We Make Holes In Teeth

I left my heart in San Francisco. Back in 2008, apparently.

Okay, well thanks to the slight shift in event scheduling for this year's Game Developers' Conference, I can't even make this work out to a perfect one-year hiatus. It's like 13 months or something. <shameface>

So to sum up, since last I had anything to say, I crunched hard on a game, went on an event binge promoting said game, racked up a nauseating number of air miles, hotel nights and roaming fees, pushed my girlfriend's patience and my body's tolerance, closed and shipped the game, finally got to play the game a few times at some point in there (some point being way too late to fix or even really refine about three-quarters of what I had been working on), went on vacation - at least a portion of it imposed by executive fiat - began reacquainting myself with what normal human beings sometimes refer to as "living" and got good and lazy.

But not so lazy, apparently, that I missed the GDC call for papers. Paper(s), plural, being the operative word here. See, at last year's GDC I had the distinct fortune to catch some of the inaugural 20-minute lectures, including Kent Hudson's awesome survey and analysis of lockpicking mechanics, and Scott Rogers' presentation on Boss Fights (a subject for which my disdain turned out to be easily matched by my ignorance; I owe Scott big-time for disabusing me of a lot of dumb biases). After all the stress involved with prepping "Do, Don't Show", I decided than and there that I would sumbit a 20-minute talk for 2009.

Perfect, I thought. This constrained format will force me to be ultra-disciplined in scoping my topic; and the time spent preparing the proposal will actually constitute a significant percentage of the actual research work.

But the good folks at CMP (which I guess is 'Think Services' now; I'm not sure exactly) had other ideas. In the new and improved proposal system, they vet the initial submissions and ask the short-listed speakers to provide additional details. While I was waiting to hear back on my expanded pitch, I received an email to the effect that the Advisory Board was hoping that I could do a full hour follow-up to "Do, Don't Show". Worried that maybe my 20-minute lecture might not make the cut (or worse, that the format had just been dumped altogether), I panicked. Of course I'd do a follow-up. I'd be happy to.

Sucker. I scrambled to put together the additional pitch and emailed it off thinking I'd just about covered my bases. But the bases were loaded, kid. Loaded.

Long story short, I did two talks.

Because I want the folks who asked right away to have access to the visuals for these, and because I know my own weakness, I'm posting both sets of slides as-is, without notes (or many notes, anyway) forthwith. Because I'm giving both these talks internally at the studio in the next few days, I'll strive to get them annotated in short order and replace the naked versions.

In the interim:

Aarf! Arf Arf Arf: Talking to the Player with Barks (~3MB)

Read Me: Closing the Readability Gap in Immersive Games (~4MB)

GDC 2008:: Slides for "Do, don't show"

Somewhere around 11pm last night I discovered that Boing Boing's Mark Frauenfelder has been systematically posting the highlights of the TED Conference. I swore to not look at any of this cool stuff until I'd finished annotating my slides. Not because I'm particularly diligent, but because I knew that watching even one of these visual communciation masterpieces would be utterly demoralizing...

As promised - and naturally, somewhat belatedly - I've uploaded the monster slide deck for my talk at this year's GDC, entitled "Do, don't show: Narrative design in FarCry 2".

In case you're wondering where the actual spoken part is; I've embedded directly into the notes pane of the Powerpoint doc. If that ends up being a pain in the ass, someone let me know and I'll paste the chewy center into a separate Word file. It's a whopping 6+ MB, and that's after I went through all the image compression/cropping wackiness. I'm sorry. Actually, no I'm not. If you can wait patiently through 350 MB of BitTorrent action to pirate the latest episode of Dexter, you can spare me a measily 6MB of your time... Damn you, Dexter.

Dereliction of Duty 4: Modern Slideware

Yeah okay I'm back.

Right now my patented TypePad List Of Posts is littered with the half-formed abortia of various points I had wanted to get across between now and whenever it was I finished Portal and Call of Duty 4, and started playing Assassin's Creed. It was kind of a watershed moment for me, frankly. But apparently I was too euphoric to complete whole sentences and hit the Publish button.

But inevitably, my brief honeymoon with the beanstalk-like Stack Of Games Next To The 360 came crashing to a close at the same time as the Christmas holidays. I had started my time-off giddy, or maybe actually just dizzy, from the announcement that FarCry 2's release date would be pushed from the March end of fiscal Q4 to... sometime I'm not allowed to talk about publicly yet (but soon).

The end of holidays also brought with it the sickening - maybe even self-loathing - realization that I had made sweet singing fuhbleep-all by way of progress on my talk for GDC. Presenting at GDC is one of those rituals that, by virtue of the stress-junkie personalities that populate the game industry, has been inflated into a mammoth and solemn responsibility not to be taken lightly, or even reasonbly, but as some kind of professional scourging ordeal. Like Rat Month at VMI, except with fewer uncomfortable Confederate military connotations.

GDC 2008: The "Do, Don't Show" uh, show

So I was pointlessly holding off on posting about this since the actual date hadn't been attached. It still remains dateless - possibly contemplating returning its rented tux and staying home to watch the Mr. Bean marathon - but for what it's worth, here is the announcement for my talk at GDC next year.

I was briefly gratified to have the talk included among the two or three design track highlights, but I'm not willing to engage to too much self-deception: A number of us from the FC2 team originally proposed a panel-style talk, and since that number included Clint and Susan, the proposal had ridiculously high profile up until the moment that the event organizers decided not to do panel talks in general. We were asked to turn it into a solo lecture. Because of the topic, I got to ride the trapeze into the spotlight this time.

