Click Nothing

First We Take Manhattan…

A couple weeks ago, The New Yorker ran a piece about Fumito Ueda, and his games Ico, and Shadow of the Colossus. It’s a good piece, and one that I am extremely happy to see running in such a prestigious publication with an audience broader than the audience for most writing-about-games.

The piece quotes me in support of its loose thesis that ‘games can be art’. While certainly flattering, and while this is a thesis I support, there is not a small amount of irony that arises from the piece running more or less in parallel to my last post which questions whether or not games should be art.

I should clarify one thing about the specific quote, which is pulled from Tom Bissell’s book Extra Lives. I said,

"Finding a way to make the mechanics of play our expression as creators and as artists—to me that’s the only question that matters."

The quote is accurate; that’s what I said. But then, as now, my own thinking on the subject of ‘how games mean’ was evolving (and has been evolving for some time). What I should have said back then was,

"Finding a way to make the dynamics of play our expression as creators and as artists—to me that’s the only question that matters."

Furthermore, the way I would prefer to express that idea today would be to say,

"Finding a way to make the dynamics of play support the creative expression of players—to me that’s the only question that matters."

Anyway, putting aside the subtleties related to where meaning in games can reside or where I personally think it ought to reside, the fact that articles like this are appearing with increasing regularity in mainstream publications is both a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because it gives game developers an opportunity to gain some much needed traction toward building credibility and artistic legitimacy in the eyes of a real audience of billions instead of a pathetically small audience of tens of millions. It’s a curse because I still supect that most of the people intrigued by such an article and inspired to take a closer look at games will be largely disappointed once they gtet beyond a very small handful of games, such as those of Ueda and a few others.

As we see more and more articles like this, and as we draw the attention of a real mass market, I worry that the limited depth and breadth of our work (at least our most visible work) cannot sustain and nourish the attention we receive from that mainstream. I suspect that, in the long term, that may be a bigger problem than not receiveing this kind of attention at all.

Didacticism in Game Design

There is a trend in game development that has been growing a head of steam over the last couple years, and I have some concerns about it. The trend is in support of the notion that game developers need to somehow demonstrate the maturity of their medium and of their own creative capabilities by making games that have a moral – or at least a socially responsible – message. The form this trend often takes is toward features such as morality meters and discrete moral choices at key branching points in game narratives. Now, I certainly have no problem with the ambition of developers to step up to the plate and demonstrate the maturity of the medium and their own creativity. I do, however, worry about some of the approaches.

I have talked and written in the past about a few of the numerous implementation challenges designers confront when trying to integrate these kinds of ethical decisions into gameplay – this post is not about that.

Rather than delving deeper into the questions of how we implement this sort of material – I want to back up a bit and make sure that in our attempts to design and build these new ‘socially responsible’ features into our games we are not missing the rather important prerequisite understanding of why. More importantly, I want to be sure that in our focus on ‘how to implement socially responsible messages’ we are not, in fact, directly undercutting the reason we have considered these sorts of designs in the first place – which in my view is to elevate the medium to a higher level of maturity and sophistication.

To begin with, I want to differentiate between three ideological stances:

The first – and I believe the most generally held throughout the game industry is:

“Games do not need anything more than compellingly motivated, well implemented gameplay in order to be successful.”

Obviously we work in a professional climate where most people simply do not give a shit about ‘elevating the medium’ or about ‘making games that are more socially responsible’ or more specifically about integrating moral or ethical decisions into gameplay or game narrative in order to offer deeper messages to our audiences. That’s fine. If that is what you think, I encourage you to continue thinking that way. I too appreciate the thermobaric annihilation of my enemies-of-the-moment, the resultant unlocking of new perks, and the accompanying wry one-liner. You’re right – there is nothing at all wrong with games that offer only that. In fact, so many games fail to deliver on even that, that perhaps discussions about anything deeper are premature. The fact remains though that this discussion is already happening in the sense that each new game released that incorporates these sorts of features is an argument within that discussion. Some may think we should let sleeping dogs lie – but the reality is the dogs are very much awake. They are already fighting in the pit, and the ones that survive will become the breeding stock of the future. It’s fine to place your bets and enjoy the spectacle without concern for the repercussions on the future – but others of us do care which dog has his day and what the resultant new breed of man’s best friend will be like.

Essentially, I argue that the stance: ‘Games do not need anything more than compellingly motivated, well implemented gameplay in order to be successful,’ is a fallacy. Properly phrased we could say that ‘a specific game does not need anything more than compellingly motivated, well implemented gameplay in order to be successful,’ but the jury is definitely out on the applicability of that stance to ‘games’ in the general sense.

The other two stances I would like to identify are similar to one another in that I believe they are both concerned with the aforementioned breeding stock. The first is a top-down stance; it is goal-focused and non-prescriptive. The other is a bottom-up stance that is prescriptive and is focused on an approach.

The first, non-prescriptive stance is:

“We should endeavour to elevate the medium of games.”

The second, prescriptive stance is:

“We should elevate the medium by making games that are socially responsible.”

