My Performance at Evolution North 2007

The short version

• I got 2nd in the Street Fighter Alpha 2 tournament (part of Midwest Championships, not Evolution), somehow losing to Justin Wong
• I go 2nd in ST (Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo), losing twice to Jason Cole.
• I did not qualify in Guilty Gear, though I did beat entire teams with just my Chipp.

Street Fighter Alpha 2
Even though I haven't played this game in many years, it was still my tournament to win. I know more about the game than anyone else there, have more experience in it than anyone there, and I was pretty solidly one of the 3 best US players back in the day. Both Jeron and Flash G are solid though, somehow knowing how to play A2 (though I wonder how they know, ha). Each of them remind me about a concept I don't really have a name for--maybe "tournament intensity." They are both serious competitors who make good decisions during tournament play. Even when they are out of their element in a game I know they don't know 100%, they still make good decisions and eke out every advantage they can.

Justin Wong has that same tournament intensity, and he's even more intense. I saw Justin play Ken, Rose, and some 3rd character (I think) during the tournament. He seemed to know just enough to get by. I figured he would play Rose against me and he did (maybe he even picked first, I forget). I picked Zangief to counter. Maybe it was my years of zero practice, or maybe it was Justin's "tournament intensity," but he destroyed me in that match. He demonstrated that he knew to counter jump-ins, which is really the main problem for Rose in that match. It was absolutely a testament to "time does not equal skill." Justin has probably played Alpha 2 about 1% as much as me, considering I played it for at least 3 years about every other day and he played it, well, almost never. And yet armed with only meager knowledge about a few important counters, he kept his head about him, turned up his tournament intensity, and was able to beat me.

Oh yeah, after game 1, I abandoned Zangief and went for Rose vs. Rose. I demonstrated that my secret low strong tactics can usually hit other people's low strongs. Rose vs. Rose is a game of doing only a few moves most of the time, with a couple random occasional things thrown in. I had the lead in games, but Justin was able to come back, mostly because he knew a little better when to do nothing and when to do the occasional strange thing.

Incidentally, my other loss in A2 was to NKI. He knows almost nothing about A2 either, but he fakes it very well. He played Rolento using A3 tactics (or CvS2?) in order to fake general proficiency. That's cute and all, but not nearly enough to win. He won by dancing around long enough to land Rolento's deadly custom-combo. Every time he activated it, he hit me with it. I think he learned this from A-Groove in CvS2, but he certainly didn't learn it by playing A2. Again, time spent playing A2 is most definitely not the major factor in whether a player can win.

If anyone is curious, I hardly played Rose at all during this tournament. I played Ryu almost the whole way through.

Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo

There were a number of good players at the event, including Jessie Howard, Wes Truelson(sp?), NKI, Jason Cole, Flash G, Jeron, and Darkside Phil (DSP) to name a few. Again, Flash G and Jeron showed their "tournament intensity" and gave me hard matches. They are able to "keep their heads about them" under pressure, but I was able to beat them, possibly more through super knowledge of ST nuances, though maybe I do have some impromptu ability of my own, shrug.

Facing NKI was a somewhat daunting because he beat me at Evolution two years ago (maybe I lost to him last year too, I don't know). I remember when NKI didn't know the first thing about ST and I could beat him without even trying. He devoted himself to the game, lived in Japan for a while, practicing often, and finally came of age when he beat me in a tournament two years ago. You can't really think about stuff like when you step up to play, and I managed not to. I used Vega (claw) to beat his Chun Li. His Chun Li is very solid, but cheapy wall-dive proved superior that day.

I lost only to Jason Cole and then again to Cole in the grand finals. I got noogied about 100 times by his Dhalsim. The finals score was 2-3 in his favor, so it was close, but his noogies proved greater than my wall-dives. Incidentally, Cole--who used to have quite a temper--has a different type of tournament demeanor altogether compared to Justin Wong and his crew. Cole doesn't seem that intense. Maybe "relaxed" is the better word. He seems to just let the right choice flow through him. Usually patient, and aggressive when he has to be. Cole likes to talk a lot about 'clutch' (the ability to really seal the deal under the final moment under the highest pressure) and he certainly has it in spades.

