GDC 2008, Day 1

Even though the Game Developer's Conference technically starts on Monday, I always call Wednesday the first day of the main conference. A lot of people ask me why I go to this conference at all. Other people at the conference ask me why I go to the actual sessions. All I can say is that it's a huge melting pot of semi-conflicting ideas. There's nothing else like it.

Player Generated Content
Daniel James (Puzzle Pirates), Brian Goble (Hipsoft), and a guy from IMVU talked about their experiences with player-generated content. Bottom line is that it's awesome, that it takes some system to manage it, but that it's really worth it. Goble explained that his word game that's been out four years now has had 2.9 million player-submitted phrases (kind of like Wheel of Fortune phrases). Only 19,000 of those are approved, but this is way more than the development team could have ever created (there are several requirements for what makes a phrase good for the game).

IMVU has a great business model. Players can create models/textures for avatars (in maya/photoshop) and upload them for sale. Users buy credits from IMVU. They spend the credits buying cool avatar stuff and 50% goes to IMVU, 50% to the content creator. The content creators do NOT sell those points back to the company to cash out, though. Some users use the points they earn to simply buy other people's cool avatar stuff. Creators that make more credits sell them back to customers on a secondary market (the price has stabilized to somewhere around 60 cents on the dollar). There's even a, uh, tertiary market of companies that buy points from creators, then do all the marketing and web transaction stuff needed to efficiently sell those points back to users. These companies take about 10% for their services. Bottom line is that money flows into IMVU and doesn't flow out. They make bank.

Microsoft
To give you an idea how much the Microsoft guy said "democratizing," he even had a joke about how he said democratizing too much. But you know what? Microsoft really *is* democratizing games if their new XBLA service works how they said it did in this lecture.

Step 1, join the Xbox Live Creator's Club. Use XNA Game Studio to make a game. When you're done, submit the game and fill out some forms about how much violence your game has or whatever.

Next, other members of the Creator's Club can play your game and rate it. They don't even rate if it's good or not, just if you were honest about the level of violence or strong language or whatever that you claimed you have. Once you pass this part (remember, you can't get vetoed for having a weird game or a bad one), then your game is fully available to ALL XBLA customers. Yes, all. Not just people in the Creator's Club. WOW! I've been waiting for that forever, awesome job Microsoft. I wonder about all those TCRs though, like the million requirements about naming the menus right, having help text right, when to use the B button for back and so on. Hmm.

Also, I happen to be in a super-fortunate position where I can get something approved on the full XBLA service in the first place without going the Creator's Club route (if only I had an actual team...please join me), but this Microsoft news is truly awesome for the industry.

Blizzard
When Rob Pardo talks,  people should listen. He spoke about multiplayer design. He first stressed that you must design multiplayer FIRST, or at least that's how Blizzard does it. Multiplayer games have more constraints and restrictions, so it's important to figure that out first, then do single player. If you did it the other way around you'd have to rip out a bunch of single-player stuff you came up with that won't work in multiplayer. As an example, Warcraft 3 had about 4 years of development time, but the entire single-player campaign was done in the last 9 months.

He spoke a lot about "skill differentiation." That means giving players lots of ways for them to show their skills. He warned against recent games going in the other direction, such as more auto-aim stuff in first-person shooters. "Twitch" gameplay is a very deliberate feature of Stacraft, he says, because it gives players that much more to master (in addition to managing their economy, multitasking, knowing the capabilities of each race/unit, and knowing the maps).

As one example, he talked about how in Starcraft you can only select 12 units at a time. On Starcraft 2 they argued a lot about whether you should be able to select unlimited, or keep it at 12. Keeping it at 12 gives the player one more thing to master because it's much easier to manage a large group of units if you can select them all at once. In the end, they decided to allow unlimited selection even though it goes against the "support skill differentiation" rule-of-thumb because players thought the restriction was arbitrary and felt like broken Ui.

I'm personally surprised they would even consider keeping the 12 unit selection limit because it tests a skill I find irrelevant. Fighting with the UI shouldn't be valued skill. And, in my opinion, neither should a whole lot of other twitch things. There's plenty in the realm of strategy, timing, and knowledge that differentiates players without needing arbitrary walls like 12 unit selection limits or 8 frame windows for recognizing Dragon Punches. While I'm interested in eliminating a lot of pointless skill tests, Pardo seemed in favor of providing a whole lot of these. He *did* make Starcraft, Warcraft, and World of Warcraft though, so what do I know?

