AI IDE 2009

I’ve been invited to give a talk at AI IDE 2009 , titled “Bringing Interactive Storytelling to Industry”.  I’ll be discussing my experiences at several companies now implementing interactive storytelling systems, and both the playtesting/research results as well as the practical discoveries I’ve had.  Lot’s of work to do still, some new data that I’m analyzing now.  But I’m looking forward to it, and quite excited to get a chance to share my experiences with story-driven single player blockbuster action games.  Hope to see you there.

The Revolution will be Played

I’ve been catching up on world events this weekend, and I’m fascinated with the response to the Iranian election, specifically, the Twitter response.  In a sense, Twitter has been vindicated as a medium  (BTW, it seems like Andrew Sullivan and Nico are the best sources right now for news from within Iran).  What once was seen as a frivolous media after India and now Iran is now seen as world-changing.  And it got me thinking – what can we learn?  It seems the biggest lesson is – information mediums can seem frivolous if people want to use them for frivolous things, but their true tests come in times of crisis.

So why aren’t games on the front-lines too?  There’s probably a billion people out there right now hungry for more information, a more personal connection to the conflict, or wanting to help one side or another in some way.  This video on the streets of Iran certainly seems like it’s straight out of a first-person game, heavy breathing included.  These standoffs for all the world look like real-time strategy games.  The organizing and political decision-making behind the scenes certainly qualifies.  Organizing large numbers of people for support is definitely a game.  But that big Iran election game hasn’t happened yet, and it hasn’t happened in previous world events.  Peacemaker is an excellent example, and it never made it big.  Why?  I can think of several obvious factors:

1. Time and Money – Game development’s biggest foe.  We just aren’t this fast – big games take years to develop with 30-300 people.  While the 1979 Iranian revolution lasted for almost a year, the bar goes up the longer you delay.  See Twitter.  To counter this, we need things like better time or fortuitous planning and prep work, or concepts that are just simpler to execute.
2. Direction – What exactly would such a game be about?  Who is it appealing to? What is it trying to accomplish?  Without being able to iterate design concepts easily (see #1), and spam the market with ideas, the topic and “sell” becomes even more critical.
3. Realism – How realistic does it have to be?  Realism takes a lot of time and money too.  If the game is about capturing the moment, that can put the development out of practical reach.
4. Fun Factor – How fun does it have to get people playing?  The always-excellent Michael Abbot wrote on this topic after the Games for Change conference, how the conflict between serious topics and need for engagement still confounds game developers.  Until we can master this problem, it will be hard to be relevant.

Not every medium about immediacy.  Take books, for example.  The books about Iran will come out in the next months, if not years.  But when they do they will add to the conversation.  And they will be a relatively minor blip in people’s lives.  If we want to be taken seriously, one path is to have a serious impact on major events.  It can all change in a week.

Why aren’t games on the front-lines  Why aren’t games on the front-lines too?  So too?

A Big Personal Milestone

I’m not dead!  I’ve actually got 5 or 6 ideas that I haven’t had time to pound out.  I’ve been in the middle of planning and executing a Big Personal Milestone, which is going quite well, but I can’t tell you about.  I hope to have it finished up soon though and get back to writing.  Much to do!

Meaning: Mathematics of

I’ve been having this feeling lately.

I was at a fabulous board game party last weekend.  Modern European-style board games are very interesting, Race for the Galaxy, Carcassonne, Hey That’s My Fish, etc., because their rule sets have well-defined explicit numbers.  Like game last around X turns, winners usually have X points, so to win, all you need to do is earn around X points every turn.  These game mechanics form a mathematics, a communicative language of goals that goes beyond the rules themselves, whose analysis forms hypothesises of the dynamics.  Dynamics are normally notoriously difficult to comprehend.  But just as much of mathematics is derived from a few axioms, from which all proofs spread, the mathematics of these board games allows analysis of the dynamics.  And these dynamics are fascinating.  Hey That’s My Fish, one of the simplest games ever constructed, has a depth that likely takes years to master.  And just adding one new mechanic, such as scoring with 2 teams of 2, adds a new dynamic that is simultaneously collaborative and loud, where no such dynamic existed before.  It was comparably trivial to imagine, create, and playtest such a desired dynamic, studying the impact on such a minimal set.  Such breadth in basics creates a testbed for ideas, giving designers tremendous power and flexibility.

