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Eighteen leading videogame creators tell us why they make games
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Stay Forever, Zweite Reihe: Worlds of Ultima » Stay Forever
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Games-Modding: Spielefirmen machen Fanprojekten das Leben schwer - Digital
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Interview: Davey Wreden
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Shall I Compare Thee To A Video Game?
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How Game Tutorials Can Strangle Player Creativity « The Psychology of Video Games
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30 years of being a game developer in 3000 words
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Spelunky Glory, Videogame Rituals, and Nifflas’ Miracle Run
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Why I Think Borderlands 2 Sucks (But I Like It Anyway!)
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A Non-Violent Immersive Sim
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Eighteen leading videogame creators tell us why they make games

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Why I Make Games: we ask 21 of the world’s leading developers about what motivates them

Why I Make Games: we ask 21 of the world’s leading developers about what motivates them

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Why I Make Games: we ask 21 of the world’s leading developers about what motivates them

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Edge Staff at 11:14am September 25 2012

What is it that motivates game designers to make the works they do? Here, we ask 18 respected creators what makes videogames the medium for them. You can skip ahead to any designers that particularly interest you by using the links below.

Ken Levine

Creative director and co-founder of Irrational Games

Ron Gilbert

Game designer

Peter Molyneux

Founder and creative director of 22Cans

Yoshinori Kitase

Producer at Square Enix

Alexey Pajitnov

Co-founder of The Tetris Company

Alex Rigopulos

CEO and co-founder of Harmonix Music Systems

Edmund McMillen

Co-founder of Team Meat, game designer and artist

Shuji Utsumi

Co-founder and CEO of Q Entertainment

Warren Spector

Founder and creative director of Junction Point

Jenova Chen

Co-founder and game designer at Thatgamecompany

Harvey Smith

Co-creative director at Arkane Studios

Hideo Kojima

Director of Kojima Productions, executive vice president and corporate officer of Konami Digital Entertainment

Adrian Chmielarz

Creative director at People Can Fly

Amy Hennig

Creative director at Naughty Dog

Jason Kapalka

Co-founder and chief game designer at PopCap

Toshihiro Nagoshi

CCO of Sega Corporation

Brenda Garno Brathwaite

COO and game designer at Loot Drop

Shigeru Miyamoto

Senior managing director, general manager of Nintendo Entertainment Analysis and Development

Anna Anthropy

Videogame designer and critic

Randy O’Connor

Videogame developer / artist and assistant designer, Tiger Style Games

Michael Samyn and Auriea Harvey

Tale Of Tales founders

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Stay Forever, Zweite Reihe: Worlds of Ultima » Stay Forever

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Stay Forever, Zweite Reihe: Worlds of Ultima

Sep 292012

Es gibt Spiele, die man im Regal in die zweite Reihe stellt: Spiele, die im Schatten größerer Brüder stehen, die unvollkommen sind oder zu speziell, um ein breites Publikum zu finden, und die auch bei Stay Forever nur geringe Chancen haben, von Gunnar und Christian mit einer eigenen Episode geadelt zu werden. Aber manche dieser Spiele haben uns auf eine Weise berührt, die wir nicht vergessen können; und manchmal lassen sich aus fehlgegangenen Projekten die interessantesten Erkenntnisse ziehen. Unser neuer Podcast “Zweite Reihe” greift nach hinten ins Regal und bläst den Staub von Titeln, die nicht zu den großen Klassikern zählen, aber deren Geschichte erzählt werden sollte.

Für die Premierenfolge bereist Christian die Worlds of Ultima: Jene kurzlebige Miniserie, die Anfang der 90er als fantastischer Ableger des Rollenspiel-Kolosses Ultima in ein verschollenes Dschungelreich und auf den Mars führte. Savage Empire und Martian Dreams waren als schnelle Zweitverwertung der Ultima-Technik gedacht, und sie zeugen vom Versuch, in einem eng gesteckten Rahmen kreative Welten herauszuarbeiten – mit sehr unterschiedlichem Erfolg.

“Zweite Reihe” ist kein Gespräch, sondern eine Erzählung. Es ist keine normale Folge von Stay Forever, aber möglicherweise der Beginn einer Nebenreihe, wenn sich genügend Zuspruch findet. Über Meinungen und Kritik würden wir uns sehr freuen.

Ein Klick auf Play startet die Reise:

P.S.

Das Skript zur Folge gibt’s in voller Länge hier.

Stay Forever, Folge 15: Shannara Live!

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Games-Modding: Spielefirmen machen Fanprojekten das Leben schwer - Digital

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Wenn Fans ein Spiel nachbauen wollen, tun sie gut daran, den Rechteinhaber vorher zu fragen. Doch selbst dann verhindern Firmen gern solche Modding-Projekte.

Szene aus dem Fanprojekt MERP, das den “Herr der Ringe” als Computerspiel bauen wollte

Jahrelang hatten die Entwickler an dem Projekt gearbeitet, hatten Berge aufgeschichtet und Täler ausgehoben, hatten Monster modelliert und Waffen nachgebaut. Das Middle Earth Roleplaying Project (MERP) sollte die Fantasy-Welt aus Herr der Ringe in einem Computerspiel erfahrbar machen – inklusive aller Figuren, Schauplätze und Handlungsstränge. Programmiert wurde es von Fans auf Basis eines bestehenden Computerspiels, es war eines der ehrgeizigsten Projekte dieser Art in der Games-Geschichte.

Doch Ende August erreichte die MERP-Verantwortlichen ein Unterlassungsschreiben. Absender war das Filmstudio Warner Bros., das die Lizenzrechte an Herr der Ringe besitzt. Eine Veröffentlichung von MERP werde die Kunden verwirren, die Marke verwässern und andere Produkte kannibalisieren, so der Warner-Anwalt. Mit anderen Worten, der Konzern war dagegen und verlangte, das Projekt sofort zu stoppen.

Die Fans hatten viel investiert und wollten verhandeln: Man sei bereit, die komplette Haupthandlung um Ringträger Frodo Beutlin aus dem Spiel zu streichen. Man sei auch bereit, das Spiel umzubenennen und auf eine öffentliche Präsentation und Distribution zu verzichten. Keine Chance, Warner wollte nicht. Das Unternehmen betreibt unter anderem das Onlinerollenspiel Lord of the Rings Online und will eine Lego-Version der Saga herausbringen.

Seit Anfang September liegt MERP nun auf Eis. Die Zukunft des Vorhabens ist mehr als ungewiss.

Gestoppt und gesperrt

MERP ist nicht das erste von Fans modifizierte Spiel, das mit einer Unterlassungsforderung konfrontiert ist. Bereits 1997 stoppte 20th Century Fox den Neubau Alien Quake, der Weltraumhorror und First-Person-Shooter zusammenbringen sollte. Seitdem werden von Firmen untersagte Fanprojekte auch als foxed bezeichnet.

Ein ähnliches Schicksal ereilte 2004 das Spiel Chrono Resurrection, ein Remake des japanischen Rollenspiels Chrono Trigger. Rechteinhaber Square Enix unterband es, obwohl weit und breit keine offizielle Fortsetzung in Sicht war.

Ressurection-Entwickler Nathan Lazur zeigte sich vom Vorgehen der Spielefirma zwar enttäuscht, aber nicht verbittert. Künftigen Moddern riet Lazur, eine Demo-Version ihres Projekts möglichst früh dem Publisher vorzulegen: “So kann es mehr wie ein herkömmliches Geschäft behandelt werden.”

