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Urgh... wtf... what time is it? Africa, safari, TGS, Aus and now we're GOLD

Meh. I'm fucking tired as hell.

Africa was fucking cool. We were in Johannesburg for a couple of days doing the Rage game show there. Thanks to all the folks at Megarom (our S. Africa distributor) who made the trip so easy on us and thanks to the team from the UK office who joined us and organized everything. Special thanks to Jason and Jeep (ie: Jason's awesome truck) for unfucking my stuff when I forgot my devkit in my hotel room before the last stage demo.

Lots of big crowds around FC2 on the show floor, and it was great seeing all the South African fans who seemed to really love the game. They unanimously were very pleased to hear the AI swearing at them in Afrikaans, and I saw a lot of jaws hit the floor... people telling us that we 'got it right' in terms of the visuals and the overall feel. Mission accomplished on the authenticity front.

After Joburg was two days on safari in Pilanesburg. Elephants are awesome. We saw some lions consider taking down a baby rhinoceros. I'll remember that for the rest of my life.

After Joburg, we had the nightmare trek from South Africa through Singapore to Tokyo for TGS. Planet Earth is big. It was about 22 hours of travel. We were demoing for the press in a hotel room and out of fatigue I never even made it to the show floor, I just stayed in the room demoing and between interviews I played with the map editor and built myself a MP map. The Japanese press seemed very impressed with the level editor (no surprise, it's fucking impressive).

I'd never been out to TGS, and in fact have never been to Japan, so it was great that we again had an extra day to wander the city and check it out. We wandered around in Shinjuku mostly, checking out the little shops and restaurants. The food was amazing and I really enjoyed the city. Hopefully I'll get to go back there one day and spend a couple weeks there.

We left Tokyo for the 'shortest' leg of our trip, a simple nine-hour hop down to Sydney. We did a demo of the game in front of about 80 press and vendors and community folks at a movie theatre, and then did some demos and interviews at the Ubi office. This morning we hopped on a plane for the Gold Coast - as of this writing I am in my hotel room. We have a demo at a big EB Games vendor conference tomorrow, and then we're back to Sydney and soon off to Shanghai.

More news to come when (if) I have time.

Oh, and by the way, for those anxious, Far Cry 2 officially went Gold on all platforms yesterday (I'm not really sure what 'yesterday' means right now, but it wasn't 'today' and it wasn't 'a few days ago'... so yesterday east Australia time will have to suffice).

It's over and I am almost done.

I'm back... no, wait... I'm gone again....

So Far Cry 2 console versions are off in submission and my many months of closing this beast are winding down. It's been a hell of a long haul, but I'm finally starting to get my sanity back. As previously announced, the game will be on shelves on October 21st (US) and October 23rd (I think) in Europe and elsewhere. Anyway - don't quote me, check your local retailer for dates. Or just pre-order, dammit.

So the good news is, I'm back. Several months of grunt work in the trenches have left my neurons shell-shocked, but they're already starting to regroup and I can feel the distant echos of coherent thought rallying them out of the desperation that comes with being in a purely reactive closing mode.

The bad news is, before I really get on my feet and start blogging again for real, I have a promo tour to do.

And holy fucking shit is it the most insane promo tour ever.

For those who watched the Dev Diary stuff for the Africa trip, you're probably aware that just before the Leipzig Game Convention last year, I pulled out of that trip at the last minute in order to get the Leipzig demo together.

So now, I get to go to Africa. I leave in 5 hours. And it ain't just Africa, either. For the next 21 days, I will go from Paris to Africa to Singapore to Tokyo to Sydney to Shanghai and back again. I'm going to set foot on 5 different continents in 3 weeks - missing only Antarctica and South America.

Anyway - I won't likely be blogging any compelling game theory or criticism or analysis until a while after I get home, but in hopes of getting back into the groove of posting regularly, I'm going to do my best to blog the entire tour, so come back often to see what far away land I am posting from.

It's good to be back.

Back in Leipzig

A year ago we first unveiled the game at the Game Convention here in Leipzig. Now we're back. It's been a fuck of a long year, but I'm really looking forward to getting the game in the hands of the fans here in Germany... they seemed to really love it last year. This year it's not just demos, its hands-on on the floor.

We just put up a very cool trailer on Game Trailers... I'm very happy with this one... it's our best yet. And also, I didn't have a chance to point to it yet, but since so many people are talking about the music in the trailer (Barra Barra - the Rachid Taha song) I'll point out that the song is NOT in the game, but the music in the game is fucking amazing... here is an article by our composer Marc Canham talking about soundtrack for the game.

Next week I will be at PAX.

au Louvre

As of this writing I am in Paris, getting ready for Ubidays.

We'll be in the Louvre, where we I will be presenting a short, live stage demo during the opening conference on Wednesday night (Paris time - that will be Wednesday afternoon EST and Wednesday morning PST).

We'll also be doing full length demos and hands-on demos with the the press as well as doing all kinds of interviews and stuff throughout the day Thursday.

Ubidays in San Francisco was just over a week ago so coverage from that event, plus the live streaming coverage from UPlay dotcom and the live coverage Gamespot is hosting should all land over the course of the day Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Of note, our first full trailer will land sometime in there so keep your eyes open for that.