Clearer and clearer every GDC, I see the next leap in game design – the next 5 years – as the exploration of aesthetic meaning.  We are establishing a science, and the principles of that science.  Game mechanics are almost a distraction.  This isn’t a question of game balance or even game construction specifically.  Meaning mathematics works on a different plane: social, story, emotion.  Craftsmanship and the comparison of results (youtube, leaderboards, achievements).  Fiction and setting and narrative.  Little Big Planet levels, Starcraft television, Street Fighter tournaments, and Warthog Jumps.  Concerts and Prius mileage. Through the 3 levels of designer-player communication (forced, implied, authored, or cutscenes, forensics, and expressive/creative).  Experience.  Flow, tension, difficulty.  Sensation, discovery, and fellowship.  Excitment, amusement, and bliss.

Our understanding of how all these things interact is startlingly new, startlingly unique.  Dancing from experiment to experiment around the possible, learning through doing, we are tapping into the forces of the psyche in a direct way that is almost unheard of. Movies and stories take hours to create meaning, we create a (potentially) different kind of meaning in minutes.  A kind of meaning that gets people talking, brings them closer together, gets them to think, remember, and makes them happy.  This abstract communication from designer to system to player gets called art, but it’s much more then that.  It’s a dotted line into who we are, an explorative theater we can simultaneously share.   There’s something special about wordlessly exploring a game together.  Discussing it afterwords.  Meaning construction is reflecting a mental map back to us of who we are, in rules-based form.

It’s easy to forget what MDA really means.  Admidst all the theory and acronyms, what’s possible.  It was a weekend of finding mathematics, and strangers delighting in the dynamics that the mathematics created.  Just through the act of play friendships and understandings were formed.  Example and concrete proof of what dynamics are possible, where we can go.  Scientifically establishing the outlines of how we can mean.

Management: Helping people work

I find people get confused about what management means.  There’s nothing worse then floundering around on a team and not being sure whose supposed to do something.  Sometimes you think you need the help of  “management”, but can’t tell someone where to come in and where to butt out.  To paraphrase the Peopleware guys, management is about helping people work.  Anything that helps people work that isn’t the work itself  is management.

In practice, this means the goals of a manager are:

• Get everyone able to solve their problems
• Keep everything the same as much as possible

Notice that I didn’t say help people solve their problems.  That’s more like doing the work.  Making it so that the problems can be solved is very different.  Continuity, ritual, keeping everything the same as long as you accomplish the first goal is very important too, because it provides an inherent structure and culture that people can make assumptions about and depend on.  That’s why it’s so hard to make big changes like switching over to Agile.  But if Agile can accomplish those 2 things in the long run then it’s worth it.

Of course, that first one’s a really doozey.  The first issue is just seeing the things that will really help someone else is hard.  Frequently, the easiest way to do that is to get distance and perspective from the work, which is why I try and put aside the work when I’m trying to manage and help from afar.  But once you see the problems, I frequently don’t know where to start.  After chasing these problems down for several years, I’ve discovered they are usually caused by larger feedback loops.  Feedback loops driven by common problems shared by teams everywhere.  I’ve noticed there are 3 principle that cover it all.  To break these feedback loops and get people solving their problems all you need, in priority order, is:

• Priorities
• Laser-like Focus
• Morale

Priorities is about having a hyper-clear direction, an accurate, communicated, up-to-date goals list, with everybody on the same page.  All known questions accounted for and able to be set aside until answerable.  Laser-like Focus is about taking each of those priorities, in order, one at a time, and knocking them out of the park.  I’m talking, serious, no distractions, no bumps Focus here, full stop.  Morale is about making sure that people are happy, the team is satisfied, in control and driving their work so that they can relax, support each other, and bring their best work to the table.

