My expo pass only allowed me to get into sponsored talks. I went to a few different ones sponsored by Blackberry(yes, Blackberry), Microsoft Kinect, and Qualcomm among others.

Oh! and I somehow ended up in Janus Rau Sorensen’s (Crystal Dynamics/ IO Interactive(Square Enix)) “Arrggghh!!! Blending Quanititative and Qualitative Methods to Detect Player Frustration” which was an exercise in the obvious. During his brief 25 min talk, Sorensen took us through the user research process for the game Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days. He walked us through the “triangulation” process of determining the frustration bottle necks for the game through interchanging qualitative(observing and interviewing players) and quantitative(automatic data gathering) methods of analysis. We looked at some mundane graphs. I was hoping the talk would reveal new approaches to user research analysis, or game specific data mining and visualization techniques, but it ended up telling a familiar tale.

One of Blackberry’s heads gave a talk about reviving Blackberry phones and their Blackberry OS(10.0) through their latest tablet, the PlayBook. The most interesting aspect of the talk was Blackberry’s interest/willingness to give a thought to the emerging markets, even if it’s because they already have a strong foothold in places like the Caribbean, Latin America, and India. At yet another mobile symposium…to my question of what can be done to focus attention to a more global audience/market(beyond western countries) one of the panelists replied by going off-topic by saying that they test their games in the Philippines, or Australia if they want a more accurate estimate of how their game will do once it’s released in the United States and Europe. The answer in short is that no company’s willing to go where there’s no money. Fair Enough. But the value/fun’s in creating and discovering new markets, no?

Also went to a Kinect Speech Recognition promotion talk. The big reveal was that developers have to cheat a lot to make it seem like speech recognition’s natural and to have it work on the Xbox360. Factoid: The Kinect has a multiarray microphone that has the ability to selectively listen in certain directions. It can listen to the head of the detected skeleton and to a very select set of pre-determined vocabulary.

I attended Joshua Debonis’s (Sortasoft LLC) poster-talk on Friday at GDC. It was titled “Game Design in Parallel”. Joshua’s mantra’s to always design in two….design two different versions of the same game so you can split every issue/question that comes up in two and develop it out in either of the two games. He suggests working on a board game and a digital game, but conceded that the medium doesn’t really matter as long as you were developing two different and complete(not just prototypes) games in conjunction. He went as far as suggesting that this strategy would work best for theme based ideas or topics and not so well for mechanics based games.

I think developing two games in conjunction on the same topic provides the necessary perspective shift that is often needed to contextualize ideas without really taking you out of the subject at hand. Debonis mentioned that he usually worked on the board game first, and while he waited for playtesters he worked on the digital version. I often find myself frustrated and overwhelmed at the variety of projects I work on at any given time. I like to say that I would like to ideally work on one project/game at a time, and what I mean is that I don’t want my attention/focus to shift back and forth between disparate subjects and not dwell at length in any given topic for any substantial length of time.

But, everything seems to be related to everything else some days, so it might just be that I need to work harder to select my projects so they relate to each other better…or in the least make up a narrative to make them seem part of a larger whole/narrative. YES! that’s what I’ll do! I’m looking forward to working on one project for the entirety of next year.

Or: The Value of Play, Relatively Speaking

The Game Design Challenge 2012: “Upgrade Humanity In 60 Seconds Flat”. I was expecting some wacky and fun ideas, and that’s exactly what we got. Jason Rohrer ripping up a $100 bill on camera for the sake of demonstrating his game was an interesting moment that won’t be forgotten for a while. (Though I remember a woman behind me protesting loudly against Frank Lantz’s destruction of some vintage $2 bills. No one did that for the $100 bill, funnily enough.)

Let’s talk about that game, Frog Skins.

The concept behind Frog Skins is that it is a game which tackles the issue of inflation. To summarize, the game works similarly to many trading card games. Players compare cards of differing values in an attempt to outscore their opponent. At the end of the game, the winner is the player who won the most rounds. They take the ante – in this case, all of the other player’s cards. However, the game is played entirely with legal tender. $100 scores higher than $10, and the minimum value (and safest card to play) is $1. Rohrer recognized the inherent imbalance in the system and added one more rule: you can tear a card in half and use its value twice. This doubles its value in-game, but renders it worthless in real life. (But not really, since banks will accept damaged notes as long as they can assess them as legitimate.) A similar mechanic was implemented before in Magic: the Gathering’s joke set Unglued, with the Blacker Lotus card.

Initially I was enthralled by the idea of a game that took actual currency and destroyed it for the sole purpose of play. It takes the addictiveness and gambling-like aesthetic of trading card game mechanics and introduces a sharp socioeconomic sensitivity in a fun and unique way. Furthermore, it seemed to be a clever and novel way of tackling the issue of inflation in America. Read More

Richard Lemarchand’s talk Attention, Not Immersion was an absolute blast.  In it, he proposes the addition of a new game design lens: that of attention.

