06.13.08
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Canadian copyright insanity

This is not one of my usual topics to blog about here, but it’s related in a number of ways (to design, authorship, and education) so I’m using this space to share my opinions and ask some questions.

The Canadian government has just tabled a new bill which would revise the Copyright Act. I’m actually reading the darn thing – the full legalese, not just the Coles Notes version they’ve provided online. You can read the critical summary at Michael Geist’s blog and his description of why this is essentially a betrayal to Canadians. More of my thoughts and questions after the break. Continue reading →

03.06.08
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Are video games ever good for kids?

This was such a great response to the question of whether kids and video games should mix that it needs to be passed along.

 Are video games ever good for kids? Of course they are. They can be good for adults, and even seniors, too.

Can they be bad? Of course they can. It depends on the games and on the people who are playing them.

Actually, the same can be said for any kind of game. Can chess be bad? It can be, if it becomes an obsession, if the chess players pursue chess to the exclusion of everything else social, physical, and intellectual.

Go read the rest of Bernie DeKoven’s response for the full dose of ludic enlightenment.

03.04.08
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Ideas > Design ?

Just a quick follow-up to my last post. Seems my response stirred up some attention, and in the meantime I’ve done some more thinking and discussing and learned a bit more about what Squidi‘s been up to.

Part of why I wrote up my thoughts was that I’m trying to sort them out. There’s a good chance I’ll be teaching some game design workshops in the fall (not because I’ve mastered it but because teaching is one of the best ways to learn more about something). I want to go into this with a decent perspective of what matters and what doesn’t, and be able to convey that to people who are new at this. I don’t want to stifle creative energy, but I also don’t want people setting themselves up to fail because of unrealistic expectations. Having already seen people come to me with a Great Idea which falls short of reality in horrible ways, I want to know how to help people get off of that train-wreck track as quickly as possible and get to making some awesome.

But this time I let myself get sucked into interweb drama, which is never a good idea. I was wrong in some ways, and more importantly I set myself up as The Voice Of Sanity when I’m still floundering through this process myself. Plus I started off with a wrong idea of where Squidi was coming from when he’s probably got more game industry experience than I do. Oops.

So, minus ten points to me for perpetuating internet angsts and misjudging people. Plus a few points for learning something in the process.

Squidi has posted some follow-up thoughts on the value of ideas, and I think he’s onto something:

The idea sets the boundaries. A bad idea with a good implementation may actually be worse than a great idea with a bad implementation. Everything that you can do, every implementation, every possibility, and every potential is embodied by the idea. In other words, the idea defines the range of quality that is possible.

I think I can agree with that, or at least move in that direction. Personally I would add that real-world experience in testing and building on ideas gives you a greater ability to sort out the good ideas from the bad. But that doesn’t change the fact that starting with a crap idea will probably never give you an awesome game. (Unless it’s B-Game Comp awesome, I guess, but now we’re trapped in an infinite loop of semantics.) I’m pretty sure you could also take an amazing idea and completely trash it with shoddy implementation, so maybe ideas are more like an upper bound, or a mean value of a set of possibilities with a long tail downwards into potential craptasticness. But now I’m drawing too many little graphs in my head and no good can come of that.

02.28.08
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Ideas vs Design

Ascii Dreams draws attention to a comment thread discussion following coverage of the Experimental Gameplay Workshop at this year’s GDC. One of the games featured at the workshop, Lost in the Static, was based on an idea explicitly borrowed from a list of 300 game concepts released by indie developer writer Squidi as a creative exercise.

In the discussion, Squidi expresses frustration that a game based on his concept got attention at the GDC, while his proposal to discuss the 300 games list he created was rejected.

So, for example, by virtue of spending two days hacking together a generic platforming game, Lost in the Static is elevated above the original inspiration that spawned it? Is that why it is up there on the stage? Because of the code or because of the gimmick? It’s up there on behalf of sweat, not talent. What message does that send?

Two of the EGW organizers as well as Sean Barrett, the creator of Lost in the Static, respond to Squidi’s complaint. Sean gives very explicit credit to Squidi, as he did at the EGW, but he makes a good case against dismissing his contribution to the game’s design as trivial.

Despite the slightly flamewar-ish nature of the end of the thread, there’s a very foundational lesson to be learned here about game design. Squidi doesn’t seem to get it, but the other (very experienced) developers in discussion with him do their best to bring it to light. The way I’ve tried to explain it over the last few years goes something like this:

Ideas are cheap.

Now, I think I’ve probably undersold the creative process (including my own) by phrasing it that way; I’ve run short on brilliant design ideas in the past and it can take deliberate effort to push oneself creatively when working on a project. So sometimes ideas can be hard despite their cheapness.

