Another “Games As Art” Article! (Not an April Fool’s Joke)

A few months ago I went to Project Horseshoe (by far my favorite conference of any type anywhere) where I met with other geek-minded game designers to discuss the most over-analyzed, utterly cliche, pathetic, hopeless, but still (yes!) highly-relevant problems in game design:

How can games be promoted as art?

The first question to ask, of course, is “Who cares?” Game designers already make good money just playing with play all day. Why be a prima donna whiner and blather about art? Do we really want game designers smashing their laptops on stage, slashing off their ears, or acting (even more) abusive at black tie galas?

The group of us wrote an article about this subject and it was published on Gamasutra on April Fool’s Eve where it has generated some surprisingly earnest comments.  Check it.

Hotel iWin Lives!

I can finally crow about something! For the past year or so, I’ve been working on a stealthy little project within my own company, a project neither quite game nor web app. Huddled in the dank corners of our office I worked with a lean but mean world-tossed team and finally… it lives!

It’s a (what else?) casual-game virtual-world social-network insert-your-own-buzzword-here!

And it’s called Hotel iWin.

We decided on a grand luxury hotel as the theme not because we wanted to rip off Habbo (perish the thought), but because we actually talked to tons of people who use our site regularly and noticed a few trends:

• There is no true virtual world or social network geared primarily for our audience (mostly women from 25 to 65).
• Our audience is highly social, but there are very few places online they feel comfortable socializing. Facebook is overwhelming. And MySpace is just, like, whoah!
• People want to escape from their daily lives, but in a mentally and emotionally stimulating way (i.e. not TV).
• Players enjoy forming intense, open, but fleeting relationships — very similar to ones formed on vacations.

So the idea behind Hotel iWin is to really make folks feel like they’re checking out of the daily grind and checking in to a brief but very relevant vacation.

1. Play any downloadable casual game on iWin’s site (over 500 of them are free for at least an hour to try, many of them are ad-supported and free forever).
2. Earn a virtual currency called Opals for every minute of play.
3. Spend Opals on avatar and hotel room pimpin’, mixing and matching over a thousand common and not-so items, with the ability to drag things anywhere you want and “paint” your own scenes.
4. Meanwhile, meet other players and maybe even make a few not-so-casual friends.

A tour is here in this lovely 70’s infomercial-esque video.

Much like operating a real-life hotel, building the darn thing is one joyful headache — keeping it actually humming and exciting and populated by happy gamers is a different beast entirely. Can’t wait!

Designing the Ultimate Game of Tag

The Perfect Terrain for Tag

Whenever you feel like you’re actually skilled at something related to game design, leave it to kids to trump you.

We were at a playground near lovely Avila Beach this past weekend when some kids approached mine for a game of tag. The ages and abilities of the participants varied greatly. As the game progressed, I was impressed at everyone’s communal game design chops. The kids play-tested, discussed, and iterated on the rules until they worked out an optimal experience that was challenging, fun, and fair for everyone involved.

Stage 1: “It” can’t touch wood (brown zones in photo above). In other words, using age-old tag parlance, wood was “base.”

This was okay for a while, but the play structures were big enough to provide several safe zones impossible for “it” to reach, and too many angles where tag-ees could break away far from “it’s” grasp. After realizing that life was too difficult for “it,” a new rule was added.

Stage 2: If anyone other than “it” touched sand, she would lose and immediately become the new “it.” This made things a bit easier for poor “it,” but there were still too many ways for people to evade the tagger.

Stage 3: Nobody except “it” can touch red. After a while, this was deemed too difficult for the tag-ees, since the red spongiform surface was the primary design, creating too many re cul-de-sacs. “It” would keep trapping people in impossible corners and nailing them in no time at all.

Which led to the final innovation:

Stage 4:Only “it” can touch blue or sand (yellow regions). This was perfect! This created a few “choke-points” around the area which had to be leapt or crossed in daring ways, making the terrain nuanced and tactically exciting.

By this point, every kid over the age of five was playing the game.

Unspoken rule: If perched on a wood plank trying to avoid “it,” you had to keep moving after a few beats to not be considered a lame-o. There wasn’t an official time limit, but it was important to try to make mad breaks to another part of the playground to keep the drama going.

What a cool concept!

Anyone up for doing some 3D modeling and coding this into a FPT (first-person-tagger)?

Five Casual Game Sequels I’d Love to See

1. Death Dash. Flo helps Uma the Undertaker start a new recession-proof business: Taking over her Uncle’s mortuary! Too many residents of Dinertown have fallen prey to the diner’s reliance on saturated fat. Dearly departed souls roll in through the loading dock and you need to drag them to the embalming station, makeover station, fashion cabinet, and coffin-o-matic. Upgrade your funeral home by adding nice touches such as lace curtains, orchids, and industrial-strength air-freshener. Be careful not to accidentally cremate someone meant for a hearse!

2. MCF: OCD. In Mystery Case Files: Obsessive Compulsive Detective you play a police officer with OCD. A demented serial killer/interior decorator is on the loose, turning normal locations into strangely-cluttered altars of surreal chaos! The killer seems to have raided every garage sale, rumpus room, and bargain bin in town, repainting all of the junk to match the gaudy fabrics in the rooms he victimizes. He even used some infernal dark magic to make some objects ten times their normal size, making them confusing to spot at first! Given a list of items to clean from the clutter, you must find some things (but not others) and then randomly try to use those randomly-found objects to do random things in random places, things that could’ve been done a whole lot more intuitively with different objects. Only you can catch the killer and bring order and cleanliness back to the poor, miserable world!

3. Virtual Villagers: Mallrat Edition. You control a group of teenagers who become stranded in a mall when their mom leaves them off and drives away as fast as she can to get “some hard-earned me time, god damn it.” You must drag each child around the mall, performing tasks such as shuffling through merchandise and putting it back in the wrong place, trying on outfits you’ll never buy, cruising for hotties, preening, giggling, grimacing, and getting yelled at by store proprietors. Work your way through the food court and upgrade your skills of coolness, radness, awesomeness, and like-totallyness. When you leave the game, your characters keep growing and changing so that when you come back to play they are, like, waaaaaay more mature.

