GDC 2011 Diary: Day 5

No writeup from yesterday since I didn't actually go to the show. Stayed in to do some school work.

But today! Today, was the last day of GDC, and I wouldn't miss it for the world. My day was filled with panels designed for students to help them break into the industry. And boy did it ever help.

The first talk I attended was advice on building a good portfolio for visual arts. There was a lot of good tips and good advice that could be applied to job interviews in general. The sample work they showed from various students' portfolios was all really impressive. Too impressive. By the end of the panel, I had lost all hope of ever becoming a visual artist. These guys are just way too good at what they do, and they've been drawing their entire lives. I don't have the raw experience to compete with them. So it was all a very intimidating and belittling experience. But it also proved to guide me towards the light.

I have respect and appreciation for visual artists, but it was never what I wanted to do. See, I had always been under the impression that "game designer" was a very prestigious position, and you couldn't just get a job as a game designer. So I figured visual arts would be a great stepping stone to take me where I really wanted to get in the end, which is just to design some GAMES. So after that horrifying panel, I was inspired to do a little Googlin'. I now had some concrete questions I wanted answers to, and that's basically what I wanted to get out of GDC. Not necessarily answers, just questions. My questions were as such:

1. What is an entry level game design position?
2. What does a game designer do on a day to day basis?

Pretty basic stuff. Not exactly the kind of thing I could feel comfortable with asking a panel of distinguished professionals in front of a large audience. So I found my own answers!

As it turns out, in recent years in the industry, game design CAN be an entry level position. Obviously a student fresh out of school isn't going to land themselves a job as creative director or lead designer, but they don't necessarily have to find a weird convoluted path to their dream job by learning unrelated skills like programming and fine arts. The eye opening article I read can be found here at Game Career Guide's website (the same group that had their logo all over the panels I went to today). Additionally, that article linked me to this article, which was equally eye opening with regards to my second question. Today, these two articles provided me with the knowledge and hope I was craving from GDC.

Later that day, filled with hope and an angus beef hamburger, I went to a lecture which gave general tips on how to break into the industry. It was much more relevant to me, and I learned some more very basic things.

According to the lecturer, it takes three people to make a game. (Or rather, three ROLES.) You need an artist, a designer, and a programmer. However, it takes five people to run a studio. In addition to the previous three, you need a marketing man to make sure your game gets out there, and a business man to handle contracts, publishers, and that sort of thing. Upon hearing this my first thought was, "That's all?" It seems so simple. So delightfully simple! If I'm a designer, then all I have to do is find four talented people that can fill those roles in order to start my own studio? A five man team means no bureaucracy to get in the way of creative vision. It means that I could be the creative director of a project right away. Sure the scope of the games wouldn't exactly be enormous, but I'd be making the games I want to make with a wonderfully small team.

But even still, that's a long way off. I still don't have the skills necessary to commit to doing something that serious. But all these ideas are buzzing around in my head now that I have a stronger understanding of how the industry works. It's very exciting to finally figure some of this basic stuff out. It's so hard to get any insight into the way this industry runs as it's all shrouded in secrecy from big business. GDC was a great way to step behind the curtain and see what's going on.

The final panel I attended was a great high note to end the conference on. A collection of huge gaming celebrities took the stage and answered questions about how to get into "AAA Game" development. I.e., your Gears of War, Metal Gear Solid, that sort of thing. The gaming equivalent of a big-budget block buster.

The big names and recognizable faces on stage talked about the difficulties people can face when trying to achieve that dream of directing "the game." It's a long road to get there, to get to the point where publishers will trust you with hundreds of thousands of dollars based on your reputation. Honestly, I'm not sure it's worth it. Yes, it would be like heaven to have that kind of money to make a game with, but the road to get there is so long and arduous, that I wonder if it really is better than being an integral part of a small indie team right away.

My main takeaway from that panel is that big companies are a great place to learn things and gain experience, but huge development studios like that have to deal with a lot of issues that simply don't apply to indie developers. Maybe it would be good to get an entry level design job at a studio like that, learn as much as I can, and then start my own studio.