Vorwurf: Naive Entwickler

Die Entwickler von MERP hatten genau das nicht getan, weshalb ihnen in Diskussionsforen immer wieder Naivität vorgeworfen wird. Auch der Blogger TotalBiscuit schlägt in diese Kerbe: “Wer würde schon sechs Lebensjahre in eine solch gigantische Modifikation investieren – und zu keinem Zeitpunkt darüber nachdenken, ob die Firma, der die Rechte an dem ganzen verwendeten Material gehören, vielleicht eine Ausnahme macht? Das ist total dämlich.”

Doch selbst wenn sich Modder um Transparenz bemühen, sind sie auf das Wohlwollen der Rechteinhaber angewiesen. Ein abschreckendes Beispiel ist das schier endlose Gezerre um das Fanprojekt King’s Quest IX: Every Cloak Has A Silver Lining. Schon zu Beginn kündigten die Macher offiziell an, sie würden das Projekt im Falle eines Urheberrechtskonflikts stoppen. Die Unterlassungsforderung kam dann aber erst 2004, als das Projekt schon vier Jahre alt war.

Auf Druck der Fans gewährte Vivendi den Moddern schließlich eine nichtkommerzielle Lizenz mit der Auflage, die Bezeichnung King’s Quest aus dem Titel zu streichen. Die Einigung war aber null und nichtig, als Vivendi 2008 mit Activision fusionierte: Die neuen Rechteinhaber entzogen dem Projekt die Lizenz. 2010 gab es dann doch noch ein Happy End: Activision änderte seine Meinung, The Silver Lining konnte endlich erscheinen.

Andere Fälle sind für Modder nicht gut ausgegangen. Man nehme das Projekt Duke Nukem 3D: Reloaded, das der Deutsche Frederik Schreiber mit einem kleinen Team von Entwicklern im Jahr 2010 gestartet hatte. Schreiber kontaktierte ganz vorbildlich den Rechteinhaber Gearbox Software und erhielt auch eine nichtkommerzielle Lizenz. Als dann aber im Sommer 2011 die offizielle Fortsetzung namens Duke Nukem Forever erschien, entzog Gearbox dem Fanprojekt seine Gunst. Nicht gerade die feine Art.

Microsoft nutzte Fanprojekt als Vorlage

Geärgert haben dürften sich auch die Macher von Halogen. Sie wollten aus dem Shooter Halo ein Echtzeit-Strategiespiel machen und modifizierten dafür Command & Conquer: Generäle. Microsoft schaute sich das populäre Fanprojekt an, verschickte 2006 ein Unterlassungsschreiben und brachte 2009 selbst ein Echtzeit-Strategiespiel namens Halo Wars heraus.

Andere Rechteinhaber gehen entspannter mit Fanprojekten um. Valve-Chef Gabe Newell spricht sich stets für Modifikationen aus, weil sie die Spieler stärker an die jeweilige Marke binden. Diese Unternehmenspolitik hat viele Projekte erst möglich gemacht, zum Beispiel Counter-Strike, Garry’s Mod oder das unlängst erschienene Black Mesa, eine total conversion des Klassikers Half-Life.

Doch auch Valves Linie ist kein reines Laissez-faire: Erst kürzlich wurden mehr als tausend virtuelle Gegenstände aus dem Steam Workshop gelöscht, die das Unternehmen als Plagiate ansah.

Der Jurist Patrick Vuleta nahm die Löschaktion zum Anlass, gängigen Modder-Argumenten zu widersprechen: Mods seien nicht schon deswegen legal, weil sie kostenlos erhältlich sind und dem Original huldigen. Eine populäre Modifikation könne durchaus Aufmerksamkeit und damit auch Einnahmen vom Originalspiel abziehen.

Fallen Games-Mods unter Fair Use?

Nun gibt es natürlich auch Beispiele, die Vuletas These relativieren. Die Modifikation DayZ war derart erfolgreich, dass sie das Original, die drei Jahre alte Militärsimulation Arma II, erneut in die Verkaufscharts hievte. Auch die Firma Blizzard Entertainment war über den Erfolg der Warcraft III-Modfikation Defense of the Ancients keineswegs unglücklich.

Die MERP-Entwickler jedenfalls geben nicht auf. Sie haben sich einen Anwalt genommen und berufen sich auf das Prinzip des Fair Use, das im US-Recht verankert ist. Fair Use erlaubt die Nutzung von urheberrechtlich geschütztem Material unter anderem dann, wenn das daraus entstehende Werk eine eigenständige schöpferische Leistung darstellt. Klassische Anwendungsfelder sind der Journalismus sowie Forschung und Lehre.

Auf Mods wurde das Prinzip bisher nicht angewandt. Die Chancen für das Projekt stehen also juristisch gesehen nicht besonders gut. Mit einer Online-Petition wollen die MERP-Macher zusätzlichen Druck auf Warner ausüben. 16.000 Herr der Ringe-Fans haben unterschrieben.

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Interview: Davey Wreden

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Davey Wreden is a game designer, and creator of The Stanley Parable (2009), an experimental Half Life 2 source mod that made waves among niche circles, and charged discussions and explorations on the structure of non-linear first person narratives.

Right now, Davey and friends are slaving away at The Stanley Parable: HD Remix, a graphical and structural revising of The Stanley Parable. I talked to Davey about the Remix, specifically his thoughts on his creative processes and on the ideas expressed in his games, as well as the ideas of games in general. His answers were.. insightful. Let’s get into it.

Who are you?

My name is Davey, I’m 23 years of age, I’m a resident of wherever I happen to be living at the time (which at the moment is not in any one place). I graduated from USC with a degree in film, then realised that everyone else in film school cared about film way more than I did. Fortunately, a month after graduating, stanley parable became a hit and I decided to go into making games! Convenient! I’m currently working on The Stanley Parable: HD Remix, which is on Greenlight despite there being no actual details about the game on the greenlight page, so I’m not sure how well that’s going to work out. Also I eat really slowly and I think way too much. Trying to do something about that second one.

How long have you been making games?

Stanley Parable was my first game and that started in 2009, so 2012 minus 2009 makes…………..um……………………………….

Can you give a brief overview on what The Stanley Parable is?

Ah, this is the part where I say something really vague and cryptic! TSP is an experiment in video game storytelling that attempts to mess with your expectations about what you think the story will be. Plus, it’s a British-BBC-Narrator-responsiveness simulator. Plus it’s totally unsure about whether or not it’s really a game or whether there’s really a story or what exactly it is or maybe it’s none of those or maybe it’s both or maybe oh my god I’m thinking about myself thinking this will never stop please make it stop. Plus it’s really best experienced without knowing anything, which sounds like I’m just trying to get out of talking about the game but I really do think it’s the only way to get the real experience and this whole nonsense description is my way of conveying the tone of the game without actually giving away details. Plus it’s got hooker jokes.

Let’s talk about The Stanley Parable series, if I can call it that. Why make an HD Remix?

The “raison d’etre” for the HDR has changed over time. At first it was basically just a graphical upgrade to appease the people who thought the original looked terrible. Then I started brainstorming a few new bits and pieces and realised there were a few new sections I’d like to add or bits from the original I wanted to tweak. Then after about 8 month of this I realised I had been thinking small. The remake should not be a tweak on the original, it should be a new perspective on the original. All of the original content is here in some form, but it’s been perverted and distorted to get you to rethink how you saw that content in the first game. I don’t want to replace the original game, I want to show how the changes in the life of its creator changes how he thinks about the same piece of work.