Pardo said a lot of great stuff I totally agree with, also. He let out one of my secrets that game balancing has little to do with math. It can *start* at math, but there's no way around being a real *player* of the game. "You have to know the nuances," he said, "not just watch replays." He said things like how much this or that unit suffers from the pathfinding in Starcraft isn't in the spreadsheet math. And knowing that 1 zealot beats 2 zerglings, or whatever, is nice, but it doesn't matter to the level of detail some designers think it does. It matters if Protoss beat Zerg, but that's a much higher level, complicated question. Also, using just math to balance can lead you to very "boring, but fair" answers. Moves ideally *feel* extremely powerful, he says, even though they are fair. He advised against "super weapons" though. That means a weapon or move so powerful that you feel like there is nothing you could possibly have done. The nuclear launch in Starcraft is his example of how to do this right: it feels like a super-weapon sort of, but has LOTS of ways to counter it. (They neeed a cloaked ghost nearby, a laser sight, there's a red dot and a timer, etc, etc.)

Use your betas well, Pardo says, because you never get as long as you'd like. If there is a move or strategy you wonder about, start the beta with that move or strategy set to "too powerful" levels. Then people will try it. Then nerf it a bit. Then a bit more if you need to. If you start with it too weak, then no one will try it at all. When you make it more powerful, even if you really made it TOO powerful, no might notice in the beta because they have been trained to consider it pointless already.

I nodded in agreement as he explained that while you need to patch to fix balance stuff, you should NOT do this too frequently. If something appears too powerful, it doesn't mean it is (I've been saying that forever!). It's very possible that players will find counters and eventually the "overpowered" thing will seem pretty fair in comparison. If you fix every little thing that appears overpowered, players learn to not even try to counter anything. They just wait for you to solve all their problems. Let the metagame develop a bit before balance patching.

Don't have tons of special effects. Artists have a tendency to turn up the effects, he says, but it gets in the way of gameplay. Don't let them. He said Warcraft 3 has too many effects and sometimes you can't even tell what's happening.

Pardo also stressed having the right amount of complexity in your game. I have said for a long time that 30 moves is some kind of magic number that's about right. Pardo's magic number is 15 units in an rts. You want enough that players can be expressive and learn nuances, but if you have TOO many then it's a huge mess and no one even knows what's what. Amen to that. Incidentally, that's why Guild Wars is confusing. In Magic: The Gathering, there's a million cards, but it's a turn-based game where you can read each card. In Guild Wars, it's real-time and even though one character can have only 8 moves, it's 8 from a huge pool. It ends up with that "who even knows what's-what" syndrome (except for expert players).

I would love to make a "wow-battlegrounds" like game that has clearly defined classes/abilities. Not a million. Think about 15 units in Starcraft, 30 moves in Street Fighter, and 9 classes in Team Fortress 2. Manageable stuff that a player can wrap his/her head around.

Another amen to Pardo saying bigger maps are not better. More maps are also not better. You want as few maps as you can get away with and as small maps as you can get away with. I wish the media would figure this out. He said Warcraft 3 has about 8 maps per map-type because if it's too many, people don't really learn the nuances of the maps and it divides up the players too much anyway. If the maps are too big, they become less and less fun because travel time takes too long. Small maps are faster and just more fun.

I was amused to hear that Pardo keeps some stats secret on purpose because he's forced into this political game with the players. If players THINK a certain race/class whatever is imbalanced, then a snowball effect happens where more and more players jump onto it, fewer and fewer try counters of another race/class, and things generally get pretty unhappy. This snowball can startup even when players see stats that are like 51%/49% on something, so Blizzard never publishes stats what the win rate is between Orc and Undead, for example.

Pardo said a lot of stuff beyond all this, even. Good stuff, but that's enough for now.

Jonathon Blow
Jonathon Blow is outside of the box. I thought he had trouble expressing some of his ideas, but hardly anyone else is even attempting to express the ideas he brings up in conference after conference, so I'll cut him some slack. A lot of slack, actually, he deserves it.
He started with a quote from the New York Times review of Halo 3 saying something close to "As cinema evolved, it developed the ability to transform as well as to entertain." For some period of time, there mostly notable films had some kind of technical achievement, but only after a certain year (which I forget) do we now say films started to really have the power to "transform," meaning to make a real impact on people's lives. That New York Times Review said that games poised to make this transition from only entertaining to really transforming, and that Halo 3 is NOT a step toward that. Ha.

