by [name redacted]

Originally published by Next Generation.

Something is happening to game design. It’s been creeping up for a decade, yet only now is it striding into the mainstream, riding on the coattails of new infrastructure, emboldened by the rhetoric of the trendy. A new generation of design has begun to emerge – a generation raised on the language of videogames, eager to use that fluency to describe what previously could not be described.

First, though, it must build up its vocabulary. To build it, this generation looks to the past – to the fundamental ideas that make up the current architecture of videogames – and deconstructs it for its raw theoretical materials, such that it may be recontextualized: rebuilt better, stronger, more elegantly, more deliberately.

In the earlier part of this series, we discussed several games that exemplify this approach; we then tossed around a few more that give it a healthy nod. Some boil down and refocus a well-known design (Pac-Man CE, New Super Mario Bros.); some put a new perspective on genre (Ikaruga, Braid); some just want to break down game design itself (Rez, Dead Rising). In this chapter, we will highlight a few of the key voices guiding the change. Some are more persuasive than others. Some have been been making their point for longer. All are on the cusp of redefining what a videogame can be.

Part Two: Masterminds

The purpose of this list is not only to profile the designers and producers of games like those above – as the most influential voices for change are not always those who put their theory into practice, and not always those whose practice is widely publicized outside of design circles. And frankly, some of the best examples of the form – like Rez – are more or less isolated efforts. All respect to Tetsuya Mizuguchi, he has done little to follow up his opus and hardly more to talk up the theory behind it.

The following is, therefore, an eclectic bunch. Some are quiet yet productive, letting their work speak for them; others have been conducting media blitzes with their rhetoric, talking until even the most entrenched have begun to listen. All are prominent figureheads of the movement.

5) Kenta Cho

So all right, maybe “prominent” sounds a bit odd here. Acclaimed by Macworld and The Escapist as one of the best independent game artists of this generation, Kenta Cho is sort of the Joy Division of the indie game scene; one of those artists who seems to inspire all the other bands, even as he himself remains in relative obscurity. And that is pretty much how Cho likes it; he is content with his office job, and programs only for his own amusement. Although Majesco is gearing up a couple of his games for a Wii treatment, Cho is barely involved in development. According to recent interviews, however, he has expressed an interest in Xbox Live, and (with the aid of XNA) designing a game to sit alongside Pac-Man CE and Geometry Wars.

Cho’s games are small, quirky, abstract, and obsessively analytical, particularly in regards to old-school shooter design. Given that shooters form the template for nearly all other videogames, breaking them down is kind of like smashing the atom, or decoding the human genome. From Rez to Half-Life 2 to Space Giraffe, the simplicity of the shooter has led to some of the most serious expression attempted though game design. By comparison, Cho’s games are humble, abstract; they omit everything unnecessary to a basic design analysis. Yet that analysis is eloquent enough to have gained Cho an almost religious online following.

Beyond his own works, Cho has aided other developers with the release of his BulletML patern-creation tool, a plug-in abstraction of the modern “bullet hell” style of shooter design. His mission is to help preserve the “classical hardcore” style of design – typified by simple mechanics hiding a great range of nuance. In the face of undemanding “casual” games and overly complex “modern hardcore” games, he feels that the fundamentals of game design are in danger of being lost. Cho hopes that especially Western developers will be encouraged by his design tools to help recapture their roots, and reexamine what makes a compelling game.

To some extent, Cho seems to have succeeded. With every new release, the blogosphere melts down a little further and his influence grows that much higher, reaching a recent peak, and flash of mainstream recognition, with a fawning interview on MTV. By raising the profile in independent game design in general, and of a deconstructionist sensibility in particular within that movement, over the last four years Kenta Cho has helped to blaze the way for similar, yet even more progressive, indie projects like Everyday Shooter and Every Extend – continuing the cycle of inspiration. Cho, in turn, cites amongst his greatest influence the likes of Rez, Ikaruga and Gradius V….

4) Treasure

Which brings us to the original postmodern men. In 1993, a Konami programmer named Masato Maegawa led an exodus of unconnected yet similarly disenfranchised employees, to form a ragtag group of malcontent idealists. For the next three-quarters of a decade they would avoid sequels, instead choosing to devote each new release to a different design concept. Many of their games, thus, became subverted pastiches of familiar genres or franchises, given just enough of a twist to suggest the untapped potential hidden within what most developers would take as rote exercises. Gunstar Heroes is basically Contra, with a few added nuances and a sense of humor. Guardian Heroes finds an epic adventure within the common brawler.