4. Build-A-Little. Now that real estate has crashed, go around town and buy forclosed houses, giving them cheap paint jobs and a sod lawn. After your renters stiff you and sell off all the copper wiring and PVC piping, try to flip your property. When you fail to make your sale, forclose on the houses yourself before the bank can catch up with you. Try to make the neighborhood a rich and pleasant one by building nuclear power plants, corporate campuses, and garbage dumps in close proximity to the houses. Special bonus mini-game: Invest your earnings in the stock market and watch them plummet into a fiery abyss.

5. Jewel Quest: Gold-Digger.  While exploring the ruined temples of a long-lost civilization deep in the South American jungles, Rupert encounters his most horrifying nemesis yet: A mail-order bride name Svetlana Sassy. She will constantly nag, harrangue, and insult him until he can match three million jewels in a row and earn enough fur coats, diamond-encrusted jewelery, and gold-lame gowns to calm Svetlana down.

Any sequels on your list that I missed here?

The Wis-Dumb of Game Review Committees

As a died-in-the-wool game developer who has become a bit of a suit, I’ve been on both sides of game review committee meetings.

These sessions usually involve the producer, designer, and sometimes all team leads, sitting at one end of a big, shiny table while representatives from marketing, sales, tech, art, and other various “stakeholders” analyze the latest build of the game and fire off questions.

This is life and death, folks. The unspoken truth: Every high level review is an opportunity to terminate the game in question.

Amazing producers can face this firing squad calmly, demo cogently, answer questions accurately, and promise clear next steps and deliverables.

Lesser human beings sweat heavily, get red-faced angry, and rant rudely. After all, this is their life here, not just the game’s. They have just invested countless late-night hours and dream-juice into the game and now it’s being flayed in front of them — prodded and poked without mercy.

Everyone has their story about how review committees suck.

I’ve seen committee members that didn’t “have a chance” to play the game in question — their first look at the game is watching someone demo it on a big screen. And having not experienced the gameplay, they make comments and decisions that just aren’t appropriate.

I’ve seen committees cow-tow to stubborn designers or over-invested producers and push through a lemon of a game that should have been killed dead.  (I’ve been that designer.)

I’ve very often seen committees redo the design of games on-the-fly and turn them into mishmashed messes or bland pleasing-everyone-actually-pleases-nobody crap.

I’ve seen committees say to make Game X “more like Game Y” and force the development team to force a rhombic-spirallohedra-shaped peg into a round hole.

I’ve seen review committees become feeding frenzies with execs one-upping each other trying to go for the jugular with spit-fire questions that are rhetorical, insulting, obvious, or downright cruel.

I’ve seen game designers and producers get so disgruntled after a review that they lose all passion and interest and let projects slowly fail.

But… Suck as they do, there’s a lot of necessary good in them there reviews.

For I’ve seen review committees make the painful decision to terminate games that otherwise would have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars and possibly led to bankrupting the company.

I’ve seen committees completely redirect games turning also-rans into hits.

And I’ve seen committees help chisel the feature list of out-of-control projects into solid but smaller games that got done on time and budget.

I hate to admit it, but in the balance committee reviews are essential to run a successful game publishing business.

(I guess I really am a suit.)

Product Review Committees DO know:

• What they don’t like.
• What isn’t working.
• How much money there is to spend.
• How much money the game needs to earn.
• When the game needs to ship.

They generally DO NOT know:

• How to find fun in a game that currently isn’t.
• What is placeholder art (even if it has the letters “PH” stamped on it).
• The synergy and cohesive vision of the perfected, polished game in the designer’s head.

As such, the ideal review committee should follow these ten commandments (five positives and five negs):

1. Thou shalt kill the game if it is bound to fail.
2. Thou shalt actually play any playable game presented to you before a review.
3. Thou shalt actually read game design documents and make clear notes (not just look at those pretty pictures).
4. Thou shalt know thy market and have played competitive games.
5. Thou shalt point out what is working well in a game and praise the individuals involved.
6. Thou shalt not redesign a game on the fly, but should register specific shortcomings then let the team come back with a better shot.
7. Thou shalt not ask to see better art or audio before a game’s schedule calls for those assets to be created (but may and should insist on seeing sample art direction of interfaces, character sketches, or animation clips).
8. Thou shalt not let the fear of failure get in the way of instinct. If a game is feeling fun, thy track is righteous.
9. Thou shalt not nitpick small issues in a review forum. That can be done with QA’s help later, via a bugbase.
10. Thou shalt not kill until a game has had three chances. If thou catchest a major failure with the current team dynamic or game mechanic then give the developers a reasonable chance to prove they can reverse the trend. If, after a fair period of time the game is better but still fails, try once more. If it still fails, three strikes and yer out.

If more committees took such commandments to heart, it would make for stronger games, happier development teams, and more profitable entertaproduct.

The Kindergarten Application Game

As the parent of a Kindergartner and someone unable to see the world other than through the filter of game design, I spend a lot of time thinking about what our educational system tells us about computer games… and vice versa.

See, in San Francisco, unlike most other American cities, the choice isn’t between your friendly neighborhood public school or a handful of private prep schools. In typical SanFran so-fair-its-unfair fashion, the choice is between a public lottery assignment based almost entirely on luck and a host of independent schools so competitive they make Survivor seem like a trip to grandma’s cottage.

The descent into the decision-making inferno starts with an innocent tour or two. Before you know it, the private schools have charmed the cynicism right off you with their music studios full of transcontinental woodwind instruments, their second grade film societies, and their organic nutritionists. Many of these institutions have their pluckiest students lead tours and you see first-hand how confident, well-spoken, and utterly certain of success these leaders of tomorrow are.

Meanwhile, most of the public school tours are given by harried principals, shuttling you through crowded classrooms that feature dazed kids slumped most unphotogenically going page by page through district-approved workbooks.

There are other choices, of course. You could always home school. Or there are democratic schools where kids do literally whatever they want all day (a good friend of mine made a brilliant little film about that). Or you can (heaven forbid) move to the suburbs and be guaranteed a solid and decently-crafted public education. But my family just wasn’t ready to seriously consider those lifestyle-changing experiments.