By and large the changes in the remake reflect how I’ve grown in the last few years. The ways that I’ve had to confront personal shit has manifested in new tensions between Stanley and the Narrator. Also the game is a lot funnier, which I think is because I’m just happier in general than I was back then. I see the game in a new way every month, it continues to show me what it’s trying to be, and I’m sure that will continue until and after its release. The reason I feel the remake is working is because I’m constantly learning from it, it’s evolving and growing, and I’m having fun making it. I’m hoping that those experiences are conveyed to the player, that they feel like they’re learning and growing along with me.

You mostly worked on the Stanley Parable by yourself, if I’m correct. How has the design process been different, working with a larger group of people, specifically Galactic Café?

>It’s as though I’m working in two completely different mediums. I started to get really depressed working on the original, which I think was because I was making it entirely on my own. I didn’t share the game with anyone pre-release; I had no outlet to test what was working. Now that I’ve surrounded myself with a number of people who are not just good at what they do but also good people, most if not all of that tension has lifted. I’m extremely extroverted, so just chatting with William (the lead mapper) every day brings the energy rushing back into my blood. I can actually share my ideas on a more regular basis with someone who understands the game and has the perspective to know what’s working and what isn’t. It makes me feel more confident about getting difficult tasks done, but also just makes me feel happy to be doing what I’m doing, which in turn leads to me being far more creative and coming up with more ideas. I know this sounds like it should have been obvious years ago (extroverted people need to work with others to be happy?????) but it feels groundbreaking and has completely changed my process.

What themes and ideas do you think are most representative of what The Stanley Parable is, and what do you want to do with those ideas in HD Remix? Will the game approach them from a new perspective? Are there new ideas and themes you want to portray? Or are we seeing the same things we’ve seen before?

To me this is the single biggest point the game makes: none of the meaning can be spoken. By putting it into words, by trying to explain and rationalise and reduce those themes and perspectives we stifle them, we split the animal’s belly open in order to see what makes it run and in doing so we kill it. The harder the Narrator tries to explain the story the harder he falls. The real story is between the lines, it’s about the change we go through as we transition from one place to another, it’s the invisible connection that ultimately makes sense out of what appears paradoxical. So this question makes me a bit hesitant, because the direct answer is that yes, there are many many new ideas in play, new circumstances, new themes. But that answer feels disingenuous to me because these details are not the story. The story is how the player has to confront himself/herself in the course of playing, how the player’s imagination inserts information to try to make sense of it, to comprehend the incomprehensible.

On one level this is happening in the game itself, but it’s also happening in the transition from the original game to the remake. If the remake challenges the perspective that you developed from playing the original, that’s part of the experience. This could also be because you’ve changed since playing the original and you see this kind of game in a new way. Or because you play the endings in a different order from someone else and thus get a different experience. Or if you thought you understood the story and then a new ending subverts that interpretation. It’s the invisible connections between these details, the way you grow and change when forced into new positions, that is the real experience of The Stanley Parable. That has always been and will always be the core of the game. The rest of it, the details, well if I explained them for you it would kill them.

I want to talk about endings for a second. The Stanley Parable had several completely different endings, each sort of memorable in their own way. What makes a good ending, in your eyes?

The biggest thing I wanted to do in the original was have each ending mess with your expectations around gameplay or story in some way. I didn’t know how that would look so I simply took every convention of how narrative and gameplay usually intersect and tried to mess with it, sending it down paths it didn’t belong. I tried to give players something to hold onto and relate to, while at the same time throwing them off balance and confusing them. I’m happy when an ending has a good balance of these two elements. Each does it in a different way, I don’t want there to be any one format for how this balance manifests itself, I want players to be surprised by each new ending. Also it’s important that they all talk to one another, that they contradict one another, that each adds a small new piece to the story. I like when an ending takes on a new meaning after you’ve played another part of the game, so that the full experience is greater than the sum of its parts.

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Shall I Compare Thee To A Video Game?

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Originals

09/21/2012

Acting Shakespeare, playing games, and answering Hamlet’s famous question.

Aaron Matteson

32

“O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew.” – Hamlet

“The president has been kidnapped by ninjas.
Are you a bad enough dude to rescue the president?” – Bad Dudes Vs. DragonNinja

…

The two quotes above are different in a couple ways.

One is in verse, the other is not, for starters.  One is spoken by a fictional prince of Denmark, the other by a gruff Secret Service agent.  And, of course, one is from a seminal work of art, a masterpiece of passion and philosophy that towers above most other artistic accomplishments.  The other is from Hamlet.

Yeah, it’s ludicrous to put text from the intro of Bad Dudes next to a Shakespearean soliloquy excerpt, but I tell you now that these two quotes speak directly to the same question.  It’s a question that Hamlet asks himself – the question, in fact.

To be, or not to be?

Hamlet sometimes argues pretty eloquently for “not to be.”  The “too, too solid flesh” quote, in moving imagery, expresses the desire to disappear.  We’ve all been to that place that Hamlet is talking about – the place where you wish you could turn invisible, hide in a dark hole somewhere, pop out of existence completely.  We all know the anguish of personhood, that suffocating need to be someone else, to be somewhere else, to escape.

The Bad Dudes quote is somewhat less flowery, but it offers the other response available.  It says, “To be or not to be?  Be!  But you better ‘be’ harder than you’ve ever ‘been’ before!”  The intro of Bad Dudes challenges you to be a strong enough person to defy circumstance, to persevere, to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous ninjas.  It’s about leaving behind whoever you were that wasn’t a bad dude, and becoming a very bad dude, even for just a little while.

I’ve been musing about Hamlet and Bad Dudes because they speak to the two things that allow me to slip my own skin and do deeds far beyond the pale of my own life – acting Shakespeare and playing video games.

Both of these activities are about becoming people in insane, life-or-death circumstances.  They’re both about epic stakes and colossal badasses.  And they’re both about leaving who you were behind to inhabit the form of something larger than life.  That’s why these are two of my favorite things in the world.

…

At first glance, archaic, wordy poetry meant to be performed onstage is a sharp contrast to the inviting, id-massaging domain of video games.  And indeed, it took a long time for me to find joy and compulsion in the lofty verse of Shakespeare.

But Shakespeare’s stories are about nations falling and heroes rising.  Their descriptions of violence are among the raddest ever committed to paper (“I should have fatted all the region kites with this slave’s offal,” et cetera).  And once the vocabulary is explained and you get over how pretentious it sounds to say “thou,” a Shakespeare play’s plot is actually a lot like that of a video game.

For one, the villains of Shakespeare and most video games are nefarious, often wholly evil, and they love to talk about it.  If there’s anyone who loves a nice Goldfinger monologue about their schemes more than a video game bad guy, it’s a Shakespeare character (Iago in Othello and Edmund in King Lear are two personal favorites).  It’s not much of a stretch to imagine the obsessed, maniacal antagonist of a classic video game speaking in verse, decrying their enemies Elizabethan-style…

…

EGGMAN: Despair, hedgehogs, foxes and their brethren! To dusky hell, all you woodland creatures! Let Nature’s reign o’er man this day to cease, And Progress take her place at the world’s helm. Flesh rots and fur molts, bones break and hair grays, But the perfection of robots dies not, For my designs are such that naught can rust The gorgeous chrome of my minions’ intents. In mine iron hawk I’ll rule all the land, Though I confess one weakness in my plan:
All life will change to machines in my grip
Unless a small mammal jumps on my ship.