Most of these experiments would be delivered with a wink and a nudge. They loved classical game design, and so did their intended audience – yet whatever the genre, there was always something dumb to point out. A loose thread that everyone had learned to overlook, that Treasure took relish in tugging, to see what happened. As a result, much of Treasure’s early catalog feels like an elaborate in-joke; As with Hideo Kojima’s later work, entire games would be based on subverting expectation and then giggling at the player’s awkwardness in adjusting.

Then in 1998, background artist and founding member Hiroshi Iuchi was granted his own indulgence, in the form of Treasure’s first scrolling shooter, Radiant Silvergun. It was in many senses a typical Treasure game, filled with squeaking anime character, boss rushes, and complex weapon systems. It did okay in Japan, and was a smash hit (as far as the genre goes) in the US – which is all the stranger in that the game was never released here, and import copies regularly go for triple-digit sums on eBay.

Revision

Three years later, Iuchi returned to the Silvergun project, practically alone. He brought with him an additional programmer and object designer; otherwise, his follow-up, Ikaruga – if it’s a sequel, it was Treasure’s first – is essentially his project alone. He designed and programmed, composed the backgrounds, and even wrote the music. Iuchi stripped away the excess of the original game, bringing the idea of a shooter to such a basic level as to practically turn it into an action puzzle game. In doing so, he opened the room for more expression and – in purer than ever Treasure style – simultaneously injected new vibrancy into a languishing genre.

Another three years, another sequel; Iuchi and his Ikaruga team tackled that old Konami chestnut, Gradius, bringing to it the same deconstructionist sensibility that Iuchi brought to his own work, once again updating both the franchise and the genre for a new generation. Now Treasure is lining up a whole cavalcade of software for the DS, Wii, and Xbox Live Arcade, including another Silvergun successor, another game from the Gunstar/Guardian Heroes team, and a portable version of cult favorite Bangai-O. 2008 may just be Treasure’s time in the limelight.

Treasure has long been the darling of the hardcore gamer – particularly the “classic hardcore” fan that Kenta Cho describes. Although they retain a classic sensibility, they do more than pay tribute to classic games; through constant reanalysis, they keep the old genres relevant. By maintaining and continuing to hone the basic principles of design, Treasure keeps videogames real, vital, and fun.

3) Hideo Kojima

Kojima, on the other hand, likes to poke fun at the idea that videogames were ever real or vital to start with. Over the last decade, his mantra might as well be “videogames are absurd, and so are you” – which would probably warrant a slap, were he to take himself any more seriously. The two things that make Kojima remarkable are his affection for everything he mocks, and that (as far as game designers go) Kojima is such a celebrity. His works are amongst the highest-profile in the industry, and when he speaks, everyone listens. That doesn’t mean everyone hears what he’s saying; still, that’s why we were given a subconscious.

When Metal Gear Solid came out, nearly a decade ago, everyone with a voice and a PlayStation hailed it as the most mature, realistic secret agent simulator ever. What no one seemed to notice is that it contained a ninja cyborg, a vampire, a psychic who can tell that you like to play Castlevania by reading your memory card, and codes that you have to type in from the back of the game packaging. There may have been self-aware videogames before 1998, yet this was on a whole new level of weird.

Faced with a contrast between a gritty presentation, his own comic book idea of narrative, and what was actually possible to express to the player with the awkward standard of game design, circa 1998, Kojima chose to skirt the immersion issue. Not only does Metal Gear Solid go to lengths to ensure that the player is conscious of it as a videogame, with its own weird rules, rather than a real experience; it makes sure that the player is conscious that the game is conscious of the player, as a player, in relation to it as a videogame. Which is to say, as long as the player has enough perspective, everything kind of makes sense and the experience holds together.

Evidently the experiment worked, as nobody realized how ridiculous the game was. This must have both delighted and frustrated Kojima, as on the one hand he succeeded in fooling everyone; on the other, no one really appreciated what he was trying to say about the relationship of game and player. To the contrary, he had built up a large audience that took the game and its hero seriously, at face value. Cue the perfect setup for a master trickster.

