After a bit of time away from it, I've re-engaged with Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman's thick book Rules of Play. In chapter seven, they engage in a discussion of the words "Play" and "Game". These are great concepts, and are fun to discuss.

As a parent of a four year old, the word "play" is a major part of my life. "Play," after all, is what children do. The concept of work is foreign (or at least, it ought to be), and they engage their world through this concept of play. Indeed, "play" becomes very generic for just about anything a child does which is not compulsory. And this is one of the reasons that children are absolutely wonderful.

Academics of course don't feel that a concept can be taken seriously until it is made Latin. And so we have "Ludology". In Latin, "ludo" means "play", so "ludology" then is the study of play. But there's something not very well, playful about this end of the conversation.

Instead what comes to mind for me is what I learned when traveling in Thailand some years ago, and picking up some conversational fluency in the language. Though structurally very different from English, Thai is straightforward and becomes rather easy to understand. In particular, some words can be combined with others in order to create new meaning. So for example there is the word "khaeng", which literally means "hard" as in hard like a rock. However you can attach "khaeng" to other words in order to create an adjectival meaning. So for example when my accent began to improve I was told "khun poot khaeng" - literally, "you speak hard," but meaning "you speak well." Though many of these phrases are common, many of them are also created imaginatively on the fly.

The Thai word for "play" is "len". And not surprisingly (if you've spent much time in Thailand), "len" is one of the more common combination words. So for instance "pai len-nam" is literally "go play-water", and means "to go swimming, just for fun." We don't have a good expression for this; they do. I was once confronted with the phrase "phom poot len". I had to think about it a bit then figured it out: "I speak play". I had been told a joke. Cool.

This type of construction would make every bit of sense to my daughter, and I've been tempted just to teach it to her. So she can just say "pai len bicycle" ('go play bicycle') and I'll get it right away. Or "daddy, len-paper" (let's draw for fun). Or, not least, "len TV", "let's play on the TV". This sounds like an awfully good way to talk somebody into a session of Guitar Hero .

Playing For Keeps
Salen and Zimmerman mention a phrase I haven't heard much since childhood, which is "playing for keeps." This phrase was going out of vogue when I was a kid, as we were just starting the phase of child-rearing where we played non-competitive sports (tee ball with no score) and certainly, gambling with marbles or pitching pennies "for keeps" was frowned upon. It seems to me that we are on the backswing of this conservative and rather silly pendulum, and I'm glad of it.

"Playing for keeps" is an important phrase. Embedded in Salen and Zimmerman's definition of a "game" is that it is isolated from consequences in the real world; that games exist in their own closed reality. Obviously this rules out one of the most common uses of the word "game", which is gambling, but we'll ignore that for now. The implicit isolation of the concept of "play" from the harsh vagaries of reality is also instructive. While at younger ages, play is indeed egalitarian and zero-sum with children, ultimately this doesn't last. The urge to "play for keeps" is real when children reach a certain age. And if a kid gambles away his marbles by unsuccessfully playing "for keeps", that seems to me a life lesson worth learning.

I wonder if we haven't so isolated the closed systems of many of the games we make, that kids don't get the experience of playing for keeps at all. On the one hand, I don't necessarily think this is bad. As the Thai people I met might say, there's plenty in life to get you down, inserting a little bit of "len" into your activities can't hurt. But as we increasingly isolate our children, and indeed ourselves from the Prozac-inducing hardships of life, I wonder if a little playing for keeps might not be such a bad thing.

Since I see that my blog has been linked by Melissa Miller in her 1up.com developer blog, and I figured I might get 2 or 3 readers from outside the industry (and thus doubling my readership!), I decided to make an entry on one of my current favorite subjects, which is education and games.

Early Education and Games
Frequently at the behest of either parents or teachers, I've been asked to talk to kids about what they should do as youngsters to help them realize a dream of making games. I think it's really cool that this is a dream of so many kids, and parents are inevitably pleased when I give them the following, honest advice: stay in school, do well and study hard.