Guilty Gear Slash

I got jerked around by a few possible teams I could join, then decided to ahead with my original plan of playing alone. That means I'd have to beat 3 people in a row without losing one game to advance each time. Literally 10 seconds before my first match, RashReflection asked if he could join my team, and I said ok. I was--well--the main force on the team though. I defeated a couple teams all by myself. Against one team, I beat their first two members myself, then faced a potemkin player as the third (I was Chipp! Ouch!). After grinding this guy down with like 100 hits, I got him down to 2 pixels, and got hit by a low counter-hit low fierce. GG, Chipp dies. I was a pixels away from eliminating that entire team with Chipp...and they went on to get 3rd I think. Ugh, ugh.

Yeah, I hate the Curse of Chipp. I practiced Potemkin and Faust against random people ahead of time, and realized how many holes I have with them compared to Chipp. My practice matches with Chipp were like 10% me losing in one hit and 90% me completely owning, so I decided to go with him for the tournament after all. Maybe I should learn Millia in GG Accent Core. She always seemed like a non-sucky Chipp to me, but I could never get the hang of her at all. Anyway, I did not qualify in GGXX. Hopefully I'll have a real team for Evo West.

--Sirlin

Can Games Teach Ethics?

Can games teach ethics? I think they definitely can, but my colleague Frank Lantz argued that I have it wrong. Before going on, I should define some terms such as "ethics" and "Frank Lantz."

Frank teaches game design at NYU and is the co-founder of an unusual game company called area/code. I see him about every year at game conferences. We have a shared understanding of competitive games and the culture that goes along with them. I draw from fighting games while Frank's drugs of choice are Poker and Go. (Yes I capitalized those on purpose.) We seem to disagree on things when we talk, but it's the "good kind" of disagreement where I think each of us learns some new point of view from the other.

Here's my side of things. Imagine a game vaguely like Oblivion, a 3D world where you control a character who can visit towns, talks to people, pick locks, and fight. Now imagine that the there's more of a diplomacy system in the game, the ability to sway politics (perhaps a voting system and the ability to persuade voters) as well as the ability to accomplish things by force. Actions have consequences, so you can break into houses and you can fight people in the streets, but you'll have to deal with the legal system and the police system if you do. So there's our world.

Now let's start with ethics. Stealing, lying, and killing are usually morally wrong things to do. Backing that statement up is beyond the scope of this post, so I'm hoping that can be taken as a given. The game world I propose is set up to reinforce those values. But, we would expose the player to a few extreme and unusual situations where stealing, lying, and killing become the morally correct thing to do. If you have the ability to save the life of a drowning person, but a thick-headed guard won't let you steal his boss's boat without a forged note, then it's probably good to forge that note. Saving a life is more important than a blanket commitment to "never forge." Perhaps you disagree, but it's definitely the kind of ethics I subscribe to and it's my game after all.

These extreme situations would be engineered so to make it obvious that breaking the usual rules can be a morally sound thing to do. This alone would be a big idea for some people whose thinking is stuck in the "lying is a sin, period" mode. (When a murderer with bloodied hands, stops and demands that you promise not to tell the cops which way he runs, and you agree, then the cops run up and ask where the murderer went...I think it's ok to break your promise, for example.) Anyway, this is not Earth-shattering stuff (I'd hope), which is why we then need to move into areas of gray. After we've established conventions (it's usually wrong to steal) and shown some exceptions (sometimes in unusual circumstances, it's wrong *not* to steal), then we can cook up a bunch of really gray areas where most people will disagree. Some people will make choice A, some choice B, and hopefully almost everyone will be confronted with the question "what is the right thing to do here?"

