Alans Games Design Blog

How "Fishing Girl" Restored My Inspiration

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Jack) — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 22:10:00 +0000

You might have noticed I haven't written anything in here for a while. While part of that has been down to changes in my personal life, my general malaise towards the games industry has played a part as well. It seems no amount of academic study or criticism will stand a chance of changing the tune of developers. Neither the brunt of the developers nor the core consumers see the need for any change to the current slew of brain-dead titles, nor do they have any desire to push back the boundaries of our understanding of interactivity. In short, there just didn't seem to be any point any more.

It was to my great surprise, then, that I saw a game appear on Xbox Live's Indie Games that, for once, was not a zombie-infested murder marathon. “Fishing Girl” was a cute little game with a simple one-button gameplay mechanic and low-key lo-fi graphics that managed to appear distinct from mainstream titles without falling into the trap of looking “obviously Indie”.

What struck me – and inspired me - was not just the simplicity of the gameplay and the graphics, but the wonderful use of story. Fishing Girl's premise is simple – two creatures are in love. One is suddenly separated from another by a stretch of water. You take control of this creature, and can earn coins by catching fish. By upgrading your fishing rod and line, you can eventually catch the other piece of land with your lure, and reel it in, pulling the two creatures back together – but the game does not tell you this. As a player, I felt that I had come to the conclusion of pulling the other piece of land towards me of my own accord. This is the holy grail of interactive writing – a fixed ending that feels emergent. It also perfectly displays a natural ludo-narrative resonance. Many larger, more complex games – including those worked on by established authors – use story as a trope or machina. In a similar fashion to the way in which a TV character might suddenly reveal an otherwise unrelated (and often unlikely) hobby or past experience that just so happens to be useful in the show, all too often our games rely on a complex plot to explain the minutia of the gaming mechanic. Fishing Girl demonstrates how a simple, natural and easily understood story can flow simply into a supporting gameplay mechanic, and how this can lead the player to a conclusion without having to directly tell them what to do.

For all the discussion that goes on today of branching vs fixed narrative, and of the possibilities and technical limitations of a truly emergent story experience, a game like Fishing Girl comes as a shock to the system, and leaves me wondering if perhaps crafting an emergent, story-based interactive experience is like learning to fly before we can even crawl. Perhaps the better solution to creating a deeper interactive experience lies not in the player carving their own solution, but in creating a single, unchanging solution that flows so cleanly from the gameplay that the player doesn't feel cheated or slighted by their inability to change it.

An Experiment In Games Design - Designing to Music

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Jack) — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 21:11:00 +0000

With my recent discussion of designing to a user's "feeling" and the emotional side of an experience, along with my lust for experimenting with game designs, I thought I'd set myself a new challenge: adapt a piece of music into a game.

For this purpose, I chose a piece I know very well and am a big fan of: "Inní mér syngur vitleysingur" by Sigur Ros. This particular piece's lyrics are unintelligible to me, so I'll be working purely from my personal interpretation of the musical elements of the song.

Here's a Spotify link if you'd like to hear the song.

My first impression of the song is always a sense of triumph - to me, it is a song for marching past crowds, with your head high. The most noticable thing that happened at this point was that I instantly began picturing the action on-screen (albeit in a rather vague fashion), which made me run quite close to the "cool stuff happens" school of design.

I took the idea of marching triumphantly, and combined it with the imagery I was associating it with: people cheering in unison, parades, confetti, fireworks. This led me to a game mechanic I knew well - the challenge of herding.

And thus "The March Of Triumph" was born:

March Of Triumph

The player plays a character returning to his home town triumphant from a great victory. Or perhaps he's just having a really, really good day. Who knows. Whatever the situation, he has somewhere to go, and he's marching there with his head held high. As he does this, he spreads cheer to the town around him - flowers grow, rubbish clears away, and everything is brightly coloured. Thing is, this town is filled with miserable, sad people who stare at the ground all day. They spread their misery everywhere, killing plants and spreading muck around.

The player must march triumphantly through the town to his destination within a set time limit. As they pass the glum, depressing inhabitants of the town, passing close to them will cause them to "catch" your happiness. They'll brighten up, cheer up, and start marching with you.

Thing is, they're fickle - if at any point they look out and can only see misery, they'll get depressed again.

Cheer up enough people and the player can unleash a little happy flourish, sending out a radial burst of super-happiness that'll attract the attention of depressed people who aren't even looking - as well as setting off chain reactions of flourishes in your followers, and just looking incredibly happy and joyful.

The aim of the game is to reach your destination within the time limit and with as many happy followers as possible. The game also tracks how "happy" the city looks after each march.

Overall, I think the game mechanic is derivative - its a cross between snake and lemmings, really - but it does stand a good chance of not only being fun, but communicating my intended emotional experience to the player.

What this shows is that, while I was onto something with the genesis of an idea from an emotive experience, there is something to be said for prototyping and tinkering with gameplay mechanics. In my opinion, the solution is to take concepts such as this to prototypes as rapidly as is possible, so that the mechanics can be tested and tinkered with - ultimately even discarded if they don't work.

I'm also pretty sure a large part of the design came from my recent gameplay experience (I've had nothing to do for two days but sit and play Saint's Row 2, endlessly, for hours on end). I do wonder, given how large a part the city plays in the concept of the mechanic, if playing something else recently might have given me a different setting, and thus a different game mechanic.

I quite enjoy these small challenges, and will be continuing to set myself to them when I have spare time. I hope others will join me in the weekly challenge over at http://gdchallenge.wordpress.com/ .

More On Design From Feelings & A Look At Adaptation

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Jack) — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 20:43:00 +0000

Recently, I wrote on my blog about how I like to approach a game design - by focussing on a "feeling" of an "experience" that I want to communicate to the player - and I thought perhaps I should expand on some of those points.

Firstly, on reflection, I do rarely begin with just that "feeling". Often, I'll begin from a mechanic or narrative concept, like most other designers. When I do, however, the first thing I do is pare that thought down to its core feeling, what it is that makes that experience feel the way it does, and ask "how should the player feel right now?".

