Back in Paris. Yesterday we passed Nintendo’s approval for the EU and today we passed US - both on first try.
This means Soul Bubbles is now Officially Done. Woohoo!
Time to relax… Has anyone heard of a good surfing spot in April? :)
I went to the panel discussion on the Future of MMOs (there’s a good writeup at Terra Nova) with pretty low expectations based on previous year’s experience. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be - mostly thanks to Min Kim from Nexon and because Ray Muzika is not only smart, he’s also a really nice person - but it was still really boring, full of obviousness and corporate non speech.
What I found most striking were the comments Cryptic Studio’s designer Jack Emmert made. Because he - as a developer - likes subscriptions, he went ballistic against microtransactions and made really strong comments against them - insisting that the model did not work outside of Asia (who’s supposedly “resisting subscriptions”).
But then he pretty much lost all credibility when he declared to Kim he was not familiar with Maple Story. I guess he’s also never heard of Habbo and its 8 million sessions per month and 60 MUSD annual revenue on virtual good. Talk about having a severe case of tunnel vision! Also, Jack did not seem to comprehend the crux of the problem is not wether to do microtransactions or subscriptions (heck, do both!) - the real question is about being free to play, giving free access to the game, or not. That is the inescapable trend he is going to have to fight against and it was quite shocking to see how blind he was to it. Interestingly, Min Kim mentioned that all of Nexon’s team are small: Kart Rider was developed by only 5 people and even now is no bigger than 20 people…
To me, the real future of MMOs is about in-browser, free to access and play experiences with a very strong identity (both in gameplay and visuals), developped by a low burn rate team.
At GDC, nothing illustrated this better than the session with Gene Endrody from Maid Marian. This incredible guy builds and runs in-browser, 3D MMOs with the help of his wife. And that’s it. He does everything, from programming and administrating the servers and the forums to modeling and animating. The result is nothing short of amazing: he has 1.8 million unique users every month (with big overlap between the games), the games uses Shockwave which is installed on 59% of PCs and he does monetization via advertising. His biggest constituency is Polish(!) at 19% followed by Americans at 13%.
He has two main products. His recently released Club Marian (a pure social hangout experience) and his better known Sherwood Dungeon (a casual fantasy MMO) and has about 6000 simultaneous players on the site at any time.
He makes heavy use of procedural construction approach (think nethack, rogue): all the environment is procedurally generated. He found out there was a similar power structure between the online and console industry: in the online world the gatekeepers are the web portals. He wanted to circumvent them so his strategy has been to build a network of affiliates with lots of smaller websites. There’s a minimum size for affiliates but he’s kept his linking rules very simple. Affiliates can in turn monetize by doing their own advertizing around sherwood dungeon’s.
All his 3D assets are created in maya or generated in lingo. Distribution model has been very important and procedural generation has been key (kept the download size low). Fraud detection is a huge issue for small companies.
What about customer support? The game is free so the expected level of support is low.
If you have registration, email confirmation and all that crap upfront, you immediately loose 90% of your players.
The other uber cool “future of MMOs” prototype I’ve seen at GDC was on a friend’s laptop right before this Maid Marian session. But shhh, this one is still in stealth mode…
One of my favorite session at GDC is the Experimental Gameplay Workshop, where a bunch of games that are “experimental” in nature are presented.
This year, a number of patterns emerged in what the judges have seen so games were presented in groups:
- Replay
This pattern was all about single player games that toyed with the idea of replaying over your previous “ghost” session.
Cursor*10: i had played this one before coming to GDC. It’s an interesting solitaire game where you use your cursor to solve puzzles and climb to the highest level. You have a fixed number of cursor each of limit use in time but you can play over your previous cursors’ actions. So you’re basically cooperating with yourself over time.
Timebot: same concept of playing with yourself but you control the spawn of your clones. Seems very hardcore once you reach high levels.
Jonathan Blow then made another demo of Braid his soon to be released XBLA game, showcasing the “repeat” mechanic.
The Misadventures of P.B Winterbottom: a flash game (made by Tracy Fullerton’s students) with the aesthetic of old silent films that also plays with the concept of clones.
- Obfuscation
This pattern was about making things hard to understand for the player.
According to Doug Church, it could be obfuscation in the presentation or obfuscation in the gameplay. Personally I’m not convinced by obfuscation as a specific gameplay mechanic. To me all games are more or less opaque and it’s only a question of where you want to stand on the accessibility curve. So all they’ve shown here are games that have crappy accessibility and - although it can be funny for about five seconds - I’m not sure how this pushes the envelope of game design.