And so you fret. You over-think, over-worry, and over-indulge yourself with the school application process — a process you don’t have much control over.

“Chill out!” many outsiders say. “Let it ride!” After all, life isn’t like an RPG where the most skill points wins! Life is more about trade offs! It’s fuzzy in a way that RPGs just aren’t… where a boost in one attribute is often a detriment to another. Isn’t it all relative?

For instance: Private Schools give you a +10 Wealth (Elitism), +19 Charisma (Self-Assurance), and +13 Intelligence (Overall Academics), but they will totally stymie your Wisdom (Streetsmarts), Strength (Self-Reliance), and Dexterity (Diversity) quotients, right?

Well…

When your first-born child, your flesh and blood, the radiant light of your every lost hope, enters a system that will likely claim her for over a decade — it’s difficult to just “chill” and “let it ride.”

You consider your own educational upbringing, and how much in retrospect it affected and shaped you.

You try, really try, to know your five-year-old and anticipate the little creature’s intellectual, social, and cultural potentials.

You spend late nights skimming blogs that let you empathise with and debate other neurotic parents putting themselves through the same idiocy.

And you conclude, no matter your bent, that this is most certainly a big decision.

And so, as much I’d like to be politically correct and think the choice between private and public are equal sides to the same coin — that turns out to be an absurd argument. They just aren’t.

As unjust as it is, there’s a valid reason people pay over $230K per child for their child to experience nine years of elementary education.

That said, life isn’t exactly as simplistic as an RPG. It isn’t just about maxing out your skill points. In life, there really are core values assigned to each attribute, and real negative implications for earning too many points in one category over another. Some people want to give their children the greatest chance of future financial success. Others want to turn their kids into rebels. Everyone says they just want their children to be happy — but definions of happy are personal and parent-centric.

And so, unsure of where we stood, my wife and I played the game. A move to the suburbs lurked in the corner like a Martha-Stewarted bogeyman.

When the assignment letter came in the mail, we wound up getting none of our initial public school choices. Our child had been enrolled in a low-score, low-achieving “challenged” place in a “challenged” neighborhood far from our home.

We also got into a bedazzling private school.

On a whim, we toured the bottom-barrel public school and found it actually had a “hidden gem” of a Japanese immersion program.

We met with a few of the other parents in that program and developed some of our own point-distribution strategies given the new specific factors:

• Public: +16 Cool New Language, +8 Ability to Make Palpable Difference, etc.
• Private: -39 Financial Stress, -5 Snobbery, etc.

Full of fear, not without remorse and regret, we took a deep look at our values, held hands, and relinquished the slot in the private school to another “lucky” child.

After a few days at her new Kindergarten, my child was singing “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes” in flawless Nihongo. Gem, indeed.

And, as it turned out, a few days later our waitlisted school (and our original first choice) called up and said a slot was available. This was one of the few public “trophy schools” with deep parental involvement, a generous PTA fund, and a commitment to social justice — all within biking distance. An even more gemlike, if unhidden, gem.

When it comes down it it, we got lucky. Our little game of Kindergarten applications had a happy ending. My kid is slowly leveling up in most of the key attributes our family considers important. But it could just have easily have gone the other way, with us frustrated in a place that didn’t align with our family’s goals and values.

Now how can we express real-world point systems like this in Role Playing or other computer games in such a way that the decisions the player makes have the same deeply emotional impact, the same challenge to core values, the same very-personal definions of success or failure?

It would make for quite a little game.

Releaser’s Remorse (Or “Why Game Grief Is Good”)

The beta period before a game ships is a bit like preparing for a big birth, but in some ways it’s more like knowing about your own imminent death. Core development is over and those sweaty glory days of being able to polish and tweak and balance are done and gone and will never, never come back.

This dread especially comes into sharp focus during usability testing. If you sit back and truly watch someone use your beta’d game and talk through what they are thinking there is a magical, dreadful moment when you’re out of the game designer corpus and seeing your beloved work through someone else’s unforgiving, skeptical eyes. The flaws pop like hairy pimples.

The  Elisabeth Kübler-Ross stages of grief apply:

1. Denial: This person doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Especially easy to do during executive or publisher reviews, since it’s a known fact that suits know nothing.
2. Anger: How did this happen? That damn art house! Those idiot programmers! Am I supposed to catch everything here!? How could this have been missed?
3. Bargaining: Give me a little more budget, let’s push out the delivery date by two weeks, and we can reach perfection, I tell you. Trust me!
4. Depression: This game just sucks. 
5. Acceptance: It is what it is. We did a fantastic job, all things considered, it’s got fantastic elements and will move the genre forward. It will be a huge hit and we’ll get to all the stuff we missed in the sequel. It will all be okay.

The key to reaching Stage 5, of course, is having enough experience and perspective to know the difference between fatal flaws (in which case the game really should have been killed for real or rejiggered way before beta, or you’re screwed) and flaws trumped by fun — issues with your game that the audience will work around or not really notice because they’re having such a good time.

The longer the development cycle, the harder this releaser’s remorse hits. And when the game finally goes out it’s only possible to celebrate the positive emotions that you as a designer deserve (joy, relief, sheer excitement) if you have worked through the five stages and acknowledged that a computer game like all art, and all else born from focused exertion, are more about the process than about achieving perfection.

