Edge's "hot 100" list

Edge published their list of the 100 most important people in game development. While it was nice to see some friends make the list, there were also some weird entries and folks missing that should have made the list. Anyhow, congrats to Robin, Trent, John, Clint and everyone else on the list.

Braid PC release announced: Mar 15, $15, no DRM

Jon's announced the first release of the PC version of Braid (he's doing several releases with different distributors). This one is with Stardock, whom you may have heard of from their forward-looking anti-DRM stance. Initially it was announced at $20, but Jon dropped the price to $15 following grumblings on the web. Note the DRM stance:

Where possible, the game will be released without DRM. Some online publishers include their own DRM as a matter of policy, and of those guys, I am only signing with the ones that have light and non-intrusive DRM. My goal is to give people a reasonable choice about where to get the game, and if they don’t like someone’s DRM or someone else’s launcher client, they can get it from whoever they like most.

Now everybody be good boys and girls and buy the game! Support indie development and don't provide fodder for pro-DRM folk to say "I told you so".

Oh, and I love this comment from Jon in the discussion thread, where someone criticized his late PC release as indicative of his being 'anti-PC':

I’m not some kind of weird platform loyalist. The PC is not some sports team that is playing the Xbox 360 for the World Cup.

Indeed, it's not, though I think the PC would kick the 360's tail if it did! (Though continuing this analogy, it would be more like a soccer match of 16 pro athletes on one side, against 1600 guys on the other side, most of whom weren't in as quite good shape.... but I digress).

Random reads from around the Intertubes

A few posts that caught my eye:

• Game retailers stocking fewer games, fewer copies of those they do buy. Further proof we're not recession-proof, recession-resistant, etc. (It will be interesting whether this compounds what we're already seeing with pubishers; cancelling risky projects, non-sequels, etc).
• Pachter would disagree, as he maintains that we are recession-proof. He blames bad planning and over-investment in R&D on new IP and the like, rather than bread'n'butter sequels. (EA did spend over $1.1B on R&D last fiscal year, which is pretty high even for them. Expect that to drop next year).
• Ubisoft is using this time to grow and invest. Smart if you have the cash on hand to carry you through. I think the "next gen consoles coming in 2011-12" is likely a bit off the mark though.
• Q4 VC investments down to lowest level since Q1'05. Also not surprising. (As an aside, I've been letting VGVC.NET attrophy for a while, but it might be a good time to do some editorial around this).
• Continuing the bad news, here's a post commenting on the downturn, layoffs, etc. An interesting snippet I disagree with: "a lot of firms, games industry or not, are using the credit crunch as an excuse to trim their more optimistic hires away". I think the difference with the games business in particular is that so many studios are running on a pretty thin bank balance, living hand-to-mouth between milestone payments. When credit dries up, cash is king, and if you don't have any, making payroll might get tricky.
• Good, but lengthy editorial on the whole "are games art?" thing and on games place in our culture. The money quote:"

There is no other medium that produces so pure a cultural segregation as video games, so clean-cut a division between the audience and the non-audience. Books, films, TV, dance, theatre, music, painting, photography, sculpture, all have publics which either are or aren’t interested in them, but at least know that these forms exist, that things happen in them in which people who are interested in them are interested. They are all part of our current cultural discourse. Video games aren’t.

• Its the sincerest form of flattery: EA, and other companies, asking for their IP to be whitelisted in Little Big Planet (Sony's been removing anything that even smells of IP infringement, not waiting for DMCA takedown notices.
• Good interview with Jon Blow about Braid, his next project, and other stuff. Jon's smart. Go read!

Braid coming to PC in Feb/Mar

Jon's commented on the PC release of Braid:

At this time, we’re looking at a window of February-March 2009 for the PC
release.

I also liked this little addition from him in the comment thread when asked if it was releasing on Steam:

"Oh, and about Steam: Originally they did not seem very interested in Braid, but
now that it’s a successful game they seem to have changed their mind. I haven’t
signed a contract with them, but they seem interested, so the biggest factor now
is just me finishing the PC version and giving it to them."

MIGS (Post 4 of N): Jon Blow closing keynote

Jon got a massive turnout for the closing keynote of the show. I took some notes, but didn't post till now as thurs/fri were pretty busy and then in transit. Anyhow, In rough form, here they are:

"A fundamental conflict in contemporary game design”

Inspiration to be found for those of us to think about problems

Goals: To touch people, to change there lives.

Other media have no problem doing this.

Today we limit ourselves to 'If it was profound  to you, it was from a game designer standpoint, not an emotional standpoint.'

Things that we do as a matter of course that prevent us from reaching those goals.

How do you make something important, profound, meaningful?

