’s archetypes, techniques that you can use. Now on to wisdom. You may fear that the above is overanalyzing and/or prone to being used for scheming; he believes, however, that this sort of analysis tends to lead towards goodness.

He then talked for a while about working in his mom’s workshop, working with the tools there. This taught him respect (and a bit of fear) for the tools; respect (and even love) for the wood. Each piece of wood was different; he was collaborating with the wood.

It takes craft to make art. Communication is a craft. But: in communication, unlike other crafts/arts, we are the medium. So it’s scary to use these communication tools: they can work on us in powerful, unpleasant ways.

Fear is good, but it shouldn’t stop us: fear itself is communication. It lets us know that we should be careful, but it doesn’t mean that the tools or the tool users are evil.

What about people who do use it for evil? When he sees people like that, it breaks his heart. They had opportunity to use these tools for such beauty, and they aren’t. A meditation he likes to use in such circumstances: “when we do not know happiness, and fill its void with pleasure, we suffer”.

Communication teaches us the true nature of people; the more we know their true nature, the more we love it. We’re scared of that, because we don’t want to know our true nature: we’re afraid of being vulnerable, we’d like to pretend that we’re purely rational.

Update: The video and slides of the talk are available for free in the GDC Vault.

Not a great day for me. The morning was postmorterms for games I’ve never played; I basically enjoyed the postmorterms, but in retrospect I should have tried something else. And both afternoon talks were actively disappointing.

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

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

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

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

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

Amazing team. (Once he got a team!)

Influences:

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

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

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

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

Challenges:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Technical Challenges:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Legal Challenges:

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

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

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

Legacy:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reusable software: OS abstraction, scripting engine.

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

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

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

Chapter 1: A Game in 4 Weeks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Metaphor: pirate ship, adventuring into unknown waters together.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seek feedback. Create a culture around feedback.

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

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

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

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

4:00pm: GDC Microtalks 2012

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

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

9:00am: Flash Forward

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Agony: make a “bloodcurdling barf”.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The procedural approach:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Final workflow:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My favorite talk on the first day of GDC was Margaret Robertson’s The Gamification of Death: How the Hardest Game Design Challenge Ever Demonstrates the Limits of Gaming, so I figured I’d break out my notes on that to a separate blog entry.

Her takeaways from the project that this session was about:

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

In other words: the bleakest GDC session ever!

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

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

Things that were hard:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Things that might be true:

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

Oh boy.

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

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

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

Update: Now the video is available for free.

The startup that I’ve been working at for the last year, Sumo Logic, has now launched its product! Our product is a service for gathering, searching, and analyzing logs: if you have software that’s generating log files, you point our collector at those files and it will upload them to our service, at which point you can slice and dice them however you want. You can do that with logs from one program or one machine, but you can also do that for logs from hundreds or thousands of machines: we’ll happily accept whatever you throw at us.

I’ve been working on distributed systems for a while; in particular, StreamStar was a distributed system of heterogeneous software running on heterogeneous machines. And when you’re working with a distributed system, surprises are going to happen; I love my unit tests, but when you’re pushing large amounts of data while wanting to meet tight performance limits, surprises are going to happen, every once in a while a piece of data won’t be where you expect it to be. And, when that happens, you need to piece together a timeline to understand and learn from the event; getting logs from all your different components and putting together a story from all of them is the way to do that.

But you won’t be able to put together a story if you don’t have a lot of logs; the flip side, though, is that you need to be able to track a single event across those logs from different machines without being overwhelmed by all the other events that are in them. So you need to deal with a lot of data while searching within it to focus on a single event while popping back out when the need arises to gather more information and test a hypothesis. We tried to do that on StreamStar, but it was hard, and the log volume was overwhelming; Sumo Logic is also a homogeneous distributed system and hence is vulnerable to the same problem, but the difference is that we can use our own product to analyze what’s going on within it! Which is awesome.

After working on StreamStar, I joined Playdom, working on their business intelligence team. There, we had to deal with logs for a different reason: instead of understanding what the different components of our own software were doing, we needed to understand what our players were doing. We needed to understand what drew players into our games, how long they stayed, what they spent money on.

We had a very good set of homegrown tools written by some extremely talented engineers. The problem was, though, that people on game teams would ask us quite natural questions that we couldn’t answer, because the homegrown tools had to be focused on doing specific types of analysis on a handful of prebaked log types to be able to perform well. As I moved out of Playdom’s business intelligence team, they’d just begun overhauling their log infrastructure to be able to do a wider range of analysis (though, I think, still with prebaked log types?); Sumo Logic’s tools, however, will accept whatever lines of text you throw at it, and let you search, parse, and analyze it. No need to spend years of engineering effort to get that benefit (years that a startup can’t afford to spend!): just stick log lines into your software, install a collector, and start querying away.

That’s my background; the Sumo Logic founders and some of the other early employees come from a different space, however, namely security. And that means that we’re quite happy to accept and analyze log files generated by third-party software (firewalls, routers, web servers) instead of logs in software that you wrote yourself. In that context, you’re trying to figure out how your systems are being used, and whether and how they’re being misused.

That sort of analysis sometimes looks like the distributed system analysis that I mentioned in my StreamStar example: if there’s a specific security breach that you’re trying to track across systems, it can look a lot like tracking down an anomaly in a distributed system. But there’s also a different sort of analysis, where you’re trying to detect a statistical signal of malicious behavior out of a sea of normal behavior.

The tools that we’re developing for that are rather fascinating. The first one to be released is the “summarize” operator: after using search to pick out a general class of logs, pipe the result through summarize, and Sumo Logic will cluster them for you. You can drill into clusters, teach the system what clusters are interesting and what clusters are expected, and in general work on teasing a signal out of what seems like noise. Useful for unexpected security events; but it’s also useful to just run a scheduled search every hour or every day where you throw all your warning and error logs at summarize to learn how your system’s behavior changes from day to day. (And, believe me, running in AWS, your system’s behavior will change from day to day…)

I mentioned my coworkers above: the thing that sealed the deal with me to join Sumo Logic was meeting all the employees when I interviewed (I ended up becoming the tenth employee) and realizing that I would actively enjoy working with every one of them. Normally, when interviewing even with a good company, there are some people whom I’m looking forward to work with, some I’m indifferent about, some I’m a little unsure about, and then there are all the people whom the people in charge of hiring don’t even trust to throw in front of job candidates. Not so with Sumo Logic: I learn something from Christian and Kumar, the cofounders, every time I talk to them; the other early hires are extremely sharp as well; and we’ve kept a quite high caliber as we’ve (slowly!) expanded since then.