Once I have a handle on that, the next step is to ask "Why does the player feel this way?", which leads into "what can the game do to enhance/promote this feeling?". This is where this particular design methodology becomes a little flimsy, because I then have to begin building a game mechanic without anything to go on but a feeling - which, most of the time, means borrowing game mechanics from other games.

For an example of how this can turn out, check out the prototype I produced a few months back, "Balloon Balloon". (I swear, I will get back to work on it in a month or two!). This began, as you can tell from the blog entry, as a picture, then a poem, before finally becoming a game concept.

What makes this system both advantageous and challenging in development is in communication to the team. While I developed Balloon Balloon by myself, I have since spoken to an artist about it - and without a core "this is what happens" pitch, I just had to show them the picture & poem and explain my choices for the design mechanic and hope that they could get on board - but art history is filled with examples of multiple interpretations of a piece. Getting an entire team rallied around a single "feeling" is something I wouldn't want to have to do.

The idea to try developing a concept in this way wasn't entirely born from the Balloon Balloon experience. I also took a stab at one point at attempting to adapt a short story - in my case, HP Lovecraft's "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" - into a game. I realised that, while adaptation from paper to cinema might be as simple as working out what bits of the story work visually and what bits don't, then reworking appropriately, history has proven that taking a single, solid narrative and inserting interactive sequences doesn't make for a proper adaptation. For this project, I took the approach of imagining what the protagonist/narrator of the story was feeling during the story, under the assumption that the author would expect us to feel something similar to this in the reading. By doing this, I ended up with a concept that was entirely different to what might have come about from directly translating the events of the story.

(for those interested, the design itself was lost - along with my 4th year dissertation - when I lost my precious USB pen, but it was roughly thus:

Entitled "Shadows Of Innsmouth", the game is set in the late 70s, when the player plays a young aspiring architect on his way to his first major pitch without any grand inspiration. Due to a travelling issue, he is forced to make a 24 hour stopover in the town of Innsmouth, a fishing town frozen in time for 50 years, and which hides a disturbing secret behinds its odd and unique architecture. The player was tasked with wandering the town for a day and a night, searching for inspiration for his project - but with every revelation (he could speak to townsfolk to get more information on the strange architecture around the town) he risked losing his sanity. The player's progress was marked by the main character's sketch pad, which would fill with ideas as the player collected inspiration.

I felt the experiment was a failure - although I was proud of the design, and thought it would be fun, it represented more of an interactive story experience than an actual game, mostly due to the linear nature of the narrative. I'll post on interactive stories vs games at a later date.)

I would think that game designs need not begin from a feeling as such, but if there is a point to take from this concept, it is this - at some point, the aim of a game is to deliver an experience of some kind to the player. When considering your core mechanic, it pays to sit and consider what the primary emotions involved in that experience are. You then have to do what people in almost every great creative enviroment do - what William Goldman called "killing your darlings". You have to look objectively at everything you're adding to the game and ask "does this promote or stand in the way of the core concept I am trying to communicate?". If the answer is that it stands in its way, acts as a distraction, or effectively works against that feeling, then - even if it is fun, even if people enjoy it, you have to question its effectiveness and worth to the game. After all, I like zombies, but do I need them in a romantic comedy? Perhaps, but you wouldn't add pirates to that film, or a terminator, even though those things are cool to see in a film. You only add what contributes to the pure experience you are trying to convey to the player.

Genesis of a game design, and the "schools" of design methodolgy

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Jack) — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 11:52:00 +0000

If there is one question I need to find the answer to before I can be comfortable working in development again, its this: what is the basis of a good game design? Where does one start, and what progression does one take?

From my perspective, it seems many designers subscribe to what I would refer to as the "Cool Stuff Happens" school of game design. They begin with an idea of something happening on-screen, and work from there. This would be the attitude most people begin with when tranistioning into the industry - hence the slew of "you play a grizzled new york cop/toughened space marine/hardened mafia boss" designs. The game mechanics are built around this - "he steals a car to escape, so we need a driving mechanic" etc.

The problem with this attitude is that it skips almost everything that makes interactivity unique as a genre - it bolts game mechanics on to a narrative-based, mostly-visual experience, and as such stands little to no chance of innovating in those mechanics, or even ensuring that those mechanics are tailored to the overall experience of the game.

A more sensible approach, and one I imagine plenty designers use, is to come up with a new gameplay mechanic and build a gameplay experience to surround it. This is an interesting way of working, but I have to question its ability to truly capture the potential of our interactive digital medium as a whole. It could be that a game built around one simple mechanic becomes very gimmicky. This is a very old-fashioned way of working. Board games are often built around a single gameplay mechanic, and to produce a game in a similar manner would seem to imply that what we are striving for is little more than a fancy, glitzy board game.

The school of design I would like to experiment with would be that of beginning with an overall "feeling" I wish the player to have from their experience and finding ways to leverage that experience onto the player using gameplay mechanics. I do fear that this could lead to too much time spent "borrowing" existing gameplay mechanics, but I feel that this is the system that would unlock the most of gaming's true potential, and achieve more ludo-narrative resonance (a subject which I really must write more on in the future).

Looking at existing games in this context, it is interesting to see how they stack up.

The Grand Theft Auto series seems to mostly have been based on giving the player an experience of complete, unadulterated freedom. Much like sitting a small child on a large play mat marked like a city (such as the one I had as a small child) and giving them toy cars to play with (as my parents did), the first thing players did was to begin moving the cars at high speed, smashing them into one another, and tearing up the city in a most unrealistic manner (as I did, complete with brrrrmmm noises - both when I was a small child with the play mat, and as a young adult playing GTA for the first time). This, I feel, is why people are often so torn on the subject of GTA IV - the game aimed to leverage the same mechanics to tell a slow, structured tale, which felt at odds with the experience those mechanics were tailored to deliver.