How Casual Games are like American Idol

1. There are vociferous judges. Sites like RealArcade, BigFishGames, Yahoo Games, and my own company iWin vet (audition) which games we think the audience will like. I’ll leave it to you to match which companies are the Randys, Paulas, or Simons of our industry.
2. It’s Darwinistic. A fledgling game must immediately get to the top. If you miss the Top 10 list, you might as well have not competed.
3. It’s all about what the people want. Ultimately, it’s pure democracy (albeit with multiple votes by hormone-laden Sanjaya-loving girls). The masses vote for the tolp games with each purchase. Money talks.
4. It’s not about who is strictly the best. Because of the weekly elimation format of American Idol, two similar but equally talented gospel-based singers will fight for the same audience and one will eventually lose out — even if she is ultimately more talented than other contestants. Casual games rely on the the same timing and positioning. If two time management epics come out at the same time only one will earn everyone’s dollars and attention.
5. It’s all about being accessible. Simon will cut you to pieces if you try to sing a song you may love but that nobody has ever heard of. Additionally, exceptionally talented singers with narrow appeal will sink like an unrolling stone. Likewise, most new or experimental mechanics in casual games crash and burn, no matter how polished or innovative the game may be.
6. Cloning breeds accessibility. Archaeologists in bejeweled jungles, plucky young women starting menial businesses, or mysteries in cluttered old mansions. Enough said.
7. Too much cloning fails at a certain point. As with Idol, the audience knows when they have a pure rip-off on their hands — no matter how slickly produced a game it is. Ultimately, a game needs soul and a spark of originally to win out.
8. Everyone thinks they can do it. For every game published on the portals — even the ones that distribute a game a day — there are dozens that don’t make it. Maybe someone can create a site to showcase exceptionally bad games, which may be as funny to play as it is to watch as William Hung sing. Or not.
9. Personality matters. Notice those little Roman Numerals on most site Top 10 lists? We’re even seeing some Vs now. Sequels of popular franchises all sell because the audience wants more of a proven good thing. Star power is huge and become self-fulfilling.
10. Both are crown jewels of our pop culture. Casual games are no longer fringe. While they may not yet garner the audience of American Idol, more and more people are spending more and more of their leisure time with them. Now if only we can produce the game equivalent of Carrie Underwood.

How to Create the Ultimate Text Adventure

Text adventures usually are cool right up intil the point where they suck. This point is usually when they say a clever form of “You can’t do that here.”

The most delightful part of text adventures is when you try to do something crazy: “Put chicken in bartender.” and it responds to you in a funny way.

So it occurs to me: Why not build the ultimate text adventure by just crowdsourcing?

Step 1: Do the usual stuff: Write the best story you can using any number of interstory tools. Take as long as you can and be a good writer.

Step 2. Again, pretty par per course: Beta test it offline with as many fans as you can. Find actions people do and objects people use do that you haven’t accounted for yet. Fill in as many gaps as possible.

Step 3. Put the engine online

Step 4. Whenever the parser fails, e-mail the author. The author has simple tool to address the failure and come up with a funny response to any edge-case textual situations.

Step 4.5. If you want to get really crazy, open it up to the audience — or some creative segement of the audience. If the parser fails, let them suggest a response. The author can then moderate.

Eventually every possible situation will be covered.

Why hasn’t this been done yet? 

[hastily adding to list of other crazy things I’ll never get around to like finishing my dozens of abandoned short stories, doing something deliberate with my finances, or finding the spirit within in India.]

God’s Metrics

Spend any time doing web work at all, and you too will get suckered into the tempting siren-song of metrics. Metrics are, indeed, bursting little seeds of potential. Metrics is a fancy word marketing people use to mean “data”. Keep accurate metrics and test your web pages against them often, the mantra goes, and you can optimize your site experience to make the most money, bring in the most people, and be the most usable you can be.

Popular metrics people use, in order of importance:

• Unique Visitors
• Repeat Visitors
• Registered Users
• Active Daily/Weekly/Monthly Users
• Lifetime Customer Value (LCV) — How much cash a given customer is worth to you over time, on average.
• Active Revenue Per User (with the doglike name ARPU)

It’s a real science, this metrics. Take any web action, give half the people one alternative and half another, then measure metrics from each group to see who wins. This is called an A/B test. Does your audience prefer a blue button or an orange button? The text “Buy This Now” or “Get It”?

Raph Koster writes often about how much game designers can learn from web folk. But the reasons game designers are resistent to metrics are many:

• A lotta games ain’t online.
• Game “players” are not visitors, members, or users. So stop calling them that. That stuff is for executives and marketers (i.e. suits).
• Thinking up metrics in advance, analyzing the metrics, then acting on them is a crapload of work. This is especially true for games that have infinite potential choices with every gunshot, maze turn, platform raise, or monster quest.

But the main reason game designers are resistant is that they know, at heart, that delight is not a numbers game. Any fan of The Wire knows that running a police department trying to game metrics such as “monthly homicides” alone does not good policework make. And game developers know that creating a game to hit sales numbers or time spent per level does not good gamework make.

Like any other anlytical tools like game grammer, I think it comes down to using metrics as an occasional sniper to solve specific problems. Take a doctor metaphor: Hooking up the patient to machines and checking vital signs is helluva useful to know if things are going horribly wrong. But first take care of the patient by nurturing, preventing disease, and applying common-sense treatments.

It makes me wonder how God measures success. Is He the First Mover delighted by the emergent cornucopic awesomeness he has wrought, no matter its many uglinesnesses? Or does He make his decisions based on firm measurements, as many organized religions like to tell us:

• Souls saved / lost ratio
• Lifetime Sin Value (LSV)
• Active Prayers Per User (APPU)

What do you think?

Woody Allen and Philip Roth

I happen to be reading The Plot Against America on this day before “the generation’s most important election” (they always say that, and they’re always right).

The book is dead on about the melting-pot insanity of America, and how a small boy’s imagination can get colored and shaped by larger world affairs. It’s f-in’ brilliant.

The cool part of that is that I’ve always hated Roth. Maybe it’s just too close to me, but his early famous Zuckerman stuff with all the “insight” about an assimilated and over-horny Jewish psyche seems like suck obvious, easy pickin’.  But most of his recent novels, featuring a narrator named Philip Roth, are just so damn wise, politically sweeping, psychologically revealing, and delightfully constructed at every turn. American Pastoral is on my personal hit list — one of those novels that frustrates me deeply because no matter how flighty my delusions of grandeur get I don’t think I’ll ever be able to pen one of that quality.

Then there’s Woody Allen, whose early stuff is beyond human in its blend of the profane and holy-smoky. Those Annie Halls and Sleepers were so good, in fact, that he can get away with currency to spare making crappy melodramas in the entire later part of his career.

Others have noticed this career flip-flop, and the two gentlemen’s braided trajectory.