But an idea is not a design. I’ve seen this misconception in game design, engineering, and I’m starting to see it in visual design as well. Someone (possibly myself) comes up with an idea which, in their mind, will be fantastic and revolutionize things and probably make them bucketloads of money. All they need is to find someone to implement the details, and success!

The problem is that in game design, as well as in almost any endeavor, the design is quite literally in the details. It’s possible to create both a well-designed fun game and a horribly boring game which both stay faithful to the same original concept. (Adding “It must be fun and awesome!” to the concept description is cheating, in the thought experiment as well as real life.) Like probably everyone else who’s ever played a game, I used to think, “Wouldn’t it be great to be the one who comes up with all the cool ideas, and everyone else can do the hard work? Being a game designer would be great!” The problem is, that doesn’t describe a game designer. (Maybe it describes the type of Executive Producer or Studio CEO who likes to drop by and periodically insist that Feature X be added to the game, but trust me, that doesn’t make you a hero.)

Now, many high-level concepts can sound great on paper but completely fall apart when you try to implement them. This is why engineers shake their heads when someone “invents” a revolutionary new energy storage mechanism which falls apart the moment you do any back-of-the-napkin calculations. Now, this does mean that there are “bad ideas”, so ideas aren’t completely without value. But there are two hurdles to overcome. You may not know an idea is bad until you look at the implementation details, or have enough experience to see them coming. Even if an idea isn’t bad at its core, it still requires good design work to take it from “interesting (or marketable) idea” to “great game design”.

Game design is, like any form of design work, about crafting the details into a coherent experience. The game concept or idea is a target, but there are many ways of getting there and not all of them will succeed. Good design work needs to address many different concerns such as complexity, accessibility, aesthetics, technical limitations, and more – and none of these concerns can be fully answered without specific, hard details.

02.07.08
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Prototype post-mortem: Quadrix

(I don’t know if I’m warping terminology by calling this a post-mortem, but since the project is dead it seems appropriate.)

Quadrix thumbnail shotQuadrix is a game concept I came up with last year. It was inspired by Jesper Juul’s writeup on the history of tile-matching games. At the time, I was playing a lot of Planet Puzzle League on the DS as well as digging deeper into the casual games world. Seeing the family tree in Juul’s essay made me reflect on how Tetris has this obscure but substantial place in the history of matching tile games. Despite this, the emphasis on spatial geometry in Tetris hasn’t exactly mapped to tile-matching games, or at least not in the same way. Rather than looking for shapes to fill gaps, the tile-matching player is scanning for colors to bring together. Continue reading →

02.05.08
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More presentation links

I spoke again at TWU for a game development project class. This is an info dump update of links to sites and games I mentioned.

Step one: my link-dump from last year’s presentation. Clicky here for a big long list.

Things that I learned about more recently that aren’t in that older post:

Dwarf Fortress is an extreme example of how indie games have the freedom to completely abandon the expectations of mainstream industry games. Text-based, cryptic controls, micromanagement sim & roguelike insanity.  (Of course, he also isn’t asking anyone to pay for the game.)

Cactus! This guy is nuts, often in a good way. Check out “Clean Asia!”, the IGF award nominee, to make your eyes bleed, or Psychonomium for a weird exercise in experimental and/or insane game-based storytelling.

Bit Blot are the makers of Aquaria, a game which despite being done in true indie fashion is also very polished and professionally made. Pick up the demo for a good taste of the more polished, commercial end of the indie spectrum.

Novel Concept’s new tower defense game, Flash Element Tower Defense 2, is a prime example of the Tower Defense genre that has sprung up in the Flash games scene. You may also want to check out Desktop Tower Defense, created by one of Novel Concept’s partners (and probably the most popular Flash game of 2007 – in fact one mainstream games blogger listed it as one of his Top 10 games of 2007 overall.) Also, hey, I just realized there’s now a Multiplayer DTD on Novel Concept’s Flash portal, The Casual Collective!

Something else I didn’t give much mention but which the class should probably look into: the IGF’s Student Showcase. I just gave the entrance rules a quick skim, and I think you should be eligible even though you’re selling the game afterwards. Take a look yourself at the submission site here. Your game needs to be at least at beta status (ie. feature-complete) before submission, but once it is this is a potential way to gain extra visibility above and beyond normal indie publishing / marketing routes.

And to close things off with a bang, the game which was described as possibly the most indie ever for being a game no publisher would ever touch: Barkley, Shut Up And Jam: Gaiden. Be sure to click the links to see the DX9 / DX10 comparison. (Made using RPGMaker, which I really ought to have mentioned alongside AGS and GameMaker.)

01.24.08
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Mysteriously Roguelike Pokémon

So, I have a confession to make. I’ve been playing a Pokémon game.