It's easy to go through life not asking questions like this, and getting stuck into one mode of thinking about ethics, but you can't have much a personal theory on things unless it stands up to tests...the very kind of tests we can create in a virtual world. The player would hopefully end up exploring his own view of things just as much as he'd explore the game world. It would also be very valuable, I think, to show that when you make a certain decision about stealing or whatever, that the local bartender thinks one thing, the distraught mother thinks another, the church thinks another, and the professor of ethics (he's definitely an NPC in here somewhere!) thinks another. And yes, the professor of ethics disagrees with the church on a great many things.

Now for Frank's side of the story. He says that one or the other is true: your in-game decisions about ethics have in-game consequences (meaning they manipulate various stats) or they don't. If they do, then no matter how clever your situations, the player will really just try to "game" the system. You'd just choose the path of least resistance and most power, or whatever other stat maximizing suits your fancy, rather than care about any "real" (or should I say "virtual?") issues. And if your decisions *don't* affect any stats or gamestate, then they are meaningless and that doesn't teach much either. Actions without consequences don't have lessons.

He says the entire approach is wrong, and that games he's learned the most life lessons from have no mention of ethics at all: Poker and Go. Here you learn about self-improvement, patience, seeing people for their merit rather than their skin color, and so on. Furthermore, he reminds me that *I* learned all those same lessons too, also from competitive games that don't concern themselves with explicitly teaching ethics. He says developers should care a lot more about just making good games (Starcraft 2, yay) and less about the authorial meaning I'm trying to convey.

Now I'll open it up to the floor. Is one of us right, or both of us? It's been three months since I discussed this with Frank, and while I still think the game I describe could be very effective if implemented well, it's hard to ignore his arguments. What do you guys think?

--Sirlin

Large Numbers and Humanity

This eight-year-old article from Scott Aaronson is thoughtful on many levels. Aaronson starts off innocently enough, with a "game" in which contestants must name the largest number they can in 15 seconds.

You have fifteen seconds. Using standard math notation, English words, or both, name a single whole number—not an infinity—on a blank index card. Be precise enough for any reasonable modern mathematician to determine exactly what number you’ve named, by consulting only your card and, if necessary, the published literature.

This exercise leads to a journey through human thought with unfortunate ramifications for our future.

One answer is to write down as many 9s as you can on the notecard. Of course, this answer would be shattered by anyone who wrote down a bunch of 9s raised to the power of a bunch more 9s. This is, in turn, blasted by anyone who writes 9^9^9^9^9^9, and so on. In fact, each of these improvements so far defeats the previous, that you could give your competitor some extra time, and still win. Instead of 15 seconds, you could give your opponent as long as the universe has so far existed, and you'd be plenty safe. Even 9^9^9 is vastly more than the number of particles in the known universe.

Aaronson goes on to show us that even these exponentials are child's play compared to strange entities such as the Ackermann series and, still crazier, something called "Busy Beaver" numbers that have to do the longest time a theoretical computer could work on a problem without working infinitely long.

All of this really gives perspective that the winner of this contest is the one who has the highest order paradigm. After you read about Busy Beaver numbers, you almost feel sorry for the poor saps who are still doing 9^9^9.

Aaronson also looks back through history, showing how far we've come. The bible said that pi = 3, and made numerous references to the number of stars and number of grains of sand on a beach being "infinite." That kind of thinking is what you'd expect from someone who just wrote three or four 9s on the notecard, lol. Archimedes came along and said the number of grains of sand must certainly be less than 10^63, therefore it is finite. Shocking stuff for his time. Incidentally, the church threatened death to Pythagoras of Samos for saying that the square root of 2 is an irrational number (its decimal form has infinitely many, non-repeating digits) and Socrates died for his scientific beliefs. Only in pockets of the world where reason had a chance to flourish did humans compute more and more digits of pi, and come up with higher-order paradigms of large numbers, and so on.

Why are people so afraid of large numbers? Why should anyone care in the first place?

Physics professor Albert Bartlett said, "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."