The Payoff

When the sequel finally arrived, justifying millions of early PS2 adoptions, players soon discovered that Kojima had been lying to them for years. Scenes which had in promotional material contained everyone’s favorite hero, Solid Snake, were now populated with a new character: an awkward, effete gamer with no particular life other than a breathless desire to be like Snake – or even better, to meet Snake in person and be his friend. Just for the fun of it, Kojima ensured that Snake’s butt cheeks contained far more polygons than those of any other character, including the women. Gamers were not impressed. And I haven’t even gotten to the water sports, or the reinterpretation of fan favorite Otacon.

In short, Kojima used his own celebrity and good will, and the profile of his previous game, to play the biggest practical joke ever on an uncritical gaming audience. From that point on, some part of the industry has never quite been the same. Those with a sense of humor and enough distance punched the air and finally got what Kojima had been saying: videogames as we know them are pretty dumb. Yet for as long as they rely on as many weird abstractions as they do, we might as well embrace the absurdity for what it is, rather than pretend it doesn’t exist. Let’s be honest, here. Then once we are aware of the problems, we can start thinking about how to fix them.

Although Kojima’s games are rarely very progressive in their own right, as pieces of design, that is almost part of the point. Kojima’s role in the industry is, more or less, to ask “See how awkward this is? How many times have you failed to question that before?” It’s not like he’s passing judgment on the industry, or on his audience; it’s not like he’s insulting anyone, or calling anyone foolish; all Kojima means is to broaden people’s perspectives, using all the tools at his disposal – including his own carefully managed cult of personality. The result has been a heightened critical atmosphere, particularly in the design community – leading to such successful reinventions as Resident Evil 4 and Dead Rising, and more broadly to the whole deconstructionist movement. With Hideo Kojima at work, it is that much harder to take videogames for granted.

As a footnote, Hideo Kojima once thought up a game that, when the player died, would self-destruct. Were it not so impractical, he said, he would have made it. Later, he designed Metal Gear Solid 3 so that the player could only save when quitting, load when resuming, and where death would delete the save file. At the last minute he thought better and swapped back to a familiar save scheme, resulting in the easiest Metal Gear yet. The reason: as the creator, he wanted everyone to be able to play to the end, and see the whole story. He acknowledged the conflict between telling a long story, of the kind that players expected, and creating an experience where players’ decisions actually mattered – where it made sense that the player was able to die, and fail. With the kind of stories he wanted to tell, though, Kojima saw no easy way to resolve the issue….

2) Keiji Inafune

Within a year of joining Capcom, Inafune co-created Mega Man. Then for the next two decades, his career consisted almost entirely of pumping out sequels and spin-offs to that work. In 2001 he branched out a little, fleshing out the early PS2 library by combining Resident Evil, samurai, and celebrity likeness. Otherwise, Inafune was the embodiment of Japanese franchise overextension – of which his employer, Capcom, was the practically uncontested king. Not that he was thrilled with this distinction; thus all the spin-offs. If he was only allowed to work on Mega Man, then hey, at least he could stretch his boundaries.

From his cozy if limited vantage point, Inafune watched the years creep by. He saw the ruts carved ever deeper, ideas narrowing and steepening. He saw new games aimed ever more at the ever-smaller audience who bought the old ones. What wasn’t a sequel was seldom far from a handy template. As technology advanced to permit more naturalistic expression, games paradoxically became all the more convoluted as those templates were overloaded. They grew longer, bigger, more complex, more lavish, and all the more expensive to produce, yet at their core were saying the same things they were when Inafune first joined Capcom.

Finally, over the course of the PS2 generation, the vicious cycle reached critical levels. Inafune saw the profit margin shrink, he saw companies cannibalizing themselves and each other. He saw good people out of work, good ideas unexplored as everyone freaked out about “Gamer drift” and turned ever more inward to escape it. The industry was in danger; this was not the time to be reach out or be creative.

New Blood

Then a few things happened. In 2003-2004, Capcom (of all companies) signed a deal to bring Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto series to Japan. For a Western production, the hype was mad; they sold well, broke a bunch of rules, and blew a bunch of minds. Around the same time, Nintendo launched its DS, promising to attract new blood and spur a huge rethink about how people and games communicate. Immediately afterward, Microsoft began to make noise about the Xbox 360, in particular about a redoubled effort to penetrate the Japanese market. Opportunity had knocked.