Lost in the Static: is a windows game with a very simple (transparent) gameplay but the visuals are completely opaque. This was idea #56 out of Sean Howard’s 300 mechanics.
Wrath of Transperator: (made by the same team as P.B Winterbottom - unreleased?) Your avatar is invisible. You can only judge where you are by environmental clues. It’s a game where the player can be intensely captivated by the interaction but spectators have a hard time understanding what’s happening.
Jeff Minter’s Space Giraffe: (released on XBLA) Jon blow stepped up in defense of Space Giraffe and stated it’s a game that’s not so much about the immediate destruction of enemies and more about management, controlling the situation. Wich is very much opposite of what the visuals convey. The game fights you trying to understand what’s happening.
La La Land 4: A windows game. Totally cryptic. I have no idea what’s happened. Jon Blow said: “One of the delightful thing about this game is that you have no idea what’s going to happen next.” In this given case, I’m not sure if that’s delightful or terrifying…
- User-Generated content or levels.
Next pattern was about games that use content or levels generated by the user.
Line Golfer: A web game similar to Line Rider in that you can draw (and share) your own level and then go golfing in it. Simple and powerful.
Bernie the pyromancer: This was a weird one, down to the exploding cows… You play a fire wizard and you try to burn everything in a little village. I’m not sure I completely understood the gameplay but it looked like some kind of physics based solitaire. I also didn’t grok the relation with user created content/levels…
Crayon Physics Deluxe: This is the upcoming PC game that won the grand prize for this year’s Independent Games Festival. Its very cool looking but the gameplay seems very brittle: sometimes you spend a lot time designing a solution that could work but is broken by the physics’ precision. The nice touch IMO is that Petri Purho, the designer, made it all about finding creative solutions to the puzzles and not so much about finding the most “efficient” solution. So he didn’t include time or scores for example to avoid pushing players in that direction.
Audio Surf: This extremely cool looking game is all about uploading your music tracks and then actually playing a kind of racing/match three game on it. I had read about it before coming to GDC, now I have to play it…
- Two Levels at Once
The last pattern was about playing in two levels or game spaces at one. This is where I found the most exciting games.
Yin Yang: Extremely cute and cool web based plateformer with two avatars each “trapped” in a gameplay space but that can interact with each other through objects.
Shift: Same sort of concept: a puzzle platformer that allows your avatar to “shift” from one game space to another. The main difference is here you control a single avatar that freely moves from one game space to the other. Very nice minimalist aesthetics.
Shadow: A game that is still in development and is about moving between 3D and 2D spaces. The shadow space is in 2D and you need to reach the “green box” in the 3D space. Velocity is carried from 2D space to 3D space. Amazing concept, extremely impressive technologically and probably really hard to play.
Then there was a game standing on it’s own, out of any pattern:
Stars Over Half Moon Bay by Rod Humble - who previously did The Marriage and is also head of the Sims studio at Maxis on his spare time. After The Marriage he couldn’t come up with a new art game idea in 6 month. He thinks it’s because he didn’t care enough about what he was pursuing. Then he saw the stars in the night sky and that gave him inspiration as a methaphore for creativity. First part is on the “organic”, self feeding aspect of creativity and the second part is a lot more about the intellectual aspect of creation. My first impression is that it is much less interesting than “The marriage”: the metaphore does not seem to emerge naturally from the game as well as it did in his previous experiment. But I’ll have to play it to make up my own mind.
Anyone who’s been around me long enough has eventually had to suffer through one of my long winded tangent on the societal impact of technology and the probable advent of the Singularity. So, of course, Ray Kurzweil’s book’s “The Singularity Is Near” takes the place of the bible on my bed stand and it was with great anticipation I headed to South Hall yesterday morning to hear his keynote on “The next 20 years of gaming”.
However, it hasn’t been as exciting as I was hoping for since he basically gave the same speech I heard him give years ago at Siggraph. It’s a quick overview of his central idea - the law of accelerated returns - and its corollary that technological development follows an exponential growth curve. So the keynote went along these lines:
Exponential growth is very surprising and people usually don’t think that way: they make linear projections.
His interest in technology trends came from his desire of becoming an inventor. Timing is essential in building products so he makes mathematical models to project the evolution of trends.
It’s hard to predict the future on a specific project but much easier to do it on trends. He gives all his usual examples Arpanet, computer chess & Kasparov, etc… Then switches on to the democratizing effect of technology on tools of creativity, of production.
Technological trends are predictable, exponential in nature. An exponential trend is very powerful. There will be a billion fold increase in price/performance in the next 25 years. The effects go way beyond technology. It affects everything we care about: health and medicine (RNA interference allows to turn genes off), energy (solar energy efficiency is doubling every year).
