Why do we innovate ?

- Because First comers own their space. At least recognized first comers.
- Markets evolve as users get sophisticated and jaded.

Nick shows the evolution of game genres over time from 2003 on real Arcade.
By 2007, in only four years, all the dominants genre of 2003 were completely replaced by new genres that didn’t exist at the time.

When the games form becomes stagnant the audience moves. Which is why innovation is important for everybody.

Some advice for innovating:

- Point 1: Start from known places.
Example Luxor. When it came out Zuma and Ricochet where really popular. It took the two key mechanics of both games and combined them: a casual hit is born!

- Point 2: Be inspired by other game media
Example Plant vs Zombies. Start with a very successful game type (Desktop Tower defense) and bring it to the casual audience by making enemy movement simpler, making the end condition more comprehensible, make units more knowable, change narrative + polish, polish, polish.

- Point 3: build new mechanics around proven desires.
Example Restaurant City. Slow growth models (because they work) + restaurant are fun places + Pet Society + friends (like all Facebook games)

- Point 4: Go big or go home
…if you’re small and want to innovate. Anything easy to make is easy to steal. The big guys have much more money than you to market the game. Make something so far crazy that you’re going to be hard to catch up with. So do something hard that will be difficult to replicate : complex mechanics under the hood, high production values, Next level technology.

- Point 5: Don’t assume your audience is solved.
Example from movies: District9 , Paranormal activities…
The movie industry is older, has more money and know their audience better and they still get it wrong regularly. So don’t assume we know better in the games industry. Try things out: testing should be your guide.

Right after Nick, Kenny Shea Dinkin gave a fantastic talk which went way too fast for me to take notes other than the money quote: “Emotional connection breeds irrational loyalty”. Point well taken!

But what surprised me most was the deep melancholy in his speech. It was by far the most soulful presentation I have seen at GDC this year but under the surface of jokes and quirky toys, there was a core of sadness – almost like if he had been hurt by the development of Noby Noby Boy.

I wasn’t expecting that at all…

The team over at Gamasutra did a much better summary of the lecture than I did but here are my notes anyway (Italics mine):

“Noby Noby Boy is different from Katamari : I didn’t come up with a wild guess. This time I had an idea and talked to my teammates.

They think I’m crazy but I’m very normal. I don’t do drugs, I don’t drink at all. Please don’t worry about me!

In Katamary I wanted to make a statement about the consumption society. When the objects are rolled in the Katamari they disappear, they are gone. And then I felt empty. This is how consumption society makes me feel.

So I wanted to make another game with fewer objects. The answer was to make Noby Noby Boy.

The other thing is that I wanted to make a game where I was not constrained by the boundaries of Time and Money. And I also wanted to make my game in that way but sadly that is not possible.

In games there are usually goals and rules. Katamari has rules but I wasn’t happy with the fact that that existed. I wanted to throw this off and start from “what games should be”. I wanted to make something that didn’t have a visible goal and set formulas. Of course at the time I wasn’t thinking about debugging and when the programmers would ask me “what is a bug in that game?”.

Miyazaki said “Children today are not playing they are consuming.” I think he’s right. In Japan people who play games are called users but I think it is wrong and it disturbs me. What’s created has to be consumable because we’re in the gaming industry but I still think that what matters is that they must have fun.

From the end of 2005 we began prototyping Noby Noby Boy (on XBOX 360!). It took us 3 years to complete and we had to change engine in the middle because we needed a real physics engine which at first we didn’t have. If you use Havock you have to show their logo in the game and I did not want to show any logo so we didn’t use it. Instead we used Physics effect by SCE. But in the end we still had to show the Bandaï Namco Logo, so…

When we were done, the people high up in the company were very angry at me… I could see them glaring at me!

Currently 55.768 people are playing Noby Noby Boy.

I said NB didn’t have any goal but it’s not completely true.  There is “Girl” that must connect the entire solar system. But it’s such a huge goal I think it doesn’t really count as one. At the current rate, this would take 820 years which is a problem because I will be dead by then.

Next I’d like to talk about what I couldn’t do.

I wanted to give pillow and scarves to the players as a token of my gratitude for buying my game. I wanted to give them actual gifts. I wanted them to receive physical gifts so as to make the game more real. So my sister made a pillow and my mom made a scarf – it’s a domestic industry – but only one person could get this. Then I wanted to make wooden doll every day  and give it to the players but the company said I couldn’t do all this because of privacy and delivery issues.

