A New Definition of Genre
Apr 24, 2006
As I dive a bit deeper into the various bits of game design theory floating around, encountering terms like "intentionality" and "generative systems", it occurs to me that as designers, we need a revision in how we define the game genres we work in.
Now this may create a disconnect with how we define genres for the consumer, at least in the short term, and that's fine (mind you, I think that as time goes by, the consumer will be looking for a different genre definition as well). But our current genre definitions I think are not doing us service.
By and large we define our genres based on content. So we have "sports" or "adventure" or "RPG". Mostly what this tells us to expect is a certain kind of content. However it does not tell us that much about the experience behind the game. So for example an SSX or NBA Street get lumped together with Madden and NBA Live, though they are very different games, and frankly appeal to very different audiences. Similarly the god-awful acronym "MMORPG" grew out of a need to use existing genre descriptions. (At least we've finally decided on a pronunciation, ugly though it may sound.)
Instead, I think we should use genre descriptors based on the key formal elements of the game. These definitions would cleave much more closely to the type and scope of development effort involved in making the game, and the expertise called for in order to nail its design and key tech. In addition these genre definitions do more accurately reflect the experience of the player, which is after all what are medium is, at its core.
The Descriptors
I would define therefore the following major genres of games:
- Narrative
- Procedural
- Multiplayer
I think that in the coming years, most major game productions will fall into one of those three genre categories. (Notable by its absence is a fourth major category, at least in terms of sales, which is 'Simulation'. I would argue from a designer's point of view that the fidelity of simulation we're seeing even in products such as FIFA or Madden -- not to mention the military sims -- has begun to take them somewhat outside the realm of actual games, and into the area of pure simulation. I think that the general intra-industry distaste for sports games, and the rising popularity of "action sports" games like the abovementioned SSX both offer proof to this point.)
I will also add three minor categories. In the case of smaller productions or 'casual' games, these genres can supply a whole descriptor, but mostly these will be sub-descriptors of larger games, and do not represent the vital core of ambitious productions:
- Action
- Strategy
- Puzzle
And Now, The Definitions
So, here goes:
Narrative
Narrative games are those in which the player's experience is essentially acting out a script created by the designer. The volume of 'linear narrative' content, taken to mean story, is fairly irrelevant, though a good narrative design and a good story do go nicely together.
progenitors: Mario Brothers, Zelda, Final Fantasy
practitioners: Kojima, Ueda, Jaffe
godhead: Shigeru Miyamoto
cute metaphor: The Wizard of Oz (pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!)
Narrative games rely on precise design, because the player is expected to learn something extremely specific, and the game fails if that thing is taught incorrectly. Good narrative games frequently become sentimental favorites, because through their interactivity (and sometimes their story) a strong bond develops between creator and consumer. (Every game I've worked on (save for one notable failure) has been narrative in nature.)
Procedural
Procedural games (as always, we need better terms) rely on systems put in place and tuned precisely by the designer, in order that the player creates his or her own experience. Procedural games generally have no story at all but allow for great expression on the part of the player.
progenitors: SimCity, Civilization, Populous
practitioners: Meier, Wright, Animal Crossing Team
godhead: Will Wright
cute metaphor: A child's favorite toy is a cardboard box
Procedural games rely heavily on careful planning and obsessive game tuning. The rules behind the game must function perfectly, yet must rapidly fade into the background. The best procedural games become favorites not because of the conscious relationship between designer and player, but because of the feeling of control and accomplishment afforded the player within its tight world space.
Multiplayer
For an increasing number of games, the multiplayer experience is the core of the game. The designer creates the rules and the core fiction for the play space, but the game literally does not exist without a multiple (sometimes a multitude) of players.
progenitors: MUDs, Ultima Online, Gauntlet, Doom/Quake
practitioners: Koster, NCSoft, Blizzard
godhead: Richard Bartle
cute metaphor: A party of one is just called a drunk
The multiplayer games (which I freely admit to knowing relatively the least about) rely on the ability to foster community in order to succeed. Successful multiplayer games are able to host social communities whose depth and significance far exceeds the planned game context; "game friends" are the norm, not the exception.
