Click Nothing

Click Nothing Tour 2009 - Part I

So for those who missed it in the microsecond that it flew past on Twitter, I will be keynoting the GameX Industry Summit conference taking place in Philadelphia on Oct 24-25. Here are the working title and summary of the talk I plan to give:

The Territory is not the Map: Hyper Realism and the New Immersion Paradigm

The games of today unsurprisingly strive to mimic the linear, authored structures of previous generations of media largely because gamers and game developers have grown up in a world where those media are culturally dominant. That is changing. As our media become more richly interactive and as our experience of the world becomes increasingly fragmented and parallelized, a new media culture is disintegrating the old. Games of the future will reflect this cultural shift by themselves becoming more fragmentary, more parallelized, and less focused on rich simulation and traditional notions of immersion.

This talk examines the potential long-term future of gaming by looking at the accelerating convergence between rising technologies and competing media from the internet, games, music and narrative media to augmented reality and the prominence of portable wireless devices.

Sorry that the summary sounds so brainy and cerebral - I promise it will be a talk about games and that it will be as chaotically poetic and filled with increasingly obsolete jokes about the first 8 seasons of The Simpsons as the rest of my recent talks.

But more than just announcing that I'm speaking at GIS, I wanted to announce that I am expanding the trip to do the talk in several other cities. I don't want to announce any places or dates yet, because I'm still putting it together, so I'll let those interested speculate away. I will admit that a part of planning this as a 'tour' was because I am a couple of trips 'in debt' following cancellations resulting from my injury - so if you had been hoping to see me talk a few months ago and were disappointed by a cancellation, odds are good you'll be getting a second chance.

For the subject of the talk - it spawns out of a lot of the thinking I have been doing recently. Needless to say once you come off a project and get some rest, your narrow, single-minded focus on closing and delivery opens up and you get to look at the big picture again... so that psychological shifting of gears definitely has inspired the core of the talk. Also, recent conversations online - particularly the discussion that evolved out of my debate with Manveer, and even yesterday's discussion on the nature and future of the expressive potential of games between David Jaffe and Anthony Burch (and others) (extended) are all topics that have been close to my heart lately and will be elementary to the talk. I'm hoping to be able to synthesize some of these ideas with my own recent talks about Immersion and Generational Shift. If you really want to get the most of the upcoming 'CN Tour 09' talk, you might want to refresh yourself on those two previous talks...but...

As an added bonus (and you get all this for free!) - I am also looking toward launching a few other special projects to 'celebrate' the tour that will hopefully increase the utility of Click Nothing as a whole and make the idea of reviewing those old talks a little easier.

So - to use the most ironic metaphor I can muster - stay tuned - if I can keep a modicum of focus, it's going to be an exciting post-midsummer.

On Authorship in Games

Not that long ago, famed film critic Roger Ebert stated that games are not, and indeed, cannot be, art.

Recently, following up on a response made by author/game convergence guy Clive Barker at the Hollywood And Games Summit, Ebert clarified his claims.

Ebert's basic argument is that art requires authorship, and that games abdicate authorship to the player, and therefore cannot be art. This is certainly a compelling and useful argument, as it strikes at the nature of our medium, not at the content we so frequently produce. Ebert is clever not to bother arguing whether or not another boring old rehash of the game where you use 24 different weapons to kill 6 different types of aliens in 18 unique levels and save mankind from annihilation is art or is not. He is going for the kill, and good for him.

As a student of the ‘school’ of design that often loudly and passionately advocates abdication of as much authorship as possible to the player, I guess I need to step up and help Ebert understand what he’s trying to say and what it means.

Ebert claims that because games – or indeed, any interactive medium, abdicate authorship to some degree to the player, that this at least diminishes, and potentially destroys the capacity of an interactive work (or at least a game) to be art. He also tugs gently at the idea that it is potentially in the interaction with the work that the artistry lies, and thus any artfulness in a game or other interactive work is not innate but rather, if it exists at all, is imbued by the audience.

