OK I'm an idiot.
This is the third entry in my little 'serious games' obsession (the first two were about my Toyota Prius, and peeing on a target, respectively), and I've been focusing on this idea of the game itself actually modifying behavior in order to affect a good. In this pursuit I encountered a website called gamesforhealth.org, and amongst the comments, found numerous references to something called "DDR." I assumed this was some kind of academic acronym so I kept reading. Then it hit me.

"DDR" = "Dance Dance Revolution".

DUH!

It's pretty clear when you read the postings on gamesforhealth that Dance Dance Revolution is a gold standard for games that actually promote health through play. I remember reading about schools that actually installed DDR machines in their public areas, set on free play, in order to promote at least a bit of exercise among the student body.

Though the net effect of DDR is dead simple (expenditure of calories through exercise), that simplicity is probably the source of its power and effectiveness. It seems to me that the overwhelming majority of "serious games" are pedantic in nature, attempting to teach lessons slightly enhanced by the engaging aspects of interactivity. In my opinion this is only a little better than just producing a nice slick film, and probably not that cost-effective. But getting kids to actually exercise for 30 minutes a day while playing DDR... now that is real, genuine change for health.

I had a conversation about this recently with Noah Falstein, a freelance designer who has been getting a lot of work in the 'serious games' space. Noah is eager to point out that an awful lot of the medical profession is starting to "get it" very rapidly in terms of the power of well-designed interactivity not only for teaching, but also for training. This strikes me as a very interesting idea. Certainly simulators of various types have been around for many years, but combining a simulator with the understanding that a game designer brings in how to create an intuitive and effective teaching system... now that could be a very powerful combination indeed.


Geocaching
Meanwhile, in this month's issue of Horizon Air magazine (question: how pathetic is it to reference an airline magazine?) there is a long article about the extremely popular hobby of 'geocaching'.

If you don't know what geocaching is, it's an incredibly simple concept which is, apparently, quite a lot of fun. The tools are the internet (mostly via a website named, appropriately, geocaching.com), and a handheld GPS receiver. Players look up caches online, plug the cache coordinates into the GPS, and head out into the wilds to find the cache. Once you find it, you can sign a book, trade an item, or just brag to others that you found it.

How popular is geocaching? According to the article, there are 6,600 caches to be found, just in the area of Seattle Washington. Wow.

I certainly find geocaching to be a game. There are very strict rules (particularly in regard to where caches can be placed), there are procedures to be followed, and though it's usually done as a hobby, it is also done very competitively by a cadre of hardcore players who attempt to log the greatest number of cache finds via the websites associated with the sport.

Caches are also graded on difficulty, which takes into account how difficult they are to reach physically, and how diabolically they are hidden. Indeed, many caches provide only clues or puzzles at the published GPS coordinates... to bag the actual cache, the searcher must solve a riddle, puzzle, or other challenge. The best known and most respected cache designers even give names to their puzzles, such as "The Matrix", a difficult and highly anticipated cache documented in the magazine article.

While I'm quite convinced of the qualifications of geocaching as a game (and a game highly enabled by digital technology to boot), I'm not sure how well it passes muster as a "serious game". Especially in places where caching flourishes (the northwest and SF bay area), outdoor recreation is hardly unpopular. Still, it does get people off the sofa, and even out of the house exploring their world and often nature. I rate this a Good Thing.

There Must Be More
I really want to learn about more of this kind of thing. Please email me or comment if you know of any examples!

Listen, I was there at the beginning of loading screens. Back on the PS1/Saturn, we figured the consumer would have to suffer through loading screens for a while, but it would just be a matter of time before the tech eliminated the N64's cartridge advantage.

Boy oh boy, was I wrong.

I've been playing several Xbox360 games, and they ALL have nasty loading times. And don't even get me started on the PSP. This is the second time we've gone through a platform transition, and though graphics have taken a major leap, this awful thing called loading (which is just about the best way I can think of to make a player forget about the immersive graphics they've been watching) is, if anything, worse.

Come on, guys.

It doesn't have to be this way.
Rewind all the way back to PS1, and a game called Crash Bandicoot. In order to get highly detailed worlds and lengthy levels, the clever dudes at Naughty Dog decided to stream levels into memory in chunks, allowing the levels to be indefinitely long without loading. Sure there was some loading at the beginning of a level, but once it started, the player was in the experience for good.