As you can imagine, this is not the answer the kids are hoping for (though it inevitably pleases the parents). They want me to tell them that the best thing they can do is play lots of games. And I realized that my answer wasn't completely fair. While excelling in school is indeed vital for most game disciplines, playing games and being fluent in their language is also important. So I've changed my tune a little recently. I tell them that playing games is great, but that they should think about how they play games, and how the games they play function. Many kids are already writing their own game reviews and such on their websites, so this resonates.

I also tried something new recently, which is that I asked a group of third graders whether they had ever created a game. While I expected a tepid response, instead I got a response that was nearly unanimous. These kids invented games like crazy, and couldn't wait to tell me about them. This validation of their creativity was the most impactful thing I said to them during the whole hour I talked to them.

I want to pint out one other thing too, which might be a little controversial, and brings this discussion full circle a bit. I was speaking to a group of students at the Polytechnic school in Pasadena, which is a group whose parents are very serious about education, and the kids are high-achievers, even in the third grade. As you might expect, many of these kids live under extremely strict media consumption guidelines. Though the sample I spoke to was totally unscientific and should be considered anecdotal, I noticed the following:
- Kids with unlimited media consumption tended to ape what they'd seen and played in commercial games
- Kids with limited media consumption seemed to have very creative play
- Kids with little or no media consumption just seemed lost in the conversation

To me this is a strong argument for balance, especially with younger kids. By keeping what kids do diverse, it makes both their play and study purposeful, rather than habitual. So in fact, both are important. Study hard, but play games too, and as part of your play, invent games on your own as well!

Post-Secondary Education and Games
This is where the action is. In the US, "post-secondary" basically means any education you get after high school. Just in the last several months I have joined advisory boards for two post-secondary institutions who are establishing game programs. I'd be pleased to join one or two more, if the opportunity presents itself, because this is something I care about very much.

While we have always as an industry had at least a grudging understanding of the importance of education particularly in the programming field, I believe that there is a meaningful and important role for post-secondary education in all areas, particularly game design.

The paths to good education for programming and art are not that complicated. I will say however the following:
- If you are studying programming for games, do not neglect your mathematics. Indepth knowledge of calculus, trigonometry, and especially linear algebra is vitally important to all areas of game programming.
- If you are studying art or animation, don't get addicted to the computer. Skills in traditional media will make you more flexible and adaptable as needs change, and a great traditional portfolio will differentiate you in the job search process.

Game Design Education
I'm going to tell a dirty little secret, which is that game designers are deeply insecure professionals. Because game design is so poorly defined, designers very frequently feel threatened, especially mid-level designers. Thus the idea that someone can get trained in college, rather than the school of hard knocks we faced, seems scary as well as presumptuous. Happily, I think we're getting over that. Now we just have to figure out how to actually educate people in game design.

Much of the emphasis in current programs is very practical. Learn the Unreal engine or whatever, and learn to make levels. While that's all fine, I really just think that's redundant with entry-level experience, except you have to pay for it instead of the other way round.

Rather, I think game design education should focus on knowledge and skills that are least likely to be picked up in the course of daily work. In a college setting you have opportunity to do two things that are pretty impractical in a work setting:
1. Study the theory of game play, including both book learning, and also playing games and thinking deeply about their meaning, their formal elements, etc.
2. Study disciplines which are strongly relevant to game design, but not part of everyday work.

I'll give some examples of both.

Game Theory
There are some really good resources developing regarding game theory. The strongest are textbooks by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, whose Rules of Play is in my opinion the best textbook I've read. It's incredibly densely written, and I don't recommend trying to read it cover to cover. Skip around a bit, especially after the first few chapters. You'll likely not understand much of it, but this stuff sticks with you, and eventually becomes relevant.

Blogs and online publications can be pretty good too. Clint Hocking (http://clicknothing.typepad.com) has a habit of writing pretty compelling and interesting stuff. Though he's pretty focused on MMO games, Raph Koster (http://www.raphkoster.com) is famous for his frequent updates and interesting perspective. And it doesn't hurt to dig thoroughly through the archives at Gamasutra.com. There are some gems there.