So: if you’re writing a service, want to add logs to understand your software’s behavior and/or your users’ behavior, but don’t want to manage those logs, take a look at us! Or if you’re running lots of servers and want to keep track of what they’re doing, we can help with that, too! You can get a free demo account if you want to play around with the product on canned data, or sign up for a free trial if you want to feed in your own data.

Or, if you’re a programmer who likes to work with large amounts of data or distributed systems or is curious about Scala, we’re hiring! (We’re hiring for non-engineering positions, too.) I had my one-year anniversary a couple of weeks ago; it’s been a great year, I’m looking forward to many more great years.

Here’s my best guess at my schedule for GDC 2012. Please say hi if you see me; and I have no current plans for lunch on any of the days or dinner on Wednesday or Friday. (I’ll only be there for the main conference, I’m skipping the first two days.)

Wednesday

9:00am: Flash Forward

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

12:30pm: Lunch

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

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

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

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

Evening: Might stop by the Playdom party.

Thursday

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

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

1:00pm: Lunch

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

4:00pm: GDC Microtalks 2012

Friday

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

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

1:00pm: Lunch

2:30pm: Jamie Griesemer, Design in Detail

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

A sentence which I have a hard time believing that I’m writing: for the last month or so, the default search engine on my two home computers has been set to Bing. Not because Microsoft has done such a wonderful job (though I’m more impressed with that company than I was five years ago), or even because Google is focusing on areas that I’m not as interested in (though that’s definitely the case, I’ve been a lot more interested in what Apple has done over the last five years than Google), but in how actively distasteful I’m finding Google’s recent actions. In a surprisingly short time, Google has switched from a company that I basically liked and respected (and that I was happy to have located a mile and a half away from my house!) to just another large company that’s lumbering along in a ham-handed fashion, doing some good stuff but also making a fair number of missteps and misusing their market power along the way. And it feels to me like they’ve reached some sort of tipping point in that regard; see, for example, this post by Nelson Minar (an early Google employee), or this post by Raganwald.

Google has, of course, claimed to follow “Don’t Be Evil” as a slogan since its early days. They’re a corporation, and these days a big one, so it’s hard to take that too seriously; but I believe that slogan and that mindset made a difference at Google for many years. Which is good, because Google is a very powerful corporation, a corporation that makes money off of advertising, and a corporation that has its tendrils into many aspects my online life. So they can gather a lot of information about me, and they can mislead me to their own ends. This is always a balancing act (and these days I’m more and more suspicious of free online models: I want to be the customer, I don’t want to be the product that companies are selling to advertisers), but on the whole they seemed to be doing a good job of living up to their early heritage of putting users and correct information first in their search results. And it’s not like they’ve acted at no potential cost to their profits: I generally applaud how they behaved in China, for example.

But the nym wars started raising my eyebrows: Google banned users from Google Plus who registered under names that didn’t seem likely to be those users’ legal names. I’ve never seen an justification of this in terms of benefit to users that’s at all plausible; and that lack of justification left as my default assumption that Google was doing this to make it easier to build dossiers on users for advertising purposes. Google was apparently quite aware of these concerns internally: from what I’ve heard, it was a big source of arguments in internal meetings, with the head of Google Plus ultimately pulling rank and saying “my way or the highway”. I’m all for a unified strategy, but as a user I’d prefer that the unified strategy not be designed to screw me; and the horror stories I’d heard about the appeals process emphasized that Google is a very powerful company with no external accountability.

And those stories continued. On the lack of external accountability: I’ve seen multiple accounts (here’s an example) of people whom Google refuses to pay advertising revenues to, whether on YouTube or through AdSense, with no meaningful possibility for appeal. Then there was the Chrome team breaking their own rules for sponsored links; to Google’s considerable credit, they applied the standard penalty to their own internal team, but that’s not a sign of a unified corporate ethos. And then the Google Kenya mess; again, Google’s main office squashed this, but what on earth were they thinking?

None of that made me happy, but I was willing to chalk them up to large company pains leading to a lack of real vision. (Though that explanation never really worked for the pseudonym policy.) But then came Search Plus: not only is Google pushing Google+ links into search results, but they’re doing so at the expense of search quality. And, with that, all pretense at doing what’s right for the user was gone: they’re making my search experience worse in an attempt to drive up usage of a social networking site that I have no interest in. (And that I’m now actively hostile towards!) That’s bad, pure and simple; so when the unified privacy policy came out, I didn’t even take the time to try to come up with an informed opinion, I just figured it’s another way for Google to try to screw me in search of advertising revenue. And when news of their circumventing Safari’s cookie policy broke, or when Motorola (which Google is in the process of acquiring) tried to seriously abuse FRAND patents, I nodded my head and said “of course they’d do that”.

But: if not Google, who? For example, which search engine to use? Safari has a dropdown menu that lets you choose between Google, Yahoo, and Bing, so I figured I should give Bing a try. And, for the first week or so, actually, I thought that Bing was kind of nice: in fact, the results looked to me like Google’s results looked before the Google+ crap showed up, albeit presented slightly less attractively. But since then I’ve soured on Bing: Google+ aside, Google really does still generally give higher quality search results. And Bing’s aesthetics have started to grate.

I thought I’d try DuckDuckGo, but here I ran into an unexpected stumbling block: you can’t add new search engines to Safari, not even through extensions. (There are extensions that try, but it doesn’t feel the same.) Fine, I thought, I’m not thrilled with the growing Safari/Webkit monoculture, so maybe I should go back to Firefox? (Plus, ever since Moxie Marlinspike’s Def Con talk, I’d been thinking I should give Convergence a try.) But it turns out that I like Safari more than I realized: I like the way it lets me leave off www./.com in website names in the address bar, and I really like ClickToFlash/ClickToPlugin, in particular its defaulting to HTML video instead of having you click to get a Flash video player.

