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I'm Sad...

I totally don’t have the time or the emotional energy to be writing this post, but in fact, I kind of feel like I don’t have the time to not write this post. You see, someone who I don’t know seems to have un-Friended me on Facebook.

I first accepted a Friend Request from this person – whom I will henceforth call 'Gina' – sometime before GDC. I remember noticing her updates around that time because we had a friend staying at our place during GDC and I remember lamenting that this new Facebook Friend was causing me some consternation.

I am Canadian. As such, I tend to have fairly left-leaning political opinions and moral convictions. To boot, I am probably more left-leaning in the ideological sense than the ‘average’ Canadian. That said, when I agreed to come to America as a guest of this nation, I decided that I would put a lid on my politics, and do my best to observe and understand how Americans think and feel about their nation and about the issues they struggle with, while trying not to pass judgement. I suspect that I fail to keep my opinions in check more often than I succeed, but I do try.

Judging from her updates over the course of six months or more, my former Facebook Friend Gina has fairly right-leaning political opinions and moral convictions. Her stances on a variety of hot-button political issues in America today are virtually the opposite of mine. She questions the legitimacy of Obama’s birth certificate. She opposes gay marriage. She opposes more stringent gun control laws. She is against health care reform. She supports the Tea Party. When I told my friend during GDC about Gina, his response was simply that I should un-Friend her.

But I didn’t (and don’t) see the point in that. I don’t see the point in that for two reasons.

The first reason is Facebook itself. The beating heart of Facebook is the idea that you can connect with people who you otherwise would never know – never mind share ideas with – by way of something else you have in common. Whether Gina knows a friend of mine, or has played one of the games I have worked on, or went to a school I went to, the point is that whatever tiny thing connects us has the potential to be the thing that bridges the gap between us and allows us to reconcile our differences. Now, I am a pretty cynical guy, and while I see that Facebook has the potential to be that, I also see the reality that it is mostly just a platform for marketing and self-promotion and for reinforcing already-held ideas. In the end, though, that’s the point. If we give up on what Facebook can be by un-Friending all the people whose opinions we disagree with, then we submit to a more cynical Facebook that nobody wants or needs.

The second reason is America. If there is any country in the history of the world where thinking differently is not just accepted, but is embraced, celebrated, and rewarded, it is the United States of America. I didn’t come to this country because I wanted to be around a bunch of people who looked the same, acted the same, sounded the same, dressed the same as me and/or thought the same as me. I came here to be challenged. Now, being challenged does not mean rolling over and accepting things you oppose – and I remain opposed to most of Gina’s positions – but it does mean coming to understand how and why you hold the ideas you hold, and why and how others hold differing ideas. This understanding strengthens your ideas and prepares you to challenge their ideas when the opportunity arises. But that opportunity will only arise if you continue to listen and refuse to walk away from the table. You should never turn your back on someone with a bad idea. If you don’t convince them it’s a bad idea when you have the chance, they’ll convince others that it’s a good idea and when you next confront it, it will be a bad idea with momentum....

So why am I sad?

Well, the end of this story unfortunately starts with the recent shooting at the theatre in Colorado. I didn’t read too much about it, frankly. I already read that story when I was in high-school, and again in college, and again in university, and again, and again. I have my opinions about how to better deal with the problem of murderous rampages, but those are not ideas I want to discuss on Facebook. I am fortunate to have a career where I can share ideas about the shape of the world, both as I see it, and as how I feel it ought to be. When it comes to complex issues of human nature I would prefer to spend the three or four years of effort it takes to develop a well-reasoned position on one idea than to scream hundreds of ideas at the walls of Facebook – which after all is just that – screaming at walls.

After the Colorado shooting, Gina put a lot of updates on Facebook of the fairly predictable sort; pro 2^nd Amendment, anti-gun control rhetoric of the ‘from my cold dead hands’ sort. All of that is fine. I disagree with the idea, but it’s irrelevant because firstly I support her right to express those ideas (under the Amendment that comes before the one that enables them) and secondly because I am a Canadian, and I have no say in the matter anyway.