A Bit More Detail; Some Case Studies
Like any definition of genre, very few games will fit neatly into any of these categories. However I do believe that they give a particularly useful method of looking at games in a modern way.
And now some recent games in terms of these definitions:
Shadow of the Colossus: This game is pure narrative in genre. Though it includes long portions of very free-roaming gameplay, this does not diminish its narrative nature in any way. (It could even be argued that the long horse riding sections are part of the narrative, enforcing a thoughtful reflection period on the player.) And though the colossi give an initial appearance of openness, there is really only one or two proper ways to defeat them. The game is masterfully done, and you finish the game having had the exact experience that Fumito Ueda wanted you to.
Deus Ex: This game stirred up a ruckus, because it added some key elements of proceduralism to what is really a narrative form. The ability sneak past (or confront) enemies in a variety of ways, all of them equal in the eyes of the designer, is a meaningful departure. The net result (which Clint Hocking and others appropriately label 'intentionality') is a significant increase in immersiveness in a narrative genre game.
Starcraft: Now this does present a conundrum; a game like Starcraft successfully bridges all three genres. Especially in the single-player mode it would be a narrative adventure (though a fairly poor one), but the game does not dictate where you build your base, how you choose to travel up the tech tree, etc., so there's procedural play as well, though compared to Sim City it's pretty limited. Finally, most would say that the true success of Starcraft lies in its multiplayer experience. Just because my genre defintions are useful, doesn't mean a game must fit within one or even two of them!
Game Deconstruction Workshop #2
Apr 21, 2006
(My Brain Age: 27)
Last night I attended a second version of the USC Game Deconstruction Workshop. This time the students reviewed two games I had not played, Metal Gear Solid 3 and Black. As ever, it was a pleasure to hear the students give these presentations, and I learned a great deal about the games (mind you it's no substitute for playing them, but it's an excellent introduction to the games).
This is only the second of these presentations I've been to, but I'm really impressed by the quality of analysis. Now maybe that's just because the concept of a critical studies approach applied to games is so foreign generally speaking, but that doesn't change how cool I find the experience.
During the dinner break I collared a couple of the students, as I like to do, and learned something which troubled me, which is that these 'deconstruction' presentations they do are not part of their general curriculum, nor is there really an analog in the curriculum. The students were quick to point to improvement in the program in terms of the demos that are being created, the equivalent of course of 'student films' coming out of the famous USC film school. But the idea of critical studies or even game theory seems to be pretty far in the distance, and I found this disappointing.
More and more I'm convinced that game study should be done using a humanities approach. And as I think about it, I think that probably the best academic analog is the way music is studied at the university level. I actually did a minor in music and my studies went something like this:
- MUSIC HISTORY: This was absolutely requisite and basically began with Haydn, moving forward through Bach, Mozart and broadening into musical movements and periods. I was only doing a minor so I did not do truly in-depth study, but I certainly got a sense of the evolution of harmony, a little bit of the sociological context for musical movements, what the "devil's interval" is, things like that.
- MUSIC THEORY: I learned about chord structure, intervals, the mathematical basis for the 12-tone scale as well as other scales and modes, and a lot of practical experience especially in voice leading, which is really the fundamental mechanic of western classical music. A fair amount of theoretical skill was involved as well; to pass my theory requirement I had to demonstrate rudimentary proficiency at the piano, and had to identify intervals by ear.
- INDEPENDENT STUDY: For most, this was performance. Most who study music academically have a performance element to what they do. And like making games, a great deal of music is in the doing. I took a slightly different tack, which is that though I did perform while in school (saxophone, if you're curious), for my academic requirement I created my own track in jazz theory. It wasn't very expansive - we're just talking about a minor here - but it was interesting, and definitely a 'humanities' approach. (My 'research' involved analyzing embedded melody in John Coltrane's solos on the Miles Davis album Kind of Blue.)
It seems to me that this kind of curriculum could work great for games studies: History, theory, practice.
While I agree with the complaint that the history of videogames is short, I think this is a brutally short-sighted view of what games are. Reading theory books like Raph Koster's A Theory of Fun and Zimmerman and Salen's Rules of Play should wise up any academic to the fact that though videogames have brought a new and crucial facet to interactive play, understanding the role of games in history (such as backgammon, for instance) gives important context to the world of videogames.