And that’s just search; I also depend on Google for mail and for storing my RSS feeds. Which makes me nervous, especially the former: I no longer trust Google to behave at all decently when it comes to my mail. (Which doesn’t mean that I don’t want them to look at my mail at all: I just don’t want them to look at my mail for anything other than spam/virus filtering.) Coming back to wanting to be a customer instead of the product to be sold: in both of those cases, I’d feel happier if I were paying money instead of getting the service for free. But, in both cases, I don’t want to change away lightly: Google’s spam filtering is quite good, and Reeder doesn’t know how to talk to non-Google RSS backends. Maybe there’s another equally good mail provider that I could switch to, I just haven’t done my research; and maybe enough other people are annoyed at Google that Reeder will provide other options soon. (Heck, if I were Reeder’s author, I’d be thinking very hard about providing that functionality myself.)

So, for now, I’m mostly sticking with Google: even for search, my work computer and iOS browsers still use Google, and I’m unhappy enough with Bing that I might well switch my home computers back. But I’m also ready to make a break if somebody points me in the right direction. And I get the feeling that enough other people feel the same way that I suspect that, a couple of years from now, a set of consensus good alternatives will have emerged, and that a noticeable chunk of people whose blogs I read or whom I follow on Twitter will have stopped using Google’s services.

Once again, I find myself at a job that uses bug-tracking software (JIRA this time, as in my previous job; the job before that used Bugzilla); once again, I’m finding that the bug-tracking software gets on my nerves. And, it turns out, gets on my nerves specifically because of ways in which that software seems actively anti-agile.

First: bug trackers are information absorbers. Because, while bug trackers sound like they could be useful as information radiators, encouraging people to put their thoughts and knowledge on a topic in some place publicly accessible, in practice they seem to me to have the opposite effect. In most of my recent jobs, I’ve been part of a team that’s working in close proximity with ample opportunity to discuss topics face-to-face; but we’re too introverted to do that. That’s okay, we have mailing lists and chat rooms where we could talk about problems we’ve noticed and brainstorm solutions; but we don’t do that either! Instead, we file bugs, bugs that almost nobody else notices.

Of course, it would be possible for the bug tracker to send updates to everybody, turning them into mailing lists with some useful auxiliary tools. But they don’t do that by default, and defaults matter. And, in fact, JIRA doesn’t (or at least didn’t the last time I checked) provide a mechanism where people can subscribe to all bugs by themselves, doing that requires administrative intervention. (Of course, JIRA’s information absorption possibilities are exceptional: I have no idea what JIRA’s authors were thinking when they designed its search box.)

Second: bug trackers encourage individual ownership. I’m sure it’s possible to set up a bug tracker without adding multiple categories, but I’ve never seen that done in practice: instead, the administrator picks categories corresponding to components of the system, and picks owners for those components. So, when somebody files a bug, that person picks a category that seems relevant, and the bug gets assigned to that category’s owner. (And, because of the information absorption properties mentioned above, quite possibly nobody other than the person who filed the bug and the component owner will ever learn about it!)

Third: bug trackers work against prioritization. Which is ironic, given how bug trackers love priority-related fields: priority, severity, target release, etc. But, in the agile world, prioritization means that the business side picks a very small number of tasks that are most important to work on right now, the development team works actively on those tasks, and the development team sets all other stories aside. And I’ve never seen prioritization systems in bug trackers that map to this workflow, or indeed that don’t actively work against this workflow.

Fourth: bug trackers work against clean code. Because bug trackers make it feel like you’re doing something useful if you see a problem with code (if you add a problem to code!) and report it. But you haven’t actually helped the code base by doing that; on the contrary, you’re giving yourself permission to leave the code base a little worse than you found it instead of a little better than you found it.

I won’t say that it’s impossible to get bug trackers to work in an agile fashion. And, in fact, the above points at what you should do if you want to pursue that course of action: have everybody receive updates for all bugs, either ignore the owner field or have the owner field always default to somebody on the business side, have as few priorities as possible (probably just two, namely “right now” and “later”), and keep an eagle eye out for clean code. But: defaults matter, the very existence of knobs and bells and whistles matter, and they all point in a rather different direction.

Despite all of that, there’s something that I like about bug trackers. It’s not something from agile, it’s something from GTD, and it’s something that I currently see as a point of tension between those philosophies. Namely:

Fifth: bug trackers encourage inventory. Bugs pile up, with every bug tracker I’ve worked with containing thousands of unresolved bugs in a shockingly short amount of time. And that inventory has all the problems that agile and lean teach us to expect.

Except: GTD teaches us that, if something comes across your mind, write it down. That certainly applies to problems in your code; and, if you’re going to write problems down, you should write them down somewhere that’s publicly accessible and where your notes won’t disappear. So private notes, mailing lists, and chat rooms actually aren’t a great place for this sort of thing: you instead want an area that has at least some of the attributes of bug trackers.

So how do we do this in a way that acknowledges the problems of inventory? GTD has one suggestion, namely the weekly review. So somebody needs to look at all open bugs every week.

Which is completely unworkable with the volumes of open bugs that I’ve seen on projects in the past. This is useful backpressure: if you have too many bugs to review them on a weekly basis, then stop writing so many bugs! Keep your code clean instead. Or, for “bugs” that are nice ideas but just end up not being pressing for week after week after week: just close them once your brain has come to terms with the fact that they’re not something that you think will ever be a good idea unless the context changes significantly. (But don’t close them until your brain has come to terms with that: GTD is all about listening to what your brain has come to terms with.)

Despite that last backtracing, I’m still quite dubious about bug trackers: I’d much rather focus on broad conversations, physical prioritization tools, and clean communal code, and see where that leads us. But I hope it leads us in a direction that isn’t averse to GTD’s insistence on trusted repositories outside of your head.