(okay, disclaimer time – ‘We should endeavour to elevate the medium of games’ is also prescriptive, but it is more general in the sense that it does not prescribe the means, so when I say the second stance is prescriptive, I mean that not only does it offer a prescription for what we should do (like the first), it also offers a prescription for how we should do so.)

I reject the second, prescriptive stance, and – with apologies for using film as an example – this is why:

Imagine if decades ago during the formation of United Artists, Chaplin, Pickford, Fairbanks and Griffith had as their stated agenda that it should be the role of filmmakers to make movies that were ‘socially responsible’. Had they been as successful  (which, BTW, I suspect they would not have been), a hundred years later I believe we would have ended up with an entire medium of politically correct, didactic, sentimentalist-pandering drivel.

In fact – in the film industry, hardly anyone sets out with the explicit goal to make movies that are socially responsible – as though social responsibility is some feature that a movie needs to have. The film industry instead empowers the creatives – the directors, writers, actors, and the entire production crew – to make movies that explore things that they care deeply about… and as a result almost every movie (at least in some ways, and almost always indirectly) has some kind of socially responsible message. Even those who do explicitly set out to make films that are socially responsible (say Michael Moore) are driven by their own creative goals – not by their belief in the inherent value of socially responsible messages as a feature of film-making that would elevate the medium. Michael Moore probably never said to himself 'film would be better if those darn movies were more socially responsible'. On the contrary - I suspect he said 'a film about how darn socially irresponsible those bastards at GM are would make a great movie', and then he went out and made Roger and Me.

No one set out to make Terminator with a socially responsible message. In the end, though, the fundamental underlying takeaway of Terminator is that love is an unstoppable force for human salvation. This is because ‘love as unstoppable force for human salvation’ is a message all people care deeply about. 'Unstoppable killing robot' is a message that ten percent of people care deeply about. Perhaps, in certain cultures (like ours), you need those ten percent to leverage the rest of the population, but if you only have unstoppable killing robots, you only get the ten percent. In the film industry, this is potentially a failure. That said, clearly Cameron did not set out with the explicit goal to make a movie whose message was ‘love as unstoppable force for human salvation’ – rather, he set out to make an awesome movie about unstoppable killing robots, and in order to do so in a way that was creatively meaningful to him and resonant with a significant audience, he chose more general, more human, more socially relevant themes for the indestructible titanium skeleton of his unstoppable killing robot opus.

It is not the role of games nor should it be the role of games to be socially responsible, nor should it be the role of game creators to attempt to be didactic by instructing people how to live, how to think or how to behave. Unfortunately, this is what the discussion on the social responsibility of games tends to boil down to these days: a surface level discussion on how to add features that have moral messages so players can learn morality. We’re too often attempting to add the indestructible titanium skeleton of social responsibility as a feature-focused afterthought to a package of vat-grown meat that too frequently resembles Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Many recent games too quickly and too often reach for moments of ‘morality dilemma’ as a feature to position or differentiate themselves as titles that have some deeper message about the human condition. To me, this approach not only risks didacticism but – worse – is potentially a risky step back from the more systemic messaging of earlier generations of games.

By removing the (weakly) systematized representation of morality such as exists in a game like Ultima IV (for example), and exchanging it for discrete moments of realization intensive story branching based on single (or few) decisions we risk reducing the breathtaking complexity of human morality down to a marketing bullet point. By ensuring there is one neatly contained morality puzzle per hour or per level of real gameplay, and preferably having one big important one at the third act climax we do a terrible disservice to the beautiful nuance of the human condition. We strip away everything that is important about morality (its complexity, nuance and irresolvability) and replace it with a conveniently contrived idiocy that espouses a message.

As McLuhan says: the medium is the message. When canned, discrete moral choices are rendered in games with such simplicity and lack of humanity, the message we are sending is not the message specific to the content in question (the message in the canned content might be quite beautiful – but it’s not a ludic message) – it is the message inherent in the form in which we’ve presented it: it effectively says that ‘being moral is easy and only takes a moment out of each hour’. To me, this is almost the opposite of the deeper appreciation of humanity we might aim to engender in our audience.

Instead of aiming to elevate the medium by making games that are more socially responsible  – which by my estimation reduces quickly down to a feature driven approach that ultimately offers little more than cheap didactic moralizing, our aim should be instead to empower our creative visionaries to explore the human condition through their work. This is a creatively driven approach which I believe will lead to people who create games being forced to think about what moves them deeply and about what they care about in life, instead of thinking about how to make their next action blockbuster sequel more socially responsible than that of a competitors action blockbuster sequel.

Believe it or not – given the time and the budget and the support – many of us would much rather be making games where we feel the unstoppable power of love as a force for human salvation, than games where yet another endless horde of terminator robots falls beneath our plasma cannons. If we hope to make games that are truly socially responsible and offer players the satisfaction of more deeply resonant messages about the human condition we must start not by looking at the feature set, but by looking to our creators. We must empower them (ie: give them the authority and the responsibility) to explore their own feelings and make games that move them deeply and reject another generic action game with a morality meter tacked on the side – because all that is, is a farce. We should be ashamed of that.