What did trouble me a bit was her blanket assertion that the guns used in the shooting must not have been legally owned by the shooter. When I later read the guns were all legally acquired, I was tempted to post on her wall to ask what she thought about that fact. But I didn’t. Maybe I should have. Maybe that was the moment when Facebook could have been good for something and allowed two people with differing ideas to connect. Opportunity missed.

But then, this afternoon, I read (sadly) about another mass shooting by a person with a legally owned firearm. I remembered Gina’s update (it wasn’t long ago), and wondered if in the ensuing weeks people had pointed out her mistake, and if a discussion had arisen there and if I might have been given a second chance to see if I could reconcile my ideas with hers.

I typed (her real name) into Facebook’s friend search, and turned up nothing.

In the preceding 24-36 hours, she had inexplicably un-Friended me. I know because I remember seeing an update from my timeline at mid-day on Saturday. I wondered if she was just cleaning out her Friends list, and so I scrolled back through the last day or so of updates to see if I could find a clue.

Then I realized I had posted this tweet relating the cost of the Curiosity Rover to the cost of the Iraq War.

And then it dawned on me that very probably she had un-Friended me because I had said something she didn’t agree with. I had shown her that I was not the same as her, and (probably) she wanted a wall that reinforced what she already believed, not a wall that challenged her ideas.

Now, probably, since most of my own friends, and most of the people who come to my blog, are self-selecting and will be inclined to agree with me, I suspect most of you will say ‘good riddance’. You probably think it’s a good thing that she has cut herself off and further isolated herself. If that’s what you think, I direct you to the title of this post. It’s not titled ‘fuck you, Gina’, it’s titled ‘I’m sad’.

I’m sad because the fact is that my and Gina’s differences – relative to the scope and scale of human disagreements in general – are effectively non-existent. Gina and I live in the most enlightening society in human history, and we have access to the most powerful connective technology in the history of the world, and we still managed to outmaneuver each other. I’m sad because, in some sense at least, I invested a lot of time and energy into this pseudo-relationship with this person I never met. I persisted in not un-Friending Gina based on principles that I actually care about, even though at times it diminished my own happiness to do it. I tried – for months – to make this technology work for these people in this culture, and at the end of the day it seems to have not mattered at all.

I’m sad because sometimes it seems like it doesn’t improve my life, or the lives of those around me to even think about these things, never mind talk about them. And that sucks.

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.

GDC09 - Part 1 - GDW and Family Dynamics

Here begins my long slow recap of GDC wherein I will ultimately get around to posting all of my various slides and presentation materials, as well as different commentary on the sessions I saw and what I thought was valuable about GDC this year.

First up is my quick recap of the Game Design Workshop tutorial. The GDW this year was the best yet, even eclipsing last years. It seemed a little smaller, but that might just be because we (ie: Mahk) were better organized and there were some structural changes that made it run more smoothly (I think I foolishly resisted making those changes last year... my bad).

It's clear to me (and not just from GDC) that the quality of students, new grads and recently-employed game developers is going up rapidly. I am pretty sure the rest of the GDW 'faculty' agrees with me on this. It is humbling - even a little bit intimidating - to see these smart new people rolling in and showing us that they have already learned much (or all) of the theory that underpins the workshop... good thing it's not a talky thing - but rather a practical, hands-on thing, or we'd be outta business (whether we all end up out of business in the broader sense remains to be seen).

 

Speaking of practical and hands-on, above is one of the groups that signed up for my elective 'Family Dynamics'. Family Dynamics is an exercise that asks each team to take a random graph which represents the relationship between two unnamed variables (ie: a mechanic) and a random word from a heavily loaded list of things related to families (ie: an aesthetic) and attempt to join the two using limited materials and their own design sensibilities.

The above team made a game about 'impotence' using a two-part graph that plotted (what they defined as) fertility and a progression through three-stages of emotional and physical arousal to try and explore how it might feel to struggle to conceive a child under the pressures that can build up in a family relationship over time.

It was an excruciatingly difficult exercise, I think, and not all of the teams made it through. The point is not really to succeed, though - it's to learn and I hope everybody did. Either way, whatever I come up with next year will likely be a bit less insane.

If you have any interest in reviewing the exercise materials, or in replicating the exercise yourself, feel free to download the parts I am able to make available, over on the left.