Okay, that’s kind of a laughable confession seeing as how I’ve “caught ’em all” way back when the original Gameboy game came out. Mock all you want, it was a pretty solid RPG, and the collecting via link-cable trading was a clever way to create a social aspect to the game. (Too bad the money-leeching trading card variety took over; but I digress.)

But! I am not playing Diamond or Pearl, but Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Blue Rescue Team. Pokémon Mystery Dungeon (PMD) is the latest Western release of the Mystery Dungeon series of games developed by Chunsoft. Mystery Dungeon is a series I learned about last year via GameSetWatch’s @Play series of blog posts about roguelikes. You play the part of a Pokémon yourself, rather than a trainer, and you go off on rescue missions facing up against rogue (*cough* sorry) Pokémon who have been driven wild by strange natural disasters. And yes, this is definitely a roguelike. You can faint from lack of food. Dungeons are randomly generated, everything is turn-based reacting to player actions, and the random number generator can drive you mad (eventually). Continue reading →

12.10.07
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Omniscient Third-Person Play

I was playing with my grandkids, who, at that time, happened to have that very problem – separating out the fiction of the game from the reality of play. So, we played with only two baby frogs: the “Happy Frog” and the “Sad Frog.”… No one “owned” either of the frogs. We were like gods, cheering for the Happy frog when the Happy frog won. Cheering for the Sad frog when she got to move.

From Bernie DeKoven’s latest blogging. What a fantastic way to skip the heartache of competitive failure! And even better, by attaching personalities to the game pieces instead of relating them to the players themselves, it turns the entire exercise into a little story-making machine. The Happy Frog has fallen behind! Will he still be happy? Is the Sad frog no longer sad? Maybe they’re both happy now and they can be friends!

I wonder if this kind of twist on competitive gameplay can actually reinforce healthy direct competition later on as well. Where by “healthy”, of course I really mean the sort of competition I prefer – where no one takes things too personally, everyone tries their best, and the fun of exploring the game’s strategies and mechanics makes even losing to a well-played game enjoyable. (I’m sure people who prefer to dive headlong into high-stakes, I-will-be-upset-if-I-lose competition think they’re being perfectly healthy too, but they sure do seem to make it harder for me to have fun.) Anyway, maybe teaching kids how to detach themselves from the direct personal connection to winning and losing early on can help that healthy sort of competition to come out later in life.

11.29.07
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Audio and slides available from Jon Blow’s presentation

Jonathon Blow has made the full audio and PowerPoint slides from his MGS talk available on his website.  You can grab them here.  He doesn’t think that the news coverage of the presentation is as thorough as I thought it seemed, and recommends listening to the whole thing before trying to judge the merits of his argument.  His presentations are generally good stuff so I’ll recommend it as well; or if you want to wait, it sounds like he might be putting together a video combining the slides and audio.

11.28.07
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Jon Blow on how most games today are junk food

“I say this kind of thing, and everybody’s like, ‘whatever dude – you’re smoking something,'” said Blow. “I want to frame this; it’s a matter of scale. What I see as a primary challenge for mankind in this century is to understand and deal with the fact that despite these good enterprises — human rights, safety, leisure time — we do these at such a scale that we cannot help but have them affect the world, as with global warming, ozone holes, pollutants – we haven’t dealt with it yet.”Carrying over the analogy, Blow said, “We don’t intend to harm players but we might be harming them. When tens of millions of people buy our game, we are pumping a mental substance into the mental environment – it’s a public mental health issue – it’s kind of scary, but it’s kind of cool because we have the power to shape humanity.”

Jonathon Blow has talked about this before in a presentation that was made available via interweb video a few months ago. He does a much more complete job of explaining what he’s getting at this time, and this confirms for me that I think he’s on to something. This presentation makes it clearer what he was getting at; mostly it confirmed the way I took what he had said earlier, but I know in discussing this with others they were jumping to conclusions like, “He thinks rewards in games are bad?” which is pretty clearly ruled out this time. The point he’s making isn’t “games are bad”, but “we’re usually missing out on doing things better.”

I think it’s important to point out that this doesn’t seem to be against well-polished games, which is an easy but mistaken conclusion to come to after he uses WoW and Halo 3 as bad examples. Those games are highly accessible and entertaining because they are well-polished, but (in Blow’s explanation) are using reward mechanisms that lack substance (or worse, teach an unhealthy world view: “It doesn’t matter if you’re smart or how adept you are, it’s just how much time you sink in. You don’t need to do anything exceptional, you just need to run the treadmill like everyone else.”).

As far as I can tell, those two things are orthogonal. A game could have more meaningful mechanics and rewards and at the same time do thorough playtesting and design analysis to make sure that the experience of the game flows smoothly for players. He gives Portal as an example of a game that does things well, which I think proves the point.

I hope that a video of the presentation is made available soon. It’d be great to see it in its entirety. In the meantime, the writeup at Gamasutra is pretty thorough.