He did throw into the mix a few interesting sound bites relevant to games:
- It’s unfortunate we use the name “game” because it makes it seem like it’s all pretend (oh, it’s just a game) when real things happen in game. Just like virtual reality or AI are unfortunate names.
- Play is the principal way in which we learn. We can learn real skills in games.
- Eventually “virtual reality” will be fully competitive with “real reality”.
Chris Hecker is one of those guys really worth following. He has been very active in the game community for years where he’s notoriously known as a super brilliant guy, that has never released a game. But that’s all going to change very soon as he’s gone directly from that to helping Will Wright on Spore…
He gave a profound speech today that is obviously directly influenced by his work on Spore and his life, trying to cross the bridge between art and science. I need more time to digest it fully. I’m left with the vague impression he’s wrong on his main hypothesis but I can’t exactly pin down why yet. Anyway there’s more than enough insight and deep thinking in there to make it worth anyone’s time, so here are my raw notes on the speech (italics are mine):
Chris Hecker - Structure vs Style.
Usually he tries for a speech that is
Concrete - specific - fancy demos - big name game - provided solution
Not this time.
Question : What technology has had the most profound impact on games?
He claims it’s the texture map triangle.
Because :
Powerful structure. The computer can reason about the triangle at a deep level… (morphology - topology)
AND
Expressive Style: the artist can represent subtle but rich designs.
Other examples: skinned mesh & bones, wavetable synthesis, mocap processing, html+css, typefaces
This decomposition is everywhere hard interactive problems are being solved.
What is a hard interactive problem ?
Not “wicked problems“.
Not “How to make this game fun” problems.
Not “easy” problems (nothing with a quantitative success metric).
So we’re not talking about about CPU, RAM even P or NP…
it IS problems at the intersection of technology, aesthetics, interactivity - the last one of which differentiates us from other media.
His theory: “I think solutions to hard interactive problems will aways have a deep Style vs Structure decomposition.”
Interactivity demands that the computer be in the loop but Emotion and Aesthetics demand that the human be in the loop.
Humans can create or execute algorithms
Humans can generate or illustrate or judge data
We often thinks of Humans vs computers when it should be Humans & computers.
We need to be finding out what computers are good at and what humans are good at and sort accordingly.
Because it’s not possible to bridge the gap yet. (he’s basically saying no one proposed a valid and complete top down model for AI. Although that’s true at this time, I strongly believe Jeff Hawkins is seriously closing in with his memory-prediction framework).
What technology SHOULD have hade the deepest impact?
Artificial Intelligence.
But it has not. We have not yet found a structure vs style decomposition for AI.
So what is Structure and what is Style?
Structure is the static specification of the Degrees Of Freedoms (DOFs) describing the object.
Style is the Values for the DOFs describing the object.
Static structure (This reminds me strongly of invariant representation in the brain): you can reason about it, You can write code that reasons about it.
Malleable Style : you can write code that changes it. IT’S DATA.
Choosing Style DOFs is an Art. It needs to be intuitive, expressive, frugal, blendable, efficient = it took a long time for the triangle to “win”. In physics the rigid body has not yet won.
Structure vs Style for AI ?
There will be structure vs Style decomposition for AI. Its style will NOT be based on code. There will be a “Photoshop of AI”. (That’s mostly where I have the feeling he’s wrong)
Does behavior require code? He used to think yes, but he’s not so sure anymore.
Who’s never heard of Sid Meier? Having designed Civilization is enough to make him a legend in game circles.
But that’s far, far from all he did. Here are my slightly reworked notes on his interview at GDC today (Italics are my added thoughts).
Standing the test of time: a Q&A with Sid Meier, questions by Noah Falstein.
On the development and design process:
Sid, born before video games, played board games as a kid (Risk and Monopoly - blech!). He feels game design has been more about evolutions than revolutions. So we should be cooperative on ideas and not be too protective. “Games are a series of interesting decisions” as he famously said. The development philosophy he follow is to make the historical research after the game is done. Fun comes first and build the game around that and only when that’s done, research the theme and make it fit the gameplay. Keep the cycle of play/improve during all development. It’s all about iteration and collaboration. “The more people you can have playing and giving you feedback, the better. I’m just the gatekeeper.” The audience today is much broader, not just hardcore gamers, so it’s important to also widen the scope of your design accordingly. The word “casual” is a tough one to pin down : it can be about either the cost or the complexity of the game. He’s personally not interested in “simple” games he’s interested in “complex” games (duh! He made Civ!), but he’s attracted to working with smaller teams. “Bring the player’s imagination in the game” : working with so much limitations in older games forced them to do that. And that imagination is still around but not being tapped as much now that we have fancy graphics. Extra stuff he said when replying to audience questions at the end:
Reward system : “people need some sort of validation at the end of the game”.
