Yearly Archives: 2007

Rainbow Six’s Upton Talks Landscaping Game Worlds

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by [name redacted]

The final session of the final day of last week’s GDC 2007 was a cross-disciplinary take on level design. Brian Upton, a senior designer for SCEA and the lead designer for Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon, called on theme park design, landscaping, and city planning as parallels for level design, explaining that they all work under the same principles.

The main concern with all of these disciplines is human psychology – an understanding of how people orient themselves within, organize, and think about the space around them. Since theme park designers, landscapists, and city planners have been doing their job a heck of a lot longer than game designers, Upton suggested looking to these older fields not only for technique but for terminology with which we might describe and define level design.

( Continue reading at GamaSutra )

Aonuma’s Reflections On Zelda

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by [name redacted]

Check out the comments section on the original article. Seriously.

On Thursday Aonuma candidly, and with self-effacing humor, spoke of his period of aimlessness and mistakes that began with the release of The Legend Of Zelda: Wind Waker, the way in which they reflected the Japanese industry as a whole, and how they led to Nintendo’s shift of focus over the last few years.

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Randy Smith Doesn’t Save the Day

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by [name redacted]

Though on the one hand it is comforting to be able to save and load at will, continually loading – thereby undoing events, and making consequences irrelevant – tends to diminish a player’s belief in the game world, making it all the harder for the game to affect the player in a meaningful capacity.

The situation is kind of damned if you do, damned if you don’t, in that allowing free saving tends to lead to abuse yet disallowing it leads to player complaints.

EALA game designer Randy Smith gave a brief speech on the psychological factors that tend to result in save abuse, and how potentially to avoid or undermine those triggers, such that players are tempted to save and load far less often, thereby allowed to take their in-game experiences at face value.

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Ubisoft’s Hocking Talks The Power Of Self-Exploration

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by [name redacted]

Video games are all about exploration – about living in someone else’s world for a while, learning the rules, learning the territory, and maybe taking something home with you. Ubisoft’s Clint Hocking has his ideas about what that means for the medium and anyone who might set out to explore it.

Although the virtual space of a game world is perhaps most obvious, the most fundamental aspect of a game is its underlying systems – the physical laws and properties that govern that space. Exploring those systems is in a sense the scientific method in fast forward, a series of experiments in cause and effect that forms the substance of game play.

The more immediate and tangible the results to the player’s experiments, the more readily the player feels progress, so the more rewarding the system feels. “It’s supposed to be beautiful,” Hocking said. “If you get this part wrong, the rest doesn’t even matter.”

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Industry Vets Never Metagame They Didn’t Like

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by [name redacted]

Two teams, split up amongst Eric Zimmerman of Gamelab, Warren Spector, Mark Leblanc of Mind Control, video game theorist Jesper Juul, Ubisoft’s Clint Hocking, Jonathan Blow, and USC Professor Tracey Fullerton, moved their virtual quarters around the board to make thematic comparisons between often highly-contrasting games.

Has World of Warcraft created a more intense subculture than Asteroids? Is Guitar Hero more culturally sophisticated than Parappa the Rapper? Is Wipeout more realistic than Nethack? Is Oregon Trail more emotionally rich than Virtua Fighter? (See below for answers.)

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Sound and Perspective in Experimental Games

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by [name redacted]

Whereas last year’s Experimental Gameplay Sessions were crammed into a standing-room-only meeting room, resulting in a nightmare for the fire marshal yet a powerful experience for the audience, this year’s sessions were moved to a huge, dark presentation hall.

Although the audience turnout was larger than ever, and host Jon Blow had more participants to introduce, the meeting somehow felt less intimate and more low-key than last year’s.

As before, the event sprawled over two and a half hours with a short break in the middle. Where last year’s sessions had a general theme of interpreting complex emotions and ideas through familiar game models – evidenced in games like flOw, Cloud, Braid, and Everyday Shooter – this year’s entries tended toward novel uses of sound and perspective. Perhaps half of the event was devoted to various game festivals, while several of the remaining presentations were of high-profile commercial games.