We did end up talking about my teaching games post (among other things) in the February VGHVI Symposium; sadly, I had weird network problems which meant that I missed maybe a third of the conversation entirely and could listen but not speak in another third. Which is especially a pity because I think Roger and I spent time airing potential disagreements and not enough time figuring out where common ground was.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Right after hitting publish on my recent post on fundamental differences, I started to feel nervous about it. I’m fairly sure I didn’t explain myself fairly well, I’m fairly sure that I don’t actually agree with everything I said there, I’m fairly sure that there are parts that I still agree with now but that future me will disagree with, and I’m fairly sure that there are parts that both I and future me agree with but where people I respect disagree with us. And I also suspect that all of that adds up to me looking like rather an ass.

I didn’t want to jump back into the fray immediately: for one thing, those struck me as the sort of mistakes that would require some amount of thinking to have any hope of digging out of, and, for another thing, I’d just started reading a book that is directly relevant to those issues. But now it’s three weeks later, so hopefully my subconscious has done a bit more processing; and I have a few thousand words of quotes to refer to when I feel like I’m going off the rails.

Before I dive back in, however, an apology: to the extent that anything that it felt like I was saying that you shouldn’t feel that an attribute of yourself makes you fundamentally different from people who don’t share that attribute, I apologize. It is not my desire to tell anybody else whom they should feel different from or similar to.

With that out of the way:

The key to how I was acting weird was in this sentence:

I have a very hard time accepting the gloss of “fundamentally different” with “a different gender, sexuality, race, class, or religion”.

This was referring to Corvus’s saying that exploring someone other than us in games is “most powerful when it allow us to identify with a character who is fundamentally different than ourselves–a different gender, sexuality, race, class, or religion.”

The important word in understanding what my brain was doing here is “gloss”: I was interpreting the dash as setting up an equivalence, i.e. that people who are fundamentally different from ourselves must be of a different gender, sexuality, race, class, or religion and that, inversely, people who are fundamentally the same as ourselves must be of the same gender/sexuality/race/class/religion. This straw man is easy to knock down—I certainly have no trouble coming up with pairs of people of the same gender/sexuality/race/class/religion who are far from clones—but, of course, it’s only a straw man, there are many other interpretations of that dash that are much more generous and plausible.

So yeah, that was a pretty strange interpretation. But I can understand why it took me a little while to notice how strange it is, because of (one aspect of) the way my brain works: INTPs will, I suspect, fairly naturally jump to definitions/equivalences like the above. (Or maybe mathematicians will, or maybe those mathematicians who are INTPs.) So it’s not a pure derailing tactic (and it certainly wasn’t a conscious derailing tactic, I hope I’m not that much of an asshole); or, perhaps more accurately, it’s a derailing tactic that a quirk of my psychology makes me more likely to slip into than most people. (Than normal people, perhaps I should say?)

A more natural interpretation of that dash in Corvus’s sentence would be: these are examples of fundamental differences. And sure, they’re good examples on that score. They are, of course, not chosen at random: they’re all categories linked with oppression and power dynamics, categories that have a strong impact on how others treat us before getting to know us, categories that continue to have an affect on others’ behaviors towards us even after they get to know us, and that even have an effect on our behavior towards ourselves. That’s pretty damn important.

As important as it is, it leaves out lots of other ways of slicing and dicing humanity. Divisions based on mental approaches and temperaments, for example: the MBTI classification that I touched on above, or where people fall on the autism spectrum. Age-based divisions: what historical events you lived through (c.f. Strauss and Howe’s generational divisions), what stage you’re at in your own life. That last one raises the question of whether it makes sense to call something “fundamental” that isn’t constant across your own life, and I agree, that’s an argument against applying that label; but child me is different from teenage me from young adult me from me as parent of a young child from me as a parent of a soon-to-be-teenage child.

I’m sure each of you can continue with examples of differences. The examples from the last paragraph aren’t chosen at random, however: they’re divisions that are related to times where I’ve felt most alien (least normal, to return to a word that I was uncomfortable with above) over the last year. And yes, it does seem a little odd to feel that being a parent of a 12-year-old means that I’m abnormal; normality is a product of both yourself and context, and, in both Silicon Valley startups and the community of video game bloggers, having a child of that age marks me as unusual in ways that directly affect my experience and ability to fit in.

In contrast, of Corvus’s five categories, I fit well enough within the dominant group in my country in four of them to accrue real benefits; and, in the fifth category, I spend most of my time within subcultures where my status is accepted without comment, even expected. So, while I do at times feel a little uneasy on two or three of the his dimensions, my response to his list was unquestionably coming from a position of privilege: when thinking about differences, I’m less likely to interrogate dimensions where the dominant culture supports my status, and more likely to look at dimensions (such as introversion / extroversion) where the dominant culture makes me feel like more of an outsider.

Returning to flying my mathematician freak flag: part of what this points out is that fundamental differences doesn’t form a partitioning of humanity, because the notion of fundamental similarity isn’t symmetric. I may feel that you and I are fundamentally the same at some level; you may, however, disagree with that. And yeah, that’s probably more likely to happen in situations where we differ along one of Corvus’s dimensions than along less politically-charged dimensions: if you’re a woman, you might be more inclined to see our gender as a significant difference than I am. (And, to return to what I said near the top: you might feel that we’re different for all sort of reasons; that’s your labeling decision to make, informed by your perspective, not mine.)

To make matters more complicated, not only might I disagree with you about what constitutes a fundamental difference between us, I might disagree with myself. “Fundamental” is a word that lends itself of many interpretations, and that pulls towards extremes: I might use it to focus on one dimension, I might use it to pay as much attention to each of us as individuals as possible, I might use it to emphasize our common humanity. I might do that based on my mood at the time, but I might also do it for political reasons; and that’s an area where Corvus’s categories are very much a double-edged sword. Because, while these categories can be used to emphasize respect for others’ experiences, they can also be used to mark people as Other with a capital O, with all the evil associated therewith. What I would hope I wouldn’t do is shift between these different meanings purely for sophistical reasons, but “fundamental” is a slippery enough term that it wouldn’t be hard to do that without intending.

