Games and the History of Fine Art

Odd. Has anyone noticed how the arc of development of games seems to be paralleling the history of Western painting, rather then the traditional movies or books? I’m not an art history expert, but my understanding is paintings began with retelling one myth over and over.  They started with the Christ legend or the Hero’s Journey, and then going into more humanistic and impressionistic elements, followed by the beginning of abstract expression. It seems like the early, recent, and upcoming phases of game design map to these very precisely, particularly in their stories – around the 90s (Zork, Final Fantasy), the 2000s (Half-Life 2, Planescape: Torment, Call of Duty), and recently, “art games” (like Passage, Braid, Flower, Portal, Blueberry Garden, etc.) What’s going on here?

AIIDE 2008: Day 1 Live-blogging

(I’m editing these notes a week after the fact, just making it readable, but I’ve left the original voice in this piece and roughness intact because I feel the live-blogging depth is more useful then a concise, thoughtful analysis would be. I’m happy to answer any questions people have, though, and I encourage you to contact the original presenters as well for more thorough details.

I’ll be posting Thursday and Friday’s notes shortly. Enjoy!)

(links to my Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3 conference analysis posts)

I’m at the Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference 2008 (AIIDE) as I write this.  Here’s the program.   I’m not sure what the conference etiquette is here, but I’m planning to live blog as the event continues. The big push this week seems to be into proceduralism and “Drama Management”, what I’ve been calling Encounter Management, so I’m looking forward to that tomorrow. I cover a lot of ground in the notes here fast, particularly on the more interesting talks, so please give a more leeway on the editing, etc.

Panel Discussion: Realistic Human Characters with Borut Pfeifer (Project LMNO), Michael Mateas (UCSC), and Richard Evans (Sims 3)

I just caught the end of a panel on Realistic Characters. The questions were wide-ranging and wandering, as much about proceduralism as about AI or behavior. There was an interesting question about having 2 human reactions rather then just one. As in, if you tap someone on the shoulder, there’s 2 reactions – the “reptilian brain” jump and then the spin around “huh”. Usually we do this with one animation, but maybe it should be 2 separate states. The procedural animation discussion focused on if you could blend code as opposed to just animation data, unfortunately only raising questions. Also, some discussion of player-human interaction – once characters get real in games, shouldn’t the player’s verbs get better? Shouldn’t the AI be two-way? This was an interesting point, and one that surfaced a couple of times through the conference.

Market turmoil: Design style

I poked my head out of my badger hole Thursday and discovered the worst week in the Dow Jones history.  I’ve spent the whole weekend researching and thinking and not panicking and trying to decide what to do.

First, of course, the disclaimer – I’m not an economist, I’ve never taken an economics course, and I’m not an expert.  In fact, I heartily endorse you not listening to me and listen to someone else instead.  But I’m a game designer, and I balance systems and player psychology, so of course I have to take a pass at the financial crisis.

Here’s what I’ve learned after reading too much:

• Something in the system was really really rotten.  Unbalanced, broken, divergently manipulatively rotten.  My gut says the issue was actually bad money in politics.  Most of the crash comes from a few laws that were passed a while ago, coming from unaccountable close political ties to businesses that would otherwise have been regulated.  Fixing this corruption will go a long way to preventing this from happening again.  Not that anyone cares about that right now.  Likewise, these business weren’t incentivized for the long term by their shareholders, most of which don’t have a meaningful vote, and so the businesses were only really representing short-term greed.   I want my shareholder vote back!
• People are scared.  This has two effects:  businesses are scared because they don’t trust each other, and citizens are scared because they don’t trust the market.  This fear has led to credit and stock contractions that are largely out of proportion with their actual value.  Things are not as bad as the news suggests.
• Things are not as bad as our stock has come to suggest.  There have been lots of crashes since the 1930s, and we’ve gotten a lot better at handling them.  Case in point, look at the Europeans actions this weekend, banking on knowledge about the Swiss crash.  Plus, everyone recognizes that many stocks are way undervalued at this point, relative to their yearly earnings and assets.  As they say, the fundamentals of the economy are sound.  See fear, above.
• The only really bad thing that could drive stocks to the 1970 or even 1930 levels that people are worrying about the Federal Treasury goes under.  All the bad news we’re hearing – banks in trouble, wheat unsellable, prices plunging, states not able to get loans – is small potatoes compared to a government.  The Federal Government is and will underwrite the bank issues.  The question is whether it can afford to.  Given the size of the banking industry, it looks like it can, as long as we don’t let it go much further.