So here’s a toast, to you, to me, to America: May we all start out Allen and end up Roth. Of course, it usually doesn’t work that way.

As Paul Simon wrote for Leonard Bernstein’s opera Mass:

Half of the People Are Stoned and the Other Half Are Waiting for the Next Election

Good luck to you, whichever side of the aisle you may imagine yourself on.

The Great Story – Great Game Tool

At Last Year’s Game Developer’s Conference, I dropped in at the Writer’s SIG roundtable, run by Richard Dansky. The discussion turned to the problem of writers having no time in a typical game production to dig deep with their plots or characters. Most game writers have to struggle to crank out dialog in the midst of constantly changing level design and playability concerns.

I tossed out a question I’d been struggling with for a while, a question I didn’t articulate very well (not a good idea in a room of writers):

Anyone who has ever worked on a novel or even a screenplay knows how long it takes to write something good, to get every sentence to be meaningful and spot on, to achieve super subtext… And that’s just to write something good. Let’s not talk about Great… yet.

So my question was: Given the intensive process of commercial gaming, can we game hacks ever achieve truly good writing?

There was a bit of stunned silence. I guess some of my compatriots felt that writing in games is plenty good already. Then someone said:

“That’s a solved problem. It’s been achieved on TV. You just need a team. Teams of writers work together all the time to create episodes on very tight schedules.”

Hmmm. So let’s talk TV.

Most TV, most people would agree, is light and mindless. Don’t get me wrong: It actually takes seriously good writing to be light and mindless. Look at Seinfeld.

But every so often there’s something on TV that glimmers beyond the LCD and can actually be called Great. Great TV is, at times, on par with Shakespeare, The Bible, and Dostoevsky. Great has many definitions, but I like to think of it this way: Good is doing something masterfully. Great is doing several things masterfully on several levels in unison.

Helped by Great Direction, Great Cinematography, and Great Acting, TV as a medium has, in my opinion, achieved some Great Stories that could live on forever as classics. Some examples:

• NYPD Blue
• Sopranos
• The West Wing
• Six Feet Under
• The Wire

Now, if you don’t care much for the above TV shows or don’t think there’s much difference between these and other dramas such as the CSIs, Law & Order, soap operas, or even Lost and Heroes, then you might as well stop reading now — or stop living in my universe — because in my opinion while good stories do their part to make life a bit less boring and much more pleasurable, Great Stories actually make life meaningful.

From whence do these Great TV shows come?

If you read interviews by David Simon (comish of The Wire), David Chase (Sopranos mob boss), David Milch  (of NYPD Blue and Deadwood fame), etc. it becomes clear that each of these individuals are, like many people named David, control freaks. They are Show Runners — “a curious hybrid of starry-eyed artists and tough-as-nails operational managers.”

Great shows may credit several writers, and may have sizable writing teams brainstorming to flesh out a script, and may release in an episodic format. But they always have one authorial voice. One unbroken tone that leads to a cohesive vision. In most cases, the Show Runner has already done a hell of a lot of work plotting out the entire season or even series. This puts a lot of weight in one headspace. But it allows for characters and situations to have a novelistic level of detail that makes them, well, Great.

So, back to games. Clearly having one head honcho is charge is one piece of the puzzle to Greatness. Few would argue that what Great Games we have are the result of a lone Show Runner (or very small, very tight-knit team). Of course, giving one person, especially a writer, this responsibility would require a monumental process change in most game development studios.

But fine, we can dream. We can each imagine, one day, having a budget of millions and a staff of talented programmers, artists, level designers, and sub-writers at our command who for some reason are willing to put up with our bullshit.

But then there’s the larger question of what to do next. How can an interactive activity reach Story Greatness?

Clearly, we’ll need tools. Many smart people have experimented with many tools to help string together relatively believable and emotionally-charged characters and situations. Some examples:

– Will Wright’s The Sims or Spore or even Glenn Abrett’s Supple. These games are awe inspiring — they have fantastic AI, great humor, and awesome insight into the human mechanism. But for all of Greatness there, there none of the arcs or terrain of Great Story.

– The famous Façade experiment of Andrew Stern and Michael Mateas. It’s the crystallization of a Great Moment, but I don’t think this could hold out through the ups and downs of a whole tale.

– Chris Crawford’s Storytron (summed up in Different Approaches in the Quest for Interactive Storytelling) plays with verbs and objects to achieve some psychological complexity. Clever, but so far no example I’ve seen is actually even a remote pleasure to play.

– Omar Khudari’s The Act (which, granted, I haven’t played) sounds very cool as well: It uses a knob to dial the main character between extremes of emotions. So a scene can progress and you can choose to either jump the pretty girl or retreat the corner shyly. The story progresses based on which side of the emotional fence you keep falling. But does this mechanism support the breadth and depth that a good story needs?

The problem isn’t: How Can We Create Believable Characters? Because complex characters alone do not a good story make.

The problem isn’t: How Can We Create Emergent Yet Interesting Situations? Because dramatic situations alone do not a good story make.

The solution is not to take away the joy or be anti-commercial. All Great Stories are thoroughly enjoyable (if not fun). And since many people consider them essential to their culture, they sell like sonsabitches.

And the solution isn’t to take away the Action. The more we talk about artsy-fartsy notions of Story Greatness, the more we risk taking away what makes games games. They are not meant to be dramatic or comedic meditations, but interactive works of action. So says an unattributed EA exec in an excellent Atlantic Monthly article about narrative in games: 

“Blowing shit up is fundamental, because verbs are what make video games work.”

Hate to say it, but he’s right — at least the part about verbs is.

So the problem reduces to: How Can We Achieve Great Story within an Interactive, Commercial Construct so Utterly Reliant on Action?

Ugh. Ugly looking question. But more or less accurate.

Questions like these were chewed, digested, regurgitated, then chewed again in “The Watery Pachinko Machine of Doom” during last year’s Project Horseshoe — a discussion I was lucky enough to participate in. The core assumption of the workgroup, which I unwillingly subscribed to since I could find no logical argument around it, is that,

“The story that is generated through gameplay is the player’s personal story that has been mediated by the game systems… Story is the tail of what we do as designers, where the mediated experience is the dog.”