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Fable is Love; Love is Puppies

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by [name redacted]

This article had a strict deadline; I rushed to finish it so it could go live before the whole Internet had reported on the demonstration. And then… I guess it slipped through the cracks. Oh well! Here it is.

As another note, I think this was the meeting where Molyneux creepily offered his audience cookies. I was the only one to perk up. Hey, cookies.

Peter Molyneux was in loopy spirits, discussing his new game. Who knows how many times he had been over the same territory that day, though he seemed to enjoy spinning his tale, finding the right notes to highlight, the right places to pause for dramatic tension.

“Sequels are tricky things,” Molyneux started off. “Not my specialty. The sensible approach is to give you more things you like, better.” More weapons, new monsters, twenty times the land, guns! When Molyneux was asked to provide a sequel, he set off doing demographical research to see just what people wanted of him anyway. Then he opened “the doors of hell” – the online communities – only to quickly, in his words, slam them shut again. There were so many demands, so shrilly phrased – “so many people mortally offended by the design choices in Fable 1” – that the best Molyneux could do was sift out the most common complaints.

Mobile Session Itself Goes Massively Multiplayer

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by [name redacted]

Going by the online schedule, Gamevil, Inc. general manager Kyu C. Lee was to spend an hour chatting about mobile MMO games and communities, by way of his mobile MMO game, Path of a Warrior – in North Hall room 124, at 2:00.

In practice, the session was held in a completely different building and Mr. Lee was absent. With the blessing of the sound and technical staff, however, the small turnout soon took command, converting the session into an informal comparison of notes.

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Ubisoft’s Adam Thiery Talks Camera Theory

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by [name redacted]

Adam Thiery, a designer for Ubisoft Montreal, gave a short talk today on interactive cinematography. His basic point was that game cinematography is player-driven. Simple it may sound; real application is always trickier. One of the big sticking points is that camerawork, being player-driven, is limited by current understanding of game design and player psychology.

A modern camera knows when to change state, explained Thiery. In Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, when the player is pressed against a wall, the standard tracking camera shifts from a behind-the-character perspective to show the player character left-of-center, and focus the player’s attention to the right, around the given barrier.

Thiery said that a good game camera is a matter of functionality, rather than cinematography – yet given that, it pays to consider the visual composition within each camera state. The reason is that any action a player takes is generally guided by what he has been shown to do.

The original Half-Life takes places in a disorienting sci-fi setting; to drive the player forward, it uses huge stripes painted on the walls, like a trail of breadcrumbs or an arrow. Though this is an artificial and somewhat clumsy application, that same principle applies to any 2D screen composition.

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Evan Skolnick Asks Game Writers To ‘Make It Snappier’

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by [name redacted]

Writing is one of the less discussed bits of game development; Vicarious Visions producer Evan Skolnick has been doing his best to redress the balance. Whereas last year’s session dealt with dialogue, this year Skolnick chose to discuss general structure.

Skolnick’s background is in comic books, and indeed much of his game industry work has been on comic book movie licenses; his methods are generally simple, direct, and accessible to an entry-level audience.

Up front Skolnick cautioned that the session was not for professional writers, but neither was it a debate on the essence of video game narrative, or a tutorial on “how to make players cry”. Rather, it was a by-the-book overview was for game industry veterans – programmers, producers – with little experience in the mechanics of storytelling.

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Audience Cheers And Jeers Mobile Innovation Hunt

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by [name redacted]

Co-host Matthew Bellows apologized up-front for only selecting fifteen finalists, citing time concerns. After repeatedly assuring that everyone had enough beer to drink, Bellows explained the setup: in turn, each developer would explain to the audience what made his or her game so innovative; if he or she went on too long, the audience would razz him or her by flapping its noisemakers. The audience showed immediate enthusiasm for this plan.

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Nokia’s Sauter Talks Next Generation N-Gage

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by [name redacted]

Two years ago, at E3, Nokia announced a strategic withdrawal from the handheld arena; in place of a discrete handheld platform, future N*Gage hardware would be incorporated into Nokia’s full line of mobile devices. Today, Nokia director of publishing Gregg Sauter elaborated on the plans.