It’s really seems that simple.  I can’t say it’s the best solution, or that it will solve everything, but each time teams get a handle on these goals things just seem to magically come together.  Each principle supports the others, jelled teams form and stop asking questions, grabbing at random tasks, and instead start knocking work out of the park.  Take a look at this comment thread of stalled Interactive Fiction projects.  One-person teams, all running into this same set of 3 problems.  Look at Getting Things Done, which proposes a system to target these exact same goals.  Hitting those 3 principle while staying consistent and working inside the classic 3 business constraints of time, money, and quality just seems to be the formula for success.  I use these every day even in my personal life, and it has not only helped me get things done, it has also helped me figure out where I’ve gone wrong.  But for a bigger team it takes full-time dedicated people, hard day-after-day work to actually shape these up.  True managers, not just leads or producers, who consistently prioritize, focus, and love fixing this problem – helping people work.

AI: Thinking for the Future

So I’ve been reflecting on Jane McGonigal’s talk.  I’ve been a fan of her work for a long time and I think she made some great insightful points about game design.  Not so much futurist but visionary and optimist.  I can get behind that.  But she poses a particular challenge to the likes of, well, me.  There’s not any room for AI in her vision!  Sure, we’ll always have single-player story games, people enjoy it, robots are cool, yada yada yada.  But, to paraphrase Raph Koster, what if multiplayer games are the future?  Where be some of that computer arti-fish-ial intelligence in this?

Well, what do designers like Jane need?  Boldly putting myself in their shoes, they need need ways to fight the fight.  They’re trying to make a different kind of game – massively multiplayer, socially changing, reality-based, impact-oriented.  Old techniques just aren’t going to be that useful to them.  That means:

• supporting users,
• maintaining the experience,
• much shorter development times,
• communication tools,
• managing large numbers of users with a small dev team,
• user training and guidance,
• and real world integration

Hmmm…. sounds like web development.  What else do they need?  What’s game-y about them?  Something like

• players assuming characters and roles,
• goal-driven,
• feedback,
• and assisted team formation.

Those aren’t traditional AI problems.  If anything, they are closest to gameplay problems.  I recall Steve Rabin’s slide from the GDC AI Summit this year where he talked about how much of game programming was moving into AI.  But none of this helps these designers.  That big circle of “Game design”?  It’s splitting in two.  Some of those designers are betting on us.  But the rest have been heading in the opposite direction.  Fast.  And coming off of GDC, it feels like there’s a lot of them.  Designers weren’t talking about how to make, well, characters.  They were talking about how to make people interact with each other and the game better.  If we want to get in on that party, and I think we can, we should start moving soon.

I can see where user matching, player feedback and training, maybe even sinulation fit on the path.   I volunteer experience management as a second step.  What else can we bring with us?

No words

This talk is just beautiful.  Could there be anything simultaneously more hopeful and more achievable then the future Jane is thinking of?

Making Games: Programmers

Why does having a programmer in charge of your company make such a big difference?

I’ve been at a number of companies over the years, and there’s always a marked difference between the companies run and founded by programmers and those that aren’t.  I hear it from other programmers too.  I’m not sure why, but at a programmer-led company programming tends to seem, well, better grounded.  Relaxed.  Expected, maybe.  Every time we compare process notes, it shares one common thread.  Not Agile.  Not size.  Programmers who made the ultimate call.