…

The plotlines of Shakespeare plays (especially the romances, like A Winter’s Tale and The Tempest) are often labyrinthine.  Allegiances shift, people fall in and out of love, conspiracies are formed and dissolved, worlds change.  Acting one of these plays can be somewhat bewildering until you get a sense of the relationships each character has to the others.

But that’s one of the most exciting things about them as well – every Shakespearean world is alive, full of unexpected twists and turns.  A Shakespearean exchange of wits between two rivals is every bit as thrilling as a swordfight, since the words are so exact and the relationship between the two so detailed.  It’s a real rush to act one of these scenes.

The best video games have moments like this, too.  It’s the reason Metal Gear Solid can get away with all those cutscenes.  And it’s the reason that Kain the Dragoon’s betrayal in Final Fantasy IV could be ripped right out of some weird, unpublished Shakespeare play about atonement, honor and moon people.

…

Cecil guards the crystal.  Enter Kain.  Alarum.

CECIL:
Kain!  A friend amidst this dark sea of foes!

KAIN:
Or is’t instead a wave to capsize thee?

CECIL:
I would hear thy tale at some meeter time.

KAIN:
The tale I would tell will make thine ears ring.

Kain draws.

CECIL:
Friend, take the point of thy lance from my throat.
I pray thee, mock me not ‘til battle’s end.

KAIN: I do not mock, nor sport, nor jest, nor play,
But do demand a certain gift of thee.
The crystal, if thou wilt.

CECIL:

Is’t come to this?

…

To go back to the choice presented by those Hamlet and Bad Dudes quotes – to be or not to be, to melt away or to become something greater – the reason why I keep coming back to Shakespeare and video games is because they let one do both at once.

When I’m onstage doing Shakespeare and I manage to get past the petty stuff like self-consciousness or memorizing lines, the current of the words carries me along.  It lifts me up into another life, and for a time I both no longer exist and I exist as someone else, someone capable of doing things my old self never would.

When I play video games, there’s the same dichotomy.  I both lose myself in the hypnosis of the gameplay and I become an avatar whose goals and bravery and skill are far purer than my own.  Never has this feeling been more acute than playing Mass Effect 3.

…

SHEPARD: So Garrus, truly lies our state so low? Our herald cries fell on ears deaf as stones, And now the fire of war turns red the stars. The Reapers our ample green worlds do raze,
And turn to ashes the steel spires of Earth,
To dust the fleets of Palaven.

GARRUS: What, sir? Canst thou wait ‘til later, noble Shepard?
For now the dread arms of this great warship,
The good Normandy, do I calibrate.

SHEPARD:
I know thou’rt busy to answer me so,
So I depart with three words: I should go.

…

With the release of Mass Effect 3, one aspect of that game that got a lot of hype was the voice command feature with the Kinect.  Using this feature you could issue basic commands to your team by barking into a headset.  The feature seemed, honestly, pretty dopey to me, but I realize that it’s the first step down a road that’s going to lead toward more and more immersive role-playing.  It’s feasible that one day we’ll be speaking all of a character’s lines, fully acting out a part in a video game playthrough.

Until that distant day, however, I’m happy to have both.  Hamlet and Bad Dudes, King Lear and Sonic, Henry V and Final Fantasy IV.  With their combined help, I never have to ask myself Hamlet’s somber question.  Whenever I want to, I can leave myself behind.  I can be and not be at will.

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Aaron Matteson is a stage actor in Brooklyn, a Seattle native, and an alum of Village Voice Media’s Joystick Division.

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How Game Tutorials Can Strangle Player Creativity « The Psychology of Video Games

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The Psychology of Video Games

How Game Tutorials Can Strangle Player Creativity

Okay, let’s do one more article on creativity and games, based on this question: Is it better to hand hold new players through a game tutorial to teach them all the mechanics and intricacies of a game, or is it better to let them figure things out on their own?

The “tutorial level” has become so ubiquitous in video game design that it seems really odd when a game does not to to painful lengths to make sure you get a slow, measured introduction to every single game mechanic, presumably so you don’t burst into tears over confusion about what the Y button does. For example, I started playing the game FTL (http://www.ftlgame.com/) earlier this week and while the game does offer a brief totorial and many tooltips, it expects a fair amount from you in terms of learning how to play the game on your own. My first half hour with the game consisted mainly of a steady stream of expletives and mutterings like “Why would I ever spend money on door upgrades?” and “Wait, why are all these rooms turning pink?” and “OH GOD! WHY IS THAT ON FIRE? WHAT FIRE? HOW FIRE? …WHAT DO YOU MEAN GAME OVER?”

FTL (or “Faster Than Light” for the cool kids) gives you a brief overview, then tosses you to the space mantis/slug/rock men and expects you to figure the rest out yourself.

Eventually, though, I got into the groove and realized that for a game like FTL, part of the experience should be experimenting with new things, paying attention, and learning how to maximize your chances survival on your own. It’s not dissimilar to systems driven, sandbox games like Minecraft or Terraria in that way: they just dump you into a system and tell you that figuring it out is half the fun. (The other half is feeling superior to people who complain about it not being spoon fed to them.)

This all reminded me about another psychology experiment I learned about from Jonah Lehrer’s recent book, Imagine: How Creativity Works. In a 2011 paper impressively entitled “The Double-Edged Sword of Pedagogy: Instruction Limits Spontaneous Exploration and Discovery” Elizabeth Bonawitz and her colleagues set out to examine how different modes of instruction affect how creative people get in their exploration of a new system. And by “people” I mean “toddlers.” Yes, toddlers are people; I looked it up. And also by “system” I mean “toy.” Work with me here.

The researchers invited kids visiting a science museum to check out a new toy, except not in that creepy way that you hear about on prime time news shows. The toy was a crazy homemade contraption consisting of tubes that did different things like squeaking, lighting up, and playing music. It’s important that these functions were not obvious and required some experimentation to discover. For some children, the experimenter took out the toy and said something like “Woah, look my badass new toy! Check it out!” Then she yanked on a tube to demonstrate how to make it squeak and finished up with “See that? This is how my toy works!”

For other children, the experimenter took out the toy, acted like she was seeing it for the first time then pretended to accidentally make it squeak. She then feigned surprise (children are very gullible, it turns out) and said something like “OMGWTF? Did you see that? Let me try to do that!” then made it squeak again. For kids in all conditions, the experimenter gave the toy to the kid and finished by saying “Wow, isn’t that cool? I’m going to let you play and see if you can figure out how the toy works.”

Picture of the toy, taken from Bonawitz et al. (2011).

So, the key points here are that the toy did multiple things, but only one thing (the squeaking) was revealed. For some kids it was explicitly demonstrated and for others it was serendipitously discovered.

What the researchers found was that relative to those in other conditions, children who were given instructions on how to make the toy squeak played with it for shorter amounts of time, did fewer unique actions with it, and discovered fewer of the toy’s other functions.

Now, I understand that most of you reading this are not toddlers, but I think this has clear implications for video games. Because when we are given a thing and told “here is how it works” that presentation tends to constrain the list of things that we consider doing with it. We explore less and are less creative. Our brains tend to take the paths of least resistance, and heavy handed demonstrations create a nice easy rut for our thoughts to follow.

It’s Minecraft. Figure out what you want to do.

