Click Nothing

Cost of Entry

Damn. It's sure costing me a lot of money to leave this blog sitting here, doing nothing.

I havent even had the time to get my GDC slides from 2011 up yet. I have wanted to go back and clean up the end of the talk, as the conclusion never really hung together the way I wanted.

Looks like I might be giving that talk again in a couple places in the not too distant future which would force me to fix the wishy-washy ending (and convince you all that I really, truly am a communist), and then hipefully get the thing up here (maybe as video??!!) shortly after that.

We'll see what happens between now and year end...

 

Click Nothing Tour 2009 - Part IV

Savannah.

It's hot here - like 25 degrees and sweltering humid. Didn't expect that as I'd been keeping an eye on the temperature in the weeks before we left, but what can you do.

So far, things have been going very well. After GameX, I did three big schools pretty much back-to-back. First was CMU in Pittsburgh, then MIT in Boston and after that, NYU in Manhattan. Each time I had the pleasure of getting different tours, meeting and talking to lots of students and seeing what they were working on, and each night following the talk, I was lucky enough to get to grab dinner with some faculty or students or local devs or all of the above. So I've gotten to see a lot of cool stuff, and meet a lot of cool people, and eat a lot of great food (dessert at Rouge Tomate - check it out if you're in NY)

The talk seems to go over well, even though it's a pretty hardcore philosophical talk. Anyway, it was really intended for Masters students, so it's not a typical 'general public' audience, and - judging by the questions that I'm getting grilled with - it shows.

Tonight, we've got tickets to the Savannah Film Festival. Sounds like we'll getto see Woody Harrelson premiere his latest film (not the zombie one). After that, another fancy dinner at The Pink House - while we watch the kids wander around trick-or-treating in their ghost town of a village.

Tomorrow I give the talk here at SCAD in Savannah, and then Tuesday I'm off to Atlanta for the last stop.

Thanks to everyone who has showed up so far, and I look forward to meeting more of you in the next few days.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

My GDC Schedule

Honestly, as much as this is gonna look like a plug for all these interesting talks - mostly what this is, is easy access for me so I can see what talks I am going to and when becuase this is the easiest way to make this stuff quickly accessible from my phone.

Those of you who consequently get an endorsement - hey lucky you :)

(Parties, lunches and other stuff not listed for my own protection against the hordes of hot chicks who stalk me relentlessly, but also so I can crash your party without you knowing it in advance... that's right - I'm talkin' to you Microsoft!)

Monday, March 23rd, 2009

Game Design Workshop
Full Day Tutorial – (Two Days)
Date/Time: Monday (March 23, 2009), 10:00am — 6:00pm
Location (room): 2020, 2022, 2024

Tuesday, March 24th, 2009

Game Design Workshop
Full Day Tutorial – (Two Days)
Date/Time:  Tuesday (March 24, 2009)   10:00am — 6:00pm
Location (room): 2020, 2022, 2024

IGDA Members Party
Date: Tuesday, March 24th
Time: 8pm to 1am
Location: Westin Hotel, Metropolitan ballroom, 50 Third Street, San Francisco

Wednesday, March 25th, 2009

Fault Tolerance: From Intentionality to Improvisation
Speaker: Clint Hocking (Creative Director, Ubisoft)
Date/Time: Wednesday (March 25, 2009)   10:30am — 11:30am
Location (room): Room 2002, West Hall

Breathing LIFE into an Open World
Speaker: Scott Phillips (Design Architect/Lead Designer, THQ\Volition)
Date/Time: Wednesday (March 25, 2009)   12:00pm — 1:00pm
Location (room): Room 2020, West Hall

IGDA VIP Luncheon
Date: Wednesday, March 25th
Time: 1:15pm to 2:15pm
Location: Westin Hotel (aka The Argent), Metropolitan Ballroom III, 50 Third Street

Making Friends is Hard: Social Mechanics in Contemporary Design
Speaker: Alex Hutchinson (Creative Director, Electronic Arts Montreal)
Date/Time: Wednesday (March 25, 2009)   2:30pm — 3:30pm
Location (room): Room 131, North Hall

alternate
The Game Design Challenge: My First Time
Speaker: Panel
Date/Time: Wednesday (March 25, 2009) 2:30pm — 3:30pm
Location (room): Room 135, North Hall

Meaning, Aesthetics, and User-Generated Content
Speaker: Chris Hecker (Technology Fellow, Maxis/Electronic Arts)
Date/Time: Wednesday (March 25, 2009)   4:00pm — 5:00pm
Location (room): Room 135, North Hall