Ebert is wrong for two important reasons.

First, there is authorship in games, no matter how much we abdicate. The form of the authorship is different, and hard to understand, but no matter how much we try to abdicate it, it will always remain. It is undeniably there, and it is inextricable from the act of creating a game.

Second, interacting with a work does not shape the work, it ‘only’ reveals it. Therefore, while there can be an art of expression in the way someone reveals the art, this does not necessarily diminish the art in the design of the work itself.

As both Ebert and Barker acknowledge, we could debate endlessly what is and is not art, or what is and is not a valid definition of art. For the sake of argument, I will accept Ebert’s roughly stated thesis that art requires authorship. In fact, I actually agree with him. I think he just does not understand where authorship lies in games.

Here is how it works:

• I am able to express my ideas, thoughts and feelings through the design of interactive systems
• Because a game is a complete formal system, the entire possible range of outputs from those systems is determined by me
• People interact with those designed systems and receive the outputs I have determined
• People literate in the medium can reconstruct my ideas, thoughts and feelings by experiencing these outputs
• Therefore, by definition, there is an unbreakable chain between my ideas, thoughts and feelings and the player's experience – I author mechanics that yield deterministic outputs in the game dynamics that lead the player to experience the aesthetic I want them to experience (within a given tolerance)

Now – by way of clarifying this explanation as well as pre-empting some of the counter arguments, I’ll try to lay out the best and most valid ones.

The Epistemological Argument
First there is the epistemological argument – which counters by saying ‘how do you know you are able to express your thoughts and feelings in the design of interactive systems’. Believe it or not, this is the best argument, because the best rebuttal is simply to say ‘I just know it.’ You could ask ‘how do you know the sentence you are speaking is not nonsense?’. I know because I understand it. What I am expressing makes sense to me both intellectually and emotionally. If others do not understand it, it is not really a question of whether I am expressing myself, but rather one of whether I am expressing myself clearly.

Beyond the subjective epistemological edge of this argument there is a requirement that the audience be literate. Hieroglyphics can’t express anything to me, but clearly the people who wrote in them had the capacity to express themselves, and they knew it. In the end, while this is a compelling argument, it degenerates quickly to a purely epistemological one, and arguing on that front is not going to enhance anybody’s understanding of the issue of authorship in games. I’d like to think even Ebert is not interested in pursuing this argument any further.

The Argument to the Incompleteness of Authorship
The next argument is whether or not it is, in fact, true that the entire possible range of outputs from a games’ systems are really determined by me. Well, honestly, no – they are not. Games are extraordinarily complex, and there are many outputs which are not literally determined precisely by me.

If we were to conduct a sort of inverse Turing Test and put me in a room and have me attempt to return the exact same outputs (ignoring ridiculous factors such as speed and precision of calculation) to a player playing Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory as he or she would receive from an Xbox… well, I would fail to pass myself off as an Xbox running SC:CT. I did not write every line of code in the game, nor do I have a complete comprehension of that code. Therefore, the argument could be made that my authorship of the game is only approximate, or incomplete.

The rebuttal to this argument lies in a comparison to film or to music or to any other collaborative artistic creation. Is every single note of a symphony perfectly determined by the composer? Is every single photon of light that enters the retina of every single viewer of a film determined by a director. No. There is noise in these systems too – some of it comes from the collaboration of others, and some of it comes from random noise. We do not deny Ode to Joy its status as art because it is playfully manipulated by a conductor, nor because the 3rd clarinet breaks a reed. It is the same with games. The outputs are broadly determined by me and heavily formalized by a large crew of people working with me to deliver on a promised aesthetic. Sometimes we make mistakes, and there are bugs. Even mediocre art can tolerate this approximate or incomplete authorship, so I am forced to assert that games can too.

The Arguments from Noise and Nonsense
The next argument would be that audiences cannot reconstruct the meaning I intend them to by way of interacting with systems. At very least there is a legitimate challenge here in saying "maybe they could reconstruct it, but they can also construct so many random meanings or contrary meanings, or generally just bring so much noise into the experience as to dilute the meaning to the point where it is not legible."