Sometimes this is great, as with simple games designed around mastery of a few skills. But for games dependent on the interaction of multiple systems, options, strategies, or approaches, detailed tutorials may hurt the player and their long-term experience with the game. Booting up a game like Minecraft for the first time, blinking a few times, and then saying “Okay, what happens if I do …this?” is a great experience and facilitating that approach is central to the appeal of the game. Like the kids who were told “this is a squeaky toy, here’s how to make it squeak,” players who get their hands held through an hour of tutorials are being mentally primed to consider only what they’re shown. Accident, serendipity, and –let’s be honest– an occasional bit of rudderless flailing about are sometimes necessary for creativity and exploration.

REFERENCES

Lehrer, J. (2012). Imagine: How Creativity Works. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Bonawitz, E., Shafto, P. Gweon, H. Goodman, N., Spelke, E. & Schulz, L. (2011). The Double-Edged Sword of Pedagogy: Instruction Limits Spontaneous Exploration and Discovery. Cognition 120, 422-430.

Written by Jamie Madigan

September 28, 2012 at 6:09 pm

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30 years of being a game developer in 3000 words

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15th Apr 2012

I borrowed the majority of this text from a great private forum I’m on, where everyone gave a potted biography of who they are and how they got to where they are today as a means to introduce themselves. I wrote my introduction 3 years ago and have toyed many times with the idea of posting it here for all to see, warts and all. And after some editing and refreshing of content I’ve finally decided to do so. The title is a little misleading of course as I’ve not been a game developer for 30 years, but I have always wanted to be, and that passion and love has never left me – as you’ll find if you dare to read on

I know it’s way too long and probably not even my Mother would read until the end, but here we go. This is how my love affair with computing and game development started, and lead to where I am today…

My name is Richard Davey. I don’t really use pseudonyms on the internet anymore (spent enough years doing that in Quake clans!) but l’m part of Photon Storm. I’ll be 37 in August and I live in a lovely part of the UK with my wife, 6 year old son and 2 year old daughter.

Growing up Atari

Back when I was the age my son is now, my parents were complete technophobes and didn’t buy into the “every home must have a family computer” one bit. So it was a long time until I got one of my own. Ironically my Mum is now the most hardcore gamer I know and I swear 40% of her annual earnings goes direct to Big Fish Games.

I may have been computer-less but I was addicted to the arcades. All of my “holiday money” would vanish into the latest Atari, Williams and Sega machines. When I was 8 we moved house and I made friends with the kids in my new street and got my first experience of home computing. There were ZX81s and Spectrum 48ks within a few houses and that was it. I was utterly hooked. To my shock (as it wasn’t even Christmas or my birthday) one day my Dad bought home a computer: A Toshiba MSX.

In hindsight I appreciate just how amazing that computer was. Built-in cartridge port letting me run all the hottest Konami and Capcom games, tape drive so I could buy budget games from the newsagent, really nice graphics, really nice sound. But no other kid within a hundred miles owned one which made aquiring new games next to impossible. But it did give me my first taste of programming. Type-in listings from magazines and hacking around in BASIC. The MSX and later a Spectrum +3 served me well for a few years until I hit secondary school. And via another kid there I was introduced to the Atari ST.

My whole life changed. It was one of those moments you know? Those real life changing moments. Getting that ST home. Hooking it up to this piece of trash black and white TV in my bedroom. I just knew there and then I was addicted, and that my life would be one spent in computers.

I wasn’t wrong

My personality is such that when I get hooked on something, I get REALLY hooked. Everything about me channels into it, every waking thought, every drop of concentration. The ST soaked this all up for years. I’d always wanted to make my own games. I tried on the MSX but just didn’t “get it”. On the ST I met STOS and it opened new doors to me. I created loads of very primitive games such as Octopod. I also dived into 68000 but to my eternal shame never really got anywhere meaningful with it. Sure I could fire-up Devpac and screw with code someone else had written, but that was about it.

I was deep into the cracking and demo scene. Never a week went by without a huge stack of jiffy bags arriving carrying 3.5″ gems of Eurodemo treasure. Pirated games were the currency with which I could acquire the latest stuff. And acquire I did! But the more I saw the more I realised I just couldn’t code very well. I made some nice pretty things in STOS, and my graphics were ok. But I just could never really make the games the way I enjoyed them most in the arcades, and by this time on the Super Nintendo.

Enter the Internet

The ST started to die out but I moved to the Atari Falcon and carried on my Atari love there for years. My Falcon saw me through University and it was in my final year that I was introduced to the Internet. Back then the only browser was Lynx and everything was done from a Unix command-line. So I spent endless hours absorbed in IRC, Usenet, Talkers, MUDs and Gopher.

I remember beta testing the Mosaic browser on massive Sun Sparc stations running X-Windows. Being amazed the day they got it to display a JPEG (a picture of Cindy Crawford!). I remember Alta Vista and Yahoo starting up, running from Stanford sub-domains. It was a real key time for me and I was swept up in the Internet at its birth.

I left University and went to work for CompuServe, the first major commercial ISP in the US and one of the biggest in the UK at the time. I was in Tech Support but they had an awesome net connection and I was plugged in 24×7. I refined my HTML and JavaScript skills and started building site after site. I left CompuServe to help set-up and run a new local ISP. I looked after racks of web servers while creating sites for clients and was introduced to PHP (back when it was called PHP/FI – the very first public release).

I focused hard on PHP/MySQL and my skills became significant. I was offered a really good very well paid job away from home, and was all set to go for it when my Dad was killed in a car crash. That was another one of those life changing moments. Everything shifted priority and new paths that had opened to me closed down.

T-Minus 10

The years pass, and I’m still creating web sites and coding PHP until 1999 when things bounce back for me, and I form a company with 2 friends called T-Minus 10. We specialised in backend web development and used Microsoft .NET (with C#) well before anyone else really touched it. I had been a Microsoft Certified Developer / Systems Engineer for years from my days with the ISP, so it was a natural fit for me. But as anyone will tell you running a company is hard work, even for very experienced businessmen. Which we were not! We were so green you could mistake us for the Incredible Hulk. It was a total rush and a total nightmare in equal measure. So much time spent chasing payments, chasing new work, preparing quotes, doing the accounts. So many silly mistakes made. Such low wages

Around this time and quite by accident I stumbled across DarkBASIC which had literally just been released. I ran a few demos, looked at the code and felt that rush once again. I bought it on the spot.

It had been a long time since I had tried to make a game. I was still playing them, but they were mostly PC based FPS or console games. Here was something new, here was that excitement of creativity that only making a game can give you. And I had found it again. Of course with years of C# and PHP development under my belt I felt much more at home. Concepts that before were totally alien to me were now second nature. I was no longer struggling with the basics, so I dived into DarkBASIC head first. It became my release from the hassle of business life.

Under the pseudonym “Dark Forge” I coded all kinds of things. Demo effects, games, tutorials, scrollers, puzzlers. My output was vast and I loved every minute of it. I was highly proactive in the community and because by day I was still building web sites I contacted Dark Basic Software and kept hassling them that their site was crap, and I needed to fix it for them.

Just over a year later and I was working for them full time, the 3 of us having closed down our company and gone our own ways. They changed name to The Game Creators and I built all of their web sites for them, as well as coding tutorials, writing the monthly newsletter (which ran for 111 issues before closing down!) and looking after the community. It was a great moment when we had our new site featured in Edge magazine

Of course the downside was that the more I worked for them, the less I got to actually code in DarkBASIC. That whole “losing the love” thing kicked in a bit. The feeling of getting too close and spending too long with something. It erodes away at the passion you had in the first place. So once again the games side of my life slips away a little. Commercial games were getting so incredibly complex by this point that deep inside I knew I could never make anything to compare to what I was playing on my PC. I guess yet again a lack of self-belief got the better of me.