But anyways, this post is turning into far too much of me idly day dreaming so I'll cut myself off here. Coming to GDC has really been an amazing experience and I'm so glad I did. If there's anyone else out there who gets the opportunity to come, even if you are clueless like I am, I definitely recommend it. It is completely worth while.

So long, GDC.

GDC 2011 Diary: Day 3

Today was the first day that the Expo Floor opened up at GDC. It was way more crowded than it had been on Monday or Tuesday. But when I finally stepped through the doors and into the light, I saw why.

I went to a couple of talks before heading inside, but I didn't get too deep into them. Suffice it to say that I wasn't the target audience for the lectures that I saw today. But that was fine, and it gave me some interesting insight into some corners of the development process that I knew nothing about.

I walked around the show floor a little bit and got to see a lot of neat things at the different booths. 3D sure is the hot new thing right now and I got to try and see a lot of it. In the end though, the glasses keep ruining the experience by washing out all the color and just generally being a hassle, especially since I wear a pair of glasses to begin with. Enter Nintendo's 3DS.

The 3DS is the next handheld coming out of Nintendo. Like its wildly successful predecessor, the 3DS has two screens. Now though, the top screen can display in eye popping 3D. WITHOUT GLASSES.

I got to demo many games on the device today, and the most shocking thing about it all is that it works as advertised. Granted it takes a moment for your eyes to adjust and not fight the dual images they are receiving, and you also have to hold the system in a somewhat fixed viewing angle for the effect to work, but once you take a brief moment to get acclimated, the effect is remarkable.

So while I have nothing but great things to say about the hardware itself, the software is pretty much all middling at best. The best game for the thing right now is a remake of Ocarina of Time. Not exactly the stellar launch one would hope the system to have. I have faith that the software will really start to get amazing later in the year, but for now, there's not really a good reason to buy the system. Which is a real shame because I REALLY WANT TO.

Apart from that, I just walked around and took some pictures. Nothing super notable happened today, so I'll just dump all the images I have and write a little note about them. Expect more of the same tomorrow because I don't have any talks scheduled until Friday.

Nintendo's 3DS. Smaller than I thought it would be, but it felt sturdy.

A talk I attended on some 3D modeling software that I'll never be smart enough to use. I think I learned that I never want to be a 3D artist.

Sony's next portable cleverly named the Next Generation Portable was not playable, but slowly rotating in a glass bubble.

Unlike the 3DS, Sony seems to be pushing their device as something that can offer portable versions of experiences you'd expect to find on home consoles. I think it's an unwise strategy personally, but it remains to be seen what exactly this device is going to be, so we'll have to see.

SpeedTree is a hilarious bit of middleware that I first heard about on GiantBomb.com in their coverage of GDC 2010. It's capable of randomly generating trees for your game based on criteria you feed it. I was tickled that I found this booth.

Some dudes from a press site doing an interview with a developer. I thought it was neat to see something like this happening.

Tomorrow I plan to go back to the Expo Floor and play the rest of the 3DS games I didn't get to today, and maybe I'll write impressions of each one on here. But again, they're not very good, so we'll see.

'Till then!

GDC 2011 Diary: Day 2

Decidedly less lectures today. Lots more hands on type activities and a little more faffing about on my part. Spent the entire day at part two of the game design workshop. But before I talk about that, I wanna show and tell some of the neat little things I'e experienced at GDC so far.

After I signed in on Sunday, I received a bag full of what I'll generously call "swag." Most of it was garbage trash, but inside it was a single blue square. On the back of the square was a note informing me that it was a pixel, and I needed to put the pixel in its designated place on a mural at GDC. Everyone attending GDC got a pixel, and we're all going to put them together to create on giant mural. It's actually a fun and neat idea, I thought.

The work-in-progress mural

I'll take another photo of it towards the end of the show when it's complete. If you get close to the mural you can see silly things that people wrote on their pixels. Actually most of them were just plugging their websites, but whatever.

Another neat thing going on is what's being called the GDC "metagame." The jist of it is that you go to the booth that's running it and they give you a hand of cards with the name's of various video games on them and question cards which ask things like "Which game is more educational?" and that sort of thing. Anyone wearing a metagame sticker on their GDC pass is playing the game, and you can challenge them with a question and a game card. They then take a game card from their hand and play it against the card you laid down, and the two of your debate for two minutes about why you think your game fits the question better (even if you really don't!).