Noby Noby Boy is made by 10 people. It’s a very small team.

There is one more thing I couldn’t do: a loose ranking. I wanted to make Girl’s ranking fuzzy. But because of time and programming restrictions, I couldn’t do it. I also wanted to make a search interface, like for google,  where if you did a search characters would bring the results and if you ate them you’d go to the site. But popular sites could run very fast so it would be hard to eat them. I also wanted to do pencil caps that looked like Boy.

What I wanted to achieve by making Noby Noby Boy: Something New – Another choice in video games – Something possible only in games – Something surprising.

I felt cramped. In the last 4 or 5 years the real world has felt cramped, constraining – nothing to do with the recession and maybe that is only my personal feeling – but something seems to be tying me up – maybe Bandai? Noby-Noby Boy is a way for me to feel I’m pushing against this constraint. Games don’t need big ideals like that, they just need to be fun… but I needed them.

I also need to tell you about the update. (He then demoes an iPhone Noby Noby boy and the upcoming multiplayer version on the PS3)

A lot of people ask me if Noby Noby Boy is really a video game – they seem to think it’s not. But I just want to do something enjoyable. I would like to ask those people how they define a video game. I don’t think games can be defined just by goals.

So I have been complaining a lot until now – people don’t call me Keita Takahashi they call me Hate Takahashi – but it’s because I think there is a great potential to games – so that is frustrating. If we love video games we have to observe more, and feel more when we make them. There is no completion when we make them: it is always in development. Perhaps we are hiding behinds these rules and we rely on past experiences. Perhaps we have to ignore the players and the company. Maybe we should rely on our inner feeling?

I want us to not fear failure. By doing that, I’m sure something that has never been done before would be born. And I think we have to make those games.

This is our mission.”

- Why do players engage in Real Money Trading (RMT)

People ask if it’s fair? Does it break gameplay?
Erik: If you have an item based game, people will engage in trading whether in game or out of game so it’s simply robust design to include it in the gameplay.

Some of the motivations behind RMT: it enhance status, it provides in-game advantage, it gives deeper controls, it’s social, to complete collections, to obtain in-games resources & money.

- Why add RMT?

- Safer transactions (which translates to happier players and cheaper support because then you don’t have to support the cost of players complaining about being screwed)
- Motivates the player base by validating their gameplay
- 10 to 20 percent incremental ARPU to active user base
- It makes it possible to monetize the time-rich (non-paying) users

But you need to do it right and make your players aware of it.

When they first introduce in-game trading through Live Gamer integrated in GoPets, players kept on trading on the grey market (Ebay, etc…) until the “Peppermint Fortune Cookie” quest that tied the gameplay to the trading platform and taught the players how to use the interface.

Erik: “It turns out marketing is important and I’ve been really slow to believe it.”

Erik: “If you think you’re doing a subscription game I would argue with you for a while because if you look at WOW its game mechanics is actually completely item based”.

- Item Design options

- Status / Appearance (doesn’t sell as well as it used to. People expect it as default.)
- Gameplay advantage (very sensitive ex: switching from main power to secondary power is one penny in Kart Rider)
- Rarity (Make limited edition items)
- Duration (consumable, charges, 1 Day, 7 days, 1 month, permanent, etc…)
- UI (you could have custom UIs)

- Balancing

Impossible not to make mistakes but there are some techniques to minimize screw ups:

- On gameplay items you can charge for Defense (more armor) but Offense will piss players off (need to stay free).
- Rental of items allows graceful re-balance
- Limited Edition (by definition is a Limited problem.)
- Buyback programs for collection (you could buy back the problematic items)
- Nerfing which is the worst solution.

- Multiple Currencies

Erik: “I Like to have at least 2. a time currency (time rich) and a money currency”
Also possible: a creative currency for the idea rich and ad-hoc currencies for specific purposes.

- Minimum level
Quests: “Do this thing you’ll get this stuff” must be really clear in UI

- Goal Interface vs User Interface
Goals must be measurable, comparable, accessible, meaningful, Scale in challenge as user progress
User Interface should exist to support Goal Interface!

Why Transactions

A Transaction is a twiddle in the DB
- Pick up an item / coin
- Drop an item / coin
- Create an item
- Buy / Sell / Trade

Concrete, measurable (metrics) player activity. If it can’t be measured, it’s noise.