So I put my head down and focused totally on PHP once more. By this time I’d been coding in it for years. I was writing articles for major php magazines, became one of the first Zend Certified devs in the UK, knew most the key php devs very well and it just seemed easy to specialise in it. The games dream went invisible on me again.

The Aardman Era

I spent 4 happy years with The Game Creators before being head hunted for a job at Aardman Animations. I had worked with Aardman many times earlier in my career, building some high profile sites for them. So them contacting me wasn’t a total shock. They were starting a proper Online department and wanted someone to lead the development team, so in January 2006 I joined as the 1st employee.

The change in work was great and I enjoyed it immensely, but it became quickly apparent that we were constantly outsourcing Flash game development. So in a pre-Christmas quiet period between projects they asked me to learn Flash.

My history with Flash until then had been a patchy one. I installed Future Splash Animator into Netscape when it first came out years ago, and created my own timeline animations in it. But back then you couldn’t code in it and I was no animator, so I put it to one side and mostly ignored it. While I was focusing solidly on PHP the Flash scene grew and grew. I tried again a few times over the years, but just never gave it the time required for it to “click”. I was used to C# and the very C like syntax of PHP. AS1/2 was just painful. The Flash Professional editor was a million miles away from the Visual Studio world I lived in. And I bought all the wrong sorts of books that taught me nothing about the holy grail of games. It had been one of those things that I was happy to not care about too much.

But in December 2007 that changed. I grabbed a copy of FlashDevelop, some of the essential AS3 books of the time and got to jump head first into the world of ActionScript 3. My aim was to create a simple “card matching” game for the Shaun the Sheep web site. After a few experiments it suddenly all just clicks again.

I mean I totally went about it the wrong way: I animated everything in code, I hand built tweens, I used “old school” tilemap sprite sheets. I didn’t even realise that using “jpeg compression” in Flash preserved transparency because I was so used to jpegs on the web, and they’re about as far from transparent as you can get. Hell I even published it with a 120 fps rate! But I had my first game finished. And best of all it was a quite fun to play. After years of playing games and dipping in and out of game development over and over again, I finally had somewhere new to channel that passion. And channel it I did!

Into the Photon Storm

I was hooked, and I didn’t let-up one bit. Another 3 games later and I start creating them for myself at home under my Photon Storm banner. At work I was doing less PHP and more and more AS3. And the deeper down the rabbit hole I went, the harder it was to climb back out into “web site stuff” again. I built beat-em-ups for Cartoon Network, a huge kids virtual world using ElectroServer which utilised all facets of my skills up to that point, from AMFPHP to server set-ups, hosting and CDNs. Things that were now second nature to me like documentation, SVN, API design, XML, JSON and all the “boring but essential” parts of game development came into play. I worked on large multi-developer projects based around major films and TV series and it was exciting and challenging work. And I’m proud to now be the Technical Director for the fine team there.

But no matter what you think – when you work for a company you’re only really making what they want you to make. You can have as much creative input as you like, but at the end of the day if the client isn’t YOU, you’ll make sacrifices and changes as you go. Photon Storm was my release valve for this issue. Here I could do whatever the hell I wanted, in whatever way I wanted. I could make games that answered to no-one but myself and that is exactly what did.

30 Years Later …

It’s now 2012 and in the words of Fat Boy Slim, I’ve come a long way baby.

I finally feel “at home” making games. It’s like I am now where I should have been a decade or two ago. But I don’t see that time as wasted. It was all good experience, and I still use what I learned every day. And I never for a second dare to stop learning.

It’s a dangerous place to be when you settle into thinking you’re at the “top” of a tree, with little left to learn. Because if games have taught me one thing it’s that no-one on this planet has reached that pinnacle yet. Every week I see exciting new games  that keep me constantly re-evaluating what I think I know about game design, and constantly trying to improve at it.

One of the biggest changes for me last year was that I swapped my focus from working on games, to spending my time helping other developers instead. Releasing thousands of lines worth of source code via my Flixel Power Tools, publishing tutorials, helping out on forums and answering emails.

I often still feel like I am playing catch-up when it comes to coding game routines that I should really already know, and would do had I not given up so many times in the past. But I now know how to get to a solution and where to start. I guess this is why I rarely ignore calls for assistance, because I hope that by spending even a little time replying I might give them the nudge required to carry on and not give up.

On the HTML5 Game Devs site I run someone recently trolled a comment saying that one of the games we featured was so bad that surely only the developer who made it could love it. I can’t tell you how annoyed that made me. I want developers to be proud of what they make no matter what. To not give up but to enjoy the rush and feeling that having true creativity and control over your game gives you.

Always looking forward

And now I’m transferring my skills into HTML5 games. Every new platform has its own issues and peculiarities and HTML5 has plenty of those! It’s constantly shifting, constantly evolving, but having spent so long programming it took next to no time to get up to speed and start making games on it.

Personally I find it a truly exciting area with some staggering innovation going on. But for me it’s like my entire professional programming history has now swung a full circle and I’m merging my love of game development with my original passion for working natively inside a web browser.

I know some people see this as “abandoning Flash” on my part. But while I love what you can do with Flash and have met some incredible developers over the years, I never actually married the platform. I’m not committed to belong to it and only it – I’m free to move elsewhere and make games wherever I like. So that is exactly what I’m doing.

This has been a small insight into me and the gaming juice that flows through my veins, mixed up with all that crazy Atari shit. There is a lot missing of course and I haven’t even thanked all those incredible people I’ve met during my life, but you know who you are – so thank you.

You know what though? There’s a whole lot more to come too. The scent of change is in the air. It’s been a roller-coaster ride for sure, but long may it continue.

73 330 3

Posted on April 15th 2012 at 11:22 pm by Rich.
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Spelunky Glory, Videogame Rituals, and Nifflas’ Miracle Run

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Nifflas posing with his reward – a Yang avatar!

Today, my roommate Nicklas – the renown Swedish indie developer better known as “Nifflas” – beat the secret “Hell” world in Spelunky. It was truly a run for the ages, full of daring feats of skill and a well-timed miracle or two.

But I’m getting ahead of myself! First, some background:

Spelunky is an addictive, procedurally generated platformer game for XBLA. It’s the follow-up the widely acclaimed (and freely available) PC version.

Over the course of this past summer, I gradually got sucked into the game. Nifflas is very good at the original version, and so he’s been teaching me along the way. Of course, Nifflas has had to adjust to the new XBLA controls, so we’ve both been honing our skills.

About a month ago, Nifflas and I started a daily tradition – a ritual, if you will. Every night, each of us gets one – and only one – Spelunky run. The other sits and watches, cheering along and providing advice. On rare days we’ll indulge in a few practice runs, but it’s only the “official” run that really matters – at least to us!

This ritual has been deeply enjoyable for several reasons. First, the tradition gives us something to look forward to every evening. Second, the “stakes” of the game feel so much more real when you only get one shot. One error and you’re done for the day. Nerve-wracking, but invigorating! Third, and perhaps most importantly, I find that it’s far more rewarding to play the game with somebody spectating – a witness with whom to share your triumphs and tribulations. After all, Spelunky is all about the stories you the player end up producing. As my hero Hannah Arendt puts it: “The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves.”

