So for some people, these two talks might come out of the blue. Both of them were in tough slots, and both of them were in small rooms. One was about level design and one was about writing. Two topics that speakers have a hard time impressing me with. But as was the case with most of GDC this year the talks surprised me with how great they were.
Susan O'Connor on Storytelling Challenges in Gears of War
The only thing I didn't like about this talk was the part of the title I omitted from above. Grrrr. I don't even care if a literal Hero with a Thousand Faces was central to the talk... simply reading those words makes me wanna punch someone. Campbell's book seems to have as firm a stranglehold on game writing as Tolkien's books have on game design. I'm fucking sick of magic elves, and I'm fucking sick of Campbell. Oops - rant over... back to the talk.
Actually, I don't have a lot to say in particular about the talk, other than to point out that it was illustrative of the fact that O'Connor is in the camp of game writers who 'get it'. Writing for games is not about having better stories or plots. It's not about having better, less cliched characters and dialogue. Yes we need all of that too - but it's not about that. Writing for games is not even really about writing at all. It's about mechanics. More specifically, game writing is structuralist and the structure of a game story is malleable.
Susan gets that, and was able to address a handful of writing challenges she confronted in Gears where her awareness of this fact clearly saved what was otherwise a collection of cliche characters in a cliche sort of story from falling totally flat. I'll be the first to admit that Gears - for all of its cliches, rises above them in many places. Obviously design-wise, artistically, graphically and visually it is worlds better than any of its competition and the same goes for its story, largely because O'Connor was clearly able to identify levers in the structure that she could pull to get me to laugh or smile or growl along with or in juxtaposition to my avatar in (mostly) the right ways.
Brian Upton on Narrative Landscapes
Talk about a tough slot... last hour of the last day. I almost didn't even go to this for a number of reasons; I was exhausted and it was 'another level design talk' - I have not had much luck with level design talks at GDC. But Upton was lead designer on the first two Rainbow Six games, which I played the shit out of back in the late 90's, and the R6 games sure had unusual level design. I've also had the luxury of seeing that level design sensibility evolve over the years with countless of my co-workers working on different Rainbow titles down the hall from me, so I figured I'd give it a shot. It was great. If anyone can pinpoint Brian's slides, let me know.
The heart of Upton's talk was an analysis of Kevin Lynch's seminal treatise on urban planning, The Image of the City (which I have yet to read). Specifically, Upton contextualized Lynch's concepts of Paths, Edges, Nodes, Districts and Landmarks to make them relevant to level design, then looked at the inherent dramatic and mechanical values of these concepts. He showed how we can use Lynch's ideas to conceptualize our designed spaces (whether interior or exterior) to get the player to experience specific feelings when encountering these spaces. The presentation was long on details and examples, and I'm not going to throw up my lenghty notes here, other than to just comment on one.
He used the example of doorways in Rainbow Six as Edges, and pointed out how Edge transitions are full of dramatic tension. Clearly that's the case in every Rainbow game from the original to Vegas. I did wonder (and I asked the question after the presentation) whether Upton felt that with improvements in AI and changes in mechanics and in overall focus over the course of the Rainbow series of games had altered the impact of the Edge transitions at doors in Rainbow.
In early Rainbow games, the teammate AI was particularly vulnerable at doors. Partly this was 'realism' - from the folks I've spoken to who know about this stuff, a huge percentage of casualties in CQB situations occur at a doorway - but partly this was also an AI failing - getting four AI characters to move through a doorway and cover their angles correctly, with all of the animation, navigation and synchronization required is a very, very hard AI problem.
In playing the original Rainbow Six, doors were certainly dramatic... but they were also potentially very frustrating because a minor AI failure could turn six guys into six corpses in point-six seconds. Any time I took a team through a door in the original R6, it was a gamble that I would fail the mission. In the intervening years, and over the course of several titles, the problem of having AI breach a door effectively seems to be completely solved. At the same time, however, the designers of more recent Rainbow games have also changed the way the games' encounters tend to unfold. They have de-emphasized the 'binary', or 'life-or-death' nature of doors.
Breaching a room successfully in the early Rainbow games tended to end with a pile of dead terrorists. Failing tended to end with a pile of dead Rainbow and a reload. Now, rooms in Rainbow tend to be much more analogue. The 'breaching' of the room is just the first 'act' - if you want - in each room, the 'clearing' of the room is the second act. Often there are (scripted) reinforcements, or enemies hidden out of line of sight of the door or doors who then engage the team once they have entered the room and gotten to cover. Failing to breach perfectly generally means a complication pushed to the second act of the fight.
My question for Upton was whether he felt this was more or less dramatic, or whether it was a better use of Edges (and/or Nodes) than in the original highly 'edgey' doorways of earlier Rainbows. I think, technically, the dramatic punch of the edges in the early Rainbow games may have got more bang-for-the-buck so to speak. While the conditions were binary, and the challenges were often frustrating, there was really clear edge-based drama at every door. In recent Rainbow games it's a lot more complex. In terms of what is fun and what fits the context of the overall play experience, the edge/doorway challenges of more recent Rainbow games are doing exactly what they should. At the same time, I think you could say that the pure dramatic intensity and the clear design focus on edges in early Rainbow games was exceptionally well realized and worth learning from. Very probably this clarity of design vision (in regards to doorways and other factors as well) is what made the original R6 games so successful, and is what still inspires smart designers to continually try to wrestle these hard problems ot the ground.
Anyway, that wraps it up for my two 'second favorite' presentations of this GDC. In a day or two I'll post my favorites - which I think are probably pretty predictable. If I have time befre I jet off to Paris next week, I'll try and fire up a sort of GDC wrap-up as well.
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