Next would come theory, whereby students would learn the mechanics and formal elements of games. Though the focus would begin to shift toward computers at this point, nonetheless concepts of balance, iteration and challenge can and should be taught first by analysis of paper RPGs, board games and even crossword puzzles.
Finally is practice, which should be limited to upper-level courses, and this is where the game demos are created, and a lot of the stuff which is already being done not only at USC but all over the trade school realm. This would be highly specialized, and much as a music department must be equally prepared to support study of oboe performance and drums performance, the school should support a wide variety of projects, ranging from the more academic (such as my John Coltrane project) to the more practical (such as creating a nice game demo).
Just as in the games industry we're trying to figure out what this thing we do really means, I give academia a pass for feeling its oats regarding what to do with this new area of study. The pass is going to expire before too long though. Right now I feel like mostly what a school like USC is doing is satisfying student demand. And while that's great, I hope that more level-headed academics start looking at games more critically, which will add great vibrancy to the art form as a whole.
If anybody is already doing this (and my gut tells me plenty are), I'd sure love to hear about it!
LED Lighting, The Future, and Philips
Apr 13, 2006
My Brain Age: 20
Bright Lights
Take note of this month, because this is the month that some researchers at USC and the University of Michigan have created LED white lights that beat incandescents for efficiency.
On the one hand, this should interest the nerd in anyone. When a serious threat is posed to arguably the most landmark invention of Thomas Edison, well that's a big deal. While the researchers' work is so far just "on the lab bench," it's just a matter of time before you're screwing these things into your light sockets, and quite happily so because the LEDs will have none of that weird bluish hue you can't quite get used to from your compact fluorescent lighting.
The problem with LEDs is that they emit light only in a very specific part of the spectrum. Anyone my age knows that the easiest and therefore earliest LEDs were red. Eventually green LEDs were created, and only a few years ago, a high intensity blue finally became practical. (If you don't understand why red, green and blue are the important colors, it's simply because these roughly define three poles of what humans can clearly perceive...so most of what we see can be represented by some combination of red, green and blue.)
So as soon as R, G and B LEDs could be made, well now you have the ability to create "real" light. The first application of this was for very large video displays, such as those you see in sports stadiums. Many of those now use RGB LED technology to show clear, bright color pictures, and since LEDs are individual elements that don't have to be embedded in a matrix of material such as LCDs or CRTs, these displays can be scaled to practically any size.
But, to get a true color spectrum (especially white), LEDs still required a lot of energy compared with good old fashioned light bulbs - especially the new compact fluorescent bulbs. So they were constrained to very specialized applications.
Apparently, no longer. Now that a true white LED is as efficient as a light bulb, it's just a matter of getting the manufacturing cost down and increasing efficiency, and there's little doubt they will eventually take over the lighting market - especially because they are not handicapped by that weird bluish hue of fluorescents.
LED Lights and Games
OK cool, but why is this of special interest to game makers? Well if red, green and blue elements are being combined in order to make white light, it stands to reason that with some reasonably primitive circuitry, a given light fixture can be made to emit pretty much any color, at any intensity. And if there was a way to hook up this circuitry to a game, just think "surround light" instead of "surround sound" and it gets pretty exciting pretty fast.
Philips
I have a long-standing connection to the Philips company, and was approached a year ago to look at some technology that Philips had put together using an earlier, less-efficient version of this exact technology. I was, as the English say, gobsmacked. Though what they showed was a pre-scripted demo, it was a very short logical step to see how if a game could be programmed to raise, lower and flash all the lights in a room, at any intensity, just about any game could be made more immersive. Wow I thought, this is cool.
Then I remembered...this is Philips.
Philips in my experience has on multiple occasions created really cool technology, then done completely idiotic shit when trying to get the technology to market.
Witness: Philips ambx.
Philips was sitting a year ago on a technology which this latest innovation in efficiency would have simply blown the doors off. But, not content to do the smart thing, their engineers took the idea of an interface to control the lights and decided to make a "fully ambient experience" out of it. So first they added an interface to a rumbling chair. Fine...I've experienced those before, nothing new, kind of a gimmick but fun.