Jokingly, before each run, we make a little prayer to Derek Yu, the game’s creator. (For example: “Derek Yu, please grant us plentiful bombs and protect us from dark levels. Amen.”). The prayer has itself become a key part of our daily ritual – to the point where we feel like we’ve almost created a Spelunky religion/cult. Like, why do bad things happen to good Spelunky players? And does Derek Yu even exist? Spelunky theology is tricky!

This leads us to Nifflas’ epic victory today. (Warning: spoilers ahead).

Hell is a secret world in the XBLA version of Spelunky. Actually, it’s a kind of secret within a secret. First, you have to make it to the well-hidden City of Gold – a difficult task that itself relies on beating a very particular sequence of secret challenges. I myself have managed to make it past the City of Gold, but I’ve never made it to the Hell world.

There were many highlights of Nifflas’ run, including how he (barely) managed to rob the Black Market (and the Ankh) despite the level being shrouded in darkness. However, there is one particular moment that stands out – a genuine Spelunky miracle.

By the time Nifflas had reached Olmec (the boss of World 4), he was almost out of ropes, and almost out of bombs. Worse yet, he possessed no flying gear (cape or jetpack). Of course, it would have been possible to beat Olmec, though trickier. But forget conquering Hell without flying gear – it just wouldn’t have happened.

Now, above Olmec, if you can make it up that high, you’ll find a treasure trove of crates and items. Nifflas proceeded to use the rest of his ropes, making it up to one platform with one crate. Unfortunately, the other crate-harboring platforms were out of reach.

And what did he find in that crate?

A jetpack. A fucking jetpack!

Unbelievable! With hope all but lost, Nifflas found exactly the item he needed. First, it allowed him to scour the rest of the level to collect the bombs he needed to defeat Olmec. Second, that jetpack would allow him to safely navigate the treacherous Hell levels.

(Sidenote: Interestingly, Minecraft’s C418 claims that he once found a Plasma Cannon(!) in a crate – in Level 1-1, no less!)

I want to take a moment to emphasize how miraculous this turn of events was. I have played Spelunky for hours and hours, raiding countless crates, and I have never found a jetpack. The odds must be one in thousands. We felt like Derek Yu had finally answered our prayers – like Derek Yu himself was blessing the run. “Yes, Nifflas. After countless deaths, you have finally paid your dues. Go forth to Hell, and godspeed.”

I almost wonder whether the Spelunky code knew to “load the dice” in this situation. Did the game “know” that Nifflas desperately needed a jetpack? If so, Derek Yu (and his team) is a goddamn genius. Thinking about game design and procedural content, it seems to me that games like Spelunky should load the dice in very rare situations like this one. Don’t ever let the player know of course, but grant them some miracles… occasionally. Enable these kinds of epic tales! A powerful design trick indeed (albeit a dangerous one).

Well, Nifflas made good on his opportunity, and managed to conquer Hell – on his very first go! Some tips we learned along the way: in retrospect, it was fortunate indeed that he had robbed the Black Market. As it turns out, angry shopkeepers still guard the exits in Hell (who knew?). This allowed Nifflas to acquire a shotgun, which proves very useful against the final boss. Earlier in the run, he had also picked up a pitcher’s mitt and sticky bombs – both critically important for beating the boss in his final floating-head incarnation.

All in all, I feel very lucky to have witnessed Nifflas’ Spelunky miracle. Maybe it’s one of those things where “you just had to be there,” but it certainly ranks among my most memorable videogame moments.

Perhaps it’s Yang who puts it best: “the journey is its own reward and mastery is the greatest treasure of them all!” Or maybe Yang only has it partly right. Mastery, yes, but also camaraderie, as we’ve learned from our daily Spelunky ritual.

Finally, on a more personal level, I just want to say that I am so, so honored that one of my own games, J.S. Joust, was nominated along with Spelunky for the IGF 2012 Seamus McNally Grand Prize. To even be mentioned in the same breath with a game as well-designed as Spelunky is just mind-blowing. Amen indeed.

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Why I Think Borderlands 2 Sucks (But I Like It Anyway!)

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Why I Think Borderlands 2 Sucks (But I Like It Anyway!)

By Michael Barnes on September 26, 2012 with

Borderlands 2 is a terrible game design. It’s boring, tedious, repetitive, and it never actually rewards the player. It’s obviously a successful design because people continue to play and enjoy it. But can you really, honestly say that it’s a great video game?

Hold on angry internet mob, put the pitchforks and torches down and lemme finish. I like both Borderlands 2 and its predecessor quite a lot and I think Gearbox’s latest is an across-the-board improvement. They’re fun, casual games that don’t really require much focused commitment or involvement other than spending a lot of time futzing around with character builds and all those oodles of weapons. Playing with friends is neat because you can shoot the shit while you shoot the bad guys. I’m glad that improvements were made like dropping those restrictive weapon specializations and adding the Badass goals and bonuses, which hugely increases the gameplay- and challenge.  But both Borderlands are absolutely terrible designs along a couple of different parameters.

The obvious ones are laid bare just by playing the game for an hour. The story is barely more interesting than the first one and the game world remains oddly barren, lifeless and remote, despite decent character writing that too often mistakes “attempts to generate memes” for “good”.  Personally, I’m pretty tired of characters being little more than quest dispensers in any game. That’s an aspect of MMORPGs that has consistently chased me away.

Quests are somewhat improved, a couple of them are a little more thoughtful and I like that some have optional goals. But by and large, it’s the same post-MMORPG find-and-fetch or kill X number of Y kind of affair. It’s still boring as hell to drive way the hell out to a waypoint and trundle around looking for an item you’re supposed to retrieve while shooting a bunch of bad guys that pretty much just run at you.

The gunplay is rudimentary at best outside of picking which shooting implement to use at a given time. Playing a Gunzerker makes the game feel almost like a Serious Sam title. Despite class abilities, extended elemental effects, and more enemy variety than the first game it’s still pretty basic, undynamic shooting action that really isn’t all that much fundamentally different from Doom.  Or Castle Wolfenstein 3D.

Further, there are no RPG elements in the game despite claims otherwise. Fiddlefarting over whether to sell Gun A that does X damage and has Y% of this effect or Gun B which does  X+1 damage but doesn’t have that effect but another is not role-playing. Nor is shopping for new class abilities with your new XP-purchased skill point. Those things are micromanagement, not role-playing.

More discreetly, Borderlands 2 sucks for the same reasons that the first one did. It’s the same silly, ultimately pointess loot grab where 99 percent of the loot you find is either not as good as what you already have, it’s something to give away to another player, or it’s more or less worthless.  Shops are stocked with the same kind of junk with the occasional daily deal there to tempt to you sell off your entire backpack. And don’t get me started on clicking on Pandora’s countless lockers and storage boxes. I don’t consider wandering around and picking up $2 and a pack of sniper rifle bullets over and over again to be gameplay and it’s definitely not great gameplay. I almost grimace when I see a bunch of green lights from a distance. I know I’ll go over there, collect my two dollars and sniper rifle bullets, and move on. Like a Pavlovian dog.

But it’s the leveling and character development that keeps you playing, right? That’s great, but the development curve and sense of progression in the game remains completely screwed up- it’s too long, drawn out, and rewards perseverance and grinding rather than good play and player skill-building. It takes like 10 levels to even unlock your character’s core class ability. Levels are few and far between, it seems, and it feels like you are constantly chasing a game-changing function that never materializes.