A winning combination, for sure

After you debate, the bystanders judge who made their case better and declare them the winner. The winner pulls a random card from the losers hand, and the game continues on throughout the show. At the end of the show, whoever has the most "holographic" cards (that is, the ones with the stars in the corner) gets some fancy gift certificate or an iPod Shuffle or something. I forget. It's a pretty fun way to break the ice or just have an interesting discussion about video games.

Some more of my cards

I also spent about thirty seconds playing my very first 3D game. I haven't even seen a 3D movie yet so it was quite an interesting experience. I walked up to a demo station running Fable 3 on PC, popped on the glasses, and was washed away by dimensions I barely knew existed.

In all honesty, I haven't been big on the whole 3D gaming thing, but now that I've tried it, I think it might not be a total waste of everyone's time. I don't think it's possible to actually use the 3D as a gameplay mechanic, but there was a marked improvement in visual clarity and depth perception with the 3D, even if the glasses I was wearing did turn everything grey. If there's ever a cheap, glasses free method of making this the new standard, I don't think that would necessarily be so bad. Provided they work out the kinks. The 3D definitely had a hiccup or two while I was playing that made my eyes want to explode in pain. It felt like I was crossing them really hard, but they were totally relaxed. Weird stuff.

Anyways, on to the meat of what I actually learned from the show today.

The first project I did today was to modify a board game called Three Muskateers so that it could be playable with 3 or 4 players, rather than just 2, while maintaining the aesthetic qualities of the original game's design. One of the interesting things about the original game was that it was asymmetrical multiplayer. In other words, each player had different moves and abilities at their disposal, rather than a game like chess or checkers in which both players are identical forces.

One of the important things about the original game's design was that in the beginning, not many moves were available to either player, but slowly more and more possibilities would open up until the game finally ended. Our instructor for this activity pointed out that the game followed the arc of dramatic progression.

As time goes on, the number of choices slowly increases until reaching a peak, and then quickly dropping off

This was a HUGE deal to me. Dramatic progression is really important to me and dictates a lot of how I think of game design, but I never thought it could apply to anything but an actual narrative. Here we have a multiplayer experience whose story and narrative is basically left at the door as soon as the game begins, and yet dramatic progression completely applies to the spirit and flow of the game. Amazing!

The design me and my group ended up with turned out to be some kind of territory control type experience, and the changes we made turned it into a symmetrical multiplayer experience. In fact, as we went around the room, I found that most groups did the exact same thing. This wasn't necessarily supposed to be the takeaway from the project, but I certainly found it to be very interesting.

Asymmetrical games are very difficult to make. The key reason for this is that the easiest way to make a game fair is to give both teams the same tools for winning. But if you want to accentuate the differences between players, you'll have to spend a lot of time tweaking and refining it to balance it, and balance is a really hard thing to measure when the units of measurement are not the same.

In the end, I think the asymmetrical experience was more exciting, interesting, and strategic. It's extremely difficult to pull off, but worth all the effort. I actually felt a bit of passion for multiplayer game design stir up inside me after this project, when typically the only things I've cared to design are single player games.

The last major thing I did at the workshop was what they called a "paper prototype." Somewhat in the spirit of the case studies I do in this blog, we chose an existing game to strip down into a game played with dice and cards. The idea being that if you remove audio, visuals, and the controller, all that will remain will be the game's design, and you can learn from it easier.

My group decided to make a paper prototype of StarCraft, a ragingly popular real-time strategy game in which you collect resources, build a base and train an army to defeat your opponent. So we sat down and decided that the most important aesthetics of StarCraft are urgency, secrecy, and strategy. We constructed a card game based around those ideas as quickly as we could, and though we almost ran out of time, when we sat down to play it, I was shocked at how truly fun and engaging it was. By the end, I wanted to keep playing and keep refining it further and further.