Inafune realized that there were solid ideas all over that Japan, in its myopia, was ignoring almost entirely. All they needed was some refinement; a change of focus, to get at the heart of those ideas and present them in a clear and appealing way – the way that Tomohiro Nishikado streamlined Breakout into Space Invaders. The most obvious target was Western games – full of new and promising concepts that just sitting there undeveloped, as if they were meant to speak for themselves. Take this Grand Theft Auto series that his company was publishing: a sort of a throwback to the pre-Miyamoto era, back when a player’s experience lay in what he made of the game rather than what the designer did. The only problem was that nothing the player did mattered – which is maybe a problem in a game where the entire draw is a lack of structure.

So – as with the later Pac-Man CE – Inafune basically took GTA and gave it structure: a time limit, and a tiered series of goals, all determined by the game’s scenario and themes. As with classic arcade games, the basic goal is just to survive. Any higher goals – more noble, professional, or personal pursuits – are a garnish, for the brave and the skilled. When that risk backfires, the player can die, and that’s the end of the story. That is liberty: making choices with consequence. Although there may be a higher story behind the scenes, the real story exists all in the moment, where death is a reasonable consequence rather than a nuisance.

Inafune then did something similar with Western third-person shooters, bringing out their visceral qualities by stripping down the interface and contextualizing both the player and his goals with the scenario. The results – Dead Rising and Lost Planet – are widely recognized as amongst the major reasons to own an Xbox 360, and the former is alternately damned and acclaimed as one of the most progressive games in years, and the first real glimmer of what a “next generation” game might look like: short, simple, analytical; every element is chosen to help illustrate the central idea.

In essence, Inafune has taken to answering to the questions that Hideo Kojima has been asking since the late ’90s by applying some of the same techniques as Hiroshi Iuchi, only on a much grander scale. He is one of the first developers to really put deconstructionist theory to practice with all the benefits of modern hardware – and having done so so early in the 360’s lifespan, he has cast a huge shadow over that system, the current generation of hardware and software, and by extension the whole industry. And now that he has made his point with raw power and a conventional framework, Inafune – now in charge of Capcom’s R&D – has shifted his sights to a rather more radical platform…

1) Satoru Iwata

Remember when Nintendo was the most backward company around? Three years doesn’t seem like long, even in the videogame industry. Three years ago, Metal Gear Solid 3, Silent Hill 4, and Katamari Damacy all came out. Rockstar had just spilled Hot Coffee all over the industry’s lap. Microsoft was readying its hype for the Xbox 360. Lost was debuting on ABC, and Battlestar Galactica on Sci-Fi. Then there was that election…

Two years before that, Satoru Iwata – in what felt like a surprise move – replaced the venerable Hiroshi Yamauchi as president of Nintendo. Although Nintendo was still one of the wealthiest companies in Japan, it had the reputation of a dinosaur, out of touch with everything except its own fans and franchises, and the under-ten crowd. In its new platform, the GameCube, Iwata inherited more than a decade-long legacy of inertia; he also was faced with an adorable dud of a console. Since it was a Nintendo system, it made a profit, sold well enough, and was at the very least a competent gesture – yet that was about it. It got by, it existed, for the sake of existing. Outside of some weirdness in the button configuration, it didn’t really have much to say.

In retrospect, Iwata describes the old Nintendo as “arrogant”. Good times or bad, Nintendo has always been a case study for the game industry as a whole, and the same goes here; the same broad patterns that Inafune witnessed, concentrated and refined. After Nintendo’s initial success with the NES, it reached a certain creative peak. Having established an identity and a style of design, Nintendo clung to it, putting more of its energy into maintenance of that static brand image than into continued evolution. Rather than find new things to say, or explore how better to communicate with its audience, Nintendo tweaked and rehashed its old ideas in different contexts. So over a period of fifteen years the company slowly turned in on itself, becoming a caricature of what it once was.

Then Iwata came along, and injected some of his own personality into the system. Since the early ’80s Iwata has been a designer, programmer, and artist. Even now, with all his corporate responsibilities, he still works as a concept artist for Hal. Going by his public persona, he has a laid-back, introspective attitude toward his work and toward life. Little seems to go by that Iwata fails to observe and roll around in his head.

Sunrise

According to Zelda director Eiji Aonuma, the wake-up call came with the lukewarm reception to Wind Waker – timed almost precisely to Iwata’s promotion. Previously, Zelda had been an inviolate series; Nintendo’s old faithful. Its failure to attract a large audience illustrated to Iwata that in a changing world nothing was sacred, nothing was permanent. Despite its wealth and identity and cultural cache, Nintendo was just as vulnerable as the outside industry to the forces of entropy. In response, Iwata began to explore new ways to engage an audience – particularly one that had a life outside of videogames (which includes most people outside the core demographic).