I firmly do not believe that we need to put in place some agenda to add social responsibility to games. I don’t even believe it is about having a broader domain of game development where we can make a class of low-risk, controlled margin games that are socially responsible to demonstrate our goodwill to a world increasingly doubtful of the notion that games can speak meaningfully and generally to the human condition.

It is about believing in our creators – and about empowering them to believe in themselves – and about helping them make the mature sorts of games that can speak to the other ninety percent of the population who can’t be fucking bothered with another horde of terminator bots and who are laughing at us when we tell them that between hordes of terminator bots they will have a neatly packaged ‘love is an unstoppable force for human salvation’ moral dilemma that will branch them into either fighting the red-eyed terminator robots to save the Earth or the green-eyed terminator robots to destroy the Earth for their own glory.

In short: all we need to do to start making more socially responsible games is grow up and start acting like the mature creators we hold ourselves up to be. When we have done that, we will almost by definition have made games that have embedded within them more socially responsible themes and messages which are there because they are beautiful – not because we have a didactic agenda. And in so doing, we will have elevated the entire medium.

Click Nothing Tour 2009 - Part II

In the beginning, there was nothing

It's been a long time in coming, but I have finally put the finishing touches on the Click Nothing Tour 2009.

It's going to be a long and complex one, but it should be fun. One talk, seven cities, ten days.

The talk, as detailed in a previous post, is about changing notions of what immersion means in the context of social and cultural shift in the face of technological change and generational change.

The dates and locations, for those who might be intertested in attending, are as follows (though not all are open to the public):

Sunday, October 25th, 9:30 am
GameX Convention, Keynote
(details)

Monday, October 26th, 3:30 pm
ETC Carnegie Mellon

Wednesday, October 28th, 4:00 pm
MIT, GAMBIT Game Lab
(details)

Thursday, October 29th, 6:00 pm
NYU, New York
(details pending)

Monday, November 2nd
SCAD Savannah
(details pending)

Monday, November 3rd
SCAD and IGDA Atlanta
(details)

For a walkthrough of the tour, you can drop this into Google Earth. If you're on Dopplr, friend me and you'll see the specific dates I expect to be around in which towns. If you're on Facebook and/or Twitter, friend or follow me and you'll be able to keep tabs on my frequent updates.

Since I already gave an early version of the talk at Ubi, here in Montreal, the Twitter stream for the tour and its collected talks is live if you want to listen in on #CNTour09.

Hopefully, if you had any interest at all in listening to my demented ramblings, I will be coming to somewhere vaguely near where you live - drop by and see the talk and harrass me with questions that I won't be able to answer and then we have a drink and talk less seriously.

If I'm still not coming anywhere near you or if you have to go to your cousin's wedding on the night I am passing through your city - don't worry. I am currently in the process of building out video for many of my previous talks - including this one - and I hope that over the coming months you'll have access to this material in video format that you can watch in your underwear while eating ice cream, or on your iPhone on the bus - or both.

Hope to see you somewhere between here and 32 degrees North latitude.

(No, I don't have t-shirts, but I promise if I survive this and do it again next year, I will have some made.)

Live and Let Die

So, what started as an experiment by Ben over at Sometimes Life Requires Consequence is starting to pick up steam. It's been tagged a couple times now at Game Set Watch and Kieron Gillen over at Rock Paper Shotgun blasted some buckshot his way in today's Sunday Papers. Already at least a couple other players have taken up the 'challenge' and are trying the same thing. In at least one case, some form of tragedy has ensued (and in some ways the nature of that tragedy is the subject of this post.)

Not to steal Ben's thunder, but here's some history on how these 'permadeath' playthroughs began.

Last month, Manveer and I got into a debate about how to design more meanginful and emotionally engaging games. On one branch of that discussion, Manveer had suggested designing a game to make certain decisions irreversible. I was opposing that approach on the grounds that it was relying on what I feel are narrative tools (in particular irreversibility and inevitability).

I was suggesting that - while we could of course make games more emotionally engaging using narrative tools, I feel we ought to be pursuing (possibly exclusively but at least primarily) the application of ludic tools to this same end. My reasoning is that by leveraging narrative tools the most engaging emotional moments we will create are equivalent to those of narrative media (like film or literature) - whereas by leveraging ludic tools, we can discover something new which is potentially more powerful, more deeply affecting, and more honestly and powerfully about the human condition.

On a lark, Ben (who I currently rank as the #2 all-time Far Cry 2 fan - but watch out Chris, he's catching up quick) took the abstract discussion and literalized it in most spectacular fashion. He is now playing Far Cry 2 under self-imposed 'permadeath'. No reloading allowed - a la oldskool Iron Man Modes of play - with the ultimate consequence being that if he dies, that's it: game over. He will wipe his save game and that's the end of that.

Needless to say - this has the effect of making every decision he makes 'irreversible'. It means that if he decides to keep a buddy - say Frank Bilders - on stand-by to rescue him if he gets overwhealmed in battle, then Frank may well be mortally wounded during any rescue attempt.

