Minmaxing Life

Before reaching Tuléar, I spent a couple of days in the national park of Isalo where I saw my first lemurs. I was lucky to catch a glimpse of two of the three diurnal species that live in the area: the lemur catta - national emblem of the island - and the lemur fulvus rufus.

Also went trekking and had a swim in the natural pools (of cold water!). Caught some beautiful shots coming back down at sunset. The pics are up on Flickr.

I am now in Ifaty a small village by the seaside after an epic drive where we got stuck in the sand twice! Thankfully the local villagers helped us out and we made it safely, late in the evening yesterday.

I’ve been in Madagascar for a week now. Not enough time to have anything worthwhile to say but I’ll still record my initial reaction - if only to compare it with future perceptions.

After landing in Antananarivo - the capital city - some 400 km from the sea, I am now traveling down the RN7 road to the costal city of Tuléar. The landscape so far has mostly been the red earth high grounds from the center of the island which, to my amazement, reminds me very strongly of central Australia. Between 3:30 to 5 pm the sunlight turns golden and enhances everything it touches. I’ve also seen a couple of remarkable lakes around Antsirabe. One of them - the Tritriva lake - has surreal, bright blue water, and is almost completely still. The legend has it that two lovers who where denied marriage drowned themselves there and it is now “fady” (forbidden) to bathe in it.

The country seems to have exceptional ressources: ingenious people, skilled craftsmen, rare minerals, all kinds of crops, one-of-a-kind biodiversity, wonderful natural sights and even oil! Which makes it all the more surprising to witness how poor the general population is… From my limited understanding, the main explanation seems to point to years of political mismanagement and corruption. But even though the people are amongst the poorest in the world, I did not get the sense of desperation and urgency I’ve felt in other parts of the globe. Not until now at least. Folks are friendly and show genuine interest: it is not uncommon to be called out loud “Vasaha” (foreigner) by little children trying to grab your attention in the street. Of course some of them see you as a walking candy/cash/pencil dispenser but most are just curious and eager for an interesting interaction. Showing them their portrait on a digital camera is often enough to generate endless laughter and a procession of would-be models.

Madagascar may well be the land of tranquility or, as they say, mora-mora (pronounced mooramoor) but to me, right now, it looks like an extremely inviting playground…

A few quotes from the previews that are coming in for Soul Bubbles:

“(…) it’s a demanding little game that’s a lot tougher than it initially looks. (…) Soul Bubbles has taken us completely by surprise. The game is dripping with character and could end up being a cult favourite.”
- Nintendo Official magazine

“Soul Bubbles has a compulsive quality to it – no doubt exacerbated by its gorgeous aesthetic design and beautiful ambient score. (…) Mekensleep may well have hit upon the DS’s very own answer to LocoRoco.”
- Edge magazine

“Soul Bubbles is perfect for the DS and has a great sense of style, humour and accessibility for all gamers. This could definitely be a cult hit. (…) gorgeous graphics and a definite ‘aww’ factor.”
- Gamesmaster magazine

“Innovative, original and beautiful. Prepare to be blown away!”
- NRevolution magazine

“The level design and general polish is up there with Nintendo’s own products. (…) The art style is highly seductive. (…) Bitter experience often stops us from making early recommendations when it comes to third-party DS games, but with Soul Bubbles we have no hesitation”
- Games TM

Now this is exactly what I needed to justify my vacations… Thanks so much guys!

I’ve savagely updated to Wordpress 2.5.1 by reinstalling from scratch and importing my comment file. I just didn’t have the time to figure out the horrendous upgrade process…

One of my plugin forced me to change the permalink format, so sorry if I’ve broken anything.
Let me know if anything else is not working.

J’étais vendredi aux deuxièmes “assises du jeu vidéo” qui, comme l’année dernière, avaient lieu dans la salle Colbert du Palais Bourbon (l’assemblée nationale). Pour être honnête c’était assez déprimant. Malgré quelques interventions de qualité - comme celle de Laurent Michaud - analyste de l’IDATE - qui a donné un bon aperçu des lignes de force du secteur, le ton général était tout de même largement à côté de la plaque.

Entre les distributeurs qui s’imaginent que rien ne va changer avec l’avènement de la distribution online et la ministre de la culture dont le discours laissait entendre que le jeu vidéo allait devoir rentrer dans le costume vieillot et étriqué du droit d’auteur tel qu’on le conçoit en France, l’ambiance était un peu celle de Pompeii avant l’éruption du Vésuve.

Mais une fois de plus, la palme du burlesque est sans conteste revenue à Jean-Claude Larue - l’indéboulonnable délégué général du SELL (syndicat des éditeurs). Il n’a pas hésité à agresser Guillaume de Fondaumière - président de l’APOM (syndicat des développeurs) - en lui reprochant vertement de demander l’assistance financière des pouvoirs publiques. Il faut tout de même oser le faire, quand les membres de son propre syndicat - de l’américain Electronic Arts au français Ubisoft en passant par la britannique Eidos - font la course à celui qui délocalisera le plus vite et le plus fort au Canada où, comme est venu nous l’expliquer un entrepreneur local, les aides peuvent parfois atteindre 85% des budgets!

Je comprends bien que les éditeurs voient d’un mauvais oeil tout ce qui pourrait permettre aux studios de s’émanciper de leur tutelle financière mais tout de même : comment peuvent-ils espérer être crédibles dans leur critique des aides françaises aux développeurs alors qu’ils profitent eux-même de distortions de concurrence tellement plus graves au Canada ?

Ils ont beau jeu d’oublier que le crédit d’impôt récemment voté (jusqu’à 20% pour certaines productions) n’a pour effet que de compenser minimalement la concurrence déloyale dont ils profitent à l’étranger. C’est vraiment l’hopital qui se moque de la charité…

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.