The term "survival horror" would imply that Resident Evil 4 was attempting to create a sense of tension and panic within the gamer, and the gameplay mechanics seem to support this - an awkward, vision-restricting camera might seem like an odd choice, but it kept me wondering about what was just out of my view. Restrictive ammunition in a game so heavy on its combat mechanic might seem like a bad choice, but it made me think carefully about every shot I took. What I am curious about, however, is why "survival horror" games have a combat mechanic at all. That seems at odds with the experience - if the experience is intended to be one of creeping fear, why let the player fight back at all? Surely conquering an enemy quels fear?

I believe that, by starting a game design from the more esoteric angle of the "feel" of a player's experience, we can achieve far more in gameplay than we could by making cool stuff happen on screen. Of course, I appreciate that we work in a competitive industry that is very much about shifting units from store shelves - and you can't always encapsulate a player experience on the back of a game box. I'm also aware that we have to always be sure to keep the player experience vague, and design from an overall "feel" perspective rather than direct the player's actions and behaviour. After all:

"[Games] are at their best when they say something about the player, not the designer." - Will Spector

But if handled properly, a game design beginning from the overall "feel" of a player experience could offer a chance to innovate and adapt gameplay mechanics to our needs, and create a deeper and more meaningful experience for players.

On Jenova Chen's "Flow In Games"

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Jack) — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 09:37:00 +0000

I was recently directed to the work of Jenova Chen - a work I had heard of numerous times, but somehow managed to skirt around until now.

http:///www.jenovachen.com/flowingames/

While the body of work discusses the apllicability of a dynamic difficulty system - and does it very well, I might add - there is one small passage that I took some umbridge to:

"Unfortunately, like fingerprints, different people have different skills and Flow Zones. A well-designed game might keep normal players in Flow, but will not be as effective for hardcore or novice players. ... To expand a game's Flow Zone coverage, the design needs to offer a wide variety of gameplay experiences"

Before I explain my issues, I'd like to say that if there was research done on the subject which I have somehow missed, I apologize. I'd also like to add here that I found Chen's work to be brilliant and inspirational - I tend to sound very harsh when criticizing people's work, and I don't want to give the appearance that I have anything other than the utmost respect for Chen. If it had not been for his work, I would not have had the thoughts laid out before you - and I lay them out for the sake of promoting discussion on game design and advancing our collective understanding of it.

That being said, I don't think that different players need necessarily have a different Flow zone, or that the game must adjust to cater for them. This is a simple case of logic - the only way in which a player can be classified as "Hardcore" or "Novice" is in their experience of a particular type of game. Surely if a game is unique enough not to be an expansion of an existing game, players will not be able to so readily transfer their skills?

Far Cry 2 - so often my go-to game for design examples these days - implemented a number of new and interesting elements that create a rather unique experience. Fire propogation had been done before (Alone In The Dark), as had convincing AI (too many games to mention) and weapon jamming (an example escapes me for the time being). Yet putting them together created a unique experience - what Clint Hocking referred to as a "series of systematic failure". This was intended to deliberately kick the player out of the compose/execute cycle, and keep them constantly thinking and reevaluating their actions.

This created game-specific thinking. The player's success or failure didn't depend on their experiences in previous games, or (so heavily) on their abilities to weild a controller. The most prevalent issue in their success or failure was their understanding of the game's mechanics, and how they reacted to this.

Interestingly, by offering a variety of different ways in which the player can approach any situation, and by using a large number of variables in the gameplay mechanics, the game really does offer an abstract form of difficulty adjustment - players are free to play the game as stealthily or as recklessly as they like - but neither is "easier" or "harder". The player has the many choices Chen describes, but I don't believe that they will appreciate those choices based on prior gaming experience (or lack thereof).

Where Chen, later in his report, says that a system which assesses the player's progress and adjusts the game to suit would be marred by players who might get lost in other activities within the game world (such as performing suicidal stunts in GTA, or endlessly jumping around in a 3D Mario game), I would have to ask the question of whether or not this should be something that we accept as part of a game. Yes, it might be fun, and no, a player should not be restricted from seeking out a fun experience that they see within a game, but if there is something fun to do in a game, should it not be integrated into the central gaming mechanic? If it clashes with this, has the game not failed the player? Is this not a prime example of the game's core mechanic failing to capture the attention of the player? Has the player not broken out from the game's "Flow" mechanic, and then created their own (thus proving that ours was not good enough)?

Chen's point, of course, still stands - it would make the game worse if taking a moment to perform a breathtaking, fun, but ultimately suicidal leap in GTA resulted in making the game easier, but I felt it needed to be addressed that such things should not be accepted as a standard in design. In the case of GTA it goes to show a major failing in the GTA series - making us care about the death of our central character in a character-driven story-based game.

Sam Fisher's Game Design Revolution

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Jack) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:34:00 +0000

Sam Fisher. Rogue operative. Super spy. Killer. He died earlier today. He died because he ran directly into the knees of a man with an assault rifle. Not exactly something you're likely to see on 24.

Not something you're likely to see in the new iteration of the game, either. In an unprecedented move, Ubisoft have revamped the control method to prevent such unmitigated disasters befalling their secretive shadow-stalking hero. While many might dismiss this as a gimmick, or a dumbing-down of the gameplay, there is something in the intention of this change that could spell out wonderous things for the future of games - that the player experience is being considered and designed by game designers in new, deeper and more thoughtful ways. In other words, Ubisoft have finally developed a game that cuts to the core of what Splinter Cell was always about - being Sam Fisher.

In previous games, we weren't really being Sam Fisher. Instead, we took control of his body, with the capability to be like him, and were tasked by the game to learn how to behave in the fashion he might. This is the tried-and-tested formula of gaming - direct application of controls to the game enviroments. Push forward on your control stick, and Sam walks forward, bumping into barrels, walking diagonally into walls, and blindly charging into enemy fire at your command. When it worked - when we pulled off a move that Sam might have performed without our intervention, the game was on form, but all those little moments where the Sam on the screen didn't move like the super-spy he was supposed to be made the game feel ... well, like a game. Not the kind of thing non-games players would like.