Sauter expressed concern that the mobile game industry, in its current form, is “immature”. As the largest manufacturer of mobile devices, in particular “convergent” ones, Nokia feels in a position to revolutionize the industry in this regard. “We really need to evolve this industry,” said Sauter, explaining that Nokia is in the middle of an essential transition from “a company that makes hardware to one that provides experiences.”

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Gathering evidence that the Wii is what the GameCube should have been

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The system: small, inobtrusive.

The controller. The GameCube pad was a strange half-measure.
* Its premise: standard controllers are confusing, overly abstract, and have too many buttons, mapped too arbitrarily.
* Its solution: make the buttons more intuitive to find, and more intuitively map actions to them.
* Result: everyone was confused and annoyed.

Original games, conceived for said controller.
* Super Monkey Ball
* Pikmin
* killer7
* Luigi’s Mansion

What else?

Swash awash

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“Piracy”, in the intellectual property sense, tends to have a regulating effect. If people enjoy a work enough, they tend to want to own their own copy — preferably a copy presented in the best possible quality. That’s why people buy DVDs after seeing a movie or watching a TV show, and that’s why “free samples” exist. You’d have a much harder sell by avoiding the initial courtship and just asking people to buy an entertainment product, sight unseen. To an extent, the idea is kind of ludicrous.

The downside from a marketing perspective is that if people don’t enjoy a work, and they know that ahead of time, they tend not to buy it. As a result you get these interesting effects where, say, Brittney Spears loses sales to “piracy” because people don’t consider her music worth paying for, and smaller, more interesting bands are often “made” by “piracy” because people who might like the band’s music are able to hear it, hang onto it, and judge it over an extended period.

From what I can see, the only way this could be a bad thing is if you’ve invested a ton of money in something culturally vapid, and you expect your dividends nonetheless. I’m sure the natural balance of the universe would feel powerfully unfair in that instance, and you’d be tempted to lobby the government to draft all kinds of arbitrary regulations to ensure you get the result you wanted. If you’re offering something of real merit, however, there doesn’t seem much danger of losing profit. Indeed, the more people who know, the better.

To boil it down, people generally:

1) want to own things that they enjoy
2) are willing to pay for things they consider of value
3) tend to value “legitimacy”, to a point.

If you place before a person a dirty CD-R burn of an album and a full, legit copy, both for free, I think it’s fair to say that most people will choose the legit one. If instead you charge a reasonable price for the legit copy, a fair number may still buy it if they already know that they adore the music on the disc, they know they won’t find the CD for a better price, and they can afford it at the moment. If you charge an unreasonable price, or don’t allow people to test the album out first to see if they like it, the free, dirty copy will look all the more appealing by comparison.

All that things like Youtube and P2P networking and tape-trading do is bring a level of honesty and clarity to the exchange. So long as you offer something of merit, at a reasonable price, and your customers know that they like it, you’ve got nothing to fear. If anything, this kind of distribution serves as free advertising; all it should do is increase your potential customer base, to a certain threshold. (After all, every work has only a certain natural breadth of appeal.)

So yeah, whatever. Go ahead and watch what you will, how you will. Make up your own mind what you value, and to what extent. Then go ahead and purchase the things you like, provided you’ve the money after you buy what you need. There’s nothing dishonest or unethical about any of this. Anyone who tries to tell you differently has an agenda to protect.

Further Eefining the Definition

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Art is a means of communication through implicit, rather than explicit, symbolism and meant to appeal to the subconscious and intuition, rather than to the conscious and reason.

This communication can be conducted through any medium. The fun part about it: intent needn’t even be a factor; merely communication. So if the recipient of a manmade work reads in it something that was not consciously intended by its creator, that reading (presuming it’s genuine) is as legitimate an interpretation as any based upon a deliberate message. Perhaps more so.

As regards non-manmade works — a sunset, a rainbow, an orangutan; whatever natural beauty you might appreciate — that’s somewhat different in the sense that, provided you aren’t subscribing to a supernatural interpretation of artist (say, God), it truly is a one-sided conversation.

I suppose the act of receiving an artistic message would best be described as inspiration. One may be inspired by anything, of course; art is simply a manufactured way of appealing to that impulse.