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

zoom zoom zoom, blah blah blah

Okay, so once again I am absent for a month. Once again I have been prepping presentations and globetrotting and talking about stuff. Last week I was in Vancouver giving the keynote at VFS's Game Design Expo. The talk is about the changing demographics of gamers and game developers. I'm not going to host the slides just yet because I will be giving the talk a few more times in the next few weeks and will likely be making some tweaks to it as I go.

I'll be doing the same talk at the local IGDA Chapter meeting on February 25th, and then I'll be doing it again down at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia at GDx. Never been to Georgia - so I'm looking forward to that.

Anyway - the slides for that talk (and the massive pile of data I aggregated for it) will go up on the blog after I get back from Savannah.

Aside from that I'm prepping my GDC talk about what I will call 'improvisational play'- which will be a 'sequel' to my 2006 talk about Intentionality. I'm also doing the Game Design Workshop again this year, and I'm going to be giving a Pecha Kucha style microtalk in a crazy session put together by Richard Lemarchand.

On top of all of that I am also, of course, working on a game.

Pat's Narrative Design Slides

Pat Redding is the Narrative Designer on my project, and he gave a wicked talk at GDC about the narrative design of Far Cry 2. He has recently put his slides up for anyone interested, and they are annotated with the text of what he said, meaning they're actually usable.

This is must-have info for anyone interested in the design and implementation of systems that turn control of the story over to the player.

GDC 2008 - Part Two - Game Design Workshop

So this year Mark Leblanc invited me to join the faculty of the Game Design Workshop. The GDW is the 2-day Tutorial that runs on the Monday and Tuesday prior to 'GDC-proper' where we conduct a series of design excercises to familiarize designers (or anyone) with important design concepts like paper prototyping, fast iteration, and the MDA framework as a model for looking at, thinking and talking about design.

I attended the GDW for the first time back in 2006 and loved it. I swore up and down I would go every year, but of course I was super busy come 2007 and couldn't. I was planning on attending this year when I got got asked on board the faculty and jumped at the chance.

Ultimately, as much as I got out of it as an attendee (which was a LOT) I honestly think I got even more out of it as a faculty member. Seeing so many people wrestle with challenging design problems was not only enlightening and will certainly make me better at my job, it was also very inspiring. Some of the excercises are HARD and I frequently found myself thinking - "fuck that's really difficult - they're all gonna give up before they get half-way" - but not only do the participants rise to the challenge, they typically output very impressive results. And they do so with a positive attitude. They work together. They challenge one another. They put the team and their ego's aside. They listen and communicate critically and effectively.

Why can't school be like that?

Speaking of challenges I didn't expect anyone to rise up to, my own elective was (I think) particularly brutal. Here's how it went.

The Seven Deadly Sins

Participants were broken into groups of about 4-7 people. Each group was given 1 standard deck of playing cards (52 cards plus 2 jokers). Included in each deck was a slip of paper with one of the Seven Deadly Sins written on it and a brief definition (ripped more or less from Wikipedia) of the sin. The Seven Deadly Sins are Greed, Wrath, Lust, Envy, Gluttony, Sloth and Pride.

The excercise was to use only the cards, and to design a game that enabled the players of the game to experience - through the mechanics and dynamics of the game - the sin in question. In an hour.

To be honest, I expected only a couple teams would even come up with a game at all, and that exactly zero of them would succeed in making a game that captured the essence of the sin they were going for. In fact, almost every team came up with a working game, and I would say about half of them had a game that made a significant step toward reaching the experience they were shooting for. A couple of them had very compelling designs. One in paticular has stuck with me, and I will share it (as I understood it).

Gluttony

I think there were two gluttony teams, but one of them in particular came up with a game that really surprised me. The rules as I remember them were this:

• The game supports about 2-6 players. I think 4 is probably ideal.
• Deal each player 3 cards.
• Place the remainder of the deck face down in the center of the table.
• The first player flips a card face up from the deck.
• Any player who has a matching number in his hand can slap the card down on top of the flipped pile. If he is first to do so, he gets that card (and every card underneath).
• The next player flips a card from the deck.
• Repeat until the deck is gone.
• The winner is the player with the most cards in his hand when the deck is gone.