- Thesis

“Good online games are engaging pastimes. Great online games have robust market economies with people spending a significant amount of time, capital, and intellectual creative inside thes spaces living lives. If they are not trading, it means they are not engaged enough.”

- High Revenues  / Low Costs

- Go Online, Skip retail, skip COGs & Intermediaries
- Yes Casual, Yes Hardcore
- Create addictive, immediate goal structures to get people on a rail of hard fun
- Create an inherent incentive in the game for users to recruit other users (eg guilds raiding PVP) in other words use personal gain to create viral growth.

Making a “hole in the ground” where players can just throw money in will help dealing with inflation. Other mechanisms include auctions, exchange or eventually, devaluation.

My first session this year was by Austin Hill, founder and CEO of Akoha a game that has captivated my interest since I first heard of it last September because its high concept has a lot in common with a project I have been sporadically working on for the past two years.

Austin started his presentation by recounting his personal history. He was previously the founder of Zero Knowledge a company back in 2000 that provided anonymizing services and employed some of the top names in cryptography including Bruce Schneier and Ian Goldberg (if I remember correctly). The company collapsed and around that same time, his brother was diagnosed with terminal cancer wich came as a complete shock that shattered his life.

A few years later he went to the TED conference and heard many talks about mass collaboration and happiness. One specific talk by Robert Wright (author of the book Non Zero) got him to think about where he wanted to apply his entrepreneurial skills. Then the end of the student clip in David Perry’s Ted talk’s about using games for good got him to think he could use games as a powerful medium.

He then moved on to the core of his speech:

“Facebook is a social status game. Wikipedia is a Knowledge War Game.
Our social playgrounds take on meaning. Democratization of Human Agency. We need to get a lot of people together.

Games > Mass collaboration > effect change.

Gift economies were an inspiration and they are about:
- Witnessing
- Reciprocity
- Social Reputation
- Organic and Authentic

Akoha’s design goals were:

- Positive Social Game (no PK)
- Based on Gift Economies
- Affect players of the game through positive psychology
- Commercially successful so as to be able to fund other social projects

Felt MMOs and virtual worlds were too time consuming and to genre oriented (SciFi, MedFan, etc…) to have a global appeal.

Designing for a global audience presents a unique challenge: if you are not designing for someone who are you designing for?

The game also needed to be globally accessible not just through the web which led to the idea of using a physical medium (Webkinz was an inspiration).

Looked at ARGs and Jane McGonigal’s work and decided to go where onine & offline worlds collide.
Couch surfing, Bookcrossing, SFzero, Where’s George, The GoGame, etc… all those social reality games were also inspirations.

Also the film/idea of “Pay it forward” which became “play it forward” Akoha’s motto.

Akoha is played with mission cards. There are different missions, one per card. Missions are to be done in the real world and they are of the type: “Give someone flowers”, “Thank someone” or “Send drinks to a coupe in Love”. You win “Karma” points by executing the mission, then you can follow the card’s path (whom it goes to next) through the website. (He showed this player made video to explain the concept). The game is still in Beta but over 3000 mission have been played so far.

Challenges we’re encountering:

- Loss of agency (only 65% of cards are played)
- Feedback systems (we need more)
- Scoring community missions
- Moderation of community designed missions

Still to come in Akoha (future versions).

- Kudos: internal currency for card purchases & rewards
- Mobile (geolocation and virtual cards) & Social Network Integration
- Akoha Superpowers: buffs for the real world (Karma detector on the phone)
- Community design Missions.

Retention is an issue: 85% drop out of the game for now.”

Ben starts off with a short history of his professional life and how he spent most of it playing Battlefield until he went on at Dice to actually work on the series.

Shows a quite funny movie he used to internally promote the vision for Battlefield heroes. At the time the project was called Battlefield West.

The idea behind the game was:

- Play 4 Free Cartoon Shooter service
- PC only, low system specs
- Launches from the heroes website
- Create, customize and level-up your own unique war hero
- Classic Battlefield gameplay simplified for a broader audience

The idea came from South Korea where many games are free, for PC only, and users buy microtransaction items. The top South Korean Titles as of 10th June 08 are:

1- Sudden Attack (counter strike clone)
2- Starcraft
3- Lineage II
4- World of Warcraft
5- Special force (counter strike clone)
6- Lineage
7- Warcraft 2
8- Dungeon & fighter (side scrolling beat them up)
9- Twelve Sky 2
10- Audition (dancing game)

Were did we start? It all came down to money: ARPU. Madden has an ARPU of 59,99$ per year per user. But a Korean “Play 4 free game” is 3 to 6$ per year from each user. So to hit a smilar margin with “Play 4 free” you need to increase the number of users and cut costs. This reality had an effect on many areas:

- Art direction: Cartoony for low system specs, mainstream appeal and lower cost (reuse of BF 2142 engine technology). Simpler asset generation.