Nominee Reception
Date/Time: Wednesday, March 25, 2009, 5:30pm
Locations: Esplanade Room, South Hall, Moscone Center, San Francisco

9th Annual Game Developers Choice Awards
Date/Time: Wednesday (March 25, 2009)   6:30pm — 8:30pm
Location (room): Esplanade Room

 
Thursday, March 26th, 2009

GDC Microtalks - One Hour, Ten Speakers, Unlimited Ideas
Speaker: Panel
Date/Time: Thursday (March 26, 2009)   9:00am — 10:00am
Location (room): Room 2007, West Hall

From CS to L4D: Creating Replayable Coop Experiences
Speaker: Michael Booth (Game Designer/Developer, Valve)
Date/Time: Thursday (March 26, 2009)   1:30pm — 2:30pm
Location (room): Room 2007, West Hall

alternate
Physical Play: for Interaction, Collaboration and Creativity
Speaker: David Merrill (MIT Media Lab)
Date/Time: Thursday (March 26, 2009)   1:30pm — 2:30pm
Location (room): Room 130, North Hall

Helping Your Players Feel Smart: Puzzles as User Interface
Speaker: Randy Smith (Game Designer, EA)
Date/Time: Thursday (March 26, 2009)   3:00pm — 4:00pm
Location (room): Room 2014, West Hall

Post Mortem: Mission Architect for City of Heroes
Speaker: Joe Morrissey (Senior Game Designer, NCsoft)
Date/Time: Thursday (March 26, 2009)   4:30pm — 5:30pm
Location (room): Room 3007, West Hall

 
Friday, March 27th, 2009

Game Writers' Round Table: Techniques, Tips, and Concerns
Speaker: Richard Dansky (Manager of Design/Writer, Red Storm Entertainment)
Date/Time: Friday (March 27, 2009)   9:00am — 10:00am
Location (room): Room 110, North Hall

Beyond Balancing: Using Five Elements of Failure Design to Enhance Player Experiences
Speaker: Jesper Juul (Lecturer / Researcher, Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab)
Date/Time: Friday (March 27, 2009)   10:30am — 10:50am
Location (room): Room 2022, West Hall

Paper Prototypes of SPORE
Speaker: Stone Librande (Game Designer, EA/Maxis)
Date/Time: Friday (March 27, 2009)   11:10am — 11:30am
Location (room): Room 2022, West Hall

The Human Play Machine
Speaker: Chaim Gingold (Designer, Levity lab)
Date/Time: Friday (March 27, 2009)   12:00pm — 1:00pm
Location (room): Room 2020, West Hall

alternate
Vast Narratives and Open Worlds, Part Deux -- Big Huge Problems
Speaker: Ken Rolston (Lead Designer, Big Huge Games), Mark Nelson (Lead Designer, Big Huge Games)
Date/Time: Friday (March 27, 2009)   12:00pm — 1:00pm
Location (room): Room 2007, West Hall

Destruction of Design
Speaker: Luke Schneider (Designer, Volition Inc)
Date/Time: Friday (March 27, 2009)   4:00pm — 5:00pm
Location (room): Room 2004, West Hall

alternate
Games Have Feelings Too!
Speaker: E. Daniel Arey (Chief Creative Officer, VisionArey Entertainment)
Date/Time: Friday (March 27, 2009)   4:00pm — 5:00pm
Location (room): Room 2022, West Hall

IGDA Montreal - Generations Talk

So last night I did my talk on 'The Next Generation of Gamer' at the IGDA Montreal chapter meeting. It was fun and I was glad to have a little more time to polish and practice it after having done the talk previously at Game Design Expo in Vancouver.

A lot of people asked me and emailed me regarding the slides - or even in some cases just the demographic  data I had pulled together and aggregated. Unfortunately, I'm not going to post the slides just yet. I will be giving the talk again at GDx in Savannah in mid-April so I don't want to post the slides until I have met my obligations to the conference there.

For those interested - expect to see the slides, the text of the presentation, as well as all the data I aggregated in pure form posted on or around the 25th of April. Also - a lot of people asked me specific questions about immersion - as coming to a better understanding of immersion was one of the challenges I pointed to in the talk. For those interested in immersion and my half-formed thoughts on it - I'll point you to the slides and text of the presentation I gave at GDC last year - linked over on the left (also here).

Finally - a shout-out to Matthew Gallant - fellow blogger and occasional commentor here (who probably would be more frequently here if I would more frequently post) - who I also often run into in the comment threads on a lot of other great blogs (linked on the bottom right). Thanks for stopping by to say hi, Matthew... sorry I got dragged away to interviews and we didn't get much of a chance to chat.