Some kind of timer or a way to put pressure for a pace seems to be necessary (they were still wrestling with this as they wrapped up the excercise). Another option would be to have an independant 'referee' flip over one card from the deck every 2-3 seconds to enforce a pace.

Why does this game work?

Well, in my opinion, any game in which you are rewarded for getting as much of something as possible could be a game about gluttony (or greed for that matter). What I felt was important - and shocking - about this game is that the dynamics of the game are in conflict with the mechanics of the game in a way that makes players feel the 'sin' of gluttony. The dynamics, in a sense, make a moral statement about the mechanics.

When I have 3 cards, and a card that matches one of my cards is flipped, it is very easy for me to parse my three cards, and slap a matching card down on the pile. I am quick because I am 'light'. As I accumulate cards, it takes longer for me to parse my hand and find a card that matches the card just flipped. My reactions are slowed, and consequently my ability to compete with the other players is reduced as I get 'fat'.

Essentially they used a negative feedback loop where the mechanics feed back into the dynamics to cause players in the lead to have a harder time maintaining their lead. The dynamics (players parsing their accumulating hands, finding a match, and slapping it down on the table) are being 'leveraged against the mechanics' to give the game a meaning that speaks to our common moral understanding of gluttony.

The timer they were trying to impose was a response to a weakness in the design they were wrestling with. Without a timer to keep the pressure on they observed players sorting their collected cards - effectively allowing the fatter players to continue to parse their hands as quickly as the thinner players. This had the consequence of working against the meaning. So the team was working to impose a mechanic (forced tempo of play) that would ensure the accumulation of cards became a handicap for the fat players instead of an advantage (messy disordered cards in a chaotic arrangement are signifcantly harder to parse for matches than are ordered cards).

Anyway - as simple as the game is, I think it was a beautiful and elegant solution to a problem that I didn't think anyone would solve.

I think it also provides insight into some of the questions people have asked me regarding my rant thesis - that "the mechanics of trust are not harder to model than the mechanics of rope". Lots of people have lots of qood questions about that. The answer to the vast majority of questions is simply - go and make a game about trust using only a deck of cards and you will find a mountain of fascinating insights into what trust means and how it can be modelled mechanically - then, if you want, you can make a AAA FPS where trust of your squadmates is an actual mechanic in the game.

The GDW teaches us (at least it taught me) that in games more than anywhere else, we learn by doing. Try it, fail. Fix it a bunch of times. Strive to reach a testable aesthetic goal. After a while, you may find your approach sucks. Start again. In a matter of days you can iterate through dozens, even hundreds of mechanical models of whatever you are trying to say with your game. This will help you understand what you are trying to say about trust, duty, honor, gluttony or whatever the fuck you think is important. Once you have a handle on what you want to say, and you are familiar with some mechanics that can lead toward delivering it, you can wrestle with the slower and harder-to-iterate problems of building computer-based dynamics that work with those mechanics to make the player experience those feelings.

Anyway - the GDW was a big, big highlight of the conference for me. To those who were there, I hope you found it rewarding. To those considering attending, I hope to see you next year whether I am invited back on the faculty or whether I am participating myself.

GDC 2008 - Part One - My Slides

Finally got around to posting my slides from both the Game Designer's Rant and my Immersion talk. You can grab them over on the right along with all the presentations I have ever done. You don't need my permission to give these presentations to your coworkers or students or do whatever the hell you want with them.

I'm very pleased at the feedback and the criticism I've received from both talks, which I will summarize briefly here.

The Rant

It seems like the feedback from the Rant is overwhelmingly positive. I am kind of surprised by that. I expected a few more people to at least challenge the premise that we can make games about concepts like honor or trust. It seems like only a year ago (never mind five) people who suggested such a thing were considered a little bit weird. Last year - putting forth similiar ideas in my exploration talk - I think there were still a lot of people who thought those ideas were a bit flakey and out of touch with production reality. Now it seems like we are ready to simply accept as a fact that we can make games about these sorts of feelings and ideas and get on with the challenging business of doing so. A lot can change in year in terms of our attitude. Let's hope as much can change in a year in terms of our execution.