Now, this isn’t to suggest that some people shouldn’t be scared.  If you’re overleveraged, or you were taking on more risk then you were comfortable with, then this is not a good time.  But from a system’s analysis point of view, there is hope.

It reminds me of the Glock Bomb, described recently in Game Developer by Soren Johnson.  Counter-strike tried a floating economy to price its weapons, but as the meta-game optimized, the “best” weapons were quickly driven to expensive highs, while marginally okay weapons went unpurchased and ended up at $1.  The Glock went “bankrupt”, and started getting used for all sorts of exploits.  Soren makes the point to show that free markets in games are dangerous.  With game economy balancing, just like market balancing, some of the emergent behavior can be unexpected.  But looking at the data you can see exactly what went wrong, debug, think about it, tune, and try your system again.  Use your industry instincts, and avoid the fear that’s punishing the markets.

Of course, this could all just be everyone’s realized Pokémon cards are dumb.

Designers: Makers vs. Verifiers

Are designers Makers or Verifiers?  Every studio seems to have a different answer.

I think of Makers as programmers, artists, creaters of the code and data.  I think of Verifiers as the reviewers of the that work, quality assurance, looking at the finished sections and decided where to go next with it.  Both are equally important – I’ve served both within my time.  I think most of us have.  But I’ve primarily been a Builder, and I know a large part of the quality I’ve accomplished is due to great Verifiers who’ve helped me.

Most apprentice Makers believe they don’t need Verifiers.  Or we just need them to find bugs, but not to help with actual quality.  They look down on Verifiers.  But Makers need that outside point of view.  They get too close to the work.  They try and take shortcuts where they think they can get away with it.  They make assumptions.  That’s why they can’t check it on their own, they’ve already decided the result ahead of time.

Many Verifiers look down on Makers.  Because there are fewer of them for the larger picture, they tend to feel anyone can Build, but it is the Verifier who truly creates the ultimate product, by directing.   But Verifiers need the Makers, not just because they can’t do it themselves, but because Verifying is reactive – directing can only happen by building on what already exists.  They need Makers, to truly translate the thoughts into actions.

Designers in many places fill both of these roles.  We don’t think we need designers who only sit around and verify – that sounds silly or would be too expensive.  On the other hand, we can’t have designers just build stuff – then they couldn’t verify, and besides, they’d likely no longer be called designers anymore, maybe programmers or scripters or UI artists, fair or not.  And calling them both gives the extraordinary power, to the point where it becomes a status above their other peers.

Everyone does both, but Maker or Verifier in a studio is always well defined.  Except for designers in the game industry.  Designers are the only industry role that leaves it undefined, almost from person to person.  Because of this, understanding the role of designers in any company before you start there is key to understanding how that company actually works.

What do you do?  What do you think they should do, day to day?

Procedural Storytelling 5: Chunks

The basic unit of a procedural story is a chunk.  I define a chunk as a set of content that can be defined by the narrative symbology and a role in the game space.  Think of a chunk as the bones in procedural animation that are moved through time and space, and the narrative symbology as the constraints on the bones.  Except you’re moving events through time.  Like a wizard.

So chunks can be pretty broad.  Take Farcry 2. To quote Patrick Redding:

Figure out the right way to break content down, for a dialogue, or for an animation, or for a scripted event, so that we can reuse as much of that content as possible and make sure that it can be used in lots of different locations with lots of different NPCs. And that’s really the nuts and bolts of it.

Beijing Olympics subtly steals from our favorites

Anyone else notice how NBC seems to have used 2 of the tunes from the original Halo during the Olympics?  I heard a drum Halo on Sunday, and this afternoon they used the sad piano tune tonight over the Polish swimmer who was in a car crash.  Just subtle background music, but it shocked the warthogs out of me.

Reviews

I’m still here.  I didn’t really go anywhere, it’s just I don’t bother to post anything saying I’ve got nothing to say.  And I’ve been too busy to post anything, with some design and organizing I’ve been doing, and well, really vacation, which I guess counts as going somewhere.  But I’m not going to get any less busy, as far as I can tell, mostly because I’m going on vacation next week.  So there.