Though that tension between different interpretations can be wonderful to explore in its own way. That’s one of the reasons why I liked Whipping Girl so much: in one paragraph, the author would talk very thoughtfully about femininity versus masculinity, and the real power and effects that that difference has, but then say, in the very next paragraph, that “it is not enough for us to empower femaleness and femininity. We must also stop pretending that there are essential differences between women and men.” I really enjoyed that juxtaposition of viewpoints, and I appreciate it as a helpful reminder of the dangers of falling too in love with a single philosophical lens. And I think it’s also quite possible that the book’s author isn’t actually intending to give me whiplash, that she instead comes from a rather wiser point of view that has allowed her to synthesize these concerns into a coherent world view. Beats me; it will be interesting to return to the book in a few years once it’s percolated through my subconscious and experiences a bit more. (Hmm, I should probably think about The Mad Man‘s interrogation of roles in this light, too.)

Enough meandering for today: I’ll stop here, as an expression of my fundamental identity as someone who writes loosely-constructed 1500-word blog posts. And I’ll doubtless have regrets soon after hitting publish on this one, too; fortunately, my friends are generous types who are willing to look past my considerable warts, and I love you all.

I’m sure most of you are familiar with Mattie Brice—over the last half year or so, she’s seems to suddenly be in the middle of every conversation on Twitter, she writes regularly on her own blog, The Border House, Pop Matters, and Nightmare Mode, and her empire is continuing to expand with appearances in Kotaku and Game Critics. (She’s been showing up in our VGHVI gaming nights, too, and is helping us put together a podcast.)

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

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

A friend of mine loaned me her copy of Whipping Girl, because she thought I would enjoy it and find it interesting; she was quite correct in that suspicion. I’m copying down some quotes here largely for my own future reference, but if y’all find something of interest in them, so much the better. (If I were sensible, I’d just get a Kindle copy and save the quotes there; good thing I type fast…)

In a world where masculinity is assumed to represent strength and power, those who are butch and boyish are able to contemplate their identities within the relative safety of those connotations. In contrast, those of us who are feminine are forced to define ourselves on our own terms and develop our own sense of self-worth. It takes guts, determination, and fearlessness for those of us who are feminine to lift ourselves up out of the inferior meanings that are constantly being projected onto us. If you require any evidence that femininity can be more fierce and dangerous than masculinity, all you need to do is ask the average man to hold your handbag or a bouquet of flowers for a minute, and watch how far away he holds it from his body. Or tell him that you would like to put your lipstick on him and watch how fast he runs off in the other direction. In a world where masculinity is respected and femininity is regularly dismissed, it takes an enormous amount of strength and confidence for any person, whether female- or male-bodied, to embrace their feminine self.

But it is not enough for us to empower femaleness and femininity. We must also stop pretending that there are essential differences between women and men.

(pp. 18–19)

Acknowledging this variation is absolutely crucial in order for us to finally move beyond overly simplistic (and binary) biology-versus-socialization debates regarding gender. After all, there are very real biological differences between hormones: Testosterone will probably make any given person cry less frequently and have a higher sex drive than estrogen will. However, if one were to argue that this biological difference represents an essential gender difference—one that holds true for all women and all men—they would be incorrect. After all, there are some men who cry more than certain women, and some women who have higher sex drives than certain men. Perhaps what is most telling is that, as a society, we regulate these hormonally influenced behaviors in a way that seems to exaggerate their natural effects. We actively discourage boys from crying, even though testosterone itself should reduce the chance of this happening. And we encourage men to act on their sex drives (by praising them as “studs”) while discouraging women from doing the same (by dismissing them [as] “sluts”), despite the fact that most women will end up having a lower sex drive than most men anyway.

While many gender theorists have focused their efforts on attempting to demonstrate that this sort of socialization produces gender differences, it seems to me more accurate to say that in many cases socialization acts to exaggerate biological gender differences that already exist. In other words, it coaxes those of us who are exceptional (e.g., men who cry often or women with high sex drives) to hide or curb those tendencies, rather than simply falling where we may on the spectrum of gender diversity. By attempting to play down or erase the existence of such exceptions, socialization distorts biological gender difference to create the impression that essential differences exist between women and men. Thus, the primary role of socialization is not to produce gender difference de novo, but to create the illusion that female and male are mutually exclusive, “opposite” sexes.

Recognizing the distinction between biological and essential gender differences has enormous ramifications for the future of gender activism. Since there is natural variation in our drives and the way we experience the world, attempts to minimize gender differences (i.e., insisting that people strive to be unisex or androgynous) are rather pointless; we should instead learn to embrace all forms of gender diversity, whether typical (feminine women and masculine men) or exceptional (masculine women and feminine men). Further, since some attributes that are considered feminine (e.g., being more in tune with one’s emotions) or masculine (e.g., being preoccupied with sex) are clearly affected by our hormones, attempts by some gender theorists to frame femininity and masculinity as being entirely artificial or performative seem misplaced. Rather than focus on how femininity and masculinity are produced (an issue that has unfortunately dominated the field of gender studies of late), we should instead turn our attention to the ways these gender traits are interpreted.

(pp. 73–75)

Thus, any model that attempts to explain human gender expression, sexual orientation, and subconscious sex must take into account the fact that both typical and exceptional forms of these inclinations occur naturally (i.e., without social influence) to varying degrees.

In order to reconcile this issue, I would like to put forward what I call an intrinsic inclination model to explain human gender and sexual variation. Here are the basic tenets of this model:

1. Subconscious sex, gender expression, and sexual orientation represent separate gender inclinations that are determined largely independently of one another. (This model does not preclude the possibility that these three inclinations may themselves be composed of multiple separable inclinations, or that additional gender inclinations may exist as well.)
2. These gender inclinations are, to some extent, intrinsic to our persons, as they occur on a deep, subconscious level and generally remain intact despite social influences and conscious attempts by individuals to purge, repress, or ignore them.
3. Because no single genetic, anatomical, hormonal, environmental, or psychological factor has ever been found to directly cause any of these gender inclinations, we can assume that they are quantitative traits (i.e., multiple factors determine them through complex interactions). As a result, rather than producing discrete classes (such as feminine and masculine; attraction to women or men), each inclination shows a continuous range of possible outcomes.
4. Each of these inclinations roughly correlates with physical sex, resulting in a bimodal distribution pattern (i.e., two overlapping bell curves) similar to that seen for other gender differences, such as height. While it may be true that, on average, men are taller than women, such a statement becomes virtually meaningless when one examines individual people, as any given woman may be taller than any given man. Most people have heights that are relatively close to the average, but others fall in outlying areas of the range (for instance, some women are 6 feet 2 inches and some men are 5 feet 4 inches). Similarly, while women on average are more feminine than men, some women are more masculine than certain men, and some men more feminine than certain women.