This is the key part of the argument against this kind of game design - it requires a suspension of disbelief, a concession to the realm of the game, with no reason or rhyme as to why it has to be there. In fact, it only exists because there was not other options when the tenets of game design were first written 25 years ago. Had Splinter Cell been developed in 1984, Sam would have been a coloured rectangle, and it would have made no difference how he moved or why - we were always going to pretend he moved like a spy. As games marched on, and the realism of graphics improved, game control methods changed very little, and thus the depth of experience has, until now, always lagged behind the depth of visuals - and we've all made the concession, and let games away with it, because we love games so much.

Now, with this new Splinter Cell iteration, I believe Ubisoft are making an authoritative statement about the new era of games design - that its time to start considering the crux of the player experience, beyond "doing cool stuff". No longer will we be playing with an articulated Sam Fisher action figure, trying to mimic the moves we've seen him do outwith our control. Now, Ubisoft give us the real deal - we tell Sam where to go, we tell him what to do, but he gets to be himself.

So, as a gamer myself, I would call on designers everywhere to sit and think "what is the crux of the experience I am trying to deliver to my player"? Instead of making concessions to old control schemes, stop and think about how the player should feel when playing your game. Sit with a controller in your hands, close your eyes, and imagine playing - however your thumbs move, that's a good starting point. Now make sure the vision in your head is matched by one on the screen. Should a character blindly batter through obstacles, or would he climb around them? Would he sidestep along a corridor because he's looking to his left, or would he just turn his head?

The time has come for games to allow us something a little more than "doing cool stuff" - from now on, games can allow us to "have a cool experience" instead.

Is Art Games? Turning the debate around

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Jack) — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 10:18:00 +0000

So much time has been spent now talking about how we can have games taken seriously as an art form, yet so little conclusion has come of it. I would like to demonstrate something that, in my opinion, demonstrates how we can adjust the way we look at games, and the way we treat them, so that we might better understand the medium of interaction. Rather than attempt to demonstrate the ways in which games are an art form, I would like to demonstrate how we can view the world of art as a game in itself.

The phrase "art must be challenging" is a tad controversial within the art world. Certainly, the extremes of the modernist art produced under this mantra may have proven to be the downfall of modern visual art, but the fact remains that without a challenge to our perceptions, without making us think about our perceptions of reality, art is not so much art as entertainment.

For art to truly engage the viewer, then, it needs to challenge them just enough that they "get it" without being turned off. Following this logic, the key to creating accessible (and hopefully popular) art would be to strike a balance between understandable imagery and challenging content - between what a viewer would find "easy" to process, and what would be difficult.

Compare this to this image, used by Jesper Juul in his paper "Fear of Failure: The Many Meanings of Failure in Video Games":

"A Better Flow": Noah Folstein, 2004

With this diagram, Folstein (and, by extension, Juul) show the optimum difficulty level increase wherein a game will reach be at its most engaging to the player. A game that is too hard is impossible to play, yet a game that is too easy offers no challenge, thus teaching nothing, thus imbuing no sense of fun in the player.

Let us now briefly address an argument from the opposite direction. Within the gaming world, there is much debate on the subject of Shared Authorship - the idea that a game's story should be viewed as something created in partnership between a game's designer and the player of a game. Quite where the line between these two elements of authorship should lie is a subject worthy of a great deal of discussion.

Now, read this quote from Marcel Duchamps, herald of the modern art movement:

The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.

If Duchamps is correct, art - and specifically the process of appreciating, understanding, and/or being moved by art, also shares the parallel of shared authorship with games.

In short, then, I believe that the appreciation and understanding of an art form is a game - just as socializing, learning, and almost every activity that involves the process of interaction - either physical or emotional - is also a game. Understanding just how and why this happens is key to understanding how we can better exploit the games we make, and produce a deeper and more meaningful experience.

Game Critique: Paper Moon

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Jack) — Sat, 02 May 2009 01:15:00 +0000

What follows is my first attempt to critique a game from a critical/academic standpoint. For this, I have chosen Blursts's recently released "Paper Moon".

I would like to start by saying that I thoroughly enjoyed the game, and feel it is a marvelous achievement of which the Blurst team should be proud. I hope that they appreciate the nature of what I am doing here, and why I feel it is necessary to look at games in this way. Thus I will not be discussing how much "fun" I had playing the game, or quantifying the experience in any way, but looking at how it is constructed compared to what we know about the concepts of game design.

I would also like to point out that I am not qualified enough to fully critique and assess the value of Paper Moon as an aesthetic experience, and if anyone out there feels they could provide this, I would enjoy reading it.

Paper Moon, then, is one of many games which attempts to build on the time-honoured tradition of the "2-Dimensional platform game". To the standard format, it adds the ability to "pop" pieces of the scenery between 3 frames on a 3rd axis (akin to the way in which a player moves in the third axis in Little Big Planet).

This twist on the genre works well, enhancing the exploration aspect that is the primary rewarding action in all platformers. It displays not only an understanding of the central concepts, but an embracing and exploiting of the limitations of the 2 dimensional platform genre.

The game's controls are the simple standard for the genre, and Blurst use them well, not complicating them. Control of the player's character is fluid and easily understood, and the game mechanics are communicated well through aesthetic touches and cryptic hints.

The Blurst team have managed to reap a satisfying number of interactions from a small number of interactive elements. The game's elements comprise:

The player character (able to move left and right and jump)
Enemy characters, who "kill" the player character on contact
Static scenery, with which both players and enemies collide
"Poppable" scenery, with which the player and enemies collide only when it is in the central plane.

From this, Blurst have also produced a combat dynamic - by timing "pops" of the scenery, you can "kill" enemies by catching them in the motion of the scenery. While utilised heavily within the game's puzzles, this dynamic feels emergent enough to be rewarding to the player, as do most of Paper Moon's puzzles.