Then they added a controller for some electric fans to blow wind in your face. Now you might think that having these fans come on would be kind of distracting, maybe even kind of stupid...but you have no idea just how retarded this experience really is. I can't imagine it seeming cool to anyone over about 11 years old - and Philips engineers.
But wait, there's more.
Dumb Idea, Even Dumber Business Model
So I thought, let's get the business guys in here. There's certainly nothing unusual about some engineers getting a little carried away with the Red Bulls and overdoing things a bit. But they had nothing on the dumb ideas thrown at me by the business guys.
I told them that though the fans and stuff were pretty stupid, they really were onto something with the lights and controllers, and they should try to get the API and kits out to developers right away. They agreed, and asked how many developers I thought would pay for the license to use the ambx technology.
Say what?
Yes, that's right. Not content to let the engineering group steal the limelight for dumbass ideas, the business guys were planning on charging developers for use of this new unproven technology, for which there was no observable market. Why would you do that, I asked, when your upside is clearly on selling the lights and equipment on the other end.
Oh no, they said, we won't be selling the systems. Just licensing the technology. Logitech is very interested!
Do not underestimate these guys, I'm telling you. They create something cool, then think they're so damn smart, they'll get someone else to cover the risk on all sides of the business proposition. Don't worry, my contact told me, you're telling them exactly what they need to hear. It'll be taken care of.
Fast forward to E3 2005. I met up again with the ambx group...this time with some higher up executives. They still thought they had a great business model on their hands, and showed me some even better fans! It went from stupid to kind of sickening, and trust me, these guys had no interest in what I had to say.
Bright Lights, Bright Future
This technology is just too cool to be left to people like Philips ambx, and I'm confident it won't be. Somebody will put together a solid, focused business model, a solid set of tech with a good interface to the lights (maybe X11? something wireless?), and we will have a seriously groovy new toy to play with.
Meantime, if you do get a chance to see an ambx demonstration, do go. Just hold your nose when they pull out their new smell generating device. Backgammon
Apr 12, 2006
A question nobody has ever asked me, but dammit somebody should someday, is if I could give a single, simple piece of advice about making games, what would it be?
Somebody should ask, because, lo, I have an answer!
My answer is the form of a story, and the story is about the game of backgammon. It's also about a lot of other things, but I'll let you figure that out.
In 1990 I was in a very small town in Eastern Thailand called Klong Yai. For reasons I can't quite explain, I found myself there for a month, and after a few days I was well acquainted with the other inhabitants of the 'guest house' I was staying at. One of them was a French-Canadian named Raymond, whom I grew to dislike in greater degrees each day I was there. Raymond had a backgammon set, and he offered to teach me how to play.
Unlike a game like chess or go, every action in backgammon is preceded by an act of pure chance - the roll of two dice. So it's quite easy to view backgammon, and indeed to play backgammon, as a game of chance - a gambling game. But backgammon is not played in casinos, and good players will consistently defeat bad players. And Raymond was kicking my ass. Repeatedly.
It sucked. He seemed to get the rolls he needed just when he needed them, and I never seemed to. It quickly became obvious that he was playing the odds, so I started doing a better job of planning for the right rolls (seven good, twelve bad), and I did a little bit better. And he continued to kick my ass.
As the days went by, my dislike for Raymond was growing, and though it was not just because he was silently kicking my ass at backgammon, that wasn't helping. Finally I swallowed my pride. Dammit Raymond I said, what is the trick to this stinking game?
Why? he asked.
Because you're kicking my ass!
No, he said, the answer is - Why?
Hunh?
Let's play again, he said. So we set up the pieces and began. I rolled the dice, and began to move my pieces.
Why did you do that? Raymond asked me.
Because I rolled a three and a five.
No, why did you choose to move those pieces to those locations? The fact that you rolled a three and a five is irrelevant.
I thought about it. I didn't change my move. But I started winning, about four in ten games. It was simple. What Raymond told me was that when playing backgammon, one must always ask the question, why? The dice are there merely to force the player to revise strategy, not to determine who wins and who loses.