I've been very impressed by the students from the program at USC who have done "game deconstructions" which I've attended. They're interesting and also rigorous. Though many of these kids are just undergrads, it's some of the most thoughtful game criticism I've seen. These guys are really onto something in terms of trying to see a game's themes and formal elements, and though they can't seem to resist giving numerical scores (eventually we'll put that all behind us), still I've been really impressed. Schools would do very well to emulate this process, using ideas from authors and theorists applied to games to talk about why they are compelling, frustrating, or interesting.

Alternate Disciplines
One of my big frustrations with on-the-job trained designers is that they frequently have too narrow a set of knowledge and experiences, and it hurts them when they need to really think creatively or understand novel concepts. I fear that strictly educated designers will have the same problem, and this is a missed opportunity.

Foremost, I'd like to see more designers educated in the idea of design. Design is a phenomenally broad field, and lessons learned in making cars, user interfaces or even kitchen implements are so often applicable to games as well. Design is about understanding the interaction between humans and the objects that surround us. Find and read Donald Norman's wonderful book The Design of Everyday Things. Study of design can be in almost any area: automotive design, landscape architecture, even more technical design disciplines like ergonomics. All of this will give a game designer practice in the thought processes behind design.

It really goes without saying that designers will benefit from training in art or technology as well, but I assume that decent training programs include this.

Designers should also consider study in psychology, or cognitive science. One of the most powerful lessons about videogames is that games are all about the process of learning, about tapping into our innate almost addictive love of learning and mastery. Understanding the theory of learning might help the next great game designer to focus her ideas into something amazing. After reading psychologist Mihaly Csikszentimihalyi's seminal book Flow, USC's Jenova Chen created one of the more interesting student projects of the year (also called Flow).

Waiting for Godot
I'm happy to say, I'm starting to get pretty old. And I'm excited by the people I'm seeing emerge from modern game development education programs. I find their frustrations frankly just as encouraging as their excitement - high expectations will help these kids get the most out of the few years they get to really learn and grow, before they have the distraction of actually making a game holding them back.

Even more, I look forward to the day when a kid goes to college, studies videogames, then decides to go to law school, or to teach high school or something, without even giving it a second thought. Because if you've read this far, you believe like I do that games are as valid a form of human expression as anything else we study and award degrees for understanding.

That will totally rock.

Loco Roco

I Love Loco Roco
I love Loco Roco. I'm sure it will be overlooked for a wide variety of reasons - simplistic controls, 2D graphics, stuck on an unpopular handheld... but it's a very well-designed game. The controls are fantastic (the hysteresis on the world-tilt is perfect), and the use of the Loco Roco character is very well done. Camera zoom is used to excellent effect (the levels must be vector graphics!) I love the way secrets are placed, and the level design is rock solid and well-paced.

My complaint from a pure design standpoint is that the game tends to get myopic in its focus. There's not much layered gameplay; instead each level seems to have a mechanic which is beaten to death, then the next level moves on to an entirely new mechanic. For instance I would love to have re-used the little character that vacuums Loco up and spits him when the button is pressed, but it occurs only once in the whole first world! Crazy! And what about the enemies? It seems like we're getting into enemies, then they just disappear. How come it takes until the fifth or sixth level to actually get some switch puzzles? In short, the game was not well-designed fractally from a macro design point of view.

This game totally hooked my 4 year-old daughter. I originally let her play obviously because of the theming, and also because of the kid-friendly control scheme. But she had much more fun with it than I ever imagined - not least because she was able to have great success (though she got very few of the secrets). With her limited ability, she was still able to play, yet I also found it interesting and challenging. I think that's a nicely scaleable game.

Listen Up!
Loco Roco also must be considered in the area of sound design. I guess the music, you love or hate (I love it), but you have to respect how the effects are used, to indicate presence of various challenges, and how the music matches the feel of each level. And do you notice how Loco Roco sings along with the music? And how Loco's voice becomes polyphonic when split into pieces? That's just cool stuff, and in a way that really expands the feel of the game.