The game also features a branching pathway - shown clearly on the map displayed between sections of the game. These two diverging routes are balanced in such a way that neither route feels easier or more challenging than the other, or offers any different way of playing the game. As such, they allow the player some degree of self-expression and choice in how they explore the game, but not any difference in experience.

This is all driven by a vague narrative, open to interpretation. Based on current thinking on shared authorship within games, the player is not given a particularly strong drive to reach their intended goal. While the goal itself is made clear enough through the aesthetics of the game, the narrative overtones suggest a more driven experience was intended. In terms of modern thinking on shared authorship, Paper Moon feels dissonant - the game is clearly designer-driven in terms of story, and falls mostly on the side of the designer in its gameplay also, but yet does not give the player a particularly driving story element to push them through to the end.

Paper Moon's reward/fail system is rounded out by returning the player to a checkpoint on an instance of player "death" (a subject of much recent debate) without any further punishment. Interestingly, they use this as a transportation method to allow the player to solve puzzles. Communication of this to the player is not laboured - a cryptic but direct hint was given at the only point where use of the method was necessary - and the slight nature of the punishment allows the player the freedom to explore the possibilities involved. The checkpoints are spaced well enough to maintain the player's interest and reduce - but not completely remove - instances of the player having to repeat the composition phase of earlier play, which would lead to a lowered (but not lost) frustration in the player.

This, however, leads to the game's primary flaw. The game's only failure condition is a timer, which ticks down constantly during play, and can only be rejuvenated with the collection of bonuses within the environment. This comes as a two-fold flaw in the game design - in terms of Hocking's Compose/Execute cycle, this represents a complete drop from execution, and a repeat of previous composition, which would lead to frustration on the part of the player - as well as being something which the player cannot prepare for fully in the composition phase. It also stands in opposition to the player's main rewarding behaviour - that of exploration and experimentation within the game.

In terms of Koster's Theory Of Fun, the game's short length does it many favours - the limited interactions are exploited as far as possible, but repetition of already-learned skills is, towards the end of the game, being repeated with no increment to required skill level. Had the game been any longer, interactions would have become stale, and players would likely have drifted into complacency, as show on Noah Falstein's diagram of game flow (which can be seen here in Jesper Juul's study on failure). As it is, the game seems to manage to maintain a solid learning curve and flow.

All in all, Paper Moon offers a degree of originality in the otherwise stale 2-dimensional platform genre, with a good understanding of a player's desires and goals. The movement and exploration at the core of the game feel mostly free and open to self-expression on the part of the player, but yet at times it seems to eager to punish the player for this, putting its failure conditions at odds with the gameplay goals. Blurst show a great understanding of the values of game design, and it will be interesting to see where they go from here.

The Importance Of Being A Bit Pretentious

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Jack) — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 12:50:00 +0000

In my previous blog post, I talked about the importance of opening channels for independent development and driving down development costs for the advancement of our industry from and artistic standpoint. Shortly afterwards, I read this interesting piece on Beyond Good & Evil. My first reaction was negative - I just couldn't understand why we would need to examine a fun game in the kind of depth shown there.

It was then that I realised that I was becoming part of the problem.

Opening channels and driving down costs for independent developers could do two things. Firstly, it could allow independent developers more room to experiment and come up with exciting new ideas. Secondly, it allows games to reach new, less hardcore-gamer-skewed markets. What it doesn't do is promote discussion and study of game design.

Open up X-Box community games. There's plenty of innovation to be seen there, but how many of those games will be discussed at the GDC next year? Also, how many of those games are experimenting based on currently accepted theories on gameplay design?

Only by examining our own work and the work of others in a style and with a depth that has, until now, seemed pretentious and annoying, can we reach a structured, solid concept of game design. By opening up channels of such discussion, we can hopefully force new developers to consider their designs in such a fashion, and/or provide direction for designers just starting out in the industry.

It won't be easy. Personally, I have a very low tolerance for pretention and (if you'll pardon the french) bullshit. I imagine by trying to promote this kind of discussion, I will, at times, as one great philosopher once stated, "Feel like punching myself", but once you see the importance of it, I hope you'll understand.

Games And Art: The OTHER Debate

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Jack) — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 13:06:00 +0000

So I've blogged a bit about my feelings towards narrative and story in games, and I figured given recent happenings in the game design blogosphere, perhaps I should jot down some thoughts on the other argument, the old Games vs Art debate. To anyone who has been following my blogs to date, it shouldn't be a surprise that I think the whole debate is pointless.

Games are an art form in the same way graffiti is an art form - if people use it to express themselves creatively, it is an art form whether it is "recognised" as such by the populace or not. Its a simple case of dictionary definition, there's really no debate to be had. Whether games carry emotional weight or not doesn't matter; I saw the Mona Lisa and it didn't move me in any way, but the fact that so many of my friends harvested Adam from the little sisters in Bioshock sickened me a little bit. The emotional weight of any piece of art is in the eye(s) of the beholder; what we are arguing about is not whether or not games are an art form, but the accessibility of games as an art form, and this seems to me like jumping the gun, since we still have enough trouble with the accessibility of games as entertainment.

The problem then is with those who want to make games more accessible as an art form, and to force this to happen seems like a backwards argument. Its like forcing two people to love each other because it would make them happier; If they were happy, they would fall in love by themselves. As we explore ways to express ourselves in an interactive medium, we will find ways to express ourselves in a fashion more accessible to the public.

It seems nowadays that almost every debate to do with games design breaks down to the issue of independent gaming, and the rapid and intense monetarisation of our industry that limits the amount of experimentation that can happen - a topic worthy of its own blog post at a later date. For now, we need to not only continue opening channels for smaller, independent developers, but consider supporting them in other ways - we need to encourage more developers to be active in academia and non-profit works. As an industry, we can all benefit from new concepts and theories that will only be found through experimentation and independent development.

The Universality Of Gameplay (& Gary Penn's Rules Of Design)

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Jack) — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 17:08:00 +0000

Stumbled on an article detailing Gary Penn's game design philosophies earlier today. I'd almost forgotten that it was he who taught me the idea that the same games we play on computers could be played on paper or cards. It's a good point, and one that feeds back into my thoughts on the matter of games and stories.