With Frank lying on the ground, shaking from a sucking chest wound as his blood seeps into rusty African soil, Ben will pick up his friend and cradle him in his arms... and then what will he do? Frank will ask Ben to inject him with a syrette. The angry shouts of APR reinforcements will be cutting through the jungle canopy getting louder... closer. And when Ben gives him an injection and Frank asks for another... and another... what will happen? Will Ben use his last syrettes to euthanize Frank? Will he save his valuable syrettes and use a bullet instead? Will he abandon Frank to whatever grim fate awaits him if the APR finds him lying helpless in the grass?

The decisions that Ben will make in these moments will be real decisions. It will be just like life, and from it, Ben will feel something real.

Or will he?

Something is very ironic about all of this....

In fact, the design of Far Cry 2 already innately supports the emotional dilemmas described above. We made it that way on purpose - it was the entire point of the Buddy system - to design an 'out of frying pan, into the fire' system where the player would be baited further and further down a losing path until he ultimately would occasionally be required to make a choice between giving up a limited though not overly rare 'resource' (a buddy) in exchange for not having to reload and redo a lengthy section of the game. Then the limited resource would be 'disguised' as a real human character and the decision of the player to abandon (or 'deny') the resource would be dressed up in classic filmic costume of 'loyal ally dies in your arms'.

Players would cry.

The existing design of the Buddy system in Far Cry 2 in some sense is a (soft) solution to Manveer's call for a design that makes certain decisions permanent and allows players to feel 'real' emotional consequence. Yet at the same time, this focus on designing meaning that arises from narrative-like structures is something I am now opposing. Why? Well, in the end, I think that even if we made a hundredfold improvement in the design and realization of the buddy system in Far Cry 2, the very best we could ever achieve in terms of making players feel the death of a buddy in a real and honest way would be equivalent to what they felt when Wade died in Saving Private Ryan.

It's worth noting that even reading a detached description of the plot points of the film that detail what happened to Wade is more moving than having a buddy die in your arms in Far Cry 2, so we have a lot of room for improvement and maybe going down that path is a good idea.

But I am conceptually opposed to going too far down this path of using narrative techniques - not because we can't make our games much more emotionally engaging than they are currently - but because we already know the limits of this approach. By mastering these narrative techniques and wedding them to our designs (as we did with the Buddy System in Far Cry 2 - but better) we can arrive at Saving Private Ryan. What that means is that 10 or 20 or 50 years from now, we will deliver a brand new entertainment medium that is as powerful and moving as one we already have. That's great, I guess. But if I am going to dedicated my life this, I want to end up with something that is more, something that is better than what we have now. (There is another branch to this argument which has to do with the potential real-world irreversibility of going down this path, which is basically what happened to the comics industry, but that's a different debate that I am not going to go here.)

All that said - there is something much more important happening with Ben's 'permadeath' experiment. There is something happening at a higher level that is more than just him embracing a narrative constraint to make his playthrough more emotionally moving.

There is at least one more level of irony here that goes to the core of the future I am looking for.

Ultimately, when I reject narrative techniques in favor of ludic ones, what I am really saying is that I reject traditional authorship. I reject the notion that what I think you will find emotionally engaging and compelling - and then build and deliver to you to consume - is innately superior to what you think is emotionally compelling. By extension, I reject the idea that I can make you feel the loss of a friend in a more compelling way by authoring an irreversible system than you could make yourself feel by playing with a system wherein a friend can be both dead and alive simultaneously and wherein his very existence can be in flux based on your playful whim.

What I am saying at a higher level of abstraction is that meaning does not come from playing a game... it comes from playing WITH a game. It is the manipulation not only of the actors in the game that is meaningful, but the manipulation of the game itself. This discussion is not about how to make a game more meaningful. It is about how games mean.

The irony then is this:

The reason I think people are paying attention to what Ben is doing is not because he is having a more emotionally engaging narrative experience. It is not because he is playing the game in a more serious way in order to experience more serious emotions.

It's not that people suddenly want to know what will happen within the fiction of the game - I'll tell you what will happen - the third time any Buddy is downed in combat he will not be able to be revived and the player will be systemically forced to choose between shooting the buddy (he will be automatically given a pistol to enable this decision if he does not already have one), euthanizing the buddy with syrettes (it takes three and he may not have enough, potentially elminating this decision possibility), abandoning the Buddy (which means he will not die and will show up in the end to get his revenge), or reloading the game (which Ben has self-denied).

The reason I think people are paying attention is because Ben is playing with the game. He is manipulating the game itself. He is playing with the magic circle. He is looking at all sides of it like a Rubik's Cube and even taking the cube apart in order to see how it is built and what are its underlying immutable rules. It is here that people start to pay attention. It is here that Ben is being moved by his experience. It is here that others, too, care about what happens... not to Frank, but to Ben, and to the game itself. They care about what can happen to Frank. The are invested in the expressive possibility space enabled by the game. They care about the real immutable limits of the question and about the limits arbitrarily imposed by the save game system, and by Ben's willful rejigging of the magic circle to exclude it. They care, now, about the Ben/Frank/Far Cry 2 system which is something real. They don't care about whether Frank Bilder's lives or dies... because that is an illusion and they know it.

Effectively, by attempting to experience the meaning that arises from adding irreversibility to Far Cry 2 and taking away one of the things he was allowed to play with, Ben is playing with the game more, not less. It is not the combination of Far Cry 2 + authored narrative irreversibility that is making the permadeath experiment meaningful to Ben and to others, it is the the fact that he is able to manipulte the game to create this experiment that is bringing meaning.