This lesson applies awfully broadly, but I like to apply it to video games, especially as I think designers frequently look at a game and can't quite understand the 'trick' that a good game has that a bad game - perhaps your own game - lacks.
The trick is, it's nothing to do with luck. It's because the designer asked the question, "Why?" Each and every element in your game, from the high points of the story down to the placement of every collectible should be able to satisfy that one simple question - Why? Why did that character in the story do that? Why did you decide to put a double-jump task there instead of a single-jump? Why did you put that move on the circle button? Why did you make that character 20cm taller than your protagonist, instead of 10cm taller?
In a great game, indeed in any object which is the product of excellent design, this question has not only been answered, but the answer is on the tip of the tongue of the designer. Though answering the question Why? does not guarantee success any more than showing up for work in the morning does, failing to answer that question guarantees failure just as surely.
A couple of weeks later, Raymond and I were involved in a rather nasty car accident, and when the vehicle flipped, it flipped onto his side, and he was badly injured. I had to literally carry him back to Bangkok to put him on a plane back to Montreal. Sometimes, it does pay to be lucky.
Smart Bomb
Apr 12, 2006
My Brain Age today: 23!
I just finished reading Smart Bomb by Heather Chaplin and Aaron Ruby. I'd heard good things about the book and I give it a generally positive review.
The first thing I noticed about Smart Bomb is that it's awfully similar to the Nintendo history Game Over and especially to Steve Kent's The Last Quarter. The stories about Willy Higginbotham and Nolan Bushnell are starting to get a little tired for me and I won't be reading any more of them. Hopefully we're getting to a point soon where not everybody writing about videogames feels the need to tell the story about Pong and the overflowing quarter tray. I'm not saying this to be especially harsh on Chaplin and Ruby, more just hoping that games now have enough common history that some of it can be skipped in a book.
Smart Bomb is divided into sections that tell the story of various luminaries in the games business. The choice to start and end with Cliff "CliffyB" Bleczinski is odd, but also kind of smart because CliffyB succeeds as a character frankly better than most of the characters in games. And of course his chameleonlike permanent identity crisis is a metaphor for the identity crisis of this whole games world is going through, trying to figure out what it really means to be mainstream entertainment.
If you haven't read the above books, you'll find the section on Miyamoto-san interesting; if you have, you've pretty much heard it before. The section on Will Wright was particularly illuminating though and probably the most fun read of the whole book. As if we didn't already have enough reasons to have a downright painful combination of admiration and envy for Will...well Smart Bomb is not going to help.
What I don't get frankly, is the inclusion of the chapter on the marriage between the military and games. I mean it's interesting I guess, but I didn't learn anything that surprised me, having seen the increasing presence of the Army at E3 and conferences like DICE. It might have made a nice chapter buried somewhere in the middle of the book, but the choice to title the whole book after this relationship kind of ruins the whole thing for me. Ultimately the question of the military in games is just an exploration of the inevitable, without a lot of real interest. The future of video games depends much more on how we grow our role as entertainers, not war-gamers.
Still, Smart Bomb is well-written, and though it has somewhat less data than The First Quarter, I'd have to give it a slightly higher rating due to far superior readability and this interesting question of how a legion of nerds like CliffyB, and me, have adapted and will adapt to the incredibly mixed blessing of accidentally getting exactly what we want, at the center of one of the world's favorite modes of entertainment.
My Brain Age: 37
Apr 11, 2006
Yesterday I started playing Brain Age, the result of Mr. Iwata's clever largesse at his GDC keynote. Nearly everyone who saw Iwata-san's presentation was at least curious about this runaway success product and it was a stroke of genius for him to drop a fully localized beta (I hope it was a beta) on us upon exiting the keynote. No doubt capsule reviews of the product are popping up on blogs and email lists all over the game industry, and if Iwata-san's real goal is to get us as developers to "think different" (Nintendo is, after all, becoming the Apple of the games business), well it's working.
Here are some remarkable things about Brain Age:
- It actively discourages addictive play. Once you've done your 'training' for the day, the game no longer allows you to progress.