This is an interesting point, but again, this is not unlike other works of art. People can watch Citizen Kane and fast-forward the ‘boring parts’. They can watch it in ten sittings or fall asleep during parts of it and forget what it’s about. This does not strip the film of its status. So, yes, I would concede that because (some) games offer the player so many ways to play, players might well ‘miss’ the meaning, but I don’t think the likeliness of missing the meaning should determine the artfulness of the work. There are some paintings hanging in far away back rooms of the Louvre that would likely take four hours of walking full speed non-stop to get to – this does not diminish their artfulness. If the audience does not participate with the work they may never perceive the art, but that does not mean it is not there.

And what about those nonsensical interactions? The argument here is similar to the one above, and suggests that people can interact with games in all kinds of silly ways that don’t support or develop the meaning the creator intends them to experience. That’s true. I can play GTA 3 purely as a racing game, without ever doing any of the non-racing missions. How does that support the game’s central meaning (which I take to be about freedom and consequence)? Well, the answer is, it doesn’t. But hold on… I can also use War and Peace to prop up the broken leg of my couch, or view Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans in a pitch black room and then say I don’t get the message. The point is that the audience must always interact with a work on some level (in games, this is very literalized), but their ability to interact with a work in nonsensical ways does not diminish or destroy the art.

You could say that in the Tolstoy example, the book is not being read, and in the Warhol example, the painting is not being viewed – but in my GTA example, the game is being played… and that’s the difference. I would actually simply say that is inaccurate. When you’re only playing one tiny part of GTA, you’re not really playing it at all, any more than you are reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula if you are only reading the sexy bits.

The Argument from Legitimacy
Another argument against the existence of real authorship in games is the argument about the legitimacy of the kind of authorship I am talking about. In his responses to Barker, Ebert says:

“If you can go through "every emotional journey available," doesn't that devalue each and every one of them? Art seeks to lead you to an inevitable conclusion, not a smorgasbord of choices.”

In other words, he is questioning the nature of an authorship focused on providing a single perspective, versus an authorship that affords the player a range of perspectives.

I agree with Ebert that there is a difference in these two kinds of authorship. Romeo and Juliet is one love story. The play gives us a specific and authored understanding of what Shakespeare wants us to think about love in this specific case, between these two specific characters, in this specific set of circumstances. But Ebert is wrong to suggest that games – in affording a different kind of authorship somehow do not lead to inevitable conclusions, or that they offer a simple ‘smorgasbord’ wherein ‘every emotional journey’ is somehow possible.

In a sense, the kind of authorship in a movie or a play requires an inductive approach to understanding the meaning. If I start with the specific love of two star-cross’d teenagers in Renaissance Verona whose families despise one another, and then try to generalize what love means, I am likely to end up with a lot of useless conclusions. It’s an inductive and error-prone process to move from the specific to the general. With all of the inductive errors possible, what can I truly understand about love in general from Romeo and Juliet alone? I could reasonably induce that real love can only exist in the convoluted set of circumstances of the play where one lover drinks a sleeping potion, and the other - distraught at seeing their love 'dead' - suicides with poison, so that the first can then prove their love equal and true by also drinking poison on awakening.

Certainly that would be an absurd notion of love, and that problem with induction is fundamentally why we continue to write love stories at a breathtaking rate… because when you are providing singular examples of love, and trying to facilitate the audience feeling love, you will always have room for more examples. You can write unique and powerful love stories forever and never exhaust the infinite scope of the material ‘love’. Examples piled on examples forever will never pile up to infinity. Regardless – and for good reasons – this ‘inductive’ form of artistic expression is the kind of authorship that we see in most media (and it is wonderous).