He's talking about the idea that if the human population continues to double every 40 years as it has so far, that the mass of all humans in the year 3750 would equal the mass of the Earth. Clearly this will be stopped short by famine, disease, nuclear war, or something. But the notion of "sustainable growth" of only a few percentage points per year is the crazy-talk of someone who doesn't realize the math. Radiation levels, population levels, CO2 omissions and many other things operate at large scales and are very real problems. They can't be addressed unless they can be understood in the first place, and that means it's important for the average person to have some grasp of exponential numbers.

Aaronsons's article also has a very fascinating section about WHY people can't grasp large numbers. Apparently, when you are asked to just guess "which of these two answers is probably closer" in a simple math problem, this uses a different part of the brain than when you have to compute something exactly. The estimation part of the brain is great for telling if there are about 3 or about 6 enemy tribespeople attacking you. But it's useless at the scale of exponential numbers. Humans use the language center of the brain to exactly compute these types of numbers, because no one has the intuition to deal with them.

I'll close with this quote from Aaronson:

"If people fear big numbers, is it any wonder that they fear science as well and turn for solace to the comforting smallness of mysticism?"

--Sirlin

GDC 2007, Day 3

Some academics showed off what they considered to be the top 10 findings from game research this year. One of them involved the "playing to win" type player, and how even that type of player seeks to even the playfield by self handicapping or teaching the opponent. Another involved a bunch of data showing that a huge percentage of players spend a huge percentage of time playing World of Warcraft alone. It even used the phrase "together alone" as opposed to the phrase "alone together" that I used in my infamous article. A third finding had to do with ethical and moral exploration in games being a big, fertile, and unexplored area in games.

So, uh, I guess game researchers tend to talk a hell of a lot about what I write.

A panel moderated by David Edery (Microsoft) which included Raph Koster, someone from The Sims, and someone else from Neverwinter Nights talked about facilitating user generated content. Raph, always amusing, challenged the title of the panel "sharing control" saying that the users have almost all the control anyway, and that we're mostly along for the ride. The Neverwinter Nights guy agreed saying that maybe the players will share some control with us game developers. There were really interesting examples of players using content in crazy ways that were never remotely considered by the developers. As one example, Raph talked about how little development time was spent putting in dancing animations in Star Wars Galaxies, yet players made endless dancing videos on youtube and even orchestrated 150 person synchronized dancing scenes. He pondered "why didn't we just put in more dancing stuff and ship that? It would have been cheaper and we would have been on MTV." ha.

The creator of Castlevania talked about the advantages and disadvantages of 2D games. He said that 2D games are really good at capturing: 1) distance, 2) timing, 3) position, and 4) direction. In 2D, distance between objects and their facing directions are very, very clear. It's also pretty easy for the player to understand where a good position is in a 2D game and how to get into it. Finally, because those other things are easy, 2D games are able to focus on timing, rather than fumbling around in 3D space.

He also talked about how 2D, in some ways, is a great help to the team making the game. One person can be in charge of all the background in a level, such as "foggy village." In a 3D game, you'd have one person doing textures, one modelling just one room of that village, another fog programmer, and so on and so on. The fragmentation of the 3D team means each person feels like a cog in a machine, while the team member on a 2D project is responsible for a big chunk and feels more ownership, so he tries harder. 2D teams are also generally able to be smaller, which helps greatly with management and communication in the team. On the flipside, so much emphasis is put on 3D games that some team members feel they have no career advancement opportunities if they work on 2D games.

He also offered the interesting opinion that because of all the advantages of 2D listed above, that it's easier to create a 2D game that has the features you want and delivers the experience you want to the player. BUT, it's much easier to create a 3D game that has a presentation that impresses the player and gets him excited, as opposed to a 2D game where that is very hard. He thinks 2D games are unfortunately mostly for hardcore players who can appreciate the advantages, but that 3D games are inherently better at presentation because of camera movement, so they will remain the dominant form of game. That said, he also thinks 2D games will never die and that nintendo DS, Virtual Console, XBLA, cell phone games, etc all show many opportunities for 2D.