Ben then shows the evolution of concept art on character and backgrounds. They wanted to move away from the typical aesthetics of games about war which are mostly “brown”.

- Game Design: Battlefield has a very simple, fun, core gameplay derived from a physic-based sandbox. The question was how to make this more casual. And there were iron gates that needed to be overcome:

The iron gate -> How they solved it
High system specs -> Cartoony Graphics
First person -> Third Person
Skilled opponents -> Matchmaking based partly on number of hours played
Hard to find matches -> Make matchmaking easy
Hard to learn -> Tutorial, simplicity
Requires high skill -> Less “twitch”-based by including a layer of strategic decisions.

- Backend, Billing, Web, Meta Services:

Designing a Play 4 Free is fundamentally different.

The website is more the half of your user experience. The game is only 2 percent of the effort. You also have to rethink the whole distribution chain. Building the distribution chain is great because you control it but not so great, because it’s a lot of work.

- Deployment of a Product vs Service:
No “release date”, it trickles out over time.

Development impact, you don’t have to make all decisions up front. It’s all about responding to the desires of the community. You can fix things “on the go”. But you can’t bugger off on holiday after you release the game. Think of the hotel business: building the hotel is not the hardest part and it’s only the start.

- PR + Marketing impact:
No “Big splash” release. Who remembers the release date of Youtube or Myspace?

The state of play in the west:
There’s a package goods console market: publishers and press focus on this BUT the online delivered gaming market is NOT up and coming, NOT a future model, it’s HERE.

At this point he showed a slide comparing package good games to web games:

Then he made that slide into a very smart analogy simply by changing the tags at the top of the slide, replacing “Packaged goods” by “Cinema” and “Web games” by “Television”. Ben explained that back in the 1930’s the cinema industry insiders would never have believed television would have such an impact that it would eventually overtake their business as they felt TV was “less immersive”, “lower res” and “shorter”. He argued that we are now in a comparable situation with packaged goods games versus web games.

And I’m certainly not one to disagree…

Alex:”I am going to do a lot of rambling about User Generated Content”.

They made their presentation inside Little Big Planet with custom artwork for GDC Paris. They explain they wanted to make a game based on creativity. Show a short history of game plateforms. “The technology improves but one thing doesn’t change: development people.” At media molecule they wanted to have a team the old fashion way (i.e: small and having fun).
Even with two people who have known each other for as long as Mark and Alex (15 years), making a game creates tension. The more people the more fights you get so keep the team small. They decided early on not to have more than 30 people on the team.

Alex: “As an industry we have the opportunity to do more than mimic books. There is a slight misconception that you need teams of 200 people to make a successful game because of the power of the hardware. but in fact many very successful games in the recent past were made with teams of 4 or 5 people.”

Where did the idea come from? The only real answer is “History”.
Mark goes on and makes a commentary while showing a slideshow about UGC starting back from the arcade through to C64, the game maker games such as the “Shoot Them Up Construction Kit”, then Amiga generation and “God Games”, then from 1996 on: the web…

So Little Big Planet is the latest take on UGC.

Alex: “You give people an inch and they make a mile.”

They show an axis:
Easy & simple ———> Complex & flexible
Singstar -> Line Rider -> Echocrome ->Spore
Their background as game designer always tempted them to go for complex & flexible. But they lost users when the tools became too complex. “Every time we removed features, the quality improved.”

Early during development they had a huge argument about a full roaming 3D environment or 2D.
They showed a pre-rendered video that settled that argument in the direction of 2 & 1/2 D.

Second big fight around the tools. Settled it with a video made by Mark. The “doing more with less” meme is thrown in.

They will keep pushing content after release. Even non UGC games are moving to a “support” model. Originally there was a lot of talk about episodic content until people realized that making a small game took 80% of the effort of a final game.

Showing your game early is good because it gives you early user input.

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…

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.

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”.

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.