A Missed Opportunity
I think that Loco Roco's biggest problem is "what might have been." The macro design issues above handicap the game, and it just doesn't quite have the je ne sais quoi of Katamari Damacy (which combined ultimate quirkiness with what I view as one of my favorite examples of emergence in gaming). The meta 'loco house' game, which should have been a nice reward for finding secrets, is mostly exasperating, and the control applied to the analog stick for this activity is downright poor.

And it must be said, the Al Jolson - styled enemies do strike me as racist. This is just a shame.

Also, watch anybody play Loco Roco, and it immediately feels tragic that Sony put that motion sensing technology in the PS3 controller instead of in the PSP where it belongs. What a game Loco could have been, with sensors reading the player's tilt of the machine! What a machine that would be!

But Loco Roco's biggest missed opportunity is that it's sold as a full price UMD game, which is clearly the wrong way to sell this kind of game in an era of emerging digital distribution. It raises entirely the wrong expectations for the player - players don't pay the big bucks for a game that's fun and well-designed. Players pay the big bucks for a game that provides an engrossing, holistic experience. We need to learn this, and fast - that Katamari was the last of a dying breed (simple, quirky game sold on a disc at your local Gamestop), not the harbinger of something new to come. The future belongs more to Jenova Chen's Flow (http://intihuatani.usc.edu/cloud/flowing/): digitally distributed, cross-platform, and cheap (or even free) than it does to Loco Roco.

So, wait til Loco Roco comes out on 'greatest hits', or better yet is made part of Sony's digital download initiative (which, sadly, I fear may never come to PSP). Then, by all means, pick it up.

I recently discovered a GDC presentation from 2006 by Clinton Keith, of High Moon Studios. High Moon is now well known as the principal proponent of agile methodology in game development.

I found Clinton's presentation compelling, especially in the manner in which he tweaks the 'agile manifesto' for the context of game development. Here is his tweak on the manifesto:


The Agile Manifesto (modified for game dev):
We value…
• People and communication over processes and project management tools;
• Working game over comprehensive design documents;
• Publisher collaboration over milestone definitions;
• Responding to change over following a plan;

When I read this, it caught my attention, because these are four principles that I believe in without reservation. And what's more, they are principles that are rarely adhered to with consistency in the industry, especially as we scale our projects. I was particularly taken with the third point:

• Publisher collaboration over milestone definitions;

This was a point that Mark Cerny and I made in our Cerny Method definition back in 2002, but is an element that has been understandably lost in favor of the core concept of preproduction. I'm going to focus on this point for the purpose of this blog entry because it is crucial, IMO, to improving the overall creative and business health of games development.

It's an Entertainment Medium, Stupid
The first thing to remember is that making a game is not like making a widget. I know, obvious, but if you look at a typical "milestone" schedule agreed upon between a publisher and a developer, that has "widget" written all over it.

Keith uses an example of creating a core moveset for a character. The moveset is well-defined heading into the development, but just after jump is developed, the creative team discovers that the game will be significantly more fun if a flight mechanic is included. The smart, 'agile' team recognizes this as cool, but also speculative and high-risk, and bumps it way up in the queue, to be developed in their next scrum "sprint".

Oops, you just fucked your milestone schedule.

In order to give space for that key creative magic to kick in, the team must not be held to strict deliverable lists. To reprise (and quote verbatim) the Cerny Method, "traditional milestones should not exist during pre-production." (Just for the record, I most decidedly do not reject the notion of highly specific milestones, when applied during actual production. These become key metrics for a team's capability to deliver the game on time once production begins.)

Still, it's not unreasonable for a publisher to expect some accountability and tracking capability for a team who is probably spending a great deal of its money and absorbing a great deal of its opportunity budget. To me, the solution is really obvious, but seems really hard to get implemented in actual development: publishers should pitch the milestone schedule in the trash, and get closely involved during pre-production.

Sadly, both the publishers and the studios seem to find this idea distasteful.

"Those Guys are Idiots"
This is what most development studios feel about publishers. Tell me I'm wrong. I've read it so many times in internet postings, heard it in conversations... even said it myself far more times than I'm proud of. This is an incredibly short-sighted and just not very bloody smart way to conduct business as a development studio.