My belief is that it is this manipulation of a game's systems that allows us to understand and feel what a game means... not a better implementation and realization of its embedded authored narratives. My fear is that it has taken us too long to figure this out; that those on the authored narrative side have already won... that the next Call of Duty will make me cry when Wade dies in my arms, and it will make you cry when he dies in your arms, and it will make everyone cry when he dies in their arms in exactly the same irreversible, inevitable way it has happened since Achilles irreversibly, inevitably died.

And we will love it.

And we'll stop asking what could have been.

(and I'll go work in film....)

Ethical Decision Making

Manveer over at Design Rampage threw up his Pecha Kucha style slides, notes and audio from his GLS talk about Ethical Decision Making in games.

He makes more or less the same points that I made in a similar talk back in 2004, linked here as well as in the stack on the right. PK talks are great because they cut right to the point. In all honesty in today's age, I am starting to lose faith in the 1 hour talk format.

I commented briefly on Manveer's site, but I wanted to recap the point here. One of the four points Manveer identifies in his talk as being important to designing for meaningful ethical decisions is `permanence`. He states in his notes "A dilemma ceases to be a dilemma if you get a do-over. Save games, unfortunately ruin this.".

I find myself unwilling to accept this. As I said in the comments over on his side, this is seeking to apply an author-centric narrative model to a medium with which it is not compatible. Games (at least modern single-player computer games) allow the ability to redo actions through save-load. This is inherent to what they are and quite possibly need to be.

In The Iliad, when Hector decides to go and fight Achilles, we know he's going to die... so does everyone else. So does he. And that's the point. Hector can't do anything else because Hector is Hector and that is why we care. Author centric media allow for this inevitability. In fact, they are dependant on it.

In a game, Hector is not Hector. Hector is the player and the player will keep fighting Achilles until he wins, and this is the way it should be. In fact, making it impossible to change the decision and do it differently - arguably even making it difficult to beat Achilles to try and make the player feel the way Hector feels - is contrary to what both games and difficult decisions are about. The emotional emphasis and resultant challenge should be on the decision to commit to fighting Achilles, not the rote mashing of buttons to launch the combos that will sever the tendon that bears his name and beat him.

The path forward - in my opinion - is to invent a new ethical decision making model specific to games that embraces what games are instead of rejecting it for the models used in other author-centric media that have been successful up to now. I don't know exactly what that model is shaped like (though I talked about it in my talk), but I know that if we adopt a narrativoid, author-centric model, we may one day manage to make EDMs in games that are as compelling as those in authored media, but we'll never exceed the emotional weight of those media.

If we truly want to be the dominant culture form of the twenty-first century, we have fight on our own terms, not on their terms. We have to do it the way that works for us. We have to step out on the field of battle and face our own Achilles, even if it means we will lose, because it's in our nature and we can't do it differently anyway...

Or maybe we can.

Maybe we can all try it our own different way and collectively solve the problem by trying all the different permutations simultaneously and seeing which way works and comparing notes in real time via the interwebs instead of waiting for someone to write down the authoritative solution and teach it to us.

That's what I'm talkin' about. How's that for a meta-post.

Well Played 1.0

A few years ago, I was invited down to Carnegie Mellon by Jesse Schell to visit the Entertainment Technology Center. While there, I met Drew Davidson who is currently the Director of the ETC.

This past year, Drew has been hard at work trying to trick a bunch of us slacker game developers, bloggers academics and others to submit critical discussion pieces on (for the most part) well known games.

His hard work has finally paid off, and Well Played 1.0 is currently available online where you can read it for free on the ETC website, or available for free download or hardcopy purchase through Lulu.com.

I am one of the contributors to the book - but as I mentioned - I am a slacker, and all I was able to provide to Drew was a reprinting of my post on Ludonarrative Dissonance in Bioshock, which every single person to have ever visited this blog has apparently read.

Far more important than my own redundant contribution to critical thought are more than twenty other pieces contributed by all manner of game brains.

From game development legends such as Noah Falstein and Greg Costikyan the book offers insight into Advance Wars and Europa Universalis. Fellow blogger L.B. Jeffries extends the bredth of discussion on Rockstar's Bully, and professors and researchers of all kinds from some of the best schools in the world round out the book with examinations of games as complex and layered as Civilization IV, to those as casual and as accessable as Guitar Hero.

At very least, any game developer should have the online version in their favorites as a valuable reference, and any blogger, reviewer, critic or anyone else who wants to write throughful criticism of a game they feel is important should read it carefully.

Citizen Naruto

So back at Christmas 2007, I snagged a copy of my studio's Naruto game - Naruto: Rise of a Ninja (not our more recent sequel Naruto: The Broken Bond, which by all accounts is even better). I finally got around to playing it a bit, and honestly, I'm really enjoying it.

Consider first that, as I have said many times in the past, I am actually really bad at videogames. Due to this, fighters are my bane. I honestly do not believe that I have ever in my entire life won a single match in Street Fighter (sorry Sirlin). Fighters are just too demanding of twitch reflexes and an understanding of how to enter combos, and read an opponent's moves. I am literally unable to decypher the language of a fighter.