- It uses some of the oldest tricks in the book as far as using the Kawashima character to connect the player to the game, revealing "little secrets" about the game and such. No doubt there were some of the same designers on
Brain Age and Animal Crossing.
Like so many games, it uses the full suite of the DS's capabilities, including both the microphone and complete use of the touchscreen.
The game's screen usage turns the DS from a game machine into a book - you turn it sideways to play. This simple choice no doubt has had a huge effect on the ease of acceptance by non-gamers.
The game's design has mastered viral marketing, with the 'quick play' feature. Kawashima gently encourages you from time to time to show your friends, using the quick play feature (this is the feature that Nintendo used in its GDC demonstrations).
The list goes on and on. It's just a brilliant game. I'm sure that makers of educational software, the math blasters of the world, will find it familiar, but the game itself was definitely put together by game designers, and hits key points like only a true designer knows how. The way it metes out success and failure for instance is all game. The way pressure is carefully applied through timers. I'm sure there's a lot of neuropsychology in there too, but the thing succeeds because it is a game.
There are a few things wrong with Brain Age, a couple of which I hope are a product of beta software. One is that the game definitely punishes anyone who is not a native speaker. Language localization is key on the game, especially in the area of speech recognition. I had my friend Klaus (whose native language is German) play the game, and it simply could not recognize him saying the word "blue". Also Brain Age's handwriting recognition, at least of my handwriting, is atrocious. I finally tried using lower-case letters and I seem to be having a little bit better luck, but not much. My first piece of advice is, if you use another device with handwriting recognition, such as a PalmOS device, start by forgetting everything you know.
This is easily counterbalanced however by the things that Brain Age does right. Just try doing the arithmetic challenges, and note how its number recognition (which is excellent BTW) will totally give you the benefit of the doubt between "7" and "1" because it knows the correct answer. Or how it will do a couple of carefully timed pauses before it finally allows you to fail. The designer is in total control here.
So far I'm two days in, I have two stamps, and Mr. Kawashima says I'm doing great (and politely commiserated with me over allergy season). And my brain age is a year below my real age! Wahoo! Independent Games
Apr 07, 2006
At this year's GDC I remedied a number of past sins (including finally attending the Game Design Challenge), but not least was finally taking the time to play the independent games on display as part of the Independent Games Festival.
Some of the games were not very interesting at all, and some were ambitious in ways that I didn't find that interesting (for instance there was a fighting game using characters built out of cubes which looked really neat and had some interesting visual ideas, but wasn't that interesting as a game). But there were some real gems in the bunch, and I give a big shout out to them, and an apology for missing so many of these games in the past.
My two favorites were called 'Ocular Ink' and 'Strange Attractors'.
'Ocular Ink' is a mouse-centric action game that is just clever as hell in both its concept and its execution. I was peripherally involved many years ago in a game whose theme was eyeballs (the codename for it was "Project Eyepopper") and it was a very conventional game idea (which never saw the light of day, so don't ask). I don't know if it would have had any better chance on the market if it was something as creative as [eyeball game], but at it sure would have been a lot more fun.
[The eyeball game] is really a perfect game for the stylus control of the Nintendo DS, and ironically the creators had hardly even played anything on the DS. Let's not kid ourselves here - the game as I saw it does not have a lot of commercial potential as anything approaching a full-price game...but if the business model is right...
I was particularly impressed by 'Strange Attractors', a 2D physics-based game set vaguely in space. The first thing you notice when watching someone play Strange Attractors is the deep intensity of the player. The first thing you notice when you step up to play it is that it uses only a single digital button as a controller. In the GDC implementation, Strange Attractor's sole human interface was the space bar on a PC keyboard. Your 'character', a small greenish sphere (circle, really, this is a 2D game after all), bounces around a moderately crowded playfield in which various objects drift around, almost Asteroids-style. There is a general gravitational pull to the bottom of the screen, and the player's goal is to escape through the top of the screen. All objects have a gravitational pull with one another, and the space bar switches on or off a dramatic multiplier in your orb's gravity.