The instructors, all successful game designers at various companies, informed us of how useful paper prototypes can be in the early stages of developing a game. Not only is it basically free, but the end result will be an invaluable tool for communicating others what you want your real game to be like. The takeaway from this project was that play transcends media. Very poetic.

After that we all blew off some steam by taking a paper bag filled with random goodies and making a game out of it in a short amount of time. Our game was very close to being fun. And with this last goofy, somewhat noneducational project, the game design workshop drew to a close.

Over the course of the two days, I met and worked with loads of game designers, many from distant countries. One from England, one from Finland, and a couple from Spain! People come so far to go to GDC, it's really amazing.

Tomorrow I'm going to two talks. One about how to start up your own studio and one about animation software. Second one might be over my head, but I wanted to check it out. I'll also be attending an award show for 2010 games, which should be fun. Also, the main floor opens up tomorrow and I'll be roaming around there talking to dudes. So staaaaaaay tuned!

GDC 2011 Diary: Day 1 (Belated)

Only thing on my schedule for monday and tuesday of GDC is the Game Design Workshop, which goes from 10:00-6:00 on both days. Here's a rundown of what we did and talked about on monday.

Hideo Kojima, my hero, took a picture very similar to this and posted it on his Twitter. *squeeeeeeaaaaaal*

The lecturer opened up by telling us that the most important thing we could do is to iterate frequently and to fail fast. That is, when designing a game, the first version of it is pretty much guaranteed to be terrible no matter what. So rather than spending a thousand hours on the first playable version and putting the cherry on top only to have it fall apart completely, it's more valuable to spend a short amount of time on early versions of the game. That way, you get actual hard evidence and reasoning to back up the changes you make, instead of playing the game in your head and finding out later that it doesn't work out quite the way you thought it was going to in the end.

He continued on to teach us about what's called the MDA Framework. The MDA Framework is a sort of philosophical structure in which you can organize your thoughts and make a better game. Respectively, the MDA stands for mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics. A game's mechanics are the rules and systems that make it go. You would find the mechanics of a board game you purchased in that game's rule book. Dynamics are what happens while the game is actually played. The lecturer made the point that you can't enjoy a game of chess just by looking at a chess board; you have to actually sit down and play the game. That act is the dynamics of a game. Finally, aesthetics refers to the desirable emotional response to the game. The "fun" if you will. However, we later learned to try to eliminate words like "fun" and "gameplay" from our vocabulary, as they are not helpful in game design. It's like calling a painting "good." It might be good, but it's not a very scientific or informative term.

The MDA Framework can be used to gain a number of different perspectives on a game that one is designing, but the one that seems most valuable to me personally is that it allows you to effectively reverse engineer your game. That is, you start by choosing an aesthetic goal, design the way you want the player to interact with your game, and lastly, refine the mechanics until the game is solid. A to D to M. Depending on what your goals for the game are though, you could approach the MDA Framework from any angle you like.

I mentioned earlier that the word "fun" is bad and should not be used when possible. The lecturer has a personal philosophy he shared with us known as the eight kinds of fun. He listed them as such:

Sensation - The sensory experience a player has with a game
Fantasy - Games as make believe
Narrative - Games as an unfolding story (This is distinct from fantasy in that it's about the story of the player playing the game, rather than the fictional story the game is telling. A good example of this being the drama of a chess game.)
-Challenge - Games as a problem to solve
-Fellowship - Games as a social experience
-Discovery - Games that contain worlds to explore or systems to learn and become skilled at
-Expression - Games that allow you to create things or express yourself in one way or another
-Submission - Games as a mindless pasttime (see: Angry Birds, Tetris, etc)

He stressed that there were probably more kinds of fun that we could come up with if we really tried, but it was more about finding and using a vocabulary that we're comfortable with. We can craft our own theories as we make our own games. I found this eight kinds of fun method very useful though and I'll probably continue to use it.

Later in the day I attended another lecture which delved deeper into the MDA Framework. Specifically, where should the player come into the equation?