You see this translate to the marketplace too.  Will Wright?  Programmer.  Valve?  Gabe was a programmer.  Blizzard?  Yep, programmers.  Looking Glass?  The whole company only believed in programmers.  EA and Activision?  Early years – founded by programmers.  Bioware, Firaxis, programmers, programmers.  These people who run companies, they all share a common hands-on background.  Even Scrum – comes from programmers.  When you take a step back, the list is staggering.  Sure, many of these people have also become designers – something I haven’t missed, trust me.  But their starting place seems too remarkable to go uncommented.  It’s not complete – there are large teams in particular who have had success, usually led by producers with a tight team of leads.  But the commercial industry seems dominated by either small-ish teams of the former or ginormous money-sucking teams of the latter.

I’m not implying causation, just correlation here.  Trying to guess, having a programmer in charge means there’s no black box.  Video games are software first, game second.  Programmers have to understand that at their core.  It’s this hard truth that has so far made design so difficult.  If you can understand what the software takes, if you can get hands on in what you have, if you’ve done it yourself in the same code base, there’s a level of understanding that comes with that.  If you can’t, it seems more likely you’ll focus on the game part first – usually the design.  You can end up underappreciating that whole engine part, relying on others to just meet your design goals.  I wish it was always that simple though.  At some point, risk or difficulty becomes high, hard choices have to be made, priorities have to be set.  And it seems like in those times history seems to show the programmer-leaders react better.  They’re better informed or better prepared.  Software first means things about priorities, means things about workflow, ultimately means things about culture, that even today it seems you need to understand making software to truly understand the craft of making games.

Of course, I’m probably biased.

Fun: Alive

I’ve been watching this video from the Daft Punk Alive tour in 2007 over and over.  I find it fascinating.  I can’t stop watching the people.

Watching people is what I do.  At my heart, I’m ultimately an entertainer.  I make games to make people happy.  I watch people to see them react – to see them joyous.  To hear them exclaim about their experiences.  But the people I watch look more like this.  If I’m very lucky, they might even look like this.  But usually when I watch playtests, the players immediately adopt this completely focused, blank, intense, unreacting look.  They’re having fun, learning, in flow, completely absorbed.  But, as Nicole has catalogued, our suite of limited reactions is limited to the extremes of play.  Look at the crowd.  Look at the musicians, even.  This kind of revelry, of expression, is still something beyond us.  The tools at work are our tools – computers, music, graphics, marketing, money.  They’re all playing the same game.  We can bring this many people together.  But what would it take for us to make a game that got people to react like this?

Oh, and the music is good too.  Someone should mix that Street Fighter tournament with this concert.  Awesome.

Edit:  10 minutes later:  Of course,  it’s something like Top-Secret Dance off.

Crunch

I’ve been reading the IDGA Quality of Life White Paper and trying to write about crunch.  And I’ve been finding it terribly difficult.  Not because understanding the role and effect of overtime is difficult, but because talking about it publically is.

There’s this implied threat that if you don’t fully support the company’s interests in voluntary and involuntary overtime, they won’t hire you.  But the company’s interests are gray.  Frequently crunch makes a project worse, but sometimes makes it better.  The morale and health of the people at the studio are in the company’s interest, but the best judges of how to serve that interest are the employees themselves.  Sometimes even a team wants to work overtime and management stops them.  And yet, talking about crunch and overtime in a reasoned, rational way as a potential employee, even from the company’s interest alone, is seen as a threat.  To me it just seems like a step – a step both towards better employee quality of life and a step towards more successful projects and more successful companies.  I believe the single greatest factor in a game’s success is the team’s drive to create a great game.  And the second greatest factor is their happiness and amount of stress.  Anything we can do to manage and improve these two factors is a tool that we should use wisely and well, and a tool we should fully understand.  Not a tool we should put on an alter behind a curtain and strike down any who question it.  Questioning is part of understanding – if there are no questions there is no discussion, and with no discussion there is only blind ritual.

So read the white paper.  While not perfect, it goes over these things far better then I can.  And encourage your teams to talk about crunch openly.  Work to ambush potential hires in employment agreement about crunch, but rather to talk about it respectfully in the interview.  So that when the time hits, your team will be right there with you, best they can.  Or maybe, just maybe, you’ll find a way to avoid crunch altogether.