That's it. So to get out, the player tries to perfectly time the button presses to send the orb in the correct direction, to cause carefully planned reflections off other objects, or, if you're really good, to loop around a large object NASA-style to gain momentum. It's difficult, engaging, and perfectly fair, and would have been a sure fire hit back in the heyday of coin-op gaming in the early 1980s. I don't know what the future now of a game like Strange Attractor is, but I sure admired and enjoyed it.
Particularly curious was the origin of Strange Attractor - the game was created as part of a competition to create games to entertain profoundly handicapped kids, and the guideline for entrants was that their games must use only a single button as input. Such a constraint is almost terrifyingly limiting for any game designer I know, but when I spoke to the game's creator he seemed to feel that it was liberating. There's a heck of a lesson in there somewhere.
Preproduction #3: The List of Questions
Apr 07, 2006
I've said many times that the goal of preproduction is not to create a game, but to create a game design, to test assumptions and ideas, and to form them into something coherent and ultimately fun and rewarding to the player.
I recently experimented with another way to phrase this idea, which is to look at preproduction as a time when one is primarily engaged in answering questions. This approach may allow teams to formalize their processes a little more, and to track some of their progress as well.
The highest level question is "what is my game?", but it takes relatively little effort to drill down below that level and find a myriad of questions that need to be answered during your preproduction phase. An easy place to start is to break down the Three C's of early preproduction: character, camera and control. For instance:
- What is my character? How does it animate? Why is it appealing? Does it support my aspirations for storytelling? Will it work with the gameplay I have in mind?
- What type of camera system am I using? If I'm using any type of fixed cameras, how will they be authored and designed for? What are the key algorithms for a successful camera for my game?
- How fast does my character run? How high does it jump? What gravitational constant will I use? What sort of combat moves will I use?
With some imagination, the Three C's can be applied to many genres, for example substituting "interface & scrolling" for "camera" in an RTS...the point is to try to get to your fundamentals quickly and begin breaking out simple questions. For my current preproduction, using a game in a pretty well-understood genre, I was able to rapidly generate eight typewritten pages of questions, just for the design, ignoring issues of art and technology.
This list has proven surprisingly useful. While I created it more as a source of comfort than a real tool, I find that simply copying and pasting a selection of the questions to the top of a document helps immensely in structuring the next experiment to be planned out. I know that if the experiment directly addresses a decent number of the questions, that the project will make forward progress by doing it.
The List of Questions, just like anything in preproduction, must be very flexible, constantly being tweaked and modified. Most importantly, as the questions are answered I will be deleting them from the list. My goal is to have the list whittled down to a page or less by the time First Playable is delivered...and the questions remaining will need to be of limited consequence.
I don't know if the List of Questions will work for everyone, or if it's ultimately a great tool rather than a waste of time, but for anyone doing real preproduction for the first time, or having trouble getting things set in motion the correct way, I recommend trying it. Let me know how it works out.
18 Months
Apr 03, 2006
So I've started reading Eric Zimmerman and Katie Salen's excellent book Rules of Play. Though the book has a tendency to get very densely academic at times, this tendency is a necessary evil in the effort to define a theory of criticism for modern games. Serious academic study in the humanities depends on establishing theories of criticism, so this is a vital effort. I'm only around 100 pages into this very thick volume, so more posts are no doubt forthcoming regarding the book.
This post is actually quite unrelated to the real value of Rules of Play and is rather a reference to an extended anecdote quoted in the book, regarding the creation of the Lord of the Rings board game. The game was created by a very experienced board game designer, and obviously a great deal was on the line given not only the incredible current popularity of the Lord of the Rings world, but also the passionate and picky fanbase.
Zimmerman and Salen use the anecdote as an example of the importance of iteration in creating games - that creating fun is incredibly difficult to do in the abstract, and it requires actual interactive play in order to determine fun. I couldn't agree more, and have written on the topic before.
But the story of the LOTR game jumped out at me for a different reason, which was that the playtesting portion of the game's development took eighteen months. Though the initial inspiration for the game took only a couple of months to develop to prototype stage, refining it from "kinda neat idea" to "fun, playable game" took almost an order of magnitude more time.