In games, it is different. The artist does not only create the specific case of the convicted criminal suddenly set free when his prison transfer bus is ambushed… it does not only tell the story of one criminal learning about the importance of liberty and the consequences of unchecked freedom. The artist is also capable of creating an entire expressive system space that explores a potential infinity of different notions of freedom and liberty. Where most other media require the audience to induce their meaning, games afford the audience at least the possibility of deducing their meaning.

In other media, ‘supporting material’ that is coherent with the central themes of the work is pushed to the side in a B-plot… in games, this supporting material affords the artist ways to illuminate the meaning from many, many possible directions, allowing the player to explore the meaning the artist is trying to provide. Potentially, because the game designer is able to express himself in systems rather than in examples, infinities can be examined.

Now, I guess this is kind of hard to wrap your head around, but surely this is a concept Ebert can understand. Many filmmakers, from Taratino to Inarritu to Haggis and dozens more have been increasingly attempting to explore stories from multiple angles in an attempt to mimic – in a medium severely limited for this purpose – what games can do innately. If Haggis’ Best Picture winning Crash was 100 hours long, and contained 100 different interconnected plots all echoing the same themes of racial tension from different perspectives, would it suddenly lose its status as art? It probably wouldn’t be a very good movie, because 100 hours of movie is painful. In any case, no matter how long you make Crash, you will never fully explore the domain of the themes of racial tension in modern America. 100 hours is just 50x what the movie already offers, and is no closer to the infinite depth of the theme than is the existing 2 hour film.

GTA: San Andreas on the other hand – which I played for a good 100 hours or so, gave me such a world transforming view of racial tension and inequity in early 1990’s California, that I have been shaken to the core, and have been forced to re-examine a huge part of my world view.

In a response to a reader letter dated November 27, 2005 Ebert said:

"To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers."

Well, here you go. Let me state it clearly and for the record:

Taken as wholes, GTA: San Andreas is a more compelling, meaningful and important work of art than Crash.

Admittedly, not everyone will agree, and admittedly, I have a high level of literacy in reading systems. The point here is not to enter a subjective debate about what is a superior work of art, rather the point is to say that – yes – if a game is offering a smorgasbord of unrelated mechanics that are neither supporting each other nor driving toward a coherent theme, if they are not providing the player with a broad range of perspectives on a specific meaning that the creator is trying to express, then Ebert is right.

But if a game creator does have something specific he is trying to communicate, and he designs his game well, and the mechanics and dynamics are coherently supporting that aesthetic, and providing the player – more or less whatever he does (assuming it is not wilfully nonsensical) – with insight into that meaning, then yeah… it’s art.

The Argument to Migrated Authorship
The final argument that I see remaining is the one that asks ‘who is the artist here anyway?’ Ebert says:

“I believe art is created by an artist. If you change it, you become the artist.”

This is a much easier point to tackle simply because there is a fallacy in Ebert’s argument. He is implying that interacting with a work is the same as changing it. But this is not true. My ‘paint’ is not ‘what the player does’. My paint is ‘the rules that govern what the player can do’. The way the player expresses himself is a form of artistic expression (or a least it can be), but it is impossible for him to change the rules or even to express himself outside the domain of the rules that I have created. And it is not simply a case of saying ‘people who make paint are necessarily artists, while painters can be artists’. I do more than ‘make paint’. If all I did was 'make paint', I would concede the point in Ebert's response to his reader where he states games cannot move "beyond craftsmanship to the stature of art."

If I created ‘magic paints’ that could only be used to paint flowers that appeared highly vaginal, would I be less an artist than Georgia O’Keefe? While some painters using my paints could make crappy paintings of vaginal flowers that were not artful, and others could create beautiful masterpieces – I think it would remain clear that I was an artist for having created ‘paints that constrained the set of possible paintings achievable to those that dealt with a set of themes I had chosen’. There is a statement there - a statement about flowers and vaginas (and paint) and it is as important as any statement in any of O'Keefe's works. It may even be as important as all of the statements made in all of O'Keefe's works combined... but we don't need to get ahead of ourselves here.