Mr. Blow's point is that he thinks we're not even as poised to make that transition as the NYT reviewer said. We're pretty far off, he said, and we're not doing great yet. Blow says he's matured over the years, but games mostly haven't and offer the same-old same-old without making much of a real impact on anyone.

To give some perspective, he talked about one way to make design decisions. In the consumer-goods view of a game, you make the game to make money. There's always design tradeoffs, so when you make your decisions about what to do and what not to, your guide is to choose the things that will make the game sell more. If adding only the minimum number of features to your yearly release is how you maximize money, then that's what you do.

Another way to approach design is to have some kind of "goodness" scale. Do X and the game is more fun (to you maybe, but also to your focus group of players, and your guess at the wide-world of players). You make your decisions in order to maximize the fun or enjoyment of the game. He pointed out how really stupid this all sounds, but he wants us to at least acknowledge that these are two different ways of doing things, and yeah, they are.

Then he really cut into the game industry. He said that we've gone way too far in making only games that are a certain type of "fun." They give the players fake challenges, then shower them with external rewards (rather than the real internal rewards). We make them feel awesome for doing the most routine things, and the whole sharade is empty and inauthentic. His example of one end of the spectrum was God of War (a power fantasy where you easily kill a zillion enemies who exist only for you to easily kill them) and on the other end, Peggle(sp?), a casual game that showers you with fireworks and sound effects when you solve the most easily solvable puzzles. (Disclaimer: I know the people made God of War and I happen to like it!)

Blow says much of the problem comes from games having trouble with the concepts of difficulty and challenge. If you want to tell a story, for example, then you need good pacing. If you want good story inside a first-person-shooter, then you just committed to some type of challenge-based gameplay. If it's too hard, then it ruins the pacing of the story. If it's too easy, why even having this aiming/shooting thing at all? So far the answer is to create these fake challenges that aren't that hard but kind of seem like you are cool for completing them, then occasionally tossing in a real challenge to help with the overall illusion.

Blow says we should be thinking of completely different kinds of challenge. Action/Skill challenge is one we do all the time, as well as problem solving. He asks what about challenges like curiosity, social challenge (trying to fit into an awkward social situation), perceptual challenges (like in Space Giraffe), ethical challenges, aesthetic challenges, or parasympathetic challenges (like in Wild Divine) to name just a few.

He also talked about how backwards it is to say "I'm going to make an fps, and I want it to have great story." He advocates we instead think of some genuine idea or emotional/intellectual territory to explore, and then ask "what kind of game can best explore this." He fully admits that this will not make as much money as a game that panders to the lowest common denominator, but that's ok. There are films like Transformers that are designed to make as much cash as possible. There are other films that are content with being seen merely by a reasonable number of people (rather than the highest possible number) and which have a real, deep impact on people, transforming the way they think and feel. The film industry has both and we need both.

Apologies to Jonathon for my poor summary of this. I could do a better job on this if I weren't trying to cram it in at 1am the night before Day 2.

Chris Hecker
I've only seen Chris Hecker a couple times and both times he seemed like he was using some sort of illegal stimulant. Apparently, he is just always like this. I took Chris's lecture as some sort of comedy experience or "ride." After 20 minutes of highly abstract stuff he said "From here on out, it's going to get a lot more abstract." He said this with a straight face and I literally laughed out loud. He also said such lines as "I don't know what this has to do with my lecture, or with games at all, but it seemed related (that was about Amazon's Mechanical Turk service). He also said "If you can invent something better than the triangle, then unlimited money awaits you." One of the questions at the end was actually "What was your lecture about?" and I'm not even making that up.

What his lecture was about is that there are few really hard problems we've solved in games that we solved really well. There is a similar character to these solutions. I won't go into the details, but let's just say they are awesome solutions. He talked a fair amount about "the triangle" being the biggest one, meaning a triangular polygon with a texture map. People tried all sorts of competing things like NURBS and other ways to describe meshes and surfaces, but the triangle apparently is the current king.

