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

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

Time and Skill from Scientific American

When I wrote that opinion piece for gamasutra about World of Warcraft, I listed that "time = skill" was one of the "wrong" lessons of the game (or any rpg, even). I can understand someone debating whether that lesson is really taught or not, but it never even occurred to me that hundreds and hundreds of people on many messege boards would say, "time really is skill, because you need to spend a lot of time on anything to get good at it."

Oh my. I'm telling you otherwise, and so is Scientific American:
The Expert Mind article

It's possible to spend a very long time at something and still not be good at it. It's also possible to spend a short time on something and be extremely good at it. This is especially true in a competitive game (where you can bring the lessons of other competitive games with you into the new one) and it's double-triple true in an MMO, where mastery of pvp has little-to-no connection to the 400 hour grind to level 60. The 400 hours of leveling up doesn't convert your time into skill; it's simply a way to gate your progress so rpg's take a long time. Replacing actual skill with your character's simulated increase in "fake-skill" makes rpg's accessible to anyone (anyone with lots of time, that is).

Philip Ross's Scientific American article also explores the idea that "effortful study" is what really makes you improve at something. That's why people who practice something a few years (such as chess, but I think it's true of many skills) can overtake someone who has been "grinding" away at it for 10 or 20 years.

Ericsson argues that what matters is not experience per se but "effortful study," which entails continually tackling challenges that lie just beyond one's competence. That is why it is possible for enthusiasts to spend tens of thousands of hours playing chess or golf or a musical instrument without ever advancing beyond the amateur level and why a properly trained student can overtake them in a relatively short time. It is interesting to note that time spent playing chess, even in tournaments, appears to contribute less than such study to a player's progress; the main training value of such games is to point up weaknesses for future study.

Measuring actual merit, rather than purely time invested, is a nice thing to do in the real world and in games. The trouble is, developing mastery in something is hard and not for everyone, so simply rewarding time allows a game to offer "easy fun" and be enjoyed a wider audience. I wonder, though, if we could devise some new rpg mechanics that better reflected what learning things is actually like in the real world without restricting our audience to hardcore gamers. Spending time would count for nothing, but actually accomplishing things would. The closest thing I can think of to this is the Zelda series of games. These games are somewhat like RPGs in that they have a story, lots of characters to talk to, etc. And yet you have no XP bar or level, you don't grind monsters, and you only get things when you actually complete a quest or defeat a boss in a dungeon or whatever. A game like Zelda could be adjusted to have a stronger emphasis on story (imagine the rich and varied storyweaving in Oblivion) without resorting to leveling-up mechanics.

Anyone else have any ideas for how to do a story based rpg that is accessible to a wide range of people, does not use grinding or leveling at all, and is still actually fun? Getting rid of the addiction cycle of "kill monster, get +2 sword, kill better monster, get better item" is a tough one, becuase it's such a powerful system. But it would be nice if we had a story based game that *wasn't* based on increasing the "fake-skill" of your character by attacking the same monster 1,000 times. (Again, see the Scientific American article for how people actually increase their skill in things.)

Another sad note for me, apparently the game industry isn't about just putting in time, either. I've been at it a lot longer than a) the combat designers on God of War, b) Jenova Chen, who made the game Flow and now has a 3 game deal with Sony, c) a friend who's now an executive at Capcom, and d) another friend who's now a manager at Xbox Live Arcade. All of those people are doing great things and deserve every bit of their success. It seems that I made a wrong series of decisions or a wrong turn somewhere along the way though, as I still have little to show for all my grinding.

--Sirlin