Yesterday I attended a memorial for a colleague. I learned of Dan's death just after Thanksgiving, and was deeply saddened. Yesterday, at a nice restaurant in LA, many of Dan's friends and colleagues gathered to honor him, and to offer our sympathies to his parents.

Dan was simply one of the best guys I ever knew. Talking with old friends yesterday, we all marveled about how universal this feeling was. I think we've all known people who were that "great guy" or "great gal" but who achieved that likeability by being a patsy or do-gooder. Dan was none of these things. He was just a lover of life, who made you want to be around him.

Dan was an environment modeler, and my work with him was as a level designer. I would hand Dan maps, and it was his job to make them come to life in 3D. He was certainly talented - his worlds had flair and life. But there was something more than that. As a I designer I secretly hoped that the schedule would align so that Dan did all my maps. I could count on handing Dan a map, and the map reaching three dimensions in a better state than what I handed him. I would imagine some of this was from Dan's incredible capability for empathy - he could see through the map what I *really* wanted, but he would also make those little improvements that I didn't think of as well, sometimes correcting some nasty screw-up or another.

Then Dan would do this magical thing - he'd show me the 3D version, including his changes, and say something like, "I knew that was what you really meant for that area." And he was totally wrong - What I had envisioned was usually totally inferior to what he had created. But Dan was so sincere, he would actually have me believing him. "Yeah," I'd say, "just like that."

When Dan was young, he had some physical problems. I was never quite sure what they were, and it didn't matter. But I knew that Dan had at one point spent a year in a Shriner's Children's hospital. I imagine that it was this experience that gave Dan the joy he had toward life. His chance to fully participate in life led him to do just that. He pursued his dream, he became a 3D artist. He worked on wonderful games like Spyro and Ratchet. And somehow, through it all, Dan failed to become the self-centered prick that so many of us would have become. He was, simply, one of the most generous guys I've ever known.

Eventually Dan's physical problems caught up with him. It appears that an interaction of prescription drugs, which he took his whole life, was the cause of his death. In the memorial, Dan's mother told us what she thought Dan might choose for his epitaph, and said in her perfect Iowa drawl, "Well, that sucks."

Yeah. It sucks. A lot.

But there's one thing. Dan didn't die. Not like the rest of us will. Not like I will. We loved Dan so damn much, that his likeness has appeared in every game he worked on. Frequently he didn't even know it. When we needed a texture for some coins in the Spyro games? Dan's face. Though I didn't work on the Ratchet games, I've been assured by Insomniac friends that Dan was in those, just the same. And when Ted Price spoke yesterday, he told everyone that Insomniac will continue to put Dan in their games. He's too much a part of them all not to.

See ya later Dan, in all those old familiar places. Thanks for the memories.

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.

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.

Back on June 12, I wrote about how much I enjoy the game embedded in the dashboard of my Toyota Prius, and especially how the presence of this game has motivated me to optimize my fuel economy. (Quick update: the "summer mix" of gasoline here in Southern California has apparently improved the performance of the Prius's Atkinson Cycle engine significantly, and I'm now getting over 49MPG average.)

I've spent some time thinking about how other simple but compelling games might be embedded in the world around us, using fun as the core motivation to promote desirable behavior by the public.

And I've found one!

Behold, the famous Dutch "pee on the fly" urinal:

http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/bl_fly_in_urinal.htm

I remember seeing this as a big internet news item several years ago, and it is indeed true. With apologies to female readers, convenient and efficient though urinals may be, they are also a source of significant mess on the floor.

As explained somewhat in this article, the back walls of modern urinals have been carefully shaped to minimize this effect. However none of this is of any use if the user fails to piss onto the back wall. In particular, like it or not, that big deodorizing lozenge that sits in the bottom of most urinals is awfully compelling as a target. It just is, man...

So somebody with a brain said "if peeing on the lozenge is fun, well let's just put something in there that's more fun to pee on. And what could be better than knocking down a pesky fly?!