He begins by decrying the idea of immersion as the ultimate goal of games.  Instead, Lemarchand argues that we should talking about attention; specifically, how attention is gained and then held.  He argues that games obtain and maintain attention by three elements: beauty, story, and gameplay.  These three elements are then boiled down to what he believes their essences to be.  Beauty is expanded to aesthetics, and then once again to contrast.  Story is expanded to narrative, then “social stuff.”  Gameplay expands to ludism expands to systems.

Lemarchand also touches on how effective these respective elements are at getting and holding attention.  Contrast, he argues, readily grabs attention but has difficulty maintaining it.  Systems can be difficult to grab attention with (Lemarchand reminds us how daunting and difficult it can feel to break into a new board game), but once they have obtained it they maintain attention incredibly well.  ”Social stuff” provides a nice in-between on both accounts, both grabbing and maintaining attention relatively well.  Good videogames, he argues, obtain and maintain our attention via a mix of these elements.

He proceeds onward to talk about how Naughty Dog watched and analyzed playtester’s attention during the development of Uncharted 3, also touching on how thatgamecompany focused on attention as a major design element as well in Journey, giving it the title “Attentional Design.”  The talk then reached back to another I had seen that day on intrinsic and extrinsic player motivations, talking about intrinsic and extrinsic player goals, “the autotelic person,” and cultivating autotelism.

Lemarchand finishes with an anecdote about the development of Uncharted 2, describing how the A Tale of Tales game the Graveyard gave him the confidence to let gameplay drop player attention for a brief period of time.  This resulted in what was one of the more memorable parts of Uncharted 2, where the player is allowed to explore a Tibetan town and interact with the people and animals within.  The fact that the Graveyard (an experience with a very limited audience and eccentric goals and design) had such a positive impact on a relatively mainstream big-budget title inspires a little bit of confidence that high-art concepts like “not shooting things” do have a welcome place in mainstream games.

I found Scott Rigby’s talk on intrinsic and extrinsic player motivations one of the most interesting and usable things I got out of GDC.  In it, Rigby talks about maintaining sustained engagement, the continuum of motivation, how extrinsic rewards can fuel intrinsic motivation, and what specifically can make extrinsic rewards thwarting to sustained engagement and the forces of goodness.

Rigby first addressed the idea of what fosters long-term engagement.  Interestingly, the amount of “fun” a player states is not very strongly linked to long-term engagement.  A much better indicator is expression of intrinsic motivation.  Although this may seem like we should abandon design for extrinsic rewards in favor of design for intrinsic ones, Rigby expresses that this is not the case.  Instead, he argues, motivation should be viewed as a continuum, with purely extrinsic motivation at one end, and purely intrinsic at the other, and the goal being not to move to one side or the other but to unify the two.

Rigby lists the three basic psychological needs as according to self-determination theory: relatedness, autonomy, and competence.  He then goes on to claim that extrinsic rewards are good when they encourage these needs, and bad when they thwart them.  Specifically, what needs to be rewarded is meaningful growth (competence), relationships (relatedness), and choices (autonomy).  Rigby states that rewards that are meted out for any action or that have no meaning have been shown to provide no satisfaction, and that meaningless choices can drain and exhaust player motivation.

He wrapped up with the idea that extrinsic rewards are “bad” when they control or thwart people’s basic needs, and “good” when they address them.  Ribgy finishes with the encouragement that we not only collect behavioral metrics, as is common now, but motivational as well.  In particular, I find these last two points incredibly useful, as they provide me with concrete things to strive towards.

Speaker:  Joseph Joy
Time:        Wednesday, March 21 , 6-8pm
Location: USC’s Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC), Room 122

The first 14 years of Joseph’s professional career was in product development, mostly in the Microsoft Windows Operating System division, and working primarily in the area of clustering, networking and telephony. In 2005, after 14 years in Redmond, he joined  Microsoft Research India, where until November 2007 he headed the Advanced Development  (ADG) Group. He is now a software architect, driving the RIN project. His primary interests are in multimedia storytelling, software engineering and semi-structured information retrieval. His personal page lists other interests.  He has a Certificate in independent filmmaking from University of Washington, an MS in Computer Science and a 2nd MS in Ocean Engineering, both from the University of New Hampshire, and a B. Tech. in Naval Archiecture from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.   He will discuss his work on recent projects: Rich Interactive Narratives (RIN, see also www.digitalnarratives.net) and Virtual India (now Digital Heritage).

The Indie Games Summit at GDC is a series of talks full of passion and motivation for creating new games free of the traditional publisher model. It’s easy, amidst all this enthusiasm, to shed practical thinking for more exciting thoughts of 48-hour game jams and constant crunch. Here in the IMD grad program, our work can often feel like a non-stop, passion-fueled crunch, and perhaps it should. We are planting seeds of design skills that we will grow for a lifetime.