Consider also that I know nothing at all about Japanese Anime. I don't know Naruto from (some other famous anime character that I can't even name to complete the phrase).

So with those major strikes against the game right out of the gate, I'm happy to report that it's a really tight, well realized experience. I strongly suspect that if you are interested in Naruto, you'll really like this game a lot. As for whether or not you'll like it more or less than I do if you like fighting games, I can't answer that at all because I have no idea if it is a good fighting game or a bad one.

The most impressive thing about it is the design of the city itself. Anyone designing an open world should take a good look at this game to see how it is structured. It is possibly the most smartly designed open world city I have ever seen in a game.

Here's the Cole's Notes of why it's great:

First - it's not too big just for the sake of being big. Full stop.

Second, it has a credible population of ordinary townsfolk who go about their business believably. All of the townsfolk dislike you at the start, but one of your rewards as you progress is the admiration of the people. As you do missions and side quests and help people, you get them to switch from disliking you to liking you one villager at a time. Unfriendly villagers say mean things as you pass by, but if you interact with a friendly villager, he will give you directions to your current objective in the form of a little arrow on screen for a short while. What this means is that as you unlock more and more friendly villagers, you have this low-level assistance available to you more and more frequently. It's a really subtle and clever way to make it feel like you're winning the hearts and minds of the villagers.

Third - from a level design point of view, the village is really well thought out and put together. The village has four vertical layers to it. As you progress through the game and unlock new powers and abilities, you are afforded access to higher and higher levels of the city - each higher level connected more 'broadly' then the previous.

At the beginning of the game, you cannot even double jump, and you can only access the lowest level - the streets and the rooftops of a few single story buildings. But you quickly learn the major routes and the major landmarks and get a pretty solid understanding of the basic layout.

Soon you are able to double jump and to run vertically up walls a short distance. This gives you access to the rooftops of most of the buildings in the village and is a very liberating step up. You also gain access to the first set of roof-connecting cables that allow you to 'slide' between interconnected rooftops.

Eventually, you upgrade your wall-running ability and can access the third and fourth vertical layers. The lowest level of cabling is the densest, connecting the most buildings with the shortest cables. The second level of cabling is sparser, connecting fewer buildings, but with longer cables. The highest level of cabling is the most sparse, connecting only a very few of the villages tallest structures.

Effectively these layered fast-travel networks allow you to 'climb up levels of movement heirarchy' giving you fewer degrees of freedom in your movement as you ascend, but giving you the ability to move much further and much faster the higher you go. It's really a fascinating topology.

The game has a really well thought-out economy and progression system as well. There are four currencies in the game: cash, coins, antique coins, and stars. Cash is the only unlimited resource and it is the resource you use to buy consumables (throwing knives, noodles, etc). Coins are (mostly) used to upgrade what you can carry - more knives, more noodles, etc). Antique coins upgrade the effects of your consumables (making all future knives purchased with cash into hardened knives or explosive knives or both). The stars are 'experience points' used to unlock and upgrade your personal abilities - combos and jutsus. Stars are doled out by missions. Both kinds of coins are collectibles (with the antique coins about 1/10th as common) and cash is given for just about everything.

The benefits of this system are obvious - it gives the designers the ability to maintain both limited economies (there are only so many abilties to unlock, hence a finite number of stars), and an open economy (once you have unlocked everything, you can still keep earning cash to buy more noodles to keep your health high - something which I desperately need). And further, by breaking the coins down into two separate limited economies, they alleviate decision stress on the player... not sure whether to save up 23 more coins to pay for that upgrade? You don't have to worry about it - the coin-based economy prices items in the 10's of coins and the antique coin economy prices things in the single units of antique coins (instead of in the 100s of standard coins). Very smart (unless of course, you are going for a more hardcore, more player-choice driven, and more consequential economy).

Anyway - I think the Naruto economy is fascinating and it taught me a lot about different concepts for game economies and I think it's worth a look.

There are also a few things I don't like.

First - I really don't understand the side-mission structure, as simple as it is. In the very beginning of the game, I am told that 'noddle delivery side missions' are unlocked. So I go do some. They are fun, easy, and help you learn the city. Then shortly thereafter, they tell you that races are unlocked, and also that hide-and-seek games are unlocked.

However - when you go to try and do a race or a hide-and-seek game, you cannot. The mission-givers tell you you need to train more - but I spent at least 4 hours (!) playing the game, doing missions, training and buying and unlocked new things before I was actually able to DO one of these supposedly 'unlocked' side-missions. Then - arbitrarily - the missions lock again after a few and you are told 'you need to train first'... but of course, I had no idea what I needed to train in or how, and went another couple of hours before being able to do these missions again.

I understand the notion of wanting to tease the player forward -but you need to tease the player forward with an IMMINENT reward, not one that they may unlock sometime this week. Additionally, by unlocking and relocking the side-missions, you end up playing two different games in parallel - you play a game where there are bunches of side missions and collecting to do - then you finish it all, and play a game of doing main missions until the side-missions are arbitrarily re-unlocked, then you switch back. It's weird. I would much prefer to just do side missions as they suit my whim.