Because these inclinations appear to have multiple inputs and show a continuous range of outcomes, it is incorrect to assume that those with exceptional sexual orientations, subconscious sexes, or gender expressions represent developmental, biological, or environmental “errors”; rather, they are naturally occurring examples of human variation.

(pp. 99–100)

This is one of the most difficult aspects of transitioning to describe, as there are so few words in our language to articulate “body feelings” of any sort. I’m sure that this lack in language is related to our cultural tendency to dismiss or discount the way that our bodies feel to us. Indeed, many of us tend to think of ourselves as brains or souls crammed inside of a shell—a shell that is our body. We delude ourselves into believing that the shell itself is not important, not connected to our consciousness, that it’s merely a vessel that contains us, or a vehicle that we move about with our minds. But the truth is, our bodies are inseparable from our minds. This becomes evident whenever hunger, thirst, or physical pain grows to the point where we can think of nothing else, or when mental grief or stress manifests itself in physical aches and exhaustion. All of us who have experienced the physical difference between feeling healthy and feeling ill, or perhaps most profoundly, between pre- and post-puberty, have a deep understanding (whether we acknowledge it or not) that our body feelings make a vital and substantial contribution to our senses of self.

(pp. 220–221)

These days, I recognize the huge difference between sexual desire and sexualization. Sexual desirability is something that we all hope to have to some extent. When other people express their sexual desire for us, it can be extremely empowering, so long as such expressions are reserved for the appropriate time and place—i.e., from the right person and when we have signaled our openness or willingness to reciprocate. Sexualization, on the other hand, has the opposite effect: Rather than empowering the person, it’s used to leverage power over them. This can be seen all the time in the media, where women often appear not as fully formed human beings with their own thoughts, feelings, and opinions, but as purely sexual objects used to sell cars, beer, and other commodities. Some might naively argue that these women have power—specifically, the power to lure men—but it’s a power that only serves heterosexual male interests. After all, how much power is there in being a carrot on a stick dangled in front of someone? Such depictions exist in sharp contrast to media expressions of sexuality that center on real-life women’s sexual desires and perspectives, such as The Vagina Monologues or a Margaret Cho show.

The fact that sexualization is an attempt to dehumanize and disempower women is even more evident in remarks we get on the street, which invariably occur when women are presumed vulnerable (when we are alone or outnumbered) and often go unchallenged solely because the men who make such comments are physically stronger than the women they harass. Perhaps it’s only one in fifty or one in a hundred men who stoop to the level of catcalls (or worse), but over time they take their toll and achieve their intended effect: They make us feel like we are targets. Indeed, the sexualization that occurs in both media imagery and public harassment reinforces a power dynamic between the sexes in which men are invariably viewed as predators and women as prey. This predator/prey mind-set makes it virtually impossible for us to imagine that a woman has the potential to be a sexual aggressor (evident in the common disbelief about, and inability to articulate, instances of woman-on-woman sexual violence or female fetishism) or that a man can be a sexual object (as seen by the tendency for people to view young boys who are seduced by adult women as being “lucky,” as opposed to being victims of statutory rape). In fact, the only instances in which adult men esem to have the potential to become sexual objects is when they are sexualized or coerced into sexual acts by male aggressors.

(pp. 254–255)

Indeed, the ongoing and hotly contested debates over whether femininity and masculinity are biological or social in origin have, in my view, served primarily as a distraction from a far more pertinent issue—namely, what meanings, symbolism, and connotations do we assign to different gender expressions? While I disagree with the notion that gender expression itself is entirely social in origin, I do believe that the way we perceive and assign values to feminine and masculine behaviors is primarily, if not exclusively, a social affair. In our male-centered culture, two forces most often shape our interpretations of femininity (as well as masculinity): oppositional and traditional sexism.

Oppositional sexism functions to legitimize feminine expressions in women and to delegitimize feminine expressions in men (and vice-versa for masculinity). So while all people are capable of expressing feminine traits, oppositional sexism ensures that such expressions will appear natural when produced by women and unnatural when produced by men. In addition to creating the perception that female femininity is “real” and “right” while male femininity is “fake” and “wrong,” oppositional sexism may also influence the “doing” of gender expression. Exceptional gender expressions are regularly dismissed, even stigmatized, in our culture, which may lead some people to hide or curb their own gender-variant behavior, further exaggerating the assumed, apparent differences between the two sexes. In these ways, oppositional sexism creates the assumption that feminine traits—which occur in members of both sexes—are inexorably linked to female biology, and therefore, to one another.

Traditional sexism functions to make femaleness and femininity appear subordinate to maleness and masculinity. This is accomplished in a number of ways. For example, female and feminine attributes are regularly assigned negative connotations and meanings in our society. An example of this is the way that being in touch with and expressing one’s emotions is regularly derided in our society. While this trait has virtually nothing to do with one’s ability to reason or to think logically, in the public mind, being “emotional” has become synonymous with being “irrational.” Another example is that certain pursuits and interests that are considered feminine, such as gossiping or decorating, are often characterized as “frivolous,” while masculine preoccupations—even those that serve solely recreational functions, such as sports—generally escape such trivializations.

In addition to placing inferior meanings on feminine traits, traditional sexism also creates the impression that certain aspects of femininity exist for the pleasure or benefit of men. Take, for example, the concern for, or desire to help, others. While those who have this quality of empathy or altruism often express it toward all types of beings (i.e., children and adults, strangers and friends, animals and humans), it’s often recast in women as a maternal, “nurturing” quality that is meant to be directed primarily toward one’s family. Thus, this thoroughly human trait has been twisted into the expectation that it’s women’s “natural” duty to take care of their male partners and children, and to carry out the bulk of family and domestic chores.