To me this says something important about the creative process. While the moment of inspiration is often perceived as the crucial point in the process, it is in fact anything but. Moments of inspiration are exciting and attention paid to them therefore is not surprising, but in fact they are terribly common. The work, discipline, and yes talent to take the inspiration through to something remarkable is a key element of creative genius.
Tomes about creative genius, such as the movie Amadeus would have us believe that inspiration strikes the blessed few, and genius merely rolls off the pen. But anyone who has studied the work of Mozart knows that his music while certainly enthralling is also deeply structured and rooted the forms of established his predecessors such as Bach and Haydn. None of this is to diminish the genius which is also requisite, but a substantial portion of the genius is the discipline and focus required to get his musical ideas to paper, to work out the orchestration, to resolve all his voice leading in the incredibly intricate puzzle that is a symphony.
Eighteen months. Wow, that is a long time. And it has paid off handsomely, with excellent sales and a perception that the game lives up to the difficult pedigree of its license. Respect.
Who the Hell is Harvey Smith?
Apr 03, 2006
At this year's GDC I discovered I'd been making a terrible error, which was not attending the annual Game Design Challenge. This session, the brainchild of academic guru/GDC court jester Eric Zimmerman, brings some of the better-known figures in game design together to attempt to create a game design around a strange and fun concept clearly pulled straight out of Zimmerman's ass. Unsurprisingly, Will Wright had won the first two. I was in the audience to see the third annual installment.
The contestants this year were:
- Keita Takahashi, creator of the Katamari Damacy games, whose rebellious artist personality has made him as much a celebrity as his cult favorite games.
- Cliff "CliffyB" Blezinski (sorry for the name butchering Cliff), whose actual design bona fides may not be as strong as his public persona would indicate, but I actually like Cliff for injecting a lot of personality into the business.
- Harvey Smith, who took lead design roles on several well-received PC titles including iterations of Deus Ex and Thief
The theme this year was "Nobel Peace Prize". Good luck, lads.
Blezinski's presentation was probably the least impressive; though his concept was clearly thoughtful and extremely faithful to the concept of promoting peace, it also just didn't look like it would be very fun. Trying to get a family out of a refugee situation looked like it would be frequently depressing, not engaging, and one of the flaws really of interactive media is that it must be engaging or else it fails outright. Schindler's List just wouldn't be doable as a game.
Takahashi gave a predictably off-base presentation. I wasn't sure at first whether he had perhaps misunderstood the contest, but I've now decided that from what I know of him, he probably decided quite consciously to subvert it. Rather than presenting a game design, Takahashi presented a marvelously animated powerpoint presentation (well actually created on his Mac in Keynote, which was fitting), talking about the power of games to engender love and essentially to distract people away from war. His presentation was very fun, but undermined its own subversiveness by virtue of being linear - of being everything but a game. While the crowd was appropriately entertained and impressed, he wouldn't have been a deserving winner.
Then was Harvey Smith. Smith actually went first, but his was overwhelmingly the best presentation. Taking to heart Zimmerman's request that the designers reveal a bit of their process as well as their results, he showed first an exploration of some 'serious games' which have already been made dealing with issues such as refugee camps, then a few of his own rejected ideas, some quite light-hearted. Finally he settled on the idea of leveraging an MMO space into something more productive, sort of combining Second Life with something Jimmy Carter might do, bringing MMO participants together in real space to perform volunteer tasks to 'increase the peace'. His Peace Bomb idea also probably wouldn't work, but the thought process and creativity behind it was both fun and inspiring.
I really applaud Eric Zimmerman for devising this concept and selling it to the GDC. And I especially applaud the very busy designers for investing so much time for no direct personal benefit. There was a lot of love in all three presentations, and wow, is that cool.
Not least though is the opportunity for, at least within the community of game developers, someone besides Shigeru Miyamoto and Will Wright to gain some notoriety. Whereas a guy like CliffyB has already succeeded to a degree, that success has been based more on his wacky shirts and magnetic personality than his work. The Game Design Challenge afforded him the opportunity to change that.
And who the hell is Harvey Smith? Well he's a game designer with a fertile mind and some really fun ideas, that's who. I look forward to watching him defend his title next year!