First, it's very unlikely that the publisher really is idiots. What is likely, is that their agenda is very different from yours. Publishers' producers rarely work on only one or even two projects; their attentions are divided, and what's important from one week to the next probably blows like the wind based on corporate priorities. One week it's your project, the next week, you don't exist. Not a good recipe for collaboration. But it's the nature of the beast. Publishers are corporations, and corporations by definition are unwieldy, inefficient and fickle. But, they also have money. And without money, you probably have no project.

Second, let's assume the publisher really is a collective idiot. You are now in possession of that idiot's money, and if you expect the money to continue to work on your behalf, it is your responsibility to educate the publisher. If you're unable to do so, one or the other of you has failed, but your project is in trouble.

A third possibility is that you've got some secrets you're hiding from the publisher you'd rather they didn't know about (where are those dev kits, anyway?). This obviously is no excuse at all, and you shouldn't be in business.

Assuming the above, development studios should be inviting publishers into their buildings. By having the publisher present, you can be more assured that you are on the radar, and that your agendas align, and if the publisher really is kind of a dope, well this is your big chance to show them what's what. Get them in-house.

"Those Guys Don't Have a Clue What They're Doing"
Meanwhile in the halls of the publisher, a studio has missed another milestone, and is trying desperately to convince you that no, really, this time they're on the right track. Yeah, right.

Chances are, your studio is struggling with genuine creative issues. I know from experience that the tendency when this happens is to 'turtle' vis-a-vis the publisher, and buckle down to really push through the problems. Maybe you will...maybe you won't.

Here's where the publishers fail. When a studio misses milestones, the publisher should be trying hard to determine whether the studio is in over its head, is slacking, or maybe just has found itself having to redefine its project in order to 'chase fun'. Regardless, simply turning down a milestone and putting the studio in a money bind is probably the single least productive thing a publisher can do in this case. And yet, this is exactly what 'the book' suggests they do. Instead of investing the effort of paying a couple-day visit to the developer to really see inside the project, publishers turn to their business affairs staff to try to see what 'leverage' can be applied.

The Actual Solution: No More Milestones
Which brings me back to Clinton Keith. His manifesto calls for "publisher collaboration over milestone definitions." I'll do him one better - let's get rid of "Milestones", meaning deliverables attached to payment, altogether.

So what do we do instead? How do we get accountability and transparency without these 'milestone' deliverables? How can we continue to do business?

Well, the answer is right there in agile methodology. Have a look at a definition of 'scrum', one of the currently popular renditions of agile methods. Scrum involves "sprints" in which digestible chunks of work are done, followed by a review of the work. Hmm, sounds like accountability to me. At the end of a sprint, the team assesses, plans, and sets up for the next sprint. Hmm, sounds like planning to me.

So why aren't we doing this?

Studios: Open Up the Doors
I alluded to this already, but the replacement for a development studio is simply to open your doors to the publisher. Let them see what you're up to. Of course this is a little scary, especially if you feel your publisher's representative is not sophisticated. But educating them is your job. This is what you do in exchange for removal of that horrid Sword of Damocles called the 'milestone payment'. Sure they may disagree with your processes in uncomfortable ways, but is that really worse?

Publishers: Shit or Get Off the Pot
Publishers: You're either funding a project, or you're not. The most obvious meaning of this is with finance... I know of no examples where choking the money supply for a project actually improved the project. I can understand a publisher wanting to avoid giving the studio the money in a single lump sum, so monthly or bi-monthly stipends would be fine. More importantly though, milestones give publishers an opportunity to "fire and forget" on a project. The statement "we'll see how it plays next milestone" is a sign of managerial failure on the part of the publisher. The publisher's commitment to a project should go well beyond the financial; if you plan on exercising any control at all over the project, that control needs to be applied constantly and consistently, not at essentially random "milestone" intervals.

I'm Warming Up...
As you can see, I'm beginning to warm up to agile methodology, as the particular game development version of it evolves. When looked at in this particular light, I'm even beginning to feel that the agile approach may be able to function as the can-opener to eliminating some of the most destructive current business practices in games.

Stay tuned for more.