It musn't be.. Fake unimportant meaningless.

Two ways to be important to people. By expression. By introduction of activity.

Story games (fable, half life 2, GTA)

Activity games (Madden, Wii sports, Pacman, Go)

Developers are always trying to make better stories.

Academics are working on dynamic story techniques.

Fallout 3, far cry 2, attempting dynamic story.

Story games are inherently conflicted.

People can sense a conflicted work. It wont strike them deeply. Disharmouious. It won’t resonate. How can we remove the conflict?

Conflict 1: story meaning vs dynamical meaning.

Dynamical meaning.

Art games (very small)

Communicating via behavior and perceptual primitives.

The Marriage by rod humble.

“Here’s what Rod’s marriage feels like”

Gravitation by Jason Rohrer

Expressing “real life” themes through rules of interactivity.

Behavior/interpretation

Stares become ice blocks/ideas become concrete projects

Blocks preven you reaching child – projects interfere with family.

(bug) (weird interpretation)

Imagine I introduce a new element:

Ice block score decrease changes with a powerup. (stops counter)

What does this freeze mean in this game that is a metaphor for work/life balance.

More rules added, less pure interpretation, more of a mishmash

By adding/subtracting rules you travel a continuum. The resulting game will always have some meaning.

In the games industry we ignore this interpretation

Extend this to any game

Any time we stet up a system of behavior

“dynamical system”

…that system communicates something to the player, whether intentional or not.

This is the dynamical meaning.

(see Ian Bogosts “procedural rhetoric”, doesn’t need to be rhetorical or procedural)

Gravitaiton has thematic elements but does not tell a story.

Conflict 1:

Story meaning vs dynamical.

Mainstream designers not thinking about dynamical meaning. Rather implmenting story and basic gameplay mechanic that is “fun”. The story and fun mechanics have separate meanings that often clash.

Like having a scoring of film “happy carnival music" through a funeral scene.

We have happy carny music over every funeral…

How does this manifest in some popular games?

Altruism vs balance.

Bioshock: Rules showed very small token difference in ADAM whether or not you saved the girls.

GTA4: “I like Kate”. No, I don’t. The game rules expressed to me that I don’t care about her.

HL2: Alex relationship vs game progress.

We want to prevent these games from  seeming fake.

How to resolve these conflicts?

-          Don’t use story

-          Don’t use dynamical meaning

-          Make dynamical meaning match story.

A)     Don’t use story

Story gives you “interesting mental stuff

What happens next, people doing things, Themes, moods

Can we supply interesting mental stuff that doesn’t come from story?

Whereas Rohrer-style games are hard, anyone can write a story?

How could we scale Gravitiation up?

"Any dumbass can write a story from a game, and if you look at our games, a lot of dumbasses do"

The trend will always be toward the easiest things to throw money at (known quantity)

B) Don’t use dynamucal meaning

-          Technically impossible. It’s automatic

-          You could navigate to 0. So this devolves to case C.

C) “Tight coupling” (Bogost) or elemintate conflicts.

Like pressing bubbles out of wallpaper.

“change aspects of story that don’t fit story, vice versa (gameplay)

Designers not trained to consider dynamical meaning.

AAA production models do not support this. (late gameplay changes are very expenseive!)

2) Conflict 2: challenge vs progression.

We base most mainstream games on story, and also challenge.

Why challenge? It’s viscreral, fun, etc, but more fundamentally.

Challenge communicates to you that your interaction 'means something’ that it is important or necessary.

Story needs to occur, challenge is a friction preventing you from getting there.

Story is a reward

Challenge is about withholding that reqard until we deserve it.

Leads to dramatic presentation of non-difficulty ‘God of War, Fable 2 – seems like there’s a challenge – dramatic presentation of stuff that isn’t difficult.

Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment.

The Arrow can’t go to zero

“like “suspension of disbelief”

But for games and importance.

A reason to exist.

Without ANY challenge, that suspension is hard to maintain.

Faux challenge is unlikely to impact someone deeply, to change the player’s life.

Challenge is a precious thing: we can do it much more derictly that other media. We waste this. [Note: Braid makes a good case for this, doesn't it. The difficulty of some of the later puzzles really made the reward of progress that much sweeter; to me anyhow]

Challenge substitutes

Not difficult, but interesting.

“invitation-style” alternatives.

Open Problem: how to make game meaningfully response to player’s choices, without blocking progress.

Conflict 3: Intreactivity vs pre-baked delivery.

Trying to create Drama or Crafted Impact.

Required careful pacing and framing

Delivery.

Interactivity sabotages delivery.

You don’t know where the player came from, or what he just did.