For those looking for other ranter's slides and materials - I found Jane McGonigal's stuff here. If you find others let me know.

Immersion

There seem to be three camps in terms of how the immersion talk is received.

The first camp seems to have found it an inspiring and insightful talk and were apparently more than willing to overlook the (many) omissions, errors in reasoning, and lack of structural support for some of the bolder arguments. Apparently there is a lot to be said for covering up the faults in your reasoning with Kirk-and-Spock jokes. To those in the first camp, I would suggest you read a bit deeper and look for some of the flaws - they can be illuminating. Immersion seems to be a powerful tool that is easy to use badly or for the wrong reasons. This talk was never intended to be a promotion of immersion (neither a criticism) but rather a deconstruction and examination of immersion and the techniques used to induce it as formal tools. An excellent starting point for looking deeper into immersion is Rules of Play by Eric Zimmerman and Katie Salen, which was an invaluable resource for me in preparing the talk (in particular refer to Unit 3: Play, Games as the Play of Simulation) - thanks Eric and Katie.

The second camp seems to have caught on to the weaknesses to a greater or lesser extent, but has been generous in attribution of value to the talk as a whole. Quite a few people have said they thought I was 'cheating' my reasoning in a number of places but were nonetheless happy to have any kind of formal examination of a topic that we too often take for granted and pin to the wall as a project objective without consideration for what it means. If nothing has been accomplished with this talk aside from helping this group of people avoid some of the mistakes I have made blindly in the past, I'm more than happy to accept their grace in excusing the weaknesses of the talk. Thanks for not kicking me when I was down. This camp could be called the 'glass-is-half-full' camp.

The third camp would then be the 'glass-is-half-empty' camp - and that's the camp I would put myself into. We are the ones who wanted this talk to be more than it was. We wanted it to be 55 minutes long instead of 35 minutes long. We wanted it to have a middle where the loosely formalized tools of the first part were examined in context and used to expose where existing games may have stumbled or excelled in their application of immersion. We wanted all of that to fit together well enough to justify a hand-wavey ending that - if it can be compellingly demonstrated - is in fact a really, really important notion.

I have spoken to many of the camp three people at length and they have helped me see how and where the talk falls short. A number of interesting suggestions were made as to how I might tie off some of the squirting arteries dangling from the disembodied heart of the talk. For now I'll just pinch them off and toss that heart back into the simmering cauldron of my subconcious where it can stew for a while and maybe eventually I can patch the talk with the middle that it probably deserves. Anyway, thanks especially to the group three folks for kicking me when I was down... you can never see the root of a problem until your head has been thoroughly stamped into the dirt.

I'll try to follow-up over the week with some more of my thoughts about GDC as a whole. 

Our Man in Havana Returns

It's been a long time since I posted - but I have a real excuse, with links to prove it. Aside from Christmas, and an extra week of vacation in Havana I managed to squeeze in as a result of the game being delayed, I've been busy as hell meeting with the press and promoting the game.

Our first official teaser trailer has been released. Cheeky commentary from Kotaku and from Joystiq on that.

I presented the game to Gamespot's Andrew Park in San Francisco who wrote a great preview here, that follows up an equally awesome preview from last fall.

Far Cry 2 became Ubisoft's first game to take the cover of Edge Magazine, with another great article that is available online here.

Stephen Totilo ran three seperate segments on the MTV Multiplayer blog - one about our innovative integration of explosive barrels (no kidding), one about the PC game market and a third one about the challenges we've been facing building real meaningful investment in characters who are mechanically and procedurally developed in the narrative design.

And speaking of the PC market UGO called Far Cry 2 the 4th most anticipated PC title for 2008... following StarCraft 2, Fallout 3, and Spore. Damn you Will... edged out again.

There is lots of other new coverage out there if you're interested.

On the GDC front - coming soon - I'll be giving a talk about Immersion, I'll be participating the Game Developers Rant, and for the first time I've been invited to be on the Faculty of the Game Design Workshop. Attending the GDW was probably the most valuable time I ever spent at GDC, and I think everyone in the industry should attend it at least once. Hopefully I'll see some of you there.