Fast forward a wee bit, to Playstation 2. Once again Naughty Dog showed us how it's done, with the contiguous world of Jak and Daxter free of loading screens entirely. No loading screens. None. And hey, remember all those loading screens in GTA3? Yeah, me neither.

Even on the PSP, which is much and rightly maligned for its long seek and load times, the last game I worked on (Daxter) was played without load screens. Art for a "loading" screen wasn't even created.

On 360 however, the only game I'm playing without incessant loading is Geometry Wars.

My friends tell me that the brutal loads I've been experiencing with Oblivion are the result of some kind of bug, and it can be fixed by holding down some combination of keys while the game boots up. Yo, fire in the theater Bethesda Softworks! This loading is freaking killing me. Didn't anyone QA this game? How can this not be a priority?

Here's the one that really gets me. I'm playing Tomb Raider: Legend on 360, and I get killed (I do that a lot). And in order to restart from a continue point, I have to watch a loading screen. The game is loading the exact section of the world I just died in! I can fathom no reasonable excuse for this. My programmer friends explain that there's some kind of re-initializing or some other horseshit going on. Whatever. The audience, the player, doesn't know this and you can be damn sure doesn't care. We've had what, ten years to engineer around these issues?

It looks to me like the Best and Brightest of the videogames business have been frittering away their time on incremental graphics improvements, while elements that do genuine harm to the player experience have been allowed to fester. Nero fiddles, Rome burns. Same old story.

An analogy...
Let me explain this to you for a moment in terms that might make it more clear. Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman in their book Rules of Play describe something the call the "magic circle" which the player enters into when playing a game. This magic circle applies to any game, and in the case of something like a sporting event, even applies to the fan. So imagine you're walking into your favorite sporting venue, and in the heat of the action, all the athletes stop, untie their shoes, look at them for a moment, then put them back on and lace them up again. They do this repeatedly throughout the game. Take you out of the magic circle yet?

OK but the announcer makes it better by announcing nice little trivia like "a basket from behind the curved line counts for three points!" or "if a player kicks the side of the ball, it will curve dramatically!". Makes it all better, right?

Right.

Let's wise up already
I think we finally have something of a consensus that improved graphics are not going to be enough by themselves to drive players to upgrade their hardware and software. I hear talk about something called "next generation gameplay," or "the HD era." I'm not sure what either of those really is, but if either of them means more, longer, stupider loading screens, I want no part of it, and I guarantee you, neither do the players.

Designers, start going to the mat, and quit letting lazy and/or chauvinistic programmers convince you that "better graphics" are the way you'll make a better game. You know better.

Programmers, you know better, too. At least, you'd better.

Producers, I'm counting on you. You're the key to this whole thing getting better, and don't think for a moment you're not.

How about we set a little goal: By the holiday season of 2008, no games should have play-interrupting loading screens. Who's with me?

This month's issue of Scientific American magazine (my favorite rag) has an article which has quite seriously rocked my world. The article is called The Expert Mind, and I've just finished reading it for a second time.

The gist of the article is quite simply this: that becoming an expert, or genius, in a subject depends far more on accumulated knowledge than on one's innate intelligence or talent.

On the one hand, this study teaches us something scientific about the idea of 'experience.' While it is conventional wisdom that someone experienced in a subject will perform in a superior way to one not experienced, the studies done for the article (based mostly on the performance of chess masters) show to a degree how and why this comes about.

Specifically, by looking at how chess masters come to understand the positions on a chess board, researchers learned that one learns the knowledge needed to become an expert bit by bit, layering knowledge at progressively higher levels. With advanced learning, a sophisticated circumstance such as a complete state of a chess board is reduced to a relatively small set of variants of previously understood positions. This process of intellectual complexity reduction is called, rather prosaically, "chunking" in the world of cognitive science.

Examples of "chunking" abound in the videogame world (and this concept does get mention in Raph Koster's excellent book A Theory of Fun). For instance when a player is first learning a fighting game, the thought process might be "press square for quick kick". Soon however the label of the button becomes chunked, and the player can simply think "quick kick" without mentally referencing the button, and can create a new process, like "quick kick, then jump and punch low." As the player becomes even more expert, even that combo becomes chunked, and the player might only have to think "counterattack for heavy character jumping punch."