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.

GDC - Part V - Smith and Smith

So this (late) post will be my last one about GDC. It will briefly cover my impressions of my two favorite sessions which I already acknowledged will probably not be surprising to anyone. Both were design talks, and both tackled specific issues in design that I have thought about often, but have never had the chance to sit down and figure out in detail.

Again - often the most important part of GDC for me is having access to the thinking that other really smart people have done so that I don't have to do it myself. Both of these talks were exactly that, as I have in the last two years wrestled with precisely the things that these two talks were examining.

Harvey Smith on the psychology of the Player-Avatar relationship

Along with my own talk, this was one of Dave Perry's Picks in the design track, and in my opinion Harvey's talk torpedoed mine below the waterline and sunk it like the Bismarck. Harvey is wicked smart, and his design philosophy, and his talks at GDC, have always been very inspiring for me, as well as incredibly influential on the work I have done.

Harvey talked a lot about a number of important concepts I have only had time to give passing thought to. I'm going to paraphrase some stuff here, but he talked about how we can build stronger player investment in and attachment to the avatar, and he talked about (what I call) the hybrid-entity that is the player-avatar. He talked specifically about ways to make the player feel a stronger sense of identity with the avatar giving specific repeated player actions an avatar-flavored realization.

For example if in your game the player can be a Priest or a Barbarian or an Alchemist and you want all players to be able to heal themselves, then give the Priest the ability to pray to his gods for health, give the Barbarian the ability to eat his enemies hearts for health, and give the Alchemist the ability to make healing potions (part of that example comes from a specific game - I forget which). If the player is playing a Barbarian, he is likely going to feel a stronger attachment to a heart-eating ability than he would to some generic class-undifferentiated particle effect, even if the ability is mechanically identical. I feel more like a Barbarian when I eat hearts than when I see a blue swirly particle effect, and thus I feel more closely bonded to my avatar.

Anyway, I left the talk with a better understanding of what it is that players (or even users - as the avatar is not a game-specific notion) use avatars for. Part mask, part expression of self, part statement of initial stance on the issues that will be addressed in the forum, part wishful idealization, avatars are a kind of projection of our self-image and all of the complexity that comes with that. He examined several techniques that designers can use to challenge players understanding of themselves, or to help players challenge their own understanding of themselves.

In some ways, I think a better design understanding of avatar is central to moving our medium foward to the point where it can truly move the general public in an engaging and emotionally compelling way, because games are really the only medium where the player actively makes a statement about themselves when they engage the media, and that statement is made (partly) in their choice of avatar.

Randy Smith on Save-Load

The only thing I didn't like about this session was that it was only 20 minutes.

The original Splinter Cell had shitty checkpoints. Chaos Theory had save anywhere, but the game was so immersive that it was easy to forget to save. But how do I fix it? I hate the fact that players are punished with having to replay areas of a game, but at the same time, playing a game where you cannot lose is boring. This is a core dilemma in game design and one that needs really smart and detailed analysis.

Randy's (too-short) lecture looked at Save-Load compulsions principally from the standpoint of the psychology of risk analysis. Players will reload based on a risk analysis of what they have lost balanced against what they think they could gain. He looked at the different sorts of risk analysis players are typically asked to do in a game, and he pointed out how formal risk analysis is a pretty good indicator of how players will behave confronted with the kinds of losses and rewards games typically dole out. It seemed pretty clear from Randy's presentation that - go figure - a better understanding of what the player is winning and losing in the moment to moment play will help us design better save systems that don't degenerate as easily into save-crawling or into punishing cycles of replaying the same area repeatedly.

As with so many things, understanding and using our tools better allows us to make better games. Along with Harvey, Randy is one of the sharpest designers out there and his deconstruction of this problem gives me better tools to use to make better games for one percent of the effort it would have taken for me to reach the same conclusions.

So the reason these two sessions rank as my two favorites are simply because they are the most practical and useful for me. Randy and Harvey did the work that I would have done if I have not been spending so much time and energy thinking about Exploration. I haven't yet had the chance to bug either of them for their slides, but if I manage to find out where they are available (neither seem to be in the GDC proceedings) I will let you know.

All Over The Map

Dammit.

Been wanting to squeeze in the time to throw up my thoughts on my two most favorite GDC sessions this year, but got terribly sidetracked. After returning from GDC, I had a little rush to close some things on the project before heading off to Paris for some big meetings. Then, back home for the weekend, and today I'm back in San Francisco again for some meetings with marketting here.

In other news, Olsen bit the farm one night while playing Gears between GDC and the Paris trip. RIP little buddy. I got the red checker-board pattern and simply haven't had the time to call MS and figure out what the hell I have to do with my pretty white brick. I find it particularly amusing to read Olsen's posts about my gaming negligence. Good to know his bitch-circuits are still working even though the rest of his innards are fried. Bastard.

Anyway, I'm in San Fran for a 2 hour meeting, so I should have time to throw up that final GDC post tonight or tomorrow. Will probably try and connect with some friends here for dinner, but other than that it's going to be a dull trip.

GDC - Part IV - Second Best

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.