What he points out about this is that there's a bunch of STRUCTURE to a triangle...the xyz coordinates, the uv coordinates, the way it connects to other triangles, and that it can have a texture map. Then there's also the idea of the STYLE you can put on a triangle, namely the cool looking texture map. So programming people can play with all that first stuff because the computer understands the STRUCTURE of these triangles. Art people who know nothing about programming can play with the STYLE and create awesome 3D worlds and characters. Great solution!

He even said the triangle solution has had the biggest impact of any technoloyg in the history of games. But what SHOULD have had the biggest impact is AI. Too bad it hasn't.

Chris says that AI needs a STRUCTURE/STYLE solution. There needs to be some way that we can define a structure of how behaviors in AI work, then let non-programmers define the style of creating behaviors for particular characters. He means something deeper than just messing with stats on a spreadsheet, but not something that involves writing real code. Do you NEED code to describe AI? He says his first answer was yet, but now he thinks maybe not.

To sum it up in a catch phrase, he wants "The Photoshop of AI." A program that non-programers could use to create AI. He thinks we are no where near doing this now, but that it is possible. He said we're far enough away that we're better off not even trying explicitly for this yet, but on just generally understanding AI better first, and once we do, it will become more clear how to create that "Photoshop of AI."

Yes I know that if you know enough about AI to appreciate this, then my quick summary feels far too lacking. Sorry! You're better off talking to super genius Chris Hecker than me about this anyway. ;)

That's it for Day 1.

--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

GDC 2007, Day 1

Game Developer's Conference, Day 1. (Well, I suppose it's technically day 3, but I like to call wednesday the first day of the event.)

In a session about protecting your IP, the speaker (a patent lawyer) mentioned offhandedly that patents are great to protect new game mechanics. The ghost of Thomas Jefferson was in attendance and he shed a single tear. (Related link.)

Sony unveiled its now Home thing for PS3. This is to be part of the PS3's OS and lets you create a (realistic) avatar and wander around a shared space where you can talk to other players, and also set up and decorate your own room, which is private to you and any friends you invite over. The graphics look really nice, and the whole thing is pretty cool, if you are joe gamer.

If you are me, you have a lot of questions. Why does every piece of software have too much loading time? (Why does God of War, also by Sony, have the least loading time of any disc-based game ever?) Do I have even the semblance of free speech in the shared areas? All the media I can download is wrapped in DRM and even if I *buy* it, I can't play it on any other platforms (including pc, ipod, etc), right? Why do I need a forum to communicate where I don't have free speech and I do have heavy DRM restrictions? Especially when it's restricted to only hanging out with other PS3 owners. Btw, Second Life was already made, and it's free, and you have rights. (Though I will say again: Sony's Home does have significantly better graphics than Second Life).

Warren Spector gave his talk about story games. I would really like to talk to Warren about this stuff as I like the area he's trying to explore. He wants to make story games that don't tell a linear story (God of War, every other game ever) yet don't give ALL the control over to the player (The Sims, Spore), but instead search out a middle ground. To use a simple, stupid example, he wants to give you the motivation and drama for *why* you want to go through that door, but all the expressive gameplay options that let you choose how you will do it. The more physics-based stuff behind this the better. That example is maybe too simple though, as he also emphasized he wants to give you real choices, not just a game on rails, so perhaps he'd throw in another door or two as well. ;)

Warren, if you stumble across this, I think very highly of you. I have these minor criticisms, though. First, the slides in your talk are really horrible and you know it, lol. Maybe rethink that huge red font with a white drop shadow. Second, you are too obsessed with story, and you know it. There is nothing wrong with making the kinds of games you talked about. Almost no one is making them the way you describe, and you really are leading that charge, which is great. But there is a lot of merit to games that have no story at all and there always will be. I learned a lot from playing competitive games, and I'll tell you right now, "story"--the kind created by an author--had nothing to do with any of that. Tetris, electroplankton, The Sims, Virtua Fighter, Mario Kart, and Tony Hawk are all examples of games (and non-games) that are not *about* stories at all, nor should they be.

That said, Warren showed a quote from Susan Sontag (that I can't find right now, ugh) where she said that a writer a really a student and judge of morality who expresses this through story. I happen to agree, which is why I have newfound interest in story games, if only they could shed their archaic trappings.