Chaim from Maxis gave an excellent presentation on the design of the editors in the upcoming game Spore. He talked about the difference between tools that let professionals create content and tools that seem to magically create awesome stuff when you hardly do anything. Photoshop can create great stuff is you know exactly what you're doing, but even a child can create interesting stuff with finger paints. Photoshop requires all sorts of technical knowledge to use to even a medium extent, but if you just put your hand in a paint bucket, then drag your hand over some paper, you get all sorts of interesting forms and shapes.

Spore wants to be more like finger paints. They want it to give you disproportionately great creatures/items/whatever for how much effort you put in. This way, your grandmother and other non-gamers can see what it's like to CREATE something, and once they do that with some success, they will be excited to try a little more complicated tools.

Imagine a large circle representing the set of all possible things a tool could make. The 3D program Maya, for example, has an enormous circle of possible things to make, as it could make any object/character/environment in any currently existing video game. Now imagine a much, much smaller circle representing all the "good" things one could make in 3D. Pretty much all of those are inside the first circle, meaning pretty much all the good stuff you could ever want to make, could be made in Maya. Too bad that the "good stuff" circle is damn tiny compared to all the really bad stuff you could possibly make in Maya. Even worse, imagine a third circle representing the content that an average users is *likely* to make. Unfortunately, there is zero overlap between what a new Maya user is likely to make with the set of "good" things that could be made. You are about 100% likely to make crap.

Spore wants align these three conceptual circles. They want the set of all likely things you'll make to be smack in the middle of all possible awesome stuff that you might want to make. Furthermore, they want as much of the awesome stuff you can think of to be inside the "possible to make" circle. At any given stage of their progress, they could look at the catalog of all the items made by various average people who get to play with Spore and see how "awesome" the resulting content is. It took a lot of iteration on the tools to get where they want to be.

One of the examples shown was the character creator tool. It was a hard problem because if you give the user the ability to make, say, *any* body for the creature, then players will tend to make very terrible bodies because the space of all possible bodies is so large. Furthermore, if the players could somehow assemble a bunch of polygons into some type of creature body, the animation system would have no clue what to do with it. So this very open system would be confusing to both players and the animation system.

Chaim (the prototyping master) asked one of the artists for help. This artist had a lot of drawings of creatures that Maxis hoped could be made in Spore (so they represent that circle of "good" things that we hope are all possible to create and even likely to create). Anyway, the prototyper knew that the artist had some kind of pattern he followed that let him always make good creature body shapes, but he didn't know what the secret was. The artist explained that all his bodies start out as a bean shape, and are then modified in only three different ways of extruding or bending or whatever.

The next creature editor prototype gave the player a 3D "bean" and a few controls to modify it in exactly the way the artist described. This structure, though very limiting relative to all the things you could make in Maya, turns out to pretty much always make good stuff. It is also very clear to the player what to do, and it's clear to the animation system how to animate anything that comes out of this structured system.

He also gave many other examples along these same lines. Quick notes are like, if you want to add legs to the creature, then allowing the set of all possible ways to put legs on would be difficult (how to place them in 3D space using a 2D screen and 2D mouse), it would lead to mostly bad placement of legs (the set of all bad places to put legs is way bigger than the set of all reasonable places) and furthermore the animation system would have too much trouble dealing with these wacky legs. So, what really happens is that all legs have feet that touch the floor. If you try to add a leg, the editor automatically puts the foot on the floor, and you move the leg around on that plane, which is very easy with a 2D mouse. It's fortunate that this gets rid of tons of bad places to put legs by not even bothering you with them, and the animation system is very happy too. They applied this same principle to many, many aspects of the editor.

I heard some people muse that creating doesn't mean anything if every choice is "right," but I think the overall approach is very good. It really will lead to empowering people like grandmothers who don't know they can create things at all, and will lure them into the experience. If they want more power, there are a couple levels of extra layers in Spore with more advanced features. If they want TONS of power, they can use Maya.