(pp. 325–327)

So why has the artificializing of femininity become a preoccupation for many feminists over the last several decades? I believe that it has to do with the fact that many of the women who have most strongly gravitated toward feminism are those who have found traditional feminine gender roles constraining or unnatural. In many cases, this is due to their own inclinations toward exceptional forms of gender expression. Because their personal experiences with femininity felt uncomfortable and contrived in comparison with their experiences with androgyny, masculinity, or other gender expressions (which they found more liberating and empowering), they mistakenly projected their own experience and perspective onto all other women. While not necessarily done maliciously, this extrapolation was nevertheless an act of gender entitlement, one that denied that any diversity in gender expression might exist among women arising out of their very different class, cultural, or biological backgrounds and predispositions. By arrogantly assuming that no woman could be legitimately drawn toward feminine expression, these feminists permanently relegated femininity to the status of “false consciousness.”

The feminist assumption that “femininity is artificial” is narcissistic, as it invariably casts nonfeminine women as having “superior knowledge” while dismissing feminine women as either “dupes” (who are too ignorant to recognize they have been conned) or “fakes” (who purposely engage in “unnatural” behaviors in order to uphold sexist societal norms). This tendency to dismiss feminine women is eerily similar to the behavior of some lesbian-feminists in the 1970s who arrogantly claimed that they were more righteous feminists than heterosexual women because the latter group was “fucking with the oppressor.” It is an extraordinarily convenient tactic to artificialize, and even demean, an inclination (such as femininity or heterosexuality) when you personally are not inclined toward it. Indeed, this is exactly what straight bigots do when they dismiss queer forms of gender and sexual expression as “unnatural.” When we feminists stoop to the level of policing gender and start inventing etiologies to explain why some women adopt “unnatural” feminine forms of expression, there’s little to distinguish us from the sexist forces we claim to be fighting against in the first place.

While femininity is in many ways influenced, shaped, and enforced by society, to say that it is entirely “artificial” or merely a “performance” is patronizing toward those for whom femininity simply feels right. Indeed, one would have to have a rather grim view of the female population to believe that a majority of us could so easily be “brainwashed” or “coerced” into enthusiastically adopting an entirely contrived or wholly artificial set of gender expressions. In fact, it seems incomprehensible that so many women could so actively gravitate toward femininity unless there was something about it that resonated with them on a profound level. This becomes even more obvious when considering feminine folks who exhibit no desire whatsoever to fit into straight society, such as femme dykes (who proudly express their femininity despite being historically marginalized within the lesbian movement because of it) and “nelly queens” (who remain fiercely feminine despite the gay male obsession with praising butchness and deriding “effeminacy”).

The idea that “femininity is artificial” is also blatantly misogynistic. While a handful of theorists in the field of gender studies have more recently begun to focus on how masculinity is constructed, the lion’s share of feminist attention, deconstruction, and denigration has been directed squarely at femininity. There is an obvious reason for this. Just as woman is man’s “other,” so too is femininity masculinity’s “other.” Under such circumstances, negative connotations like “artificial,” “contrived,” and “frivolous” become built into our understanding of femininity—indeed, this is precisely what allows masculinity to always come off as “natural,” “practical,” and “uncomplicated.” Those feminists who single out women’s dress shoes, clothing, and hairstyles to artificialize necessarily leave unchallenged the notion that their masculine counterparts are “natural” and “practical.” This is the same male-centered approach that allows the appearances and behaviors of men who wish to charm or impress others to seem “authentic” while the reciprocal traits expressed by women are dismissed as “feminine wiles.” Femininity is portrayed as a trick or ruse so that masculinity invariably seems sincere by comparison. For this reason, there are few intellectual tasks easier than artificializing feminine gender expression, because male-centricism purposefully sets up femininity as masculinity’s “straw man” or its scapegoat.

(pp. 337–340)

In retrospect, I would say that the assumption that distinct identities would automatically lead to exclusivity was entirely misplaced. After all, an identity is merely a label, a descriptive noun to express one particular facet of a person’s experiences. And if we look beyond gender and sexual identity politics, we can find many examples of flexible and fluid identities. For example, if I were to identify myself as a “cat person,” nobody would be outraged or confused if I said I also loved dogs. Further, when I tell people that I’m a “musician,” no one makes unwarranted assumptions about what instruments I play or what styles of music I prefer. Nonpoliticized identities like “musician” and “cat person” allow us to see that the recurring problems in gender and sexual identity politics arise not from identity per se, but rather from opposite-think (e.g., that a cat person cannot be a dog person, and vice versa) and from a sense of “oneness” (e.g., the assumption that all musicians are or should be punk rock guitarists.)

(p. 353)

Some might argue that it’s simply human nature for us to assign different values to different genders and sexualities. For example, if we tend to prefer the company of men over women, or if we find androgynous people more attractive than feminine or masculine ones, isn’t that assigning them a different worth? Not necessarily. There is a big difference between rightly recognizing these preferences in terms of our personal predilections (“I find androgynous people attractive”) and entitled claims that imply that there are no other legitimate opinions (“Masculine and feminine people are not sexy, period”). Similarly, there’s a big difference between calling yourself a woman or a genderqueer because you feel that word best captures your gendered experience and using that identity to make claims or presumptions about other people’s genders (e.g., assuming that “men” or “gender-conforming people” are your “opposites”).

Some might also argue that there is such a thing as “bad” gender—for instance, a woman who feels coerced into living up to stereotypically feminine ideals. As someone who was closeted for many years, I can understand why someone might be tempted to describe genders that are enforced by others (e.g., stereotypical femininity or masculinity) as being “bad.” The problem is that there is no way for us to know whether any given person’s gender identity or expression is sincere or coerced. While we experience our own genders and sexualities firsthand, and thus are capable of separating our own intrinsic inclinations from the extrinsic expectations that others place on us, we are unable to do so on behalf of other people. We can only ever make assumptions and educated guesses about the authenticity of someone else’s sexuality or gender—and that’s always dangerous.