Have a look at this clever toilet:



Apparently, installation of these urinals has reduced 'splashback' by 80% in Amsterdam's airport. Wow!

Here's a closer-in view:



Notice how the fly is placed slightly off-center, which gives it a sense of authenticity that would destroy the illusion if it was dead center. Note that it's facing downward, such that if you were to startle it, you're less likely to have it fly up into your face. All of this adds to the compulsive nature of the design, or what we might call addictiveness. I know for a fact that if I had one of these urinals at my place of work, I would pee on that damn fly every single time. It would make a very mundane act a little more fun.

The commentary you see on those pics is from engineering professor Kim Vicente, from his book The Human Factor. Process control... sure Kim, great. I call that game design. I love this quote from Vicente:

"what do you think most men do? That's right, they aim at the fly when they urinate. They don't even think about it, and they don't need to read a user's manual; it's just an instinctive reaction."

Sounds like the definition of a good game mechanic to me. The same reason a player will take incredible risks to go for a coin in Mario Brothers, that's the same motivation, fundamentally, for peeing on the fly. It's just fun. Cool.

Leave it to the Europeans, who seem somehow to be more tolerant of the concept of design in their daily worlds, to push the envelope even further on this idea:




That's a little sticker that changes color (better living through chemistry!) when peed upon, revealing, what else, an advertising message:



That techno-pisser is located in the 'technopark' in Zurich Switzerland. (Image from this blog.)

It gets better.

Here's a tech demo made in 2003 by Dan Maynes-Amizade, and Hayes Raffle, a couple researchers at MIT Media Lab:



You can probably figure out what's happening here: piss on the target, interact with a game displayed via the LCD above the urinal.

Here's a screenshot of the actual game they wrote, which they call You're in Control:



Looks fun!

A great quote from Maynes-Amizade and Raffle's paper on the project:

"While urinating outdoors is playful for
many people, bathroom sanitation requires a serious focus
and conformity. You're In Control encourages cleanliness
while reintroducing play to the act of micturition."

In case you're curious, "micturition" just means urination.

I'd love to hear if somebody else has examples of this type of game/behavior merge. As you can see with the fly-in-the urinal, it doesn't have to be high tech, though as with most games, technology can be applied to make it more flashy and interesting (for better or for worse).

Now, I gotta go pee.

The rare brief post.

After some (very brief) conversation, fellow traveler Brian Hook (www.hookatooka.com) has set up a website which is both a directory and a resource for contractors working in the game industry. Or, as Brian has taken to calling us (and I approve): "Gaming Mercenaries".

Check it out:

www.gamingmercenaries.com

Some (though not all) posts here will be echoed at gamingmercenaries.com. But more importantly, it's a watering hole for those of us who are taking a little different path to game creation. Check it out from time to time.

Or maybe you'd like to join us?

We can always use another mercenary.

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to speak to a class of third graders about game design. I've been invited to do these sort of talks a few times over the years; teachers assume, correctly, that kids will actually pay attention to a professional game designer in a situation where perhaps a local doctor or lawyer might get tuned out. My message is pretty simple - stay in school, study hard in your math and/or art classes, things like that.

It had been a while though, and I've learned a lot over the past few years about what it really means to be a game designer. So I decided before I went in front of the class, it was time to polish my speech a little. And I hope you'll forgive a self-indulgent attitude for a bit as I explain some of these lessons about being a game designer.

Both of my parents were educators (both recently retired), and like Raph Koster describes in his great book A Theory of Fun, I grew up in an environment where this was highly valued. I got a good college education (major: English) and proceeded, much to the consternation of my family, to do very little that could be perceived as 'useful'. And somewhere along the way, I ended up a game designer.

When I first entered the games industry, the idea of being a "game designer" as a full time job was not very common. Most people who called themselves game designers were really programmers, moonlighting as game designers because well, somebody had to do it. Since I had no tangible skills, but seemed to be useful nonetheless, I generally called myself "producer". In fact this was the title on my business card when I worked on my first real game, Insomniac's Disruptor, as what would today be called a level designer.