But I was and am uncomfortable with that notion. A few of us brought up the question of how authorial voice fits in. The group concluded that games are best at promoting a different type of author. As Danc summed up in the group’s report,

“In games, the voice of the designer becomes less about having a unique narrative style than it is about using various types of game systems in a distinctive fashion.”

Well, as much as I agree with that conclusion and appreciate the masterful use of Great Game systems… I still resist the idea that games can never have their own Jesus, Gatsby, Lolita, or Tony Soprano. In fact, the Horseshoe group used Reality Television as the closest other-media analog to what it was trying to achieve. Reality TV is not without its sociological brilliance. But it is consumable — not immortal like a Great Story.

The closest example I’ve found to achieving real literary depth and cohesion in games is Javier Maldonado’s Masq. At first Masq seems like a Choose Your Own Adventure game, but slowly you realize that the choices are almost always relevant. The choices you make in the game are spot on with the choices you would actually make in life, and the outcome of your actions are not always predictable. It’s more a “Your Own Adventure Chooses You” game.

Masq is told in graphic novel style, and involves a lot of reading. But what if the same techniques could be applied more interactively and graphically — so that the player can make relevant story choices at any given juncture using more modern game mechanics?

I’m working with Javier now on a tool to help codify his method of story design and create more depth in shorter and shorter periods of time. I’ll let you know what we come up with. But I have a nagging suspicion that we as an entire industry are missing a dead-on obvious technique that will unlock Story Greatness from our midst.

What is it?

Creative, Cool, or COMMERCIAL?

Whether at the brainstorm kickoff or a week before gold master, game designers make painful decisions that are consciously creative (original and ground-breaking, appealing to those thirsting for a novel experience), cool (hip or pop, appealing to the savvy), or commercial (out for the mass appeal). Clearly, the most celebrated and successful of works manages to simultaneously appeal to all three sensibilities.

Thing is, going the commercial route has this huge honking set of advantages — the ability to actually know mass tastes with usability and focus testing, the relative ease of cloning lots of other people’s hard-won and long-proven design decisions, oh, and return on investment… the safest way to go when there’s an actual money involved.

Is there a process or team dynamic that can to keep these three tensions more in balance — especially given the overwhelming power of commercial?

My Career Path

Every resume tells a story. But that story is usually fiction, making the protagonist seem a directed journeyman willfully forging a path to master a chosen vocation, career, or trade.

The real story can usually be found between the lines.

The text in blue is the stuff you’ll find on my official C.V.:

• Elementary School in Denver: I copied BASIC from magazines into my Commodore 64 to get free games. I joined BBSes to get free games. I learned some real programming to make some of the games better. I got an allowance sometimes.
• High School: I worked at a podiatrist’s office linking a database about foot pain to a visual interface. I fixed my friends’ parents’ computers. I worked in an endocrinology lab putting radioactive rats in blenders. I made bad films. I wrote my first novel.
• College: I got good pay from a wacky psychiatrist typing his scrawl into papers and submitting them to endless journals. I lost my job when AIDS got to him. I wrote my second, third, and fourth novels. I worked on the humor magazine, the horror magazine, and the daily newspaper. I volunteered at NYU’s Media Research Lab on a really cool project that let people walk up to a screen projection of virtual actors and interface with them. Wrote some software for interfacing between the video camera and a Mac and detecting some basic movement, but didn’t really touch any of the cool stuff.
• Graduation. I almost went to ITP. I almost took a job working at a company that built databases to track TV ads, telling myself it was glamorous because it involved TV. Last minute, I got a gig doing Director coding at one of the original (and final) multimedia CD-ROM companies. I was working on my fifth novel.
• When a semi-sociopathic game designer working on a sucky game I was coding quit in frustration, I took over. We worked 90-hour weeks. The game shipped, but still sucked.
• Recruiters were on the hunt. I was offered nearly double pay to switch to an e-commerce company that for some reason was starting a game division. I gave it a whirl. I sat in the back room of a huge bullpen full of programmers hacking together a multiplayer real time strategy game in Java. I jumped in as designer on that one too because everyone else wanted to do “real work” and write code.
• The game division officially spawned off into a game company called Actionworld. I wrote the engines for backgammon, chess, checkers, and some card games. I went back to my first novel and rewrote it to be more commercial. It still didn’t sell.
• Actionworld spawned off into an online game store that turned the 11th floor of a Manhattan skyscraper into a retail warehouse and shipping facility. It also purchased a company that conglomerated game sites and sold ads called Unified Gamers Online (UGO).
• UGO management talked to some investment bankers and knew it could go IPO. It became an affiliate site for all 18-24 web content and a Tier One Internet backbone. I played the role of big-time manager. One week, I hired a six people. I fired two the next week. We still made Java games and game lobbies.
• UGO spawned off a pure game company called PlayLink. I became a Vice President and had an office. Everyone had an office. We were a handful of people in a 5,000 square foot office. I still made Java games and game lobbies. Every once in a while I’d hire someone or give someone some tasks to do. I learned a bit, but not much, about how to delegate.
• When the IPO market for dot-coms dried up, UGO needed cash bad and stopped funding PlayLink. The company was sold to a gold mining company. The gold mining company purchased PlayLink with bundled stacks of actual cash money. The gold company had no active mines, but thought that the purchase would diversity their portfolio and draw attention to their stock again. It didn’t. They stopped paying employees.
• Most people left. A few of us desperately looked for something, anything to do with our semi-cool multiplayer game site. I almost took a job working on web coding for an interactive ad agency, though the people that interviewed me made me nauseated with their hipness. This entrepreneur out of San Francisco just sold his prize site and had some seed cash and had this pretty decent idea of hooking up with PlayLink to make a skill-based game site where people would play games against each other and wager a few bucks, winner take all (minus our tournament fee).
• And so I became one of the founders of NextGame. I worked for peanuts, but at least I had a (skill-based) job. I contributed to yet another Java game lobby and game server. I remade chess, checkers, and some card games. I wrote a new novel but didn’t know how to end it. I got married.
• NextGame purchased a flailing company called iWin and changed our company’s name to that nice four-letter domain. We made a download version of one of our most popular Java games called Jewel Quest. I didn’t understand why people would pay $19.95 for a game they could play online for free, but it sold like hotcakes.
• We abandoned the skill based model and focused on downloadables. I wrote a bunch of game and framework stuff in C++, which I had to dust off again. I co-wrote a screenplay and co-produced a low, low-budget film. I had a kid. I moved out to San Francisco. I bought my first car.
• I began coding less and managing more. I designed some games and did story writing for other games, did some art direction, conceived of and did basic architecture of a DRM system, hacked up a system for playing ads inside games, envisioned a micro-transaction subscription model.  I had another kid.
• iWin became one of the top “second-tier” casual game distributors.
• I stopped coding altogether. I managed game engineers. I acted as producer on a game or two. I chased some albatross. I became a Vice President again and started attending financial review meetings. I began realizing why some of the seemingly stupid decisions I’d seen in the past were made. I vowed to do better.
• I became the guy writing specs for all web product. I strongly opined about the games we were making and helped green-light some things that became hits (and many which did not).
• I see a need, make a case, get some cash, and begin work on a highly experimental interactive experience that frames a game store and integrates it into a large multiplayer game itself. Stay tuned!