After all, playing isn't always about sport-like games. Children play "house" and "doctors" - or, in my case "space fighters on the run from robotic ninja dinosaur nazis". In these games, story is an integral part of the game - the production of the story is, in a way, the aim of the game.

None of the theories I or anyone else espouse on game design are exclusive to computer or video games, and its why I try and avoid saying "computer/video games" when I talk about them. Play is a universal concept that has happened as long as humanity has existed. In some ways, it is even more primal than the concept of storytelling - animals play, but they don't (as far as we can tell) tell stories*.

So if you're looking to diversify your inspiration, you might want to consider playing more board or card games. Its not that cool, it seems a bit sad and geeky, but I've found a few I find perfectly acceptable, and you might too.

Then, next time you're designing a game, think how it might work on paper or cards. If it doesn't seem fun there, ask yourself - what would make it better on a computer? Its a good way of catching a problem in a timely and economic fashion, rather than wasting time and money developing a product with fundemental gameplay issues.

* With the notable exception, of course, of my mum's cats, who tell her endless stories about their daily routines, their preference for "the expensive cat food" and their dislike of any changes in their surroundings.

Restating My Beliefs: More On Games & Narrative

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Jack) — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

As I've said before, my views on games and narrative are always changing. Once, I believed that games were games, and stories were just tacked onto them. Then I began to see things differently - I began to realise that gameplay itself had a sort-of narrative embedded in it, and that marrying the two narratives could produce something magical, new and exciting. Now, my beliefs have broken completely free of the confines of that argument, so I thought I'd go back over them one more time.

Tetris, believe it or not, was the title that first made me consider the potential for gameplay to form a narrative of a kind - for Tetris might well be the one great "tragic" narrative in gameplay, comparable in a way to Romeo & Juliet. From the introduction that makes it clear this is a "tale of woe" (much like the way in which Tetris's bucket shows no way of completing the game) to the rising tension between the families, leading to the final demise of our couple, any individual's story in Tetris is analogous to the Shakespearian tragedy, despite each player's story being unique.

I've said before that the term "storytelling" doesn't apply to films OR games. I've recently found a new way of explaining this; considering the point at which the story itself is born. A story is, in its purest form, words that are spoken directly from one person to another - narrated, hence the term, narrative. When a story is told directly, the point of the story's creation is clear - the words are being spoken from one person to another. When watching a movie, however, we are left to interpret the images on-screen into a story by ourselves. The point of story creation is once-removed from the author themselves, in that we are left to interpret what they are showing us into a story of our own. Games, then, are the next logical step from this - a medium thrice removed from the author, where we are given an environment where we could potentially have a story, and we are left to first manipulate this environment in whatever way we see fit, and then to construct the story in our head from this.

The argument, as I see it, is not whether games are as credible a medium for stories as movies or books. Games are a medium completely separate from any other, even more abstracted from its most direct predecessor, cinema, as that medium is from its predecessors.

To put it another way, I have been right all along, despite my viewpoint changing. Games are not a storytelling medium as we know it, and stories we add to them are always tacked onto them. Gameplay, however, can form something like a narrative of its own, and in this way we can see parallels between a gameplay experience and a story. Until we can accept games as a truly independent medium from others, we are bound to limits in what we can achieve with them.

Why The Nerds Have To Go: The Need To Diversify In Our Industry

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Jack) — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 13:12:00 +0000

I posed a question on twitter recently - what would games be like if more developers listened to Miles Davis instead of Dragonforce? A joke, perhaps, but one with a serious message.

Ideas are not magical. Its not a concept that makes for very popular discussion, but ideas are not the product of some inexplicable miracle, merely the end result of our brains processing the stimuli fed into them. Yes, we are all capable of having our own, unique ideas, but - in the end - our ideas are not as amazing as we think they are.

Why would I bring up such a negative concept? Because a lot of people complain about the lack of originality and creativity in computer games, but often the same people fail to notice the lack of creativity and originality in their own lives. If ideas are merely the product of our inspirational stimuli, then its no surprise that our swarms of anime-heavy-metal-and-games loving enthusiasts fail to make waves in the creative process.

Diversification of outside interests might be the secret solution to creating exciting new games. Instead of playing Gears Of War or watching Naruto, go climb a mountain. Instead of buying £300 pieces of limited edition movie memorabilia, buy a plane ticket to Nepal and check out the architecture. Even if its not something you'd normally enjoy doing, think of the unique influence it'll have on your creative processes.

Even something as small as changing your choice of background music can make a huge difference. Try designing a fighting game while listening to Mozart, or a puzzle game to the disjointed jazz of Jon Zorne.

In short, if we want to shake up our industry, we should start shaking up ourselves first.

Warren Spector on Game Design, Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Jack) — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 15:34:00 +0000

A while ago, I found a .torrent file of the Warren Spector Game Design lectures. Fascinating stuff, but lengthy and difficult to watch on a tiny screen.

So in an effort to make some of these points sink in with myself, and to make the video more watchable on a quick lunch break for my busy peers & colleagues, here's a 6 minute version of the first lecture that just contains Warren's excellent main points on player choices and experience:

Alas, I've yet to find a contact address for Mr. Spector to get his approval, so I'm publishing this under the "I don't see why you wouldn't like it, but if you don't I'll take it down" licence.

If there's enough interest, I'll edit down the other half of his introductory lecture, and then take a look at some of the guest lectures that followed.

Games & Writing: The New Frontier Of Narrative (and why EA should be ashamed)

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Jack) — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 14:29:00 +0000

Writing and games have always made for strange, difficult bedfellows. Chances are, if you're not on the side of those who see games as a new art form, ripe for retelling old stories and telling new ones, then you're on the opposing side, believing that games aren't about storytelling so much as having fun.

Of course, you're both wrong.