Depending on the approach you want to take, you could insert them anywhere. Making the player themselves a mechanic of the game is something that's become more and more popular in recent years with motion controls and cameras being integrated into party games. You could also view the player as solely a subject which should react to your game, though in my personal opinion, that approach is more suited to passive media such as books and movies. But if the player is considered in a game's dynamics, you're accommodating them as they actually experience the game. This is the most logical place to think of the player for most games, in my opinion.

To expand on the player as a piece of a game's dynamics, the instructor talked a lot about human psychology and how game designers can manipulate the players in a number of ways. The example he gave (conveniently enough since I wrote about this game at length a few posts ago) was Pacman. In theory, the powerups in Pacman should make the game easier, right? You give the player a tool with which to survive and it should make it easier for them to win, right? Well in the case of Pacman, it causes players to play much riskier and greedier. A real world example he gave was when several groups of people were asked to build a tower as tall as they could using only marshmallows and dry spaghetti. They performed decently under normal circumstances, but when a large sum of money was offered to the winning team, not a single team was able to construct a qualifying tower. This psychological phenomenon is called the greed catalyst.

Later he talked to us about something called a self-serving bias. I'm sure everyone has experienced this before, "I lost because I was unlucky, I won because I am skilled." People have a tendency to attribute their success to themselves, and their failures to forces outside of their control. This is called the gunslinger's alibi. This is actually useful in friendly multiplayer games because it allows one player to feel good without the other player feeling bad. Wizard's of the Coast (a notorious maker of trading card games such as Magic and Pokemon) have an internal philosophy with their magic series called the 70/30 rule. A more skilled player should win 70% of his matches against a less skilled player due to events in the game that he could not possibly foresee or prepare for. This is a great rule of thumb for casual multiplayer experiences, though the audience of a highly competitive game like StarCraft might cringe at such a deliberate imbalance.

The lecturer reached a point that I couldn't help but strongly disagree with, though. He said that players are more tolerant of failure that can be blamed on bad luck, or random failure. As long as they are not blaming themselves, he claimed, they won't become frustrated. Before coming to this lecture, I specifically carried a design philosophy very close to me that stated the exact opposite. The player should ALWAYS blame themselves for their own losses. It makes them feel like the game is worth playing, worth mastering, worth another round. The phenomenon of losing a game to something you should have known about is called a purloined letter. If you doze off while playing and forget a particular rule and lose to that rule, you can't really blame anyone but yourself. The instructor said that the gunslinger's alibi plus a purloined letter equals a rage quit, since it becomes impossible for the player to escape their own ineptitude.

It may be true that players are more accepting of random defeat, but I would argue that the only reason for this is low investment. Low investment means that they are dangerously close to getting bored, and a bored player is dangerously close to quitting. Also, if a game glitches out and shuts down, I would put that in the category of random failure. Losing to a coin toss. For me personally, nothing makes me angrier, so I was surprised to hear the lecturer speak in favor of such a thing, but I guess I've been playing video games for almost all my life so perhaps my perspective is in the minority. It's certainly more punishing and games I make might be less accessible for it.

Even I'll admit that it's somewhat of an unsolved mystery in game design. Mastery through repetition is one of the oldest themes in video games, but is it obsolete? Is it engaging? Is it appropriate for game design moving forward? Should trial and error really be the way a player is taught to get good at a game? Particularly in competitive multiplayer games, I'm quick to criticize games like StarCraft and Street Fighter for failing to teach the player how to actually get better at the game. Learning by going online and getting destroyed by more experienced players is incredibly discouraging, and it led me to quit competitive StarCraft, even though I love the game to death. It's a tough case to solve to be sure, because weakening failure also weakens success.

So that's basically a summery of GDC day 1 for me. Hotel internet has me behind schedule on these writeups unfortunately, and I'm far too lazy to do much proofreading on this. These are just meant to be quick summaries of my experience at the show, and jotting down what I've learned. Hopefully it's not too longwinded and boring. I certainly didn't take enough pictures to sprinkle through these articles.

Not too busy for now. That will probably change when the expo floor opens.

Anyways, I'll write again "tomorrow!"

GDC 2011 Quick Update

Hotel's WiFi was just not cooperating with me last night, so I was unable to write up my notes. Tonight I'll try to get up a giant summary of day 1 and 2, assuming I can get online.