Also - and this is probably the shelf moment for me - I am about halfway through the main story missions and a strange icon appeared on my health/chakra HUD following a major battle with a boss. This icon capped my health and chakra at 500 each, when formerly they were both around 1000. There is no explanation anywhere of what happened to cause it, or how I get rid of it (or even if I can)... I don't even know what it is or what it means - but it has stripped away fully 1/3rd of my power... and I am certainly not a good enough player to make due.

In both cases - the inexplicable locking and unlocking of side-quests and the bizarre 'capping' of my two main combat stats - are simply not explained, leaving me frustrated. Not only is it not explained to me what I need to do to continue forward and/or solve the problem, or when or if I might expect plot progression to solve the problem automatically, it is not even explained to me what the problem is - these impediments are just arbitrary.

Anyway - I still enjoyed the first half of the game quite a bit, and for the city structure alone, I once again recommend it to anyone interested in a rock-solid level design for an open world.

If the two problems mentioned above have been ironed out in the sequel, I'll definitely be picking it up.

The Next Generation of Player

So I am finally posting the slides and other presentation matertials for my Generations talk.

The talk is about the current shift in player demographics taking place in population of gamers and game developers.

I originally gave the talk in Vancouver as a Keynote to Vancouver Film School's Game Design Expo back in the beginning of Febraury.

I also gave the talk to the IGDA Chapter here in Montreal at the beginning of March. The IGDA Montreal Chapter has a write-up of the talk here (thanks Caroline), and they're also linking a full video of the entire talk, here - it's actually hosted on Motionbox, here.

For those who don't know, I have been laid up with a herniated disk in my lower back for the past month. I was supposed to be going down to GDx in Savannah a couple weeks ago to give the talk there as well, but my injury regretably prevented the travel. Thankfully with the slides, text and now a full video, anybody can see the presentation at their own leisure.

One final note for you number crunchers out there: the talk presents - in rapid-fire format - a lot of graphs based on data pulled down from the US Census Bureau which I harvested here and then aggregated. I have included in the ZIP file all of my datafiles and the graphs that were generated from them. The data is included as notepad files, whcih were then imported into excel to make the XLS file.

GDC09 - Part 3 - Wines and Rants

The last set of slides I have to put up are those for my five minute talk about game rating systems that I gave as part of Richard Lemarchand's Microtalks session on Thursday morning.

Overall I really enjoyed the session - though the prep was a nightmare. I guess it's pretty easy to enjoy a session where you only have to do 10% of the work and then you get to listen to smart people explain to you what exactly it is that you do for a living.

Anyway, the five minute format is colossally difficult. Especially if you are trying to make a point and support it with arguments instead of being all hand-wavy and theoretical. I wish I could have brought to bear all the arguments I have as for why we should switch from 10, 20, 100 or even 1000 point rating systems to a simple five point rating system, but I just didn't have time.

I guess that's what blogs are for.

Here are the arguments I made in the talk:

100 point rating systems are so analog that the human brain cannot make sense of the granularity (what is the difference between an 86 and an 87 in real perceptible, measurable terms?). These systems nobly attempt to make a threshold-less system - but when the brain is overloaded we add thresholds back in... we say '61-70 is above average' and '71-80 is good' or whatever. This is effectively adding back in the thresholds that a 100 point system endeavors to remove... but it is adding them back in in a less rigorous way leading to a mysticism created around certain improbable thresholds at the far reaches of the curve. I called this mysticism the Cult of 90+ and talked about it specifically in the context of wine rating.

I talked also about the relationship between the review scores, the reviewer, the publishers of the review and the developers and publishers making the games. There are pressures in these relationships that push reviewers to give higher scores. This is very easy to do in a 100 point system (because of the bracketed question in the previous paragraph), meaning a reviewer under pressure can relieve that pressure incrementally by inflating a score ever so slightly to make everyone involved a little bit happier. This systemic, distributed pressure release into the system of review scores is inflationary and increases game review scores over time.

In terms of inflation, I present the evidence of it by looking at the aggregated game ratings taken from gamerankings.com and I discuss why it is bad: principally because it prevents cross-generational comparison of games (in fact, this need for cross generational comparison means we should impose and maintain a bell curve in ratings even if games are getting empirically better over time).

As an aside: Adam Sessler ranted against a different set of problems inherent with the way aggregators work at this years Rant session. Adam is also right, in my opinion, and a global switch to a five star system would also work alleviate his complaint to some extent.

In any case, if you want the discussion on the above points, you can download the slides and the text of the talk here.

Also of note is that I used Kent Hudson's 'How To Pick a Lock' talk from GDC 2008 as a point in the discussion and I have had a couple people ask me about it. For those interested in that discussion, Kent's slides and video support can be found here. Thanks Kent.

Now - over and above the points raised in the talk there are a couple other arguments for why we ought to undertake a global switch to a five star rating system for games that I did not have time to cover in the talk itself.