Its taken a lot of thought and a fair bit of reading to get my head around how games can work as a new medium - and even more to find a way of explaining it.

The key is in the term "storytelling". This is a bad word to use with games.

To understand why, we have to look at a brief history of the word.

In the days before the advent of written word and the printing press, "storytelling" was the literal telling of a story from one person to another. This is the purest form of "narrative", being an orally narrated story. The written word was a natural extension of this, offering twists on the concept of a narrative (1st person, 3rd person, etc) but still always narrating a story to a (hopefully) fascinated reader.

Then there's the staged performance of stories - plays, operas, etc, and later cinema. For the most part, these were without a narrator - instead, people were seeing the narrative actually come to life by itself. Now, the defined meaning of "narrative" and "storytelling" are called into question. Could there really be a narrative without a narrator? Is the story really being told, or is this a form of "story-showing"? They bring more to the table than written or spoken word do, and what they bring with them muddies the waters of definitions for things that were defined back then.

Now we can extend this to today, and look at the mysterious murky world of interactivity that we call games. Whether we view games as an extension of cinematic narrative or as something entirely separate, they undoubtedly bring more to the table and muddy the waters of definition further. As cinema was a visual medium that worked best when making use of what it could do - visual metaphor, direction and misdirection, giving us a more visceral experience than the written word ever could - games are an interactive media, and as such the key to making use of them is to look at what interactivity involves and what that means; just as cinema changed narrative from "storytelling" to "story-showing", games have moved the world of narrative from "story-showing" to "story-experiencing".

So games let us experience a story in a deeper way than cinema, performance, written word or oral world - but what does that actually mean, and how do we exploit it? To put it another way - what the hell is this blog trying to say?

My point is this: while we keep tacking cinematic stories onto tried & tested game formats, turning out the same old control systems and gameplay experiences with new plots and characters, we're not going to achieve what games are supposed to be all about. We have to be looking at the overall experience and feel of a situation, and how a game can let us be drawn into and experience that, rather than tacking cinematics onto an action sequence and calling it a story.

Case in point: EA's Dante's Inferno game. The key element of this tale was that it took the form of a cautionary, allegorical tale about the dangers of life. While a visual portrayal of the demons and punishments Dante watched on his journey might offer a more visceral, moving metaphor than the text itself - perhaps sacrificing some of the deep reflection and the thoughts of Dante's character in order to give a more instant shock and revulsion - the experience of Dante wandering these lands is one of questioning, and reflection on life - at times filled with fear, other times revulsion and other times sorrow for the poor souls trapped, facing an eternity of torture for their sins.

So EA made it look like God Of War.

*slow clap*

Now, I'm not a professional games designer, so I won't claim I have all the answers, but I think I've proved here that games can serve a purpose in a sort-of narrative, sort-of storytelling way, so the opportunity to adapt one of the greatest texts of all time ought to be a chance for games to really shine and be elevated above the mire of mindless action games with paper-thin characters. This was our chance to truly experience what Dante did, to be forced to reflect upon all he did - the nature of sin, existence and punishment - and to be reviled, disgusted and yet intrigued, and - hopefully - to come away, as Dante did, a changed man. There's no reason why Dante's Inferno (the 9 levels of hell) could not be followed by its (less visually spectacular) sequels Puragatorio (moving through purgatory, where souls sat out penance for their minor sins) and Paradiso (the final spirals of heaven, leading up to face God himself and receive The Answer).

So I guess there are two points I'm trying to make here:

#1: Games have a very important place in the sphere of all things narrative related, and could offer a new and exciting experience as long as we stop both treating them as nothing but a cheap thrill, and comparing them to other, incompatible media such as cinema or written word

and

#2: Fuck you EA.

No, really.

FUCK YOU.

Games We Can Learn From: Far Cry 2 Shows Us Emergence In Action

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Jack) — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 14:51:00 +0000

I find the experience of reviewing games to be incredibly, painfully subjective, and I couldn't imagine using my blog to tell people what games they may or may not like.

I do, however, think there are a lot of games that, if you're interested in the development of gameplay systems and interactivity, you should play just for the experience, and I'd like to start with the most recent experience I've had: Far Cry 2.

If I could use an analogy to sum up the Far Cry 2 experience, I'd say it was like taking a hooker to an expensive restaurant. Both good things in their own right, neither makes the other less enjoyable, but they just don't really gel together properly.

Despite being a game of emergent elements, open exploration and tense narrative with both political and personal elements, Far Cry 2 is, at its heart, still an action-shooting game (see this interview with Ubisoft Montreal's Narrative designer Patrick Redding). The game packs a real emotional punch, but this feels at odds with a world in which flimsy pretenses are used to explain why everyone - and I mean everyone - you meet in the world seems to want you dead.

Thats not to say that the game is, in any way, flawed by this. As an arcade shooting game, Far Cry 2 excels, and its reliance on emergent elements is perhaps the key - the game's fire-propagation system, for example, not only leads the player to develop their own mostly-emergent strategies for dealing with problems, but encourages this behaviour.

During my time with the game, shooting out oil lamps and gas cylinders to start fires that flush enemies out of cover became a staple tactic for dealing with emplacements. This was balanced with similarly emergent risks - the status quo of a reliable technique was shaken up on occasion by random "wandering" enemies stumbling on me while I was focussed on picking off the fleeing guards; at other times, fires would spread to and set alight the ammunition supplies I was looking to swipe, while another time a petrol tanker explosion blew debris into the air that fell on top of me and almost killed me. Then there was the gas cylinder I punctured, sending it spiralling and snaking around the camp, propelled by the tiny flame of escaping gas, which set alight to the dry reeds I was hiding in, surrounding me and forcing me reluctantly out of hiding ...