A lot of crazy things were shown in the experimental gameplay workshop. Too much to explain, and even if I did, some stuff is weird enough that it would take too many words to describe. I'll quickly mention that one person showed a quick game that simulates game development. This development is done by a legion of tiny slave-creatures who work in an old, broken down warehouse. You can click on them to kill the slower ones so the rest work faster. A dialog box asks if you want to try an innovative idea from one of the lower slaves, and the audience all yelled "no!" and laughed. So he didn't let the slave use his idea, and he killed more of the slower ones. But then some slaves stopped working and held up anarchy symbols.

Then the presenter showed a screen of options the player can set such as how much graphics vs. gameplay vs. marketing he wants to have. If you set gameplay to 100%, then the other two quantities go to zero, and so do sales. There are also other various settings, such as the wage of a slave, which defaults to $3. Anyway, he clicked on more slaves to kill them, but then he got the entire rest of them to stop work. The game popped up a message saying that no further work can be done because the slaves revolted. He can either cancel the game or ship it as-is. He decided to ship it. Then we saw the results screen showing 201% ROI (return on investment) and pretty good sales, but all the slaves died.

This game is really quite something, because when a game actually SAYS something--I mean anything--it's like water in your face. Games don't usually have much of anything to say. A game like this clearly could not be made inside the normal game industry, which again demonstrates how important it is to have any indie voice.

In a *very* packed session about MMOs, we have panelists Raph Koster, Rob Pardo, Mark Kern, Daniel James, and a couple others. They all had really good comments about where the genre is going, how to compete with WoW and how not to compete with it, and how large the genre really is, even without WoW being counted at all.

At one point, Daniel James (Puzzle Pirates, Bang! Howdy) said something close to "I'm not sure if I should move my company offshore now, or in a few years. Who knows what the US government will say about any MMO such as mine...will they say my players are gambling? That they are engaging in virtual sex that they don't like? Or some other ill-informed thing? I probably need to move my game to a jurisdiction that is more into the idea that people can do whatever they want than America."

OUCH! Our founding fathers just rolled over in their graves, because that country was supposed to be America. I don't doubt anything James is saying though, and he went as far as to say that the innovations in MMOs (and he didn't mean MMOs that look anything like WoW) will not come from the US, because our regulations are not conducive to, well, freedom.

Raph Koster repeatedly made just about everyone in the room feel dumb by rattling off subscriber numbers about 9 different times for a bunch of MMOs no one in the room had heard of. He listed a couple that he said had higher subscribers numbers in north america than World of Warcraft. Many of these are web based. Many are originally from countries outside the US. Many are not even for gamers, and a couple are for kids. He reminded all of us over and over that our perceptions are way off, because the mainstream gaming press doesn't cover these games, but they DO have the numbers and small budget MMOs are taking off...and it's not the ones being sold in retail stores.

The Game Developer Choice Awards had better production values than ever this year. Huge, huge thank you to Tim Schaefer for doing part of the presenting. Tim showed us all how much impact and humor you can get out of just a few words between awards. He obviously wrote his own lines and has great comic timing in delivery. It almost makes up for the first 15 minutes of Psychonauts. Thanks Tim!

The Lifetime Achievement Award went to Shigeru Miyamoto, who was actually there to accept it (he speaks tomorrow). I felt genuine happiness to share the honor of giving him a standing ovation. He said that the name of the award seems to imply that we think he's done making games. He then said that he hopes to keep doing this for a very, very long time. The crowd gave thunderous applause.

Ok, that's enough summary for now.

--Sirlin

GDC 2006 Quick Summary

I just got back from the 2006 Game Developer's Conference, and there is just too much to write about. Xbox 360 magazine (in the UK) wants two articles from me about Street Fighter, Game Developer Magazine (US) wants one about certain game design topic, plus I should write about all the great things at GDC for all of you.

The roundtable discussions about MMO economies were all good (I went to all three of them), Will Wright is on another level as always, Nintendo's speech about disrupting the market was a direct hit, Bungie's founder outlined the business model of his new comany that outsources nearly everything except the core gameplay, Ernest Adams had an interesting new take on story games, Raph Koster left Sony Online Entertainment (after being there 6 years), Linden Labs explained the importance of giving property rights to your players, and there were many other interesting ideas floating around, too.

I have so much to write, that I feel like playing Brain Age on Nintendo DS instead of doing any of it, lol.

--Sirlin