Summary: 15 years, two jobs, no clear description of my current job, and no clear direction for what’s next. And pretty much lovin’ every minute.

Game On Da Brain

Feeling academically inclined today? Me neither. But I bet some of the articles below will tell you something about something.

My dirty little secret is that I like skimming through this type of work and feeling superior since I of course intuitively grok 98% this stuff (and without having to beg for grants).

My even dirtier little secret that I wish I had the time to write these type of masturbatory think-pieces!

Video Game Round Up 1 has games a social form, criticisms of the gaming, funny observations, games as art, anthropological work, and games and learning.

Round Up 2 is about Social Science and Anthropological Themes. Go human go!

Finally, Round 3 is about the Brain and Psychology – Meaning, Language, Gender, and History.

Bobe-Mayse

Bobe-Mayse (באָבע־מעשׂה) is one of many irreplacable Yiddish idioms. It means “tall story”, an old wives’ tale, urban legend, or, if said in a more sneering sort of way, a way to call bullshit on an associate. In my family, however, bobe-mayse was used more to mean pointless… not just a wildly untrue story but untrue living — spending valuable time doing something beneath a mature person’s stature.

When I was growing up, reading comics and playing video games were bobe-mayse compared to the serious business of homework and A-pluses. Drawing my own comics and programming my own games were a yet deeper form of bobe-mayse — gournish (nothing), luft gesheften (affairs built on air) meant for luftmenschen (men with their heads in air or full of air, i.e. intellectuals).

 

I got into college on an eight-year medical school junket. How proud everyone was. When I dropped out, my suggested alternatives of journalism or (gasp) being a working novelist were bobe-mayse in the eyes of my family and most of the social circle I was, at the time, still confortable with. To lessen the damage a bit, I wound up centering in on computer science, which was still a bit radical and unknown at the time, and probably still mayses-gesheften compared to the stolid world of a law degree, accounting certificate, or starting a real business selling something people could touch. But it was still on the straight and narrow enough to keep the tuition checks coming. “Maybe you can create computer programs for radiologists to see things,” my dad advised. “I hear there’s good money there.”

 

As a graduate, when I seriously contemplated the games industry, it was utter bobe-mayse. But by then all my friends were bon-a-fide luftmenschen. Getting a corporate job at all was pretty damn straight laced and radical.

 

Years later, it’s clear to me how bobe-mayse is all a matter of context.

 

Let’s look at games as an example. There’s a pecking order:

 

Graphic researchers view medical imaging professionals view Hollywood special effects masters view 3D engine writers view game developers view level editors view “digital fine artists” as either beneath them, irrelevant, or downright worthy of contempt. This view goes up the ladder as well as down. Above them all are the theorists in physics, optics, cognitive psychology — people who feel they originated the real work of recreating the world digitally. Then of course there are sci-fi writers, who truly pioneered the concepts upon which virtual worlds and the metaverse were built. 

 

Within the narrow slice of the gaming industry itself there’s a hierarchy of bobe-mayse that works both upwards and down. MMOG developers scoff at the simplicity of stand-alone core developers who scoff at handheld developers who scoff at casual game cloners who can’t believe anyone that spends a weekend making a Facebook game dares call himself a game developer. And let’s not even talk about paper-and-pencil game designers.

As with most things, there’s the narcissism of small differences at play. Someone who does something similar to you, but not exactly what you focus your hard-fast hours on must be the most misguided of all fools.

  

I’ve certainly got my own predjudices, and I routinely trivialize the work of others as utter bobe-mayse. To me, most “fine art” with that Grand Statement about how games are life or life is a game is pretentious self-referential claptrap. Most academic or or deep critical writing about games isn’t worth boo-shee — empty words that are either childlishly obvious or hopelessly obscure. I’ll admit, as a commercial game developer, I generally have little patience for the purely academic or meta-artistic. The things those putzes pop out is worth bubkes.

 

But every once in a while I read an academic article or play an experimental game or see a work of “digital game art” that reminds me there’s actually a reason to keep an eye open, reminds me of why I really care about computer games to begin with. And then I tear up and lose my mind in the luft for a while and dream big and write blog entries like this.

Truth is, we’re all of us telling our own story, from different POVs. None of us who really care about computer games can say we toil at honest trade. Whether you’re a storyteller, visionary, architect, thinker, patron, or other enabler — you have the fortune to be dwelling in the land of tale tale. And you realize that games, above all other bobe-mayse media, have the potential to connect the domain of bobe-mayse with the domain of the important and world-changing. The domain of more worthy and worldly pursuits like profiting deeply from global mega-capitalism, waging warcraft in the name of geopolitics, or recombining human genome to create a superspecies. 

It’s not that we don’t care about the real world, it’s that we honestly believe that tall stories, especially multimedia digitally-enabled stories, are the truest path to communally get there.