The best analogy here, again, is that of a symphony. There is an art in the composing of the symphony itself – the creation of the song and the recording of the instructions for reproducing that song using a symphony orchestra. Yet, because of the comparative fuzziness of the transcription, there is often a high degree of malleability in interpretation of those instructions, and the ability to interpret those instructions well and to facilitate an orchestra to actually play the symphony is an artistic task. There are ways to do it non-artistically. Technically, a metronome and sheet music could do the job of conducting an orchestra, but we make a lot of room for conductors because in their art, they can add a tremendous amount of beauty to what is already a beautiful work.

Ebert’s fallacy extends to suggest that Ode to Joy is not a work of art once a composer conducts it, and that the conductor's art is not art for long anyway, because as soon as a musician plays it, he or she becomes the artist. The reality is, they can all be artists, and when an artfully composed work is conducted by an artful conductor, and played by artful musicians, the full perspective of the work is truly appreciable.

It is the same with a game and a player. Technically, a game could be played by a computer – many games are played by computers. While the beauty of the particular play experience might be diminished or even destroyed by doing it that way, it does not diminish or destroy the artfulness inherent to the game itself.

Such is the relationship between the designer and the player as I see it. The designer is the composer, the player is the conductor. The orchestra is the hardware and the sheet music is the software.

Conclusion
I think that about sums up my rebuttal to Mr. Ebert. When he made his first statements months ago, I was mostly just upset and insulted, but with his latest clarification of those original statements, he has not only looked more carefully at the real and relevant question, but he has opened the door to have the real nature of authorship in games described. I hope – should he happen past here and read this – he’ll finally understand the scope of the issue and admit that he’s wrong.

#$%& Fun

How the hell did I miss this?

A year or so ago it started to dawn on me that there were problems with the notion of fun. At first, I started ot think that maybe 'fun' was merely a formal quality of games - the same way rhyme and meter were formal qualities of poetry. If that's true then perhaps fun is no more necessary in a game than rhyme and meter are in a poem. I wrestled with that idea for a good year, before I finally spoke about it in a round-about way at Futureplay.

Ultimately, the conclusion I came to is not that fun is a formal quality of games that we may or may not need - but rather that fun is a useless concept because it is too subjective.

The solution I proposed was to stop talking about fun and start talking about an 'axis of meaning' that has at one end 'distraction' and at the other end 'engagement'. I think this allows for a richer possibility space than does the notion of 'fun', and lets us talk about ways to design mechanics and dynamics that lead to a wider variety of aesthetic experiences for potential players.

Feel free to challenge this notion, because honestly, while I think it pushes in interesting directions, I don't think that's the end of it. Fun - while subjective - is still something a designer can iterate toward and provide feedback to programmers on until he gets it right, and will still yeild a moderate probability of delivering a good game in the end. Iterating on 'distraction and engagement' without regard for fun is - I expect - very likely to end up with shitty games as output. So there's something incomplete with the concept.

Anyway - while I was wrestling with this concept, and in particular doing first drafts of my Futureplay presentation in the first week of October, The Escapist was publishing supporting material without me even knowing it. I usually pop in a check out The Escapist every week, but I was a bit busy and stressed that week, and missed it.

I found the response to my presentation to be surprising. A lot of people really seemed to agree with what I was saying. So to find that Warren (whose opinion I respect greatly) was simultaneously coming to the same conclusions, even more suggests that there is something to this notion.

David Sirlin also picked up on Warren's article, and blogged about it here. He seems to agree that - at very least - fun is a weak concept, and that games do not need to be fun.

Tears of War

Probably by now, everyone has seen the new Gears of War trailer.

With apologies to the gang at Epic (without whose engine I would still be an unemployed writer), I'll be the first to admit that I've had some doubts about Gears. It's not that I don't think Gears will be a top-notch adrenaline-pumping shooter with probably the best visuals we will see on 360 this Christmas, and maybe this year. I know it will be that. In fact, I think it will be more than that.