Researchers refer to the process which leads to successful chunking as "effortful study." What this means is, it is not sufficient merely to practice a thing if one wants to increase expertise. It means that practice must target above one's current skill level, requiring continuous mental effort. So for example today's chess masters, with their readily available computer opponents, have a great advantage over their predecessors in access to effortful study.

The implications for game design in general are rather obvious... and I think for those experienced in design, are pretty well understood. We use words like 'challenge', 'pacing', and 'tuning'. All of these concepts comprise what I like to call Macro Design. While this is an interesting topic, I think that Raph's book explains it reasonably well, and in any case is sort of a Design 101 topic and not well suited to my current obsession with game development.

Rather, I think this tells us a great deal about why the young medium of videogames is so vibrant. One need only to look at the advancement in computer graphics to see the effects of effortful study and chunking in action. It wasn't that long ago that whole GDC sessions were dedicated to helping people understand how to think in terms of shaders as a form of graphics parallelism. Especially for pixel shaders, this initially proved a little tough to grasp. But now even a technical moron like me knows why shaders are useful and I can readily chunk this into my necessary knowledge for vetting design ideas.

Similarly in design, through playing games and especially through making them, the best of us have managed to, for instance, "chunk" the idea of chunking. When I make a macro design chart for a game, I can very quickly look at it and discern whether the pacing will work or not. I can look at a character in a character-action game and know right away whether there's enough options available to the player to allow effortful learning throughout the course of the game (this would be the concept I sometimes call "completeness".).

In other words, every year, games are indeed getting better. The theories behind the Expert Mind tell us not only about individual learning, they also tell us how a gain in knowledge of the group, or institutional knowledge, can quite literally make us smarter. And indeed, especially when I look at the younger people making games, I can see that compared to what I was doing at the same age, they seem almost infinitely smarter. I believe that Sir Isaac Newton had a wonderful phrase for this, but I'll leave it to you to look up.

There are many more great things in this brief article, not least being a long-overdue attack on the notion of "talent" (they show empirically that "talent" in sport actually depends more on what month you were born, and by extension your relative age when entering youth sport programs, than on innate ability). But I'm not here to rewrite the article. Check it out at http://www.sciam.com.

To anyone trying to give this blog a real read, my apologies. It's a mess.

For reasons unclear to me, most of the internal links recently failed, and it's pretty much impossible to look at anything but the most recent posts. I think it has to do with recently upgrading to the newest version of my offline blogging software, Rapidweaver.

In fact, I'm getting pretty sick of Rapidweaver. I do appreciate that I can work offline, a major convenience since I primarily write on the train, but Rapidweaver is slow, clunky, and just doesn't compare well to the groovy online systems such as typepad or wordpress. I've even started goofing around with the latter a bit, at http://methodgames.wordpress.com/. I'm not sure what it takes to get a nice custom look on WP, but it can't be too hard.

Meanwhile, I've decided to make a legit upgrade to this blog, which is to set a guaranteed publish date. Every Wednesday evening, beginning this week, I hereby guarantee a blog update. Mind you, I've been averaging more than an entry per week already, and I hardly feel short of something to say, but I thought it would be cool to set a date certain for updates. There will certainly be updates on other days as well, but I thought heck, why not make Wednesday "Blog Day". It'll be fun. How will I pull it off? Well to start with, I've got three articles already banked on my hard drive... and in the interest of interactivity, whichever of the following three gets the most votes via comments or email (see below) will go up first:
1) "The Expert Mind"
2) "Playing around with 'Play'"
3) "Enough with the Loading Screens Already!"

Your call .

And one more final note, a request of readers. I know from looking at my logs that I've got more readers than I ever expected. I'd love to hear from you. Just drop me a line at mj@methodgames.com and say hello. I know a lot of you are my friends, and it'd be nice to hear from you! If I don't know you, even better. I guarantee a reply, and would especially love to hear, for instance:
- Your favorite post (if you write, I'll tell you mine)
- The stupidest post (I may or may not tell you mine)
- Please no more about .....
- I've been thinking about .....
- You are seriously full of horseshit vis-a-vis .....

Thanks, and take care,

-MJ

So, E3 is dead.

I have to admit, I am genuinely stunned by the amount of 'good riddance' sentiment being thrown toward this news from inside the game development community. While I can see that E3 was incredibly expensive for those who were footing the bill (the publishers and platform holders), to me the cancellation was nothing more than a cold-hearted business decision, and will have the same kind of deleterious effect as most downsizings.