It must be said also that I never envisioned myself as a game designer either. I loved videogames as a kid, and grew up on the classics both of the home and especially the arcade. (Around the seventh grade I decided I would be what I would later learn is called a 'QA Analyst'.) But as I got older, I always figured that I'd do something more serious with my life. Like, maybe be a teacher, right Mom and Dad? Right Raph?

But somewhere along the way, I've ended up a game designer. And if you're reading this, I don't have to tell you, that's pretty cool. Coming to see just how cool this is, and how frequently meaningful it can be, has been a long process for someone who entered the industry in the early 1990s. It's kind of like when I moved to Los Angeles - I always figured I'd leave eventually...and yet here I still am. And I have a great career. Coming to understand this, has made all the difference.

I suppose I should get back to those third graders. I figured, any jackass can tell these kids to stay in school and do their math homework. Sure maybe I had a little extra street cred with the kids, but it actually felt a little dishonest not to tell them at least a little about how to be a game designer. I mean, isn't that why I'm there?

I thought about this a lot the morning of the talk while in the shower (like lots of people, this is where all the good ideas happen). I thought, I'll talk to them about what really matters if these kids want to become *great* game designers. And I figured, I'll cap it off with a secret weapon - I'll show them that they are already game designers. I had my speech.

The early part of the speech went as expected. The kids' teacher had wisely had them prepare the day before by writing down questions in their journals, so I got some good ones, like:
- "How many people does it take to make a game?"
- "What's your favorite game?"
- "How long does it take to make a game?"
- "What's your favorite color?"

OK, so they're third graders...

As the talk was winding down, I told the kids that if they wanted to be game designers they should play games, that games are fantastic...but that if they wanted to be great game designers, that wasn't enough. I told them the story about Mr. Miyamoto, who remembered the fields and caves of his youth when designing the Mario and Zelda games. I told them that the best ideas I've had have all come from movies, from books, or just from playing around outside (all true, BTW). I had these kids. Now time for the finishing blow.

"How many of you have designed a game?"

I figured, you ask this to a group of high school kids, not a single hand will go up. Why should third graders be any different?

My bad.

Easily half of the hands in the class went up. Kids described playground games they had made up or adapted from traditional games...one kid had made a sort of primitive board game with her sister. One kid went off on an elaborate tangent describing what amounted to a space RPG, all of which took place on his backyard play structure. Eventually it disintegrated into a contest to describe who had invented the best way to torture a pet with a squirt gun, so I cut it off (they were third graders after all...). But the damage was done. I was stunned. These kids invented games as a matter of course; creativity came to them as naturally as getting up in the morning.

Though I was off-balance throughout this time, I realize now that I achieved exactly what I had hoped to. As the kids were leaving the class, and were supposed to head off to their phys ed activity, they were collaring me at the door, describing even more games they had invented. The spark was there...they were making the connection between their own innate and natural creativity and what the "hero" does. They no longer were interested in what I had to say, so much as to have me help them understand what they themselves had been doing.

There are many lessons in this. Not least is, as game designers, or indeed as people doing anything creative, it frequently behooves us to think like third graders. Third graders do not pre-judge their own ideas; they begin playing and keep playing and modifying the rules until the game gets fun. How many variants on 'tag' did you play as a child? How many variants of a simple race? See what I mean?

Another lesson, and maybe this is just for old, insecure fools like me, is that making games is not just good because it encourages rigorous study of 'real' academic subjects. Making games is inherently a Good Thing. Games are part of how we integrate and come to understand the complex, formative experiences of our youths. And gee, how much of psychology, of literature, is about this?

It also begs a question for me, a question that's been bouncing through my mind a great deal over the past year, which is whether the center of games is indeed play, if it is "simply, fun" as Iwata-san of Nintendo says...or is the experience of a game as an adult fundamentally different from that of a third grader? Much as campfire stories evolve into great tales, do (or should) games become something where adults can explore the larger issues of self and society? I don't know.