I think the emphasis on using cover and out-maneuvering the enemy will be exceptionally well balanced, and will open the door for casual players to better appreciate some of the thrills of more tactical combat; combat that is as much (if not more) about movement and position as about circle-strafing and twitch-reflex head-shots. I think it might be the game that bridges the gap between Call of Duty and Brothers in Arms, opening the door for players in each niche to crossover, broadening both markets. At least that's how I've interpreted the promise of the game since I first saw it at E3 last year.

So what the hell am I talking about when I say 'I have my doubts about Gears'? Sadly, what I mean is that I'm getting bored of this game. Gears has the potential to be huge - drawing in the combined audience of Halo and GRAW with a perfect mix of run-and-gun and thinkin' man's combat. But in the end, I've played this game before. I've played it dozens of times. And while Gears promises more, the 'more' that it promises is more refinement.

Then comes the trailer.

This trailer promises something totally revolutionary. It promises me that in playing Gears of War, I will experience something meaningful, something that is unique to Gears and that is not promised by any other shooter ever made. Specifically, it promises me that between iterations of the main gameplay loop (combat sequences) there will be a second gameplay loop in which I will feel an overwhealming sense of loss. I will interact with the ruins of my world and feel what a terrible shame it is to have lived beyond the end of a great culture that has accomplished so much. It promises to put me in situations where I will be tempted to indulge that sorrow and slip into self-indulgent melancholy before yanking me back into what might be a pointless battle for my own survival. Will it deliver on that promise? Well, I'm willing to shell out my eighty bucks to find out. At very least, I expect to get the refinement of shooter mechanics, and maybe I'll get more.

Now - some of you will say 'all that crap you're asking for is a waste of time - Gears will move 4 million units and make 150 million dollars without it, so why should they bother?' Others will say 'the kind of emotional connection you think the trailer promises is impossible to acheive'.

You'd be wrong on both counts, I think. To respond one at a time:

It's a waste of time becase it will sell without it.

True - it will sell millions. But to whom will it sell millions? It will sell millions to the same old collection of 18-34 year old males that every other great shooter has always sold to. I'm 34. I'll buy it. But as I said, I'm getting bored of it, and likely a year from now I will have just given up completely on these games. And millions of guys my age are probably in the same boat. And millions have been in the past, and millions more will be in the future. If Gears delivers on the promise of this trailer, it will not only move 4 million units to the 18-34 market, it will move another million to to the rapidly swelling 35-45 market, who have been blowing away aliens with machineguns for like 15 years. We still like blowing away aliens with machineguns, but we want to experience something more than just that. We want to experience what this trailer promises, and we will line up and give you money for delivering that experience. And we have a fucking shitload of money. I, for one, would pay twice the price for that kind of experience - yet at the same time, I'm pissed that I have to pay 10 bucks more for the same old experience I was getting 5 years, 10 years, 15 years ago.

That kind of emotional connection is impossible to deliver.

Wrong again. All it takes is to systemically enable the same interactions that make me feel these things in the trailer, give the player goals that push him into using those interactions, and then give the player feedback through Marcus that embodies those interactions with meaning.

From what I have seen, I am certain the player will develop a powerful empathic connection with Marcus. The way he is animated into the world makes him a strong bridge between the player and the virtual world. Because of this, the player will feel a powerful psychosomatic connection to Marcus. I know this because I've seen it happen to players playing Splinter Cell. The accuracy and quality of Sam's animation glues him to the world, physicalizing the player's intent and generating agency. When the player presses 'A' to open a door, the door doesn't just swing open magically. Sam grabs the doorknob and turns it, and swings his arm forward - with the entire kinetic chain of his body movement driving the motion. Pressing 'A' becomes a physical action that bonds the player to the world through Sam, it is no longer merely a conceptual action that abstracts the world and allows the player to experience it mentally.

If the player has a powerful empathic connection with Marcus because of a psychosomatic link created by the animation, then the designer can make the player literally feel what Marcus feels. How do we make Marcus feel? And how do we show the player what Marcus feels?