For me the loss of E3 cuts two ways. One is personal... I will quite simply miss it. The other though is that I honestly worry what this portends for the games industry. How will the loss of a focal annual event impact the standing of games in the popular culture?

Loss of a Friend
I went to every E3, even the ones in Atlanta, and several CES shows before it. And when May of 2007 rolls around, I will be very sad.

It's no exaggeration to say that I used to begin looking forward to the next E3 as soon as the prior E3 wrapped up. I would always go to at least two days of E3, even if I had no particular business to conduct. I would play many games, see many friends, and as much as I could, try to soak up the zeitgeist of the current industry. Are there a lot of FPS games this year? Do the Xbox 360 games really look that much better? I remember when the Xbox and Gamecube launched, EA had a display of Madden running on all three of the new platforms (Xbox/Gamecube/PS2) side by side. This was an incredibly useful demo regarding what the three systems would be capable of graphically.

What's the ratio of PC to console games on display? Wow, NCSoft sure has a big booth, with lots of games. They must be in it for keeps. Looks like everybody's doing an FPS this year. Oh man, did you see the Superman game, that was crap! (this particular comment being valid for a number of E3 shows). Mario and Crash... which one will win? How come they're not letting anybody play Tomb Raider? Did you see the line to see World of Warcraft? Dude, those "I'm Leroy Jenkins" shirts are hilarious. I think Dreamcast is dead. Who's playing at the Sony party this year? Wow, look at all those accessories for the PSP! I think Xbox is for real. The Chinese are in Kentia where the Koreans were two years ago. Looks like everybody's doing an RTS this year. Where do you suppose those Gizmondo guys get all their money? Gran Turismo looks amazing on PS2. Did you see Conker's Quest? I don't get The Sims. If I see one more cel shaded game I'm going to puke. What ever happened to Conker's Quest? Who's playing at the Sony party this year? I think Acclaim just doesn't get it. Ubi Soft has some great games. Any sighting of Conker's Quest? Hey weird, the US Army is here. 3DO looks like they've finally given up. I'm all jumpy from drinking that Bawls crap. Looks like everybody's doing an MMO this year. If Rockstar is trying to convince us they're all dicks, it's working. Why is everybody lining up to see Daikatana, anyway? You know what I liked - Pikmin. Looks like everybody's doing a sandbox game this year. I can't believe Nokia is still sticking with the N-gage. Who's playing at the Sony party this year?

These are all things I've said over the years at E3. All things that I observed at E3. You think I won't miss it?

A Cultural Icon Evaporates
Sure I understand that E3 was fundamentally a subsidized event, but its size and scope nonetheless served as a touchstone for games as a part of popular culture. If you were a national media outlet, and you only covered one games event for the year, there's no question it was E3. The big magazines, national papers, a smattering of cable TV outlets, all would descend on E3 to report on the games industry.

Was E3 the games industry for real? Certainly not. But neither are the Oscars the reality of Hollywood, but it's still a day for everybody to think about the movies. What will they cover now? I'm not sure. The "New E3" isn't going to fill the gap...that's more for the publishers to do business. GDC? God, I hope not. DICE? No, that would be silly.

My guess? Games will just see a long, predictable decline in cultural relevance.

The counter-argument goes, with a broadband world, MySpace and Xbox Live and all that, face to face contact is passe. Games can be marketed directly to consumers, so what's the point?

I say bullcrap. While I definitely believe in these outlets for both promotion and community, I don't believe it's possible, at least not yet, to generate a genuine cultural event online. I suspect that the people making this argument have never felt comfortable with the status of games as a genuine participant in popular culture. They long for the old days when games were a smaller, more comfortable community, and the makers and consumers had more in common. For these folks, E3 got more and more uncomfortable as time went by, and I understand this.

But you won't be surprised to hear that I respectfully disagree. I love the fact that games have become part of pop culture, and that the audience has become stunningly diverse in age and interest. And the people on the edges of that diversity are the ones we risk losing by canceling E3. The hardcore, the nerds, we'll never lose those people. But the loss of the hoi polloi, that's what I fear, both for the reduction in the market, but more importantly because it might drive us to be a more elitist, less inclusive industry. I don't want that.

Come next May, I think I'll throw a party. A nice wake seems like the least I can do for an old friend.

RIP, E3.