GDC - Part III - Third Best

So, I wanted to post some thoughts about my favorite GDC sessions and comment on some of the takeway. Unfortunately, this was such an excellent GDC, and I tend to post huge tracts anyway, that I think I had best not do it all in one post.

There are six sessions I wanna talk about in particular, so I'll do them two at a time, starting with my two 'third favorite' talks.

Chaim Gingold on Spore's Magic Crayon's

I thought Chaim's talk was engaging and thought provoking. Even better is that I'm not really entirely sure if I agree with the underlying principles. Basically - and maybe I'm getting it wrong here - but Chaim was saying we can use the computer to help the player make better decisions about (for example) where to put a foot. The reasoning is that it's better to have most people make pretty awesome creatures (or spaceships or buildings or whatever) than it is to have almost everyone be able to make shitty creatures, while an elite few make really awesome creatures. Thus, we give the computer rules that - for example - make sure all feet attach to the ground, or that eyes have bi-lateral symmetry or whatever.

Cool. Smart. Clearly the right way to do it. But at the same time, isn't it kind of like saying 'we should not allow the player to delete the door to the bathroom while his Sim is inside'? It seems to be a small but important step back from what I would expect from Maxis which would be - 'hey if the player wants to put the creature's feet on its head - why not?'

To me it's kind of like the old Lego 'problem'. Lots of kids who play with Lego make spaceships. So sometime in the '80s Lego made space Lego, which to a 9 year-old me seemed like the best invention since - well - since 'plain' Lego. Lego said 'kids wanna build spaceships, but our vanilla Lego bricks only do a mediocre job of that - let's make space bricks in blue and grey and black with lots of angles and cones'.

In effect, space Lego allowed more people (including me) to do a better job of the thing they were trying to do anyway, which was build spaceships. And that is exactly what I took Chaim's talk to be about. But in my mind, there is a cost associated with this. Call it a lost opportunity cost. Call it pandering to the lowest common denominator. I don't know. The point is that a little bit of imagination is killed when the step from 'pile of Lego' to 'spaceship' is short-looped with more affordant Lego... maybe.

It's possible - I suppose - that the imagination isn't 'lost' it's just spend solving different, higher order problems about making 'awesome spaceships' instead of solving the more trivial and less interesting (and less entertaining) problems of just getting something that feels like a spaceship. I'm not sure. Part of me wants to believe that's true, but another part of me looks at Lego today and says - shit, Lego today sure looks a lot easier and a lot less fun than it did when I was a kid. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm a cynic.

Anyway - the talk was brilliant and I learned a lot from it. Questions of this sort are overly harsh and nit-picky. Mostly I think the way they're solving the (very hard) sorts of problems that Spore seems full of looks pretty fucking ingenius to me. So don't let me get in the way.

The Game Design Challenge - The Needle and Thread Interface

So 'tied' with Chaim's talk was Eric Zimmerman's Game Design Challenge. Having been up there before, I know for real how brutally hardcore this challenge is, and to be completely honest, in my opinion this was the hardest one yet - I think it may actually just have been unreasonably hard. Not to be all flakey and waffly about it, but I really think all three of the contestants did an admirable job under what seemed the direst of circumstances. The most important take-away for me was after David and Alexey had both gone, and before Harvey presented, Eric pointed out that seeing the differences of approach between Alexey's drive for elegance and David's 'guts+fun mechanics' approach was worth the show right there. And it was no surprise after that statement that Harvey's solution was clever and strove to say something meaningful.

While Alexey won, I think he had the +2 Fan Favorite Bonus on his roll. His design was clearly elegant, and he was obviously handicapped with the language and powerpoint barriers - it's possible that Stitch and Cross would be the most compelling game in a decade - it was hard to tell. I did really like his observation that because the moves were stitched, that every second move was a hidden move. He used the mechanics of the interface to generate the classical game theoretical concept of hidden information. Crafty.

As far as demonstrating the most robust understanding of the domain of the challenge, I actually think David Jaffe should have won it. I thought the 'paper airplane game' part of the design was weak, but his understanding of and utilization of the interface was the strongest. Things like detecting the topology of a fold in the fabric by passing the needle through two points simultaneously - fuck that was brilliant. Detecting bad stitches and good stitches to determine the mechanical strength of attachments to virtual hardpoints was also brilliant, though it's a clear example of what I mean when I say that, while his demonstrated understanding of the interface was stunning, his resultant design was a little weak and forced. I don't particularly think it would be good design to make the player really spend hours making strong stiches in order to have his virtual plane have more hit points.

Harvey's game was the most believably possible as an actual game in my opinion, but I felt he overreached a bit by trying to generalize the controller to all games, and ended up with what was mostly a remapping of conventional controls to something kind of like a touch-pad with some added functionality. Some of the unique gameplay elements he designed to more robustly support the controller (like stitching bits of fabric to your doll to give it new powers) were great.

Anyway, like I said, the Challenge was (possibly) unreasonably hard this year. Keep in mind that when I did it, the driving focus of my talk was about hunting for good constraints because I found the challenge too open in many ways. That clearly did not seem to be the case at all this year and I think all three of these fucking geniuses had to wrestle a little freedom out of a very harsh constraint.

Tomorrow or the next day I'll try and get around to posting my two 'second favorite' sessions. I think both of them will be surprising.