This year Aaron Isaksen gave an enlightening talk at the IGS on how to live a happy and sustainable life as an indie developer. Though most of his points may have seemed obvious on hearing them, it was important that they be said. Since they were ecclectic in nature, rather than sum them up, I’ll lay out a couple here:

This Career is a Marathon, Not a Sprint

In a casual poll he held, Aaron asked indies when they guessed that they would earn enough money to never have to work again. He found that most overestimated their earning potential, feeling that they would earn a great deal of wealth in 5 or 10 years. The reality, Aaron reminded us, is that most of us may never earn enough to never have to work again until retirement age, and THAT IS OKAY. We’re all doing what we love, presumably, so what’s the rush? Plan, and work, for a long, fruitful career. There’s money to be made if we’re doing quality work, for sure, but we should plan realistically, and work at a pace that we can maintain for our whole lives.

AVOID LEGAL PROBLEMS

When we get wrapped up in legal disputes, we risk losing more than money. We ensure, actually, that we will lose time and energy quibbling over the issue in question. While many who get tied up in legal battles certainly didn’t seek them out, there are steps we can take to ensure that we avoid them. Be clear up front with collaborators. No one enjoys starting a project with legality and paperwork, but simple contracts (many templates can be found at Nolo.com) can ensure that everyone is getting what they deserve, and free up everyone to focus on the project. Establishing the terms of a project upfront helps to prevent arguments later one.

Of course, some people you work with might seek out legal dispute or fail to behave as a member of the team, being willing to harm or kill a project if it means gaining more for themselves personally. Aaron’s advice there? Don’t hire assholes.

I was fortunate enough to attend SxSW Interactive this year. Here is my takeaway from my first experience at the conference.

SxSW Music and Film is a unique gathering of music and films that exists almost nowhere else in the world. It’s considered one of the best times and places to see a huge gathering of lesser-known or unknown bands, a wide array of quality films that will never have a major release, and a celebration of the idea of creating music and/or film for the sake of the medium. All kinds gather to revel in their collective creative endeavor. Interactive, however, is not like this.

I expected SxSW Interactive to be a gathering and a celebration of artists and designers coming together to celebrate the beauty of what interactivity can deliver. I didn’t expect it to be small, but I did expect some sort of parity with the music and film festivals. Instead, there seems to be too much money and too many parties. That hope I had is there, somewhere, and shines through intermittedly, but it’s buried by a strange layer of start-up culture and swag promotions. Read More

Andy Nealan closed out this year’s GDC with a final-hour talk on analyzing the complexity of a game’s systems, and how to make a complex system more comprehensible to players. While staying out of the clouds of design philosophy and in practical, mathematical evaluation of game design, he gave an extremely inspirational and highly practical lecture.

I was familiar with the issue of complexity in a game as it pertains to the player. Any given game’s systems must be laid out simply enough for the player for her to pick it up in-stride while enjoying the game, not feeling as though she is being stopped for instruction. I was also familiar with complexity within a given game mechanic. Most designers learn early in their careers how much more complex the basic movement and jumping mechanics in Super Mario Bros are than they appear to the player, and there have been fascinating talks at past GDCs about the complexity of design in something as simple as a single weapon in Halo. Each weapon in a shooter requires careful balancing of countless values — rate of fire, reload speed,accuracy when fired, damage dealt to health, damage dealt to shield, round size, total ammo capacity, time from player input to actual firing, and more.

But the design concept that I pulled out of Andy Nealan’s talk most clearly was the balancing of complexity between game systems. Andy talked about “closing’ a game’s resources — connecting all the resources to one another to increase the depth of the system and player decisions, while maintaining or even reducing the complexity perceived by the player.

I’m recounting this pretty obtusely, so I’ll lay out his example to share this concept most clearly:

thatgamecompany’s game flOw presents three primary resources to the player:
1) Size – the player must grow in order to move up the food chain
2) Food – the player must eat food (other organisms) to gain Size
3) Movement – the player moves in order to seek out food

In flOw, Movement is unconnected to the first two resources. It is essentially free, limited only by the set speed of the organism, and the player’s thumb agility. This creates two groups of resources – one being Movement by itself, and the other containing Size and Food.

Hemisphere Games’ Osmos, presents the same three resources to the player, but folded into one single group. Player movement consumes Size as its fuel, forcing the player to consider each move more carefully, as it comes with a cost. By connecting this resource to the others, Osmos “closes the loop”, as Andy put it. This, he argued, creates more complex choices for the player, but in a game that features no more systems than flOw.

I’ll mirror Andy’s disclaimer that he has great respect for flOw, and admires some of the other systems and aesthetics it utilizes. He merely used this one cross section to prove a point — that designers can give their players more complex systems without creating a more complicated game for the player to learn.

This GDC, I partially took part as an exhibitor at the booth of a Korean game company I am working with. From time to time, I presented the game I was working on and talked with potential publishers and investors. Talking with them made it clear that most publishers are interested in games that has social, network, and downloadable contents. However, the game was not really well-clickable with those business models. This dilemma sparked many thoughts about user and market expectation.
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