Next up, Ernest Adams talked about how he sucks at games and he wants more games for him and other people who suck but have money and want to play anyway. He talked about how a goal-oriented game can still allow diversions and sandbox stuff that is fun. Yeah we all know that but he's saying designers can take the sandbox activities more seriously and embrace the idea that it's perfectly valid to play around without a particular goal and not treat the notion as a second-class citizen.

Adams talked about FarCry takes place on this beautiful island with sandy beaches and blue water with fish and how he'd like to explore the game. But FarCry is, he said, allows you to explore that island if-and-only-if you want to be in a world entirely based on quickly shooting people before they shoot you. Of course, FarCry is simply not the game for him, but his point is that apparently MOST games aren't for him, which is a narrow state of affairs.

A game that offers a series of moral choices was an example of giving the player meaningful choice, but not requiring "skill" or challenge obstacles. I happen to be very interested in this exact type of game, but I guess that's for another time.

Oh, Ernest had a good line when he talked about how first person shooters have some of the most beautiful environments in the game industry, so "we have awesome nouns...and yet we have hardly any verbs." Rather than just shoot, he wants to ride a horse, climb a mountain, scuba dive, explore caves, go fishing, and other various activities involving tourism and exploring. He's saying that this style of play--that is play without gameplay--is way too uncommon. The reason, he says, is obviously because game developers are obsessed with games having to be hard challenges, which is less and less true as the market expands.

Everyone I've mentioned said a lot more than what was noted here, but I think I'll call it a day and get some rest. Game Developer's Conference 2007 is now over.

--Sirlin

GDC 2007, Day 2

CliffyB lamented that Gears of War is really the same game as Bionic Commando. Instead of jumping from platform to platform, the game is turned on its side so that you run from the cover of one "platform" to the cover of the next. Instead of a grappling hook, you have that strange running feature that basically functions like a grappling hook to the next platform. Interesting, ha.

I don't know what words can even do Miyamoto justice. He is a king among men. He told us how important it is to take risks, as is a corporate philosophy of Nintendo. He also told us that tenacity is important, because there are some ideas that it has taken him like a decade to really get. He showed us his original try at "build a face" software from some really old platform that I forget what it even was. Then he showed all the tries he's had over the years from gameboy, to N64, to GameCube about various "making faces" software that never went anywhere. Most of Nintendo thought it was all horrible, but he kept trying it. Finally, with Miis on the Wii, he got it right. I just said "Miis on the Wii."

One random interesting line from Miyamoto was that he proposed that game reviews include an extra score for how much that game appeals to non-gamers. That really put some things in perspective, as Brain Age and Nintendogs would get a 10 in that category, while Gears of War (good game as it is) would get somewhere around a 0.

Introversion software is notable for their win of last year's Independent Game Festival award, where they said at their acceptance speech that they funded it all themselves because "we didn't want any publishers fuckin up our gaime!" (Trying to capture his accent there.) At this years awards (last night) they were presenters, and reminded us that publishers will still fuck up your gaime. In their 1-hour session, which was great, they talked about how publishers will fuck up your gaime. They say that many of the things publishers used to do are now obsolete. Interoversion is doing just fine selling Darwinia on Steam, and you don't need a publisher to get on xbox live or sell directly on the web, either. In many cases, they claim that publishers are adding zero value, and taking 70%, while Xbox Live takes only 30%. Yeah, yeah, publishers can foot the bill for huge games and pay for QA and marketing that you can't pay for, but his point is well taken for small games made by indie studios. I guess you really don't need a publisher if you can someone manage to fund the first game yourself. Publishers would just fuck up your gaime anyway, right?

Keiji Inafune is head of Capcom R&D, making him the highest ranking creative person in Capcom, and he's been there for over 20 years. Rockman (Megaman) is his character. I've heard Inafune is a little crazy, but I was totally unprepared for how shocking his lecture was. It was a question/answer session with questions written by--I forget who--but they were damn good questions. Almost all the questions were highly critical of him and Capcom, even to a surprising degree.