Comments

[Brett Douville]

It's funny -- I spoke with three different people and got three different impressions of who the "real" winner was.

I tend to agree with you that Jaffe had the deepest understanding of the interface -- he clearly really thought about it. But I think he was hampered by a couple of factors -- first, he went first, which is always tough. But more importantly, he lacked showmanship -- he was a bit whiny with Eric about which of his concessions to the designers he could and couldn't have, especially when Harvey showed his stretched version, and he was way too self-deprecating -- a little more confidence on his part would have helped tremendously.

Compare that with Harvey, who had very strong applause (very close to Pajitnov's, from where I was sitting), who came up with a subversive but playing-to-the-crowd story with oil paint filtered pictures of our government's leaders with dark names like "The Lord of Chains". He ended really strong, even if I was a bit lost with his remapping of the controller and was never really clear on how the game itself was supposed to function (indeed, he spent most of his talk describing the process by which he came up with his idea). What I particularly liked about the, though, was his reliance on influences from pretty far outside of game -- Native American snowshoes is pretty well off the beaten track for most devs.

I blogged about that a while back (http://www.brettdouville.com/mt-archives/2005/07/discussion_disp.html ). I love to see influences beyond the pretty limited set we tend to see in videogames, and I'd love to see more.

It seems unfair to criticize without offering something up. My "I've thought about this for about ten minutes" design would be to use the needles and their velocity/penetration info to do a really neat kite flying game -- tugging the needles through would give you the feeling of tension that a kite string gives you, and if the kite were flagging, you'd want to give it a tug. For advanced users, you could use dual-stringed kites (or perhaps even advance to kite-boarding) -- and do tricks and all that. Naturally, this would have to probably ship with the device, since it's probably not $50 worth of game ;)

B-

PS Still looking for that RSS feed... :)

[Scott Jon Siegel]

Call me crazy, but I actually found Harvey's game concept to be oddly compelling. Yes, it was tongue-in-cheek, but the idea of a game based in magic-realism, playing a little girl in Iraq who ventures from home to find her father, had a strange effect on me. That's an RPG that I want to get lost in, one where the little girl relies on her doll to fight her battles, and stitches him up using the skills her father taught her. One where the actual war and its sides are unimportant, as the player only wants the little girl to not lose her family. It's a fantastic story, taking place in fantasy but still grounded in reality by its parallel to the war. I'd play it.

[Nikita Mikros]

I usually really enjoy the challenge, but I felt Eric went too far this time. It's supposed to be challenging not impossible! That said, for me Alexey won, hands down. It was the only game that really took advantage of the needle and thread mechanism and imho could actually work as a game. That said, throw away the needle and thread interface and Harvey's game is the one I'd personally want to play. Playing a little girl struggling to survive in Iraq seems like fertile ground for interesting IF.

[James O]

I agree that Jaffe demonstrated the greatest technological understanding of the challenge, but I have to differ re. Mssrs. Pajitnov and Smith. While Jaffe pushed the boundaries of what the technology was capable of, Pajitnov appeared to take more into consideration what could mechanically be done with the medium. Pajitnov's game was the only one of the three, in my view, that was not just compelling, but compelling specifically because of the interface (primarily because of the allowance for hidden information and bluffing mindgames.) Jeffe's game, on the other hand, didn't seem especially enhanced by the interface (we can make paper airplanes just fine with real paper, and to me I don't think the game would be any less fun if the stitching-on-parts bit was replaced by a different minigame to weld stuff onto hardpoints.) Of course, I'm probably a bit biased because I enjoy elegant abstract games, and Pajitnov's game was the only direct head-to-head competitive game.

Smith's game actually disappointed me a little bit; while his presentation on exploring the possibilities and finding inspiration was quite fascinating, it seemed that his end result was ultimately just a been-done adventure game, now burdened with an extremely awkward interface that took very little advantage of the hardware (his bits about sewing stuff onto the teddy bear seemed rather forced.) The narrative aspect of it seemed a bit sophomoric as well.

[Ben]

Since everyone else is discussing the game design challenge, I'll be the odd man out and comment on the Spore session.

I'll be blunt and straight up say that I think they are making the right choice in taking some level of control away from the user in order to make the tools more accesible to the masses. I believe that is the future of user generated content. These participatory systems can only survive for so long off the sweat of the lead users -- the casual players need to step up too and create content if there is any hope of achieving true critical mass of created content (is that a good thing? well, that is a discussion in and of itself, but I think yes). I'll go one step further and say that I believe the creation of content to seed these systems needs to be a meta-game -- it needs to be fun and stand on its own legs as a form of entertainment. The crysis level editor is surely powerful, and some advanced users are going to make some amazing maps, but for most people the learning curve will be too steep to ever make creating levels 'fun'.

I think LineRider had the right idea -- incorporate the creation of the content into the actual 'play' itself. My bet is on LittleBigWorld as being the launching point for kicking the long tail of user-generated game content up by an exponential degree.

[Steve gaynor]

I loved how Pajitnov's design was the only one that referenced the nature of the interface itself in the end product. Both Harvey and Jaffe's designs seemed to be trying to make something fairly unrelated out of the base elements (an RPG, or an airplane simulator,) while Pajitnov's design was wholly about actually sewing with a needle, thread, and cloth. It was incredibly pure and found a way to extend the act of sewing onto the screen and make simple, competitive fun out of that act.