 

So whatever your preferred flavor, long live bobe-mayse!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Authenticity and Casual Games

I like to think that I consciously chose a career in casual games, but of course things don’t work that way.

When trying to explain what I do, there are a lot of phases I drop. To relatives who don’t play computer games at all I might say:

“You may think of games that something teenage boys play in dark basements. But in casual games, our biggest audience segment is 30 to 50-year-old women!“

To old pals:

“I love it because with casual games I impact the mass culture, not just a sub-culture. People around the country, of all ages and jobs and genders, have heard of the games I make. I hear people discussing my games on the bus and see them playing my games in airport lounges.”

Or to potential recruits coming from the core game space:

“The product life cycles are perfect. Small close-knit teams, six months with no burn-out, and games are almost never killed mid-development!”

And all of these things are true — and I say these things passionately, Casual games seems like a spot-on place to be. There’s clearly something deeply meaningful about casual games. I help make a worthwhile product that many people truly care about.

But the passion is fading.

My company, iWin, actually began as a skill-based multiplayer gaming site. To be honest, I wasn’t hugely passionate about the games I was making — most were utterly unoriginal standards such as solitaire, backgammon, or checkers. But I was passionate about building a thriving game community, and this seemed like a cool business model in which to do that. It was only after revenues of our first downloadable game, Jewel Quest, eclipsed the skill-based business that we realized being a developer/publisher/distributor of casual games was a smarter way to go.

This was great with me. It allowed me to justify spending more time and money on the sweet stuff I always cared about like whizbang graphics, deeper story, and polished gameplay.

So while I didn’t consciously start at iWin to create casual games, I was tremendously happy with how things evolved.

But as the market gets bigger and bigger, meaningful becomes mass-market. As with anything else aimed to the masses, from election campaigns to reality TV, lowest common denominator triumphs. Without fail, time and again, hidden object games, Diner Dash rethemes, match-three clones, and brand-name sequels dominate the charts. 

I recall a specific time when I was particularly proud to be associated with casual games. I was at a club one night, dancing drunkenly to some D.J. I met a young man, a friend of a friend, who told me, “One day I’m gonna be up there spinning and people will know my name.”

This was poignant to me. I’ve always been fond of hangers-on striving to greatness. Whether a wannabe movie star, wannabe rockstar, wannabe chef, or this wannabe DJ… You can tell that most of them will never ever make it just by their attitude. They go to the key events and wear the right styles and drop the big names and push and strive and yearn. But in the end wannabes care about the outer expression — being rich and famous. Not the inner expression — saying something new, killing themselves in obscurity to master the craft better than anyone else, taking big risks, earning an inner confidence nobody can shake.

Now I care deeply about a lot of art disciplines, but when it comes to electronica music, I’m pretty clueless. I’m ashamed to say I don’t even understand what D.J.s do, exactly. Play records? What’s hard about that? And in my ignorance, I appreciate almost nothing about those that excel at DJing — the disclipine is as meaningless to me as collecting Beanie Babies or curling. So here was a wannabe of meaninglessness.

Talking to this fellow made me appreciate my own work. As long as a wide swath of society cared about the games I made, I was doing something meaningful. And the games my company were producing were hits, among the top brands of all time. How wonderful a feeling.

But now, even though my company is still able to consistently manufacture hits, and even though the casual game market is exploding at breakneck pace, I fear by pandering to the base our industry is losing authenticity.

But what’s the alternative? Dozens if not hundreds of indie developers create gorgeous, insightful, deep, unquestionably authentic games that then languish and fail in the open market. Is it the nature of all pop art to be inauthentic? And if that’s the case, where does that leave my own aspirations? At times I strive to be Peter Molyneux or Will Wright — legends who, so it seems, can toil at great quixotic projects and take great ridiculous chances and still be given bottomless resources to work with. But who outside of our small clique of gamers cares about the products these guys produce? Compared to the 350 million downloads of Bejeweled, even these greats and their visions are meaningless.

Still, call me ungrateful… but these days I get the feeling it’s better to be an authentically striving wannabe of meaninglessness than an titan of meaning with nothing more original to say.

Luckily, I’m back where I started — focused on a casual game community again. Trying to craft something with meaning not just to me… but to the faceless masses who, I’d bet, while consuming these throwaway games, strive for a deeper connection.

 

 

You Too Can Fail at Multiplayer Games

These days literally hundreds of companies are promising to deliver the next big Massively Multiplayer Online tour de force. But it may serve us well to remember that even the simplest of multiplayer games usually ends in more whimper than bang. In fact, the commercial success rate for multiplayer games and game communities is downright dismal. As a person deeply involved with several epic failures (as well as a hit or two), I will present design, technical, and business techniques you can emulate to ensure that your multiplayer game becomes a party nobody shows up for.

Slides and MP3 here: http://www.casualconnect.org/content/Seattle/2008/foxsea08.html

Beyond The Box

All too often, developers ignore what occurs before, beneath, and after the actual gameplay experience, leaving such things to evil marketers. We often take for granted that the psychological state of the gamer’s brain is unique among all other leisure activities – a magical blend of zoned-out and focused-in. By applying true game design to areas outside the game itself, we can entrance, enhance, enthrall, entertain, and (since we have to make some money here) extract significantly more value out of our audience. Some examples of things we will discuss include awards, nerd-cred points, in-game ads, emergent story, theme continuity, social networking, user generated content, and alternate/extended reality games.

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Vinny’s Story Challenge II

See the Story Challenge 1 post to catch up.

Story Challenge II began when Vinny wrote an editorial on Gamezebo how much he liked the Sopranos. I agreed — it was the first time a TV series had seemed downright novelistic.

I sent Vinny this great blog post I found about the meaning behind the Soprano’s final episode. It was the most literary analysis of a TV show I’d ever read, and did a great job making the case that the series ended with Tony being murdered in front of his family.

One song in the episode was particularly affecting: “It’s Alright, Ma, I’m Only Bleeding” by Bob Dylan. Turns out Vinny and I also share a passion for Bobby D lyrics.

And so that become our muse-object for challenge two.

His entry: Acapulco Blue.

Mine: Medium Rare.