The thing that always impresses me about human beings is our diversity. Even when we are brought up in similar environments, we still somehow gravitate toward very different careers, hobbies, politics, manners of speaking and acting, aesthetic preferences, and so forth. Maybe this diversity is due to genetic variation. Or maybe, being naturally curious and adaptive creatures, we invariably tend to scatter all over the place, exploiting every niche we can possibly find. Either way, it’s fairly obvious that we also end up all over the map when it comes to gender and sexuality. That being the case, if we take the subversivist route and focus our energies on deriding stereotypically feminine and masculine genders, we will inevitably disparage some (perhaps many) people for whom those genders simply feel right and natural. Furthermore, by critiquing those gender expressions in an entitled way, we actively create new gender expectations that others may feel obliged to meet (which is exactly what’s now starting to happen in the queer/trans community). That is why I suggest that we turn our energies and attention away from the way that individuals “do” or “perform” their own genders and instead focus on the expectations and assumptions that those individuals project onto everybody else. By focusing on gender entitlement rather than gender performance, we may finally take the next step toward a world where all people can choose their genders and sexualities at will, rather than feeling coerced by others.

(pp. 360–362)

In the January VGHVI Symposium, we discussed some of Roger’s thoughts on teaching. Which was a very interesting conversation, and I’d like to follow it up more. Unfortunately, I’m hampered for a couple of reasons:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I stopped playing SpaceChem two and a half months ago, but somehow other blog posts intervened, so I’m only writing about it now. Which I could use as an excuse for the complete lack of insight that I’m going to display, but the truth is: I don’t think I would have anything useful to say about the game if I’d written about it while it was still fresh in my mind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A while back, I mentioned that I’d written a little microblogging platform called ‘fragments’. At the time, it was a little unpolished; since then, I’ve cleaned up the code a bit (most importantly, separated the content from the guts of publishing, though presentation is probably more interwoven with the latter than would be ideal), enough so that I don’t mind putting it up on github. I’d be surprised if anybody else found it useful, but you never know; if somebody else out there wants a way to write extremely spare and unlinked small posts, is running their own web server, and wants to write posts in a text editor instead of through a web interface, then have at it!

If anybody is looking at the source code: the main way in which it’s not representative of how I normally program is the fact that most classes don’t have unit tests. This sometimes happens to me when I’m gluing stuff together: there’s not much in the way of logic, and the ultimate test of a fair bit of that code is how it looks in the web browser, so I’m not sure where unit tests would be useful. In situations like that, though, I do like to throw in some kind of overall acceptance test that at least detects whether or not I’m inadvertently changing the HTML output. And, of course, it’s much smaller than software that I work on at work! Other than that, though, it’s reasonably representative: functions and classes are pretty small but there’s room for further shrinking, I’ve taken a bit of care to remove duplication, but I wouldn’t present it as anything like a shining, polished gem.

I’ve also added a front page for the site, so you can see the fragments (at least the most recent 20 ones—no pagination yet) without having to go to the feed. (Incidentally, Safari isn’t correctly doing feed autodetection right; I’ll look into that eventually, but if somebody happens to why that isn’t working, please tell me.)

It’s turned out differently from how I expected it to be. In particular, I labeled it as a “microblogging platform” above, but you’ll see if you look at the front page that that isn’t accurate, that “miniblogging” is more the size posts are turning out. Also, in the original post, I talked about “mosaics”; support for them is still there, but I’ve only written one, and that one was a proof of concept instead of something that I really felt compelled to do. So, instead of figuring out how to represent mosaics on the front page, I just left them off the front page entirely, and am not advertising the mosaics RSS feed, either; I’d be surprised if I ever write another one, though who knows.

What does seem to be the case is that the fragments blog is turning into my ‘morose blog’. Something about the fact that it feels hidden—very few readers (almost all of whom are people I know and feel quite comfortable talking to in person), combined with a complete lack of comments and an almost complete lack of analytics—makes it feel more private than it actually is. (Because I don’t want to kid myself: it’s on the web, it’s accessible by search engines, so any mistakes I make there will be available to be uncovered!) The result of which is that I spend some amount of time digging into in-person interactions, and the in-person interactions that I think about the most are ones where I feel out of place. That gives entries a morose tone, to the extent that I end up backtracking on that within the blog itself, because I certainly don’t feel like a morose person the vast majority of the time! Still, I think I’ll stop backtracking/apologizing for that within the blog: this paragraph is the context you’re going to get for the tone, the fragments themselves should be minimal and unapologetic.

And, unless something changes, this post and its predecessor is all the talking I’m planning to do about the fragments blog: it’s been a successful enough experiment that I’ve added a link to it to the right-hand column on this blog, and I imagine the fragments will spur ideas that play out here in a larger scale, but in general I’m going to leave it tucked away. No more discussion of it here, no automatic forwarding of posts there to Facebook or Google+ or whatever. I doubt that the vast majority of you reading this would find anything at all interesting there: it’s primarily targeted at myself (which, admittedly, is the case for this blog, too!), and I don’t think people who haven’t interacted quite a bit with me would find anything of interest there.

Our current TV is really showing its age, so I’m planning to buy a TV next week; any advice, whether about specific models or attributes to look out for or good places to go for reviews or good places to buy them from? I imagine I’ll spend less than a thousand dollars on the TV, the place it will fit is approximately 47 inches wide, it’ll get used for TV, video games, and movies. I’ve been assuming I’ll buy a receiver at the same time (our current setup is from before the HDMI era), though one of my coworkers today was arguing that receivers aren’t necessary today, that you can do enough switching between devices and driving of speakers (of which we have 5 + subwoofer) from your TV; is that true? (For what it’s worth, I’ll have 4 HDMI devices that I want to plug into it, and that will probably change to 5 within the next couple of years.) Also, currently I use optical audio cables; has HDMI rendered that obsolete, or are there good audio protocols that travel over optical cables but not over HDMI? Anything I should be asking about but am not?

Any advice is appreciated.

I never participated in the Blogs of the Round Table back when Corvus was running it (at least I don’t think I did?), but I was quite happy to see that, with Corvus’s blessing, Critical Distance is relaunching that feature. So I thought I would take a swing at this month’s theme (provided by Corvus himself), which says:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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