Yet the game also contained elements such as the "buddy" system, wherein you met recurring characters that (provided you could keep them alive and healthy) would bail you out when you were injured and offer alternative solutions to your missions, and the political elements of the missions themselves, which lent the game a sense of depth that the gameplay didn't match. It jars the senses - first of all, when approaching a checkpoint in the roads for the first time, and later when the game would happily let an important character, with whom you've built a rapport and friendship, die from an errant sniper bullet from your own gun, or your failure to get to them and administer first aid in time. In the latter case, giving you the option (which they often beg for if their injuries are bad enough) to finish them off yourself, and recording these actions and having other characters respond to you accordingly just twists the knife in your already wounded heart.

So Far Cry 2 is an action shooting game with elements of things we don't normally expect to find, but yet is somehow isn't. The intense shooting action doesn't quite marry up to the tense political storyline, or the emotional impact of the interactions with the game's characters. In essence, Far Cry 2 offers two seperate but overlapping experiences, both extremely enjoyable, and both expertly crafted.

If there's one other thing Far Cry does well, though, its the ending. Few games risk an understated ending - nothing feels worse than coming away from 40+ hours of gameplay feeling short-changed and frustrated - but so many games (Fallout 3, for example) feel like they labour the point of their emotional impact that Far Cry 2's nice, simple ending feels both fresh and rewarding. While its not hard to see the twist coming, it feels good when it does, and when the story wraps up, it does so in a simple moment that offers so much pathos, its hard not to feel moved by it.

So what can we learn from Far Cry 2? Regardless of whether you feel Ubisoft did it successfully or not, we can take away the knowledge that grafting new elements (emergent gameplay, exploration, in-depth character progression) onto familiar gameplay structures (shoot anything that moves) is a complex process, but one that can be worth the extra effort and risk. We also get further evidence for the idea that the "sweet spot" of gameplay lies somewhere between scripting and emergence, that the game should encourage a player to play freely with their toys, and not punish them for trying things the designers didn't necessarily expect.

All in all, Far Cry 2 is one to add to the list of games we could all learn something from, so - if you haven't already - pick it up and give it a shot; and if you already have, drop a comment and let us all know what you thought of it!

5 Reasons Why Your Business Should Use Linux (and one very good one why it shouldn't)

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Jack) — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 13:07:00 +0000

Having just bought myself an Acer Aspire One I've been introduced to Linux with all the ease and gentleness that a flying brick might be introduced to a man's face; and like that man, I've emerged from the ordeal with a very different outlook. Unlike that man, however, my experience has, on the whole, been positive, and has left me with a lot to think about.

There's a secret joy to Linux, and - like many things in life - it lies in your interpretation of its little nuances and eccentricities. It does its job as an operating system brilliantly and efficiently, more so than anything I've ever used, but it comes with so many things that people would consider "downsides" that the lay-person rarely even gets the chance to consider using it, but its all a matter of perspective. Often, things that may be a "downside" in a particular situation have benefits in another.

With this in mind, I present 10 reasons why your business should use Linux:

1. Its Free

There's no argument here (or, at least, no sensible ones). Linux does its job, and it does it for free. No licensing costs, no costs for updates. Linux is free like roadkill for dinner.

2. It Works

I know, the idea that (relatively) anonymous strangers on the Internet can collaborate to produce anything other than fake celebrity pornography and crudely drawn penises amazes me too, but there is just no denying that Linux works, and it works solidly. From my own personal experience, I have yet to have any kind of performance issue or crash with Linux, and my Acer Aspire is running a particular brand (Linpus Lite Fedora with a customised XFCE desktop) that can boot in UNDER A MINUTE. Take that Windows XP.

3. Its Tailored

Being Open Source means anyone can tinker with Linux all they want, and produce a new version. While this may sound scary and unstable, so long as you stick to the major, trusted brands of Linux (Fedora, Red Hat, etc - all tried and tested by millions) you can get a version that does what you want, and ONLY what you want. In a business environment, this means no more training people to "click start and look under Programs -> Office -> Accesories ...". You can easily set Linux up so that your users can just click the big button marked "DO OFFICE STUFF".

4. Theres A Wealth Of Support Available

I'm just going to come out and say it. Lets be honest, 75% of IT problems are solved by looking up the Microsoft Knowledge Database and finding the answer. Well, if you squint a bit and tilt your head to once side, you can see that Linux has an EVEN BIGGER knowledge database. Its called google.

With thousands of people already using Linux and offering support and tutorials for others, the only difference between Linux and Windows in this way is the centralization of the knowledge on Microsoft's site.

5. Its Really, Really, Really Complicated

Wait. I know what you're thinking, but this really is a very good thing.

By trying to make itself as easy-to-use and accessible as possible, Windows opens the floodgates to your untrained excel monkeys to start messing with settings and playing with things. Linux, on the other hand, is very, very difficult to play with, to the point that almost every alteration to the system needs to be done through linux's terminal command-line-interface. Linking back to what I said about Linux's customisation, remove access to the terminal and suddenly it becomes very, very hard to mess with the system - to the point I could let my nephew loose on it and, short of drooling on the keyboard, he wouldn't be able to damage it.

All these reasons aside, however, there's a very good reason why you shouldn't use Linux - a reason which, as someone with managerial experience myself, would make me doubt the possibilities of using Linux.

There's No-One To Blame When It Goes Wrong

The anonymity behind which Linux is developed might promote its portability and customisation, but it also means that, when things go wrong, there's no-one to blame.

Perhaps this is the reason IT technicians often prefer to train in Microsoft certification - if they come up against a problem they can't solve, their training absolves them from responsibility. They can simply blame Microsoft, and Microsoft is a big enough company to carry it. If a problem arises with Linux, responsibility stops with the IT technician.

Now, personally, I would say that this is the mark of a good IT technician. If I might romanticize a moment, an IT technician that takes responsibility for his work and doesn't just rely on the Microsoft knowledge base is one who takes a commendable risk, and puts their keister on the line for his or her work.

In my opinion, an IT technician who takes that risk and uses a Linux system is saving himself a lot of work in fixing and optimizing a system not perfectly designed for their needs. Using Linux could save a company time, money and effort, and it all hinges on one person taking a risk and taking pride in their work.

So consider this a challenge to the world of IT - do you have what it takes to work with Linux?