The negativity of the questions didn't even phase Inafune. I think he's far beyond even caring what anyone thinks about anything, so he just says whatever crazy thing comes to his mind, with even less self-ceonsorship than I have. Within the first one minute of him talking, he told us how Japanese developers are "cowards." They are cowardly and don't have bravery. Also they are cowards. He was very clear that they are cowards.

At one point, an answer to who-knows-what question had him rambling about how we fight zombies and monsters in games, but he fights zombies and monsters and other evil creatures in Capcom management. We all have our zombies to fight, and must keep fighting, he said. He mentioned how Capcom was against doing Resident Evil and even wanted to cancel it when it was almost finished, but Inafune pushed them to release it. The moderator then asked "What did the...uh...zombies and monsters in Capcom's management say after Resident Evil was released?" Inafune said that it did really well so of course they suddenly liked it, but that they don't know anything in the first place. I swear I am not making this up.

Another question: "The xbox did very poorly in Japan, coming in at last place and getting nearly zero traction. The xbox 360, in Japan, is doing even worse. Capcom decided to release two expensive, high-profile games, each with new IP on Xbox 360: Dead Rising and Lost Planet. Why did you do this? Was it a tough sell at Capcom?"

I couldn't follow Inafune's answer about why this was a good idea, but the part about it being a tough sell blew my mind. He said he told them it would cost X amount, and "They said no. They said no very quickly." So then he told him some lower number, but they said no again. So then he had the two teams start working on the game, even though he had no authority to do so. He had them keep at it "for six months...maybe longer." He then showed Capcom management and said "Look, aren't these games fun?" Capcom management still said they could not sell these games. He  kept fighting them and somehow eventually convinced them. Again, I'm not making this up.

A prominent game designer later told me that Inafune told Capcom management he was working on a driving game during this time, to hide Dead Rising and Lost Planet, but Inafune didn't a mention that in the talk.

Another question: "The save system in Dead Rising met with much disapproval and bad reviews. If you could go back in time and change it, would you?" Inafune said that people cannot go back in time, so it doesn't really matter. If he could though, he would not change it because he has no regrets and the player should just accept it. He then told a story about how in that game, you must save the game by going to a bathroom (inside the game). He originally told the team that he wanted the game to be more realistic by requiring the player to sleep and use the bathroom. He thought you should have to do that. The team hated this idea, refused to implement it, and ignored him. Later when they made the save system, they put it in the bathrooms as a way to give an inch on the whole bathroom idea.

I knew Clint Hocking (Splinter Cell) would give a good lecture, but I didn't expect it to be possibly the best one of the Conference. He talked about how some games explore a physical space (we have lots of those!) while others allow us to explore a system. He even quoted my book with the line "Playing to win is exploring." It's exploring the system of a game to find effective strategies. Anyway, he went on to say that one system we never really seem to explore is a system of morality. 22 years ago Ultimta 4 kind of tried to do this by measuring your valor, humility, etc. It also tried to do some fake 3D. It sort of sucked at both, but it tried. 22 years later, we have iterated the hell out of 3D to the point where it's awesome. We're nowhere on exploring moral/ethical spaces in games. KOTOR doesn't count.

He even went as far as to say that the game Spiderman 2 (a game he really likes) did a big disservice to the license. Spiderman's premise is that "Great power brings great responsiblity," but that the game only offers great power with zero sense of responsibility. That isn't even Spiderman, Hocking says.

Games are accused of teaching things like murder, mugging, rape and so forth. Hocking says games aren't teaching those things because they aren't teaching much of anything, on the whole. They aren't SAYING anything. He proposes that games actually start to clean up their act, and he didn't mean by not having GTA anymore. He meant by starting to explore what a game about exploring morality would really be like. This is exactly the topic I am interested in, so this really, really caught my eye. I had the fortune of having dinner with Clint and discussing this further.

It's late and there's more tomorrow, so I'll sign off.

--Sirlin