In fact, that kind of summarizes a lot of my complaints with how Borderlands 2 is designed. It’s a hamster wheel game. You’re constantly trying to advance or find a great new gun, but when you do either it’s rarely more than a minor, incremental change. I can’t believe they haven’t figured out a way to monetize this endless chase for something slightly better. Maybe Borderlands 3 will have you buy BorderBucks with your credit card to increase the odds of finding a purple weapon.  But for now you can pay the entry fee and just keep running and opening boxes between bouts of shooting, blissfully ignoring how empty the game actually is.

Of course, with co-op partners, it doesn’t feel quite so much like that and bear in mind that most of my time with the new game has been solo, although I played through every piece of the first game with a steady group. We didn’t bitch too much about the design.  We talked about movies, family, politics, whatever instead. The game was nearly secondary. Focusing on the game as a single-player design reveals things that are still present in co-op- you just don’t pay as much attention to them. You also tend to blissfully ignore how tedious, repetitive, and workmanlike so much of the design is.

Of course, the great art direction and visual panache, coupled with some funny jokes helps to glosses over all of that ugliness and eventually the game bests you. It is addictive. You fall into a kind of a dull-eyed stupor and just enjoy it for what it is- a dumb shooter with a lot of guns, quests, and four very divergent character options. There’s nothing wrong with that for so long as you’re having a good time. The good news is that Borderlands 2 is more fun to play than its predecessor. There’s plenty of activities to do with it and many hours of them at that. But I’m not under the illusion that it is in any way a great or progressive video game design.

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A Non-Violent Immersive Sim

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One of the interesting challenges you run into as a game developer is how to simply and clearly describe your game to people who encounter it for the first time. The 10-second hook, or the “elevator pitch.” Sum it up in one sentence. What is your game?

Gone Home is a simulation of exploring an abandoned house to discover the story of the people who lived there.

Like any elevator pitch, your one-sentence description should get people asking more questions. What I’d like do here is answer the question “what does ‘simulation’ mean in Gone Home?” Because the answer to that question drives our entire design philosophy behind the game.

Mechanically, our biggest video game inspirations come from the subgenre of “Immersive Simulations”: Ultima Underworld, System Shock, Thief, Deus Ex, BioShock, the upcoming Dishonored. These are first-person games that emphasize believable gameworlds and player-driven experience. Explore how you want, develop the playstyle you want, inhabit a world that functions in convincing, internally-consistent ways. Immerse yourself in the experience as if you “really are” the character in the game.

These games also all center around combat (or, often, avoiding combat.) Many of the interesting systems and player choices come from how you interact with enemies, and how you customize your own abilities to do so. But there are no enemies in Gone Home; there are no other people at all.

So how does the philosophy of Immersive Simulation apply to a game with no combat? Can a “non-violent Immersive Sim” even exist? For us, it comes down to extracting the specific definition of “simulation” as it applies to the games that inspire us, and applying that to the context of experience we’re presenting in Gone Home.

Because “simulation” in our case is not a literal term. It’s not virtual reality or the Holodeck (or even Jurassic Park Trespasser.) What it means is allowing the player to do whatever their character might logically do within the game’s context, and ensuring that the gameworld reacts in the way you expect. The design challenges in pursuit of this goal involve deciding what to abstract away from literal simulation, and how best to accomplish it.

This all starts from considering the role of the player character. In Gone Home you are a normal person in an abandoned house, trying to figure out what happened to the people who lived there. So what might you want to do in pursuit of that goal? Walk through the house, open doors and drawers and closets and cabinets. Read things. Pick up objects and examine them for clues.

Interesting design questions start to arise at this point. For instance, you want to be able to “read things,” but in the context of the game, what things do we make “readable”? A single-family home tends to contain hundreds of books. Allowing the player to literally read every single one of them would be bad both player-experientially, raising the text noise-to-signal ratio way above acceptable levels, and production-wise, as implementing and maintaining thousands of pages of text just wouldn’t be practical for us.

This is where the idea of abstraction via consistent visual language comes into play.  In Gone Home, you can pick up and examine any book that is lying out on its own, and cannot interact with any book that is jammed into the lineup of a bookshelf.

Quickly an implicit contract is established: any book you see lying out on its own will be relevant to the story and characters, and will be  interactable; anything stuffed into a bookshelf will not be interactable, but also will not be relevant to uncovering the mystery of the house. Abstraction occupies the space where the rules of the game deviate from the rules of the real world; abstracted rules must always be clear and consistent, and help the player to more fluidly inhabit the role of the character they’re playing.

The question of how the player interacts with physics objects gets a little more interesting, and a little more challenging from a systems standpoint. It starts with a similar type of filtering as the book problem: if you’re an explorer trying to figure out what happened in this house, your character wouldn’t need to rearrange the furniture or topple bookshelves. But she might want to pick up smaller objects on tabletops or inside cabinets to look for evidence underneath them, or to pick up specific objects to examine them more closely. To support this player role, we implemented the Physics Examine and Put Back systems.

The Physics Examine system allows the player to grab any small physical object in the game and rotate it to look at it from different angles. This keeps the idea of “examining objects” within the same interactive mode as walking around exploring the house, and puts all physics objects on a level interactive playing field; you can examine a totally mundane pencil the same way you’d examine a matchbook with a portentous note scrawled on it. You don’t get to look at only specific physics objects in high detail “because the designer says so”; you can closely examine any physical object that YOU suspect might be relevant to your experience.

Gone Home Physics Examine system
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This only got us halfway there, though. What happens when you want to put the object down? At first we only had a system where you toss the object back at the world, turning you into a clumsy vandal by default. Which felt really bad and dumb. The player character in Gone Home might want to pick something up, look at it, then put it back down carefully. But we also wouldn’t want to restrict the player to ONLY be able to pick up objects and put them back where they came from. If the player WANTS to toss stuff everywhere, by all means they should be able to. But it shouldn’t be the only option.

Our initial ideas for design solutions were way too complicated and impractical, entailing a system that would allow the player to place any physics object precisely on any surface, arranging arbitrary objects just so, dynamically detecting valid placements and rotations in realtime, etc. Eventually we realized that this wasn’t supporting the role of the player as investigator, but our own desires as blue sky designers of a literal simulation, which is not what Gone Home is about.

Instead we implemented the Put Back system, whereby any object that has been placed intentionally before your arrival (anything from a desktop picture frame to a bottle of handsoap) can be “put back” in its original location by pointing at its original spot and clicking to place the object. If you look anywhere else while holding the object, you toss it into the world.

Gone Home Put Back system
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So if you want to put back everything you find right where you found it, you’re free to; if you want to grab all the mugs and books and photo frames that are placed around the house and pile them up in a corner, you can do that too. But YOU’ve made that decision, and have the freedom to do so with any object you pick up. We’ve provided authored possibilities to the player, to support inhabiting the role of the player character, but we do not dictate that the player must comply with them.

To us, that is the essence of Immersive Simulation: giving the player all the interactive tools they might desire in the pursuit of inhabiting the player character’s role, without ever saying “you HAVE to play this way, or make this decision, or engage with this content.”

The difference between Gone Home and its inspirations is what role you inhabit: not a gene-spliced assassin or cyborg superagent, but a normal person in an unfantastical, everyday locale. Gone Home is an invitation. Come to this simulated place, explore as much or as little as you want, get as much out of it as you put in. “Playing how you want to” can mean more than choosing to sneak past a guard instead of killing him, or upgrading run speed instead of jump height. It can mean inhabiting a familiar, virtual place “the way you really would if you were there,” engaging with the experience how you want to, if you want to, immersing yourself as deeply as you choose into this particular slice of interactive experience.

We only hope that we can live up to our inspirations.

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