But the final lesson, the one that I'll take to the bank, is that the one thing that game design gives me maybe more than anything else is the skill of a teacher: empathy, the ability to see from an outsider's perspective, and the ability to stick with a pedantic goal and roll with the punches. And not least, the ability to inspire. Raph Koster was right. See Mom, See Dad? I became a teacher after all.

One of my proudest accomplishments in games is my perfect attendance record at Sony's now-legendary E3 parties. I was at the very first (Huey Lewis and the News at the Santa Monica Airport), and every one since, and over the years they've grown more and more impressive and entertaining.

Until this year, that is...and this makes me very worried about Sony.

Part of the problem was clearly money. Sony was spending phenomenal amounts of money, not only on top music acts like Outkast but also on the venue and the vibe. Incredible light shows, and an almost carnival-like selection of entertainment. Last year featured Mexican wrestling, and a show by Mini-KISS. (Or rather, as we were reminded by the performers "Mini Fucking KISS".) Two years ago was this amazing circus act in which every acrobatic maneuver was accompanied by fire. I smelled like gasoline for the rest of the night after that.

No doubt this was costing a lot of cash, and I can hardly blame Sony for wanting to scale it back a little. After all, some of the best parties (I think the ones at the City Center Studios downtown were great) weren't as elaborate. And given what the PS3 has been doing to Sony's bottom line, I'll have a little sympathy with trying to save some money.

But there was something else missing at this year's party. Riding the bus up the hill above Dodger Stadium I was as excited as ever, but as soon as I entered the venue, it just seemed somehow quieter. People were moving more slowly. Maybe there were fewer young people. Lord knows I wasn't helping bring the average age down. I was having trouble putting my finger on it when Kaz Hirai took the stage to introduce...Incubus. Not exactly an auspicious act. Remember this is the party that had brought us the Foo Fighters, Macy Gray, and Beck, Outkast, all at the peak of their popularity. Incubus was a lot cooler during PS1 than it is today.

Then Kaz I think hit the nail right on the head. He shouted for the crowd to get a little more excited. "What time is it?" he yelled, and the response was tepid. "Come on everybody, you know the drill!" shouted Hirai.

Yeah, that was it. You know the drill.

---

I remember the first Atlanta party. It rained all day, then cleared up just in time for the show. Foo Fighters came on and we went crazy. Everybody in the crowd was kind of looking at each other like "can we really be doing something this cool?" When the Sony people took the stage they were awkward, unsure what to say. They were outsiders crashing this party called video games, and they couldn't wait to share the rebellious spirit with us. When the Foo Fighters scandalously crashed the Sega party later that night and played an unannounced late set, it only made things cooler.

After E3 came back to LA, there were a couple parties at Sony's Culver City studio lot. These were awkward too, with a kludgy location and too many people. It was really fun.

By the time we were going to parties at the LA City Center Studios, Kaz was proud. Sony had launched the PS2, and with guts and determination they had made it kick ass despite early problems. It was hard for him not to stand up on the stage and give a speech, you could see it. But it was time to party, and party we did. We were in love with Sony.

This year, Kaz, and indeed all of Sony, just seemed tired. There was a noticeable absence of the Japanese, usually cloistered in groups and in Sony's VIP area. It seemed like I probably could have even walked right into the VIP area if I wanted to. But I didn't want to.

The Sony we fell in love with, the one that gave us the gray box with the goofy name, then the black box that somehow made us all cool, just wasn't in the house this year. Instead it was a company that was going through the motions, that didn't have the energy of rebellion or innovation.

Kaz said it all perfectly: "You know the drill." Yes Kaz, sadly, we do know the drill, and unless something changes, this is the part of the drill where Sony ceases to be the exciting center of the games business.

For the first time ever, I left the 2006 Sony party early.