Deus Ex spoof from “old man murray”

Interactivity sabotates structure!

Chehkov's Gun

“if you say in the first chapter that there’s a rifle hanging on the wall, then in chapter 2,3 it better go off”

Economy of audience attention.

Sideeffect of foresshadowing and justification

In a good story, it’s not random out of context gun.

Requires and intense preprocess.

Story is a filtered presentation of events that have already happened. ß games haven’t already happened.

Why is the gun there? What’s the history, etc.

Drama manager – “intelligent dramama manager? Yeah, show me… Can never match a human drama manager. A human drama manager can never match a human writing a pre-baked story.

Character animation analogy: Pre-baked CGI vs Live Physics {<-- ooh, good point!]

Recap: story telling techniques we suck at:

Foreshadowing

Justification

Pacing

Potetic adjustment

Tone adjustment

Vocal emphasis

Body language

“importance”

-- 

Dynamic stories are

Pretend stories

Poorly structured

Poorly delivered

Will always be awkward second fiddle to linear media. Not a good core value proposition for our medium.

Don’t use story. At least as not as a core value prop. We said this was hard

What does story provide people, can we provide it in a different way?

Why not pursue examples from other forms? Music, sculpture, painting, etc.

Art games are a good place to start. How afar can we go in this direction?

To try completely, we art game authors must abandon “the message model of meaning”

The message model of meaning is insufficient

"The moral of the story is”

High school: Taught to read works and say what they are about.

Gamers get mad at art games. Inherently pretentious. Being condescended to. This is often true! If the message model of meaning is applied, whe the works are created. Trivializes meaning. (high school 5 paragraph essay)

[Frank Lanz quote, I missed part of it, so my apologies for perhaps butchering it...]

"...meaning which is less specific, less concrete and deliberate, harder to define, harder to pin down, trancends the author reader conduit model of message styles. "

Message model author is at least a little deluded. The true meaning of a game is multidimensional and fuzzy. … more complex than what you set out to build.

"if I understand it, it can’t be that important."

Instead, what if I build something that readhes beyond the eduge of my understanding and we all explore it together. They will have a play experience that is very deep and very precious and meaningful.

So what does Freeze mean? I don't know, but I think I'll stop here.

Braid mention in Wall Street Journal

In addition to the glowing reviews of the game, WSJ has a nice write-up here with some background on the game's development.

Braid is out!

Braid has *finally* released on XBLA.


I only had a few minutes to play at 5am this morning before heading out, but was so happy to see the final product.

I believe it's one of the most beautiful things on xbox360, and I also believe it's THE most beautiful thing to happen TO xbox360. (Metacritic scores up so far seem to agree)

Congrats to Jon for seeing his vision through, and for keeping nose to the grindstone for SO long (I first talked to Jon about it at IGF 2006, so he started 2005?2004?). I stand in awe of his passion for the art.

Good interview on Braid

Jon did a good interview with IGN on Braid:

Braid for XBLA Announced - YAY!

I've had to keep tight-lipped about this for a while, but Braid got announced for XBLA.

The post about it on GameSetWatch has a good comment thread by Jon (the developer) and Simon (of GameDev mag and IGF) on some of the issues around indie games and the IGF.

I'm really excited to play the final version. Braid is one of the few games that I've played in a long time that has REALLY made my brain hurt!

Jon Blow interview

If you haven't read it, it's great.

I am so looking forward to Braid.

GDC 2007: Sessions I attended

As I stated earlier, I only attended a small number of sessions. In ranked order, they were:

1. Clint Hocking's presentation on (self) Exploration in Games.

Clint's own post-mortem on the session, along with the slides and accompanying paper, can be found here. (Note that the talk was written as a paper first, like I did here, and like he, I and some others discussed here).

Clint is the awesome. At some point I decided that if I'm going to a conference where he's speaking, I block that time to attend and schedule around that. The guy takes some hard topic ideas, dives after them, and does some serious work on both the research and the resulting presentation. Clint is my presentation hero :-). Go read the paper, or get the short version in the gamasutra coverage here. (or buy the Mp3 version here, if reading is more painful to you than parting with $8 :-)

2. How Casual Games Will Kill the Console (and Why That's a Good Thing)

John Welch, President of Playfirst, gave a really good session that I'm surprised wasn't blogged more widely. John subscribes to the same Geoffrey Moore school of thought that I do, and he led the audience through a well thought-out argument about how open markets win, and how games will be no exception. Plenty of good analogies from other mediums & markets, and a good presentation style to boot. I beleive his pitch was right on the money, and is the long-term light at the end of the tunnel that Greg Costikyan presented during the rant session. Speaking of which:

3. Burning Mad: Game Publishers Rant

The rant session is always entertaining, enlightening, and provocative. This year's was a little more mixed, which is why this falls midpoint on my list. Some rants fell flat, while others were well prepared and thought through. Details on the sessions here. My short comments on each:

• Great: Chris Hecker's Anti-Wii rant. Already blogged in detail around the web. I agree, and he's my hero for having stones to get up and say it, even if he regrets the way in which it was taken.
• Great: Nicole Bradford's "excite the young'uns using games" rant. It was a strong message, well written, and well rehearsed. A lot of similarities (and no, I am not refering to race nor gender similarities) to Majora Carter's TED speech I blogged about a while back. Perhaps that's the style/effect she was aiming for? The only thing making me rate this one second is that it was perhaps a bit TOO rehearsed for the GDC rant session. It's supposed to come off as a rant; a little rough around the edges. That commentary aside, she was very good.
• Good: Greg Costikyan's "wolf in digital distribution clothing" aka "the consoles will be our new overlords" rant. Greg is always a little understated in presentation style, but I beleive his to be the most insightful of all the rants. I beleive his argument is absolutely on the money and one that developers/publishers should keep in mind. And yeah, I say that despite his bagging on Arcade, and despite his misnaming Arcade 'Xbox Live Arena'.
• Good: Richard Hilleman's Leadership rant. Spot on topic, well delivered, if a little understated for the flavor of gdc rant.
• Good: Lee Jacobson's "some devs pull some funky sh*t" rant. A good look at walking in the other man's shoe that hopefully let devs understand why the evil publisher sometimes needs to be as evil as he is :-)
• Poor: Jason Della Rocca's "I read some books this year" rant. Uh, sorry J, you're a friend, but that was a pretty shoddy rant. (a) it was more or less a repeat of Seamus' rant from last year, and (b) it was far less specific. It also made a pretty big assumption: That the rest of the industry doesn't already dabble in other media by reading books, viewing movies, etc. I don't know what your IGDA polls are telling you, but many of the devs I hang with are the biggest renaissance men & women I know, reading far more, and far more varied fare, than most folk I know outside the industry. Gotta ding you for this one buddy, sorry.
• Poor: Alex St John's yet-another-vista-rant. I've addressed this in the IGDA Casual Games Sig Q&A, but I think he's overstating the issue, and came off looking that way. No real call to action anyway, though I'm sure he's pitching his company's product as a solution in other sessions/meetings. Whatever.

4. Innovation in Indie Games

An interesting and entertaining panel during the Indie games track. I commented to Jon Blow after the session that he came off as the time-tempered old veteran of the panel, whereas just a few years ago it seems he would very much have filled the raging, stand by your principles and damn-the-torpedos role that this year was filled by Jonathan Mak (creator of the brilliant Everyday Shooter). A summary of the session can be found here.

5. Jeff Minter 'keynote' from Indie Games Summit

Hrm. Jeff's a pretty poor speaker, didn't have a well thought out message to give people (other than perhaps "do your own thing") and labored through a bunch of demos of old games saying "I didn't want this to be a clone of X", and then would show us a clone of X where some element had been replaced by a bunch of wildlife. Sorry dude, but replacing a space ship with a camel doesn't exactly make it innovative. To boot, he was rude during Q&A by ignoring audience member questions while playing his own games on screen.

There were a couple highlights: (1) Space Giraffe does look to be an LSD-like trippy game. (2) I like than an equally, ahem, alternate substance afficionado got up to ask a question along the lines of "so, this is a game where I can take alternate substances and trip out while I play?" and he answered "alternate substances are optional, but yeah". Kindred spirits. (3) Clever wordplay when he said his small indie games that are visual-rich but not aimed at the commercial big time were "about electronic art, not Electronic Arts".

6. Sony PS3 keynote

This has been covered to death elsewhere, and I'm not listing it last because I'm a microsoft guy. I just wasn't wowed. I have two things to say:

I was asked *a lot* what I thought about PS3 'Home' while at GDC. Here's my opinion: It looked like the software embodiment of a knee-jerk reaction. It was a feature list, implemented, and wrapped into a demo. It's basically like someone said "Go do Xbox Live, Mii's, Habbo Hotel, and some of the better bits of Second Life". They concatenated those feature lists and then built it. Only then did it seem they said "what might we then do with it?". Rather than starting with "what do we want people to be able to do?". Many of the demos were about technically impressive things as a result. Few were 'omygosh gotta have!'. Mostly, I saw things that would be HARDER to do/use as a result of having been done prettier or in 3D.

On the other hand, LittleBigWorld looks *really* good. I really would like to have a go at playing it.