Firstly, 100 point rating systems leverage the 'fallacy of precision' to lend authority to the accuracy of the rating (difference between accuracy and precision is here). Essentially the argument here is that if I claim a game is an 82, then most readers are likely to think 'well, it must be somewhere between an 80 and an 85'. In fact, this is a fundamentally invalid assumption. If I were to use a 10 point system and give the game an 8, readers would assume it to be 'probably between a 7 and a 9'. If I were to use a five star system and give a 4, they would assume it 'probably between a 3 and a 5'.

The problem is that the precision afforded by an 82 does not make the accuracy of the rating higher. It is as likely to be a 60 or a 100, just as a 4 star rating is probably somewhere between a 3 and a 5. Accuracy and Precision are orthogonal concepts, but the fallacy of precision leverages the fact that our brains tend to correlate them. In a the highly subjective field of rating games, it is much more important that we be accurate than that we be precise and someone who plays a lot of games can be accurate in a five star system.

To go one step further with this argument, I would point out that in a world full of aggregators, we still have 100 and 1000 point systems and having these systems aggregating five star ratings into percentages is useful and good (provided everyone uses a five star system and their aggregation policies are standardized, fair and well understood - cf Sessler). Having them aggregating ratings that are already claiming 100 points of precision makes the aggregators susceptible to the effects of the aforementioned inflation (in fact it is in the aggregators that we are able to measure the inflation).

For the record - this point was misquoted in IGN's article on the talk wherein they wrote:

According to Hocking ... 35 of the 100 current top-rated games (as tracked by an aggregate site) were released after 2001. That presents a skewed view of the industry's history and points toward a recent inflation of sorts in game reviews.

Note that an astute commenter then went on to reply this:

To say 35 of the top 100 rated games of all time came out since 2001 means that scores have been inflated since them is not consistent. Since 2001, there have been 8 years of games released. We can assume that almost all games with ratings have come out since around 1985, or 24 years ago. The past 8 years represents 1/3 of this time, and 35/100 is about 1/3 of the total game volume. It is consistent that ratings have NOT been inflated as 1/3 of the top rated games have come out in 1/3 of the time period of game releases.

The commenter is exactly right if 35 of the Top 100 rated games of all time were released since 2001. But the real quote was that 35 of the Top 41 highest rated games of all time were released since 2001. That`s not the 35% we would predict, that is 85%. Get it right IGN, you kind of invalidated the entire talk by erroneously reporting the most critical and central piece of data. Maybe it was the precision that threw you off?

I won't go into the other horribly broken arguments in the comments thread... I should know better... but here's my personal favorite:

Clint is a joke. Far Cry was overrated trash. The 100 point system is fine. It allows a more accurate score. Period.

That's like a straw-man multiplied by the denial of the fallacy of precision. Awesome stuff.

As a follow-on from the fallacy of precision point is the argument that the kinds of precision implied in 100 point systems feel elitist to 'ordinary' people. At a time when the industry is experiencing explosive growth - when new players of all demographics are starting to take up gaming - it serves our interest to give them reviews and rating scores they can understand. An 89.3 implies a level of refinement in perception among gamers and reviewers that not only does not exist, but is also intimidating for the mass market. It is the equivalent of terms like 'mature oak finish' and 'fruity nose' in wine discussion. These concepts are alienating for the market and make people feel excluded when - in the end - the entire purpose of game reviews and particularly of giving numerical scores at all is to help inform people about the product and invite them to play.

The final point I wanted to make was that - as members of a press with increasingly important social responsibilities - the reviewers, writers and editors giving the review scores should be the ones championing the push to a five star system. For all the reasons mentioned above, finer granularity systems are broken and compromise the integrity fo their work (and the utility of their work to developers). Chris Hecker also gave a mini rant this year and he called for the gaming press to do their job well. I believe the first step in doing that lies in radically reducing the importance and weight given to numerical scores and emphasizing the importance placed on quality reviews, well written.

I am pretty sure no matter what I say, this call is going to go unheeded... but I am also pretty sure that those who don't make the transition are going to find themselves very rapdily serving a smaller and smaller niche of an explosively growing market. I look very much forward to continuing to work with those who survive the transition.

GDC09 - Part 2 - Improvisation presentation materials

So I promised a lot of people I would have the slides from my talk up by Monday, but then I got lazy. But finally, a whole 24 hours late, here they are. you want a quick overview of what the talk was about, Chris Remo recapped it pretty clearly here.

Here's some usability tips for those who aren't aware:

Download the big zip, and open and print the word document (or have it on a second monitor) then run the powerpoint in presentation mode (or have it on your main monitor), then - every time you see a bold word in the text of the word doc, you advance the slides. This will keep all the slides and text in synch and give you the full effect of the presentation.

Just reading the presentation alone will be confusing without the slides, and the slides themselves will be totally meaningless without the text - it's really the synchronization of the two that you need if you hope to follow it.

Also - for reference, you might want the following:

My GDC 2006 Intentionality talk is here.
Harvey Smith's Orthogonal Unit Differentiation talk is here.
Harvey Smith and Randy Smith's talk on emergent gameplay design is here.

Thanks - obviously - to Harvey and Randy for continuing to host the slides and making all this great stuff available for freeloaders like me (and hopefully now you) to cash in on.