A year later, Iwata unveiled the DS to a perplexed world. Two screens; a tactile interface. A less abstract means of communication. He was tentative, wary. This was just the boldest of a series of experiments, and there were no guarantees – yet that was the whole point. When it began to bear fruit, Iwata turned to adapting and refining its tactile interface for a home system, with all the conceptual tweaks that would suggest. Along the way, Iwata encouraged developers to expand their definition of a videogame, if they wanted to take full advantage of the format; to take into account the real lives, concerns, interests, and habits of a potential audience and to address them (whether explicitly or implicitly), so as to make the make the audience feel included; that videogames have an important place in their lives. Furthermore, he suggested the hardware itself reflect that notion, in the Wii’s low power consumption; constant news, weather, and shop updates; and Mii avatars.

Is was in the ramp-up to the Wii that Iwata really began to demonstrate his methods. In place of dramatic announcements, Iwata built up to the console’s unveiling with a series of public speeches, each brimming with anecdote, rhetoric, and plenty of difficult questions to mull over. These speeches continued at intervals of four to six months, each picking up from the last, building on its topics, furthering the discussion. He did not so much lecture as lay open his thought processes, for scrutiny.

As the launch date approached, Iwata then launched (and posted online) an extensive series of interviews with his hardware and software staff, soliciting their impressions, fielding questions, and discussing the observations and theories behind Iwata’s decisions. He coaxed programmers to admit their difficulties, artists to make fun of Miyamoto, and Miyamoto to vent his frustration with the new generation of design staff.

More recently, Iwata blew executive minds everywhere by convincing the Wii Sports programmers to share code and technical advice with third party developers – a practically unheard-of exchange, particularly in the Japanese arm of the industry. He says that the lifestyle and minigame products now hitting the shelves are just the first, most obvious step down the path. Though they may be “a good start”, they are not an end in themselves. He encourages developers to keep going, to think bigger – to stay dynamic, instead of nestling in this recent niche.

Mister Invisible

Iwata’s vision of Nintendo, of the videogame industry, and of game and console design, is one of transparency in communication. To drive the point home, he has made sweeping changes to his company’s policy, philosophy, and working atmosphere, placing the exchange of ideas at a premium over procedure and shaking up decades of control structure. He has built a didactic relationship with the industry, press, and public, abandoning the traditional talking head role for one of a thoughtful uncle. He worries as much about the industry as a whole as his own company, to the extent that when a conflict arises, his instinct is to place the industry’s interests over Nintendo’s alone – as no one can exist in a vacuum. If other companies snipe Nintendo’s ideas before they get to use them, well, that happens. There will be other ideas. In the long term, it’s probably worth it.

Especially given its history and its weight within the industry, Iwata feels that Nintendo has to constantly prove itself, to set a good example for everyone. To do that, he has been fostering a shift from rote craft toward a policy of observation, theory, and communication, and a focus on the people involved on all ends. More than anything, Iwata encourages people to think about videogames; their relationships with them and assumptions about them. To look at them critically, analytically, instead of taking them for granted; to question why people should let them into their lives, and what videogames might have to offer them.

Iwata is the voice of the new generation in two regards. On the one hand, his deconstructionist attitude and message extends not only to software or hardware, but to the whole concept of videogames, from product to infrastructure to philosophy and perception. On the other, he pursues his understanding through a distinctly humanistic methodology – a vital concern for any form of human expression. It’s not that Iwata is a saint, out to make everyone’s lives better through videogames; like Treasure tackling a diluted old property, he just wants the industry running as deliberately and constructively as it can be – which in this case means sensitivity, and lots and lots of communication. Whether or not the DS or the Wii last, or even represent the best approach to hardware, the principles behind them are some of the most vital and powerful ever to come around – and so long as figures like Iwata keep challenging the faith, working hard to express themselves, and placing people ahead of tradition, those ideals should drive the industry for years to come.

In the third and final installment of The New Generation, Next-Gen will investigate some of the environmental and architectural factors that help to support, encourage, and identify this new age of design. Tune in for the last part of the puzzle – the one that ties it all together and makes it real.

Next Time: Infrastructure