But I’m writing anyways.  One, because I introduced my fiance (yay!) to Zero Punctuation and two, because I just read the always excellent Danc on reviewers.  And surprise surprise, he’s right (although I think he underestimates the role of movie critics putting on viewer’s shoes, but then that just supports his point).

See, what I’ve really been doing is playing Grand Theft Auto 4 and Metal Gear Solid 4.  And frankly, I didn’t like them.  Not my cup of tea.  In every sense of the word.  But what really gets me, design and tech ignored, is that these games are rated some of the best games of all time.  Of All Time.  Ever.  Grand Theft Auto 4 is supposed to be perfect.  It only sits behind what everybody knows is the best game of all time, Ocarina of Time, but that has Time in the freakin’ title, that’s how awesome that game was.  But GTA4…. really?  MGS4… really?  Both of them aren’t sure they want to be games at all.  I’m pretty sure I spent more time watching the MGS movie then I did touching the controller.  Well, except I had to touch the controller, for hours, while waiting for a stupid X to show up that might give me something (nope) because you keep telling me it’s important.  And GTA4 – I don’t even know where to start.  The average user can’t even seem to figure out how to walk down the street, let alone get in a car and drive it, with their 4 changing controls schemes.  And no mid-mission checkpoints?  Best game of all time is insulting.  And this shouldn’t be a matter of opinion – it’s not even in the same category.  Portal showed a mastery of form that makes GTA look like a topaz showing up at the world’s best diamond mine.

Are these good games?  Sure.  I beat MGS4, gluttonous story hog that I am.  That counts for something.  I played 20 hours of GTA4, which should have put some sort of dent in it.  But put them in perspective people.  Reviews only a few years ago meant something, but today… the audience has grown up.  We need real analysis to understand whether these games are worth playing.  We have tastes.  These are games only for specific tastes.  We need critics.  Game makers want critics.  These games needed critics.  Step up and play real ball with us.

But that’s just my opinion.

Now I’m off to go play Starcraft on ICCUP.  Yeah, that’s where I’ve been all this time.  There’s a game we can start talking about as worth playing.  For everyone.

Robot Bones

There’s been a number of stories lately on how scary robots look on the inside.  Reporters keep pointing out how if you take the skin off a robot it doesn’t look so cute and reassuring any more, so those feelings of tenderness and empathy must be fake.  See NPR’s Morning Edition this morning about the seal Paro.  This strikes me as odd.  If we took the flesh off a human, we wouldn’t call the bones cute and cuddly.  We’d be kinda freaked out.  I’ll bet you were just freaked out by me mentioning it.  Why should it be any different for anything else we feel is alive?  Doesn’t that make robots more alive, not less alive?

Some science behind happiness

There was a great article on gamasutra by Lorenzo Wang highlighting some recent lessons from science studies about happiness. It’s worth the read. A lot of these made intuitive sense, which is always nice, and his applications are great, but I found it hard to track all of them together, so I’ll list them here:

1. Happiness is relative.
2. People suck at predicting their future enjoyment.
3. People rationalize their happiness.
4. Feeling in control is a significant predictor of happiness.
5. Happiness is a perspective.

No deep analysis tonight, but most interesting to me is that while these seem simply exploitable, this means it could be a starting point for new games that focus on maximizing people’s happiness.

Ascribing story connections

guyal brings up a good point in the comments.  Humans seem much more likely to ascribe connections to things on a macro level then a micro level.  In my generated story research, it’s actually proven critical.  Without this trick, this logical leap of the brain, procedural content because much harder to tie together, because the AI has to determine intent on it’s own and then communicate it to the player as well.  It’s easier if people just make intent up themselves, guided by common cultural clues.  Try laying a few randomly chosen game events next to each other and to see the connections and stories people will create.  In an interesting twist, I recall even the chapters of Don Quixote were designed to be read in any order and form an interesting plot, as was the style at the time.

I can’t find an online reference so correct me if I’m wrong.  But my search did turn up these thoughts on some of the rules of story and how to apply them to procedural storytelling.  I get so excited about this stuff.  I’ve researched and used some of these rules, but this covers a broader level of detail then seems necessary in most games, filling in too many details you could say.  But the key here is that there are rules behind stories, and rules are things we can program.  We just could use more precise rules then Mr. Simakov presents here.