On the title: Within about a week of the session announcements going up on the GDC site, I got an email from Noah Falstein. Noah was writing to taunt me with the fact that he had already coined the phrase "do, don't tell" in his regular column for Game Developer magazine (January 2007 issue, I believe). If his work on the 400 Project is any indication, it wouldn't surprise me in the least to learn that he's been sitting around for literally years, systematically ludofying core principles from other media into pithy maxims, his printer churning out trademark applications a few feet away. I'm on to you, Falstein.

At some point, I promise to talk about the actual content of the talk.

Flow and Engagement: Too Human

One of my FarCry2 colleagues, Simon Charbonneau, directed me to this video produced by Silicon Knights to promote some of the game design philosophy behind Too Human. I'm not very familiar with the game -- sadly, more aware of the recent Unpleasantness between Denis Dyack and Epic -- other than its central hook of the Norse Gods as cybernetically enhanced humans. But it is interesting to see how much of this video is given over to tweedy academics talking about psychological models for gamer satisfaction. They get into Flow in very broad terms, and discuss something Dyack calls engagement theory as a rough formalization of elements that need to be present in order for Too Human to achieve its experiential goals.

On a completely superficial note: For a dev diary -type piece, I find it a little odd and over-stylized; heavily derivative of Errol Morris' documentaries down to the Philip Glass -inspired minimalist score. But you know what? Steal from the best, man.

AGDC 2007: My talk notes and slides

I hate being so tired on a flight that I can't even summon the energy to fire up my laptop and do basic text-editing. But as I promised to a small group of shell-shocked GDC attendees, post-screed, here are the zipped-up slides and presentation notes for "Familiarity breeds contempt: Buidling game stories that flow (1.35MB)".

The Blueberry in the Tomato Soup

Goin' to Austin. As of... a while now, I guess, I'm officially on the program for this year's Austin Game Developers Conference (Writing in Games track), running from September 5th to the 7th. The title of my talk is, perhaps not unsurprisingly, "Familiarity breeds contempt: Building game stories that flow." To the three or four of you who've read any of my blog entries, this should provide a fairly clear hint as to what I'll be covering; although it represents a fairly powerful source of procrastinatory anxiety for me that the lion's share of what I'll be talking about (and have yet to fully codify in Power Point form) is new, that is not covered in my blog entries. I have a lot of writing to do between now and the August 17th deadline for handing over my materials -- a week from Friday. Ulp.

Why We Write, Pt. 1

I expect that the meat of this post will develop into a sort of standard introduction, by way of back-rationalization, to the benefits of Narrative Game Design as a formal practice. This isn't the first time I've tried to do this, but it may end up being the most pragmatic approach so far. After all this time, there are still people at the studio where I work who do not understand why there should be someone on the core design team - different from (or not only) the scriptwriter - who cares about the story of the game. Someone who is involved in the production from concept to gold master. Lately, my tried and true flippant response to people like that has been to hold up a very complicated flowchart printed out on tiled 11x17 sheets, explaining that "this is the story". But frankly, this seems a little glib.

Luckily, in the course of doing research for the Familiarity talk, I ended up reading the frequently-referenced paper by Penelope Sweetser and Peta Wyeth on Game Flow that lays out an excellent and rather thorough framework for examining how any particular aspect of a game's design contributes to the overall player experience. And since I've been arguing for a while now that the narrative is implicated in - you heard me - every aspect of the player experience, I now have a mouth with which to co-locate my money.

Familiarity Breeds Contempt, Pt. 2

I'm starting this post without knowing for sure that by the time I get to the pseudo-mathematical parts I'll have tracked down, installed and mastered the use of a proper formula typesetting tool. In other words, I am assuming a certain amount of calculated risk, on balance convinced that I will be able to overcome this challenge and deliver a desired result.

When I encounter a challenge (of any sort, not just typographic), what is it in my head that makes me think: "I can do this. Probably." -- ?

Do I literally calculate the odds of success? Only partly. And only if I have the benefit of some distance from the reality of the challenge, some breathing room, time to think, a level of abstraction. But mostly, I intuit the apparent likelihood of success/risk of failure and compare that fuzzy notion to some indefinable threshold, or risk-tolerance.

And yet, odds can be calculated or at least estimated; and statistically speaking that estimate can grow more precise with larger amounts of sample data on which to draw. So what does that mean? How do I reconcile the coexistence of risk as a gut sense of likely success vs risk as a quantitative expression of probability? When you put those two concepts side-by-side with each other, it seems like there might be an incongruity there.

Familiarity Breeds Contempt, Pt. 1

This next bit borrows (by which I mean steals) heavily from two books, in this order: Raph Koster's A Theory of Fun and Laurence Gonzales' Deep Survival, both of which discuss the root of the human urge to engage in challenging (or even risky) fun.

Complex social animals like tigers, dolphins and humanfolk spend fewer of their formative months in the womb, so they emerge into the world less able to fend for themselves than, say, fish or lizards or bats. On the one hand, our young come out without any special wiring that lets them immediately stalk prey or flee predators or engage in complicated locomotion. On the other hand, our young learn how to do all those things in a fundamentally different way, taking advantage of their more sophisticated brains to construct progressively more detailed and accurate models of how the world works and how they can optimize their time inside it (however brutal and short that time might be).

And this is where play comes in.