The prototyping process is not pretty but it’s important to try out as many ideas as possible in order to find what works. Having a working prototype is essential.
He draws a solid wall behind the “game logic” and the “presentation”.
On creating Civilization:
Like in Will Wright’s Sim City, the idea of creating and building was one of the driver behind Civ, as opposed to just blowing stuff up as was the norm in strategy games. Adding different systems, each clearly understandable on its own, increased complexity in a way that made the sum greater than the parts.
On the subject of narration: how do you feel about story ?
One of our key role as a game designers is to pay attention to “who’s having the fun”. The player should be having the fun and the game designer not so much. He feels the player is more interested in his own stories than the ones the game designer can come up with so he designs in this way (sooooo true).
On balance:
Balancing has a lot to do with iteration. It’s about allowing rich choices but keep the complexity at a level that’s manageable to the player. The computer can manage a very high level of complexity but the player can’t necessarily follow that. Later on, to an audience question: “Our approach is really to play the game and keep playing. And if something is imbalanced it will show up.” But balance is not the end all: a positive experience is more important overall.
On addiction: did you expect it would be that addictive and how do you feel about it?
He did not expect it and was scared about it at first when he heard stories of severe addiction. It was a revelation and at the time they felt that this gave a glimpse of the future and how people would be willing to spend a lot a time in games. As this was pre-internet, people came to convention with the need to speak about their “Civ experience”: they did not have any message board were they could express how they felt. “It’s always scary the effect your game has on people”. To the audience, later on: “I’m more confused by why people are not addicted to games! (…) What do we do with this industry/art form? We are already influencing people but do we take responsibility for that?”
On Dinosaurs: (a game project that was canceled one year in development because he couldn’t find the fun)
An idea that he has not given up on. “We all have failures and it’s important to recognize them early and let go as soon as possible.”
On Civilization Revolution: (the console port of Civ he is currently working on)
The approach with Civ revolution is to put you back in that “king seat”. Giving you the feeling that you are making important, high level decisions. Finding what is “fun managment” and was is “micro managment” and get rid of the latter so that “every decision is interesting”.
More opinions on games: (mostly extracted from audience questions)
- It’s kind of a golden age for gaming. Games he liked recently : Grand Tourismo, Mercenaries, Halo “of course” (Unbelievable! I would never have thought Sid Meier enjoyed twitch games…), “when you do something all day, you want something else” which is why he’s not playing so many strategy games.
- What motivates you to make games: “The fundamental desire to play a game that hasn’t been done before.”
- Would he collaborate with American McGee on “Trains in Hell”?: No, each designer has his own approach so two designer working together you’d probably get the worst of both as opposed to the best of both.
Last question:
Q: With Spore, Will Wright is attempting a combination of everything he’s done before. Do you have any ambition of making some kind of monumental game that would sum up all the mechanics you’ve build along the time.
A: “NO!”.
I’m leaving for SF tomorrow morning where I’ll spend a week listening to all the smart game people at the GDC ranting about how big and loud everything has become and how much better it was back in the days. :)
Well I, for one, am looking forward to a week of game related discussions and thinking in-between trips to Berkeley to replenish my collection of bumper stickers and having pizza at the Parkway Speakeasy theater. Not to mention filling myself up with cheeseburgers, milkshakes and pancakes. That’s the Real American Way of Life ™ as far as I am concerned! I’d be totally hyped right now if the prospect of the ignominious border crossing procedure didn’t suck all life and joy out of me…
Anyway, give me a shout if you’re in the area too.
Apparently, the good Dr Kawashima - who inspired the Brain Age games that sold over 17 million copies worldwide - does not want a single yen from the 22 million dollars in royalties he is due:
“Everyone in my family is mad at me but I tell them that if they want money, go out and earn it.”
he says, because
“to hear this may put you off, but my hobby is work.”
Score one for passion, zero for money!
Also interesting, his comment on work versus play:
“Having fun is not studying. Making them study is not to entertain children but to pressure them to make efforts. People fall to lower and lower places unless they are driven to go higher.”
This correlates with my own observation that strictly favoring fun over anything else prevents one from learning those skills that demand hard dedication and self-discipline. Unfortunately, there are some things in life we don’t (yet) know how to teach in a fun way but that still need to be learned…