We make Marcus feel by giving him objectives and interactions that draw his character into emotional spaces. Interactions like picking up a piece of rubble and revealing that what used to be something beautiful is now destroyed. Of course, to make him do that, you have to give him objectives to do it, or reward him for doing it on his own. From what I know of the story, Marcus lost his father. If there was a mystery around that event that Marcus was trying to solve in addition to saving the world, then we'd have a motivation to have him interact with small objects that could be representative of that theme of wasted beauty. Give the player side-objectives to solve that mystery - forcing him to interact with the clues in the mystery, and then you can make Marcus feel (generally you'd do this with authored content so that when he interacts with object X at story beat Y, he will be feeling emotion Z, but you don't have to - you could make Marcus's emotional space dynamic, taking constant low-level feedback from the game and using it to generate his emotional state at any given time, so that any given interaction with any given object is going to reflect the players experiences more than the authored emotional state of Marcus).

Once you make Marcus feel, you show the player what he's feeling by placing those objects in front of mirrors - or in the case of the trailer - reflecting pools. Facial animation shows how he feels, is reflected back to the player, and made real through the psychosomatic bond. Circle complete.

If you really want to deliver the promise of trying to draw the player into self-indulgent melancholy, then jerking him out of it, then you only need to layer in a few mechanics. Gears already offers a damage power-up if you 'hot-reload' (I think it's called) - where a successful micro-game performance during the reload animation makes the bullets in your next clip do extra damage. What if instead of putting that mechanic on the reload, it was put on the interaction with these objects. Marcus can dwell on the tragic loss while trying to figure out what happened to his father by looking at bits of ruined junk - but in the facial animation there is a 'sweet spot'  - drop the object just at the right moment when Marcus is angry, but before he slips into melancholy, and now he does extra damage because he's pissed. Same mechanic, just transposed onto different objects where the player will be constantly having to confront Marcus's emotional space, and experiencing it himself due to the psychosomatic bond.

You could even put different power-ups on those emotions that Marcus is feeling... maybe under certain curcumstances the power-up the player gets from allowing Marcus to drift into melancholy is more valuable than the power-up he gets from being angry. Maybe there are increasing or diminishing returns in the nature of those power-ups over time - baiting the player into self-indulgent melancholy by proxy.

Of course, I'm pulling this mechanic out of my ass. Just as any other mechanic, creating compelling dynamics and using them to deliver meaningful aesthetics is a question of constant tuning and balancing. It's nowhere near as easy as this... but the notion that it's impossible is complete and utter bullshit.

Next-gen is here. All that remains is for someone to make a next-gen game. Hopefully Gears of War will be the first one.

Post Futureplay Podcast Interview

Dave Brodbeck, a psychology professor at Algoma U, who I met at Futureplay also does a podcast. He grabbed me after my keynote there and we did a little interview. You can listen to it here, or download it for direct from this link.

Good questions and good interview, thanks Dave. It's good to have a less formal forum to discuss the stuff I was talking about in the presentation. I think the interview helps put a lot of the issues I was driving at in perspective. Three cheers for dialogue, which is better than monologue... kind of like games.

Futureplay and Toronto

Just got back from the Futureplay 2006 conference in London, Ontario yesterday, where I got to give my first ever keynote. That was pretty exciting. The other keynote speakers were Justin Roche, Sheri Graner Ray, Don Daglow, and Ken Perlin, so very flattering to be among that roster.

I gave the same presentation the following night to the Toronto IGDA chapter, who quickly managed to get up a summary, here (thanks to Jason MacIsaac and Josh Druckman for all their hard work) Some cool folks there I got to chat with over beers after.

It was also good to give a quick plug to Ubi's currently running National Game Design Challenge. I missed a chance to blog about it during my recent trip to Vancouver when we launched the contest and associated promotion and recruiting campaign, but yeah getting to bounce around Canada with Fred made for a fun (though busy) fall.