For the people who want to be game designers or fancy game design.

[Kornman00]

So I got a GDC subscription not too long ago and when I was heading over to gdcvault.com (http://www.gdcvault.com/), about an hour ago, to search for some interesting presentations, I noticed a "free-preview" presentation which had a picture of a woman (http://cmpmedia.vo.llnwd.net/o1/gdconf-com/2010/img/vault/10318-speaker.gif) who looked familiar to me. What started off with me clicking "watch" just to see if her voice rang any bells, turned into me sitting still for an hour and having a seasoned game designer spill mind blowing experiences and wisdom through my ears and into my brain.

Train (or How I Dumped Electricity and Learned to Love Design) (http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1012259/Train-%28or-How-I-Dumped)

She started off basically describing how jaded games, especially FPS games, have become, or at least made her feel (plus me, and I'm sure many, many others). She then went into an idea about using the same system that have made many famous photographs exactly that, famous. That is, the emotion(s) they capture. Now, the way I'm describing all of this may seem pretty elementary in nature, but that's why I highly suggest you take an hour out of your life and watch/listen to her presentation about how she basically went to the "grass roots" with game/systems design. After all, it's kind of hard to beat her highly energetic (as she mentions as well, I'm sure her five cups of coffee deserve some credit in this case) and detailing mind.

While her Train game (http://playthisthing.com/train) targets a specific historical event (and in her Q&A session, she even talks about "mods" for her "board" game to target other groups/events), I hope other game designers take from this talk the idea about using games for serious shit (ie, games that interact with our emotions). Developing puzzles, or at least brain stimulating tasks, which don't just scream "Hey, I'm a puzzle!" (because, just like in a thesis statement, flat out saying what you are can automatically be a major turn off).

Of course, for them to do so, they have to battle publishers and AAA game studio owners who just want to mass out game titles (which begets itself, really). Gotta separate the creative folks from the corporate folks (http://www.xbox360achievements.org/news/news-7734-GDC-2011-%E2%80%93-Bungie%E2%80%99s-Marty-O%E2%80%99Donnell--%E2%80%9CCorporations-Are-Almost-Always-Mean-to-Creative-People%E2%80%9D.html) (or if you have a GDCvault account (http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014617/From-MYTH-to-HALO-Marty)).


Note: I realized later that her picture on the presentation image actually reminded me of one of this actress (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melora_Hardin) when she was acting in The Office.

[Timo]

Seriously cool talk, I never thought of games like that before. I'd recommend anyone interested in vidja games to watch it if they have a spare hour as well.

http://www.lowbird.com/data/images/2011/03/apcdn-39435.gif

[Limited]

Is she talking about AAA games, or indie games? If its about AAA games, then its definitely different to Indie games. Both types have serious differences in development and the creation 9of both the product and the idea).

Also, she barely looks like Jan .

[Kornman00]

bbcode say what

Pretty sure she was just talking in generalities, leaving the viewer to take what they will. Some of the ideas brought up here could find its way into the development of Indie games. There's no one-way to do something. Unless you believe in creationism.


Also, my mind has a more developed pattern recognition than yours, sorry that you can't pick up the similarities between Brenda (http://cmpmedia.vo.llnwd.net/o1/gdconf-com/2010/img/vault/10318-speaker.gif) (especially when she has a fat "play" button covering half her face like she does on the gdcvault free preview slider) and Jan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jan.PNG). Perhaps you should learn to see through cosmetics ;p?

[Warsaw]

Ohmygawd, you guys picked the damnest time to upgrade. 18h00 EST? Really? Now I have to re-type my [somewhat] longpost. Anyways...

What she said in the presentation is basically how I've always felt about games. Always with the cookie-cutters, always trying to change up the technical aspects of the mechanics of play, but never using the human element to their advantage. We are only now starting to latch on to the emotional attachment players may form with entities within the game (Mass Effect, anyone?), but it is extremely limited.

I have been mulling over an idea in my head. What if we make a game that has a procedural story? You have a set beginning that gives initial momentum to the player, but from there on what he/she does affects what the game does to him/her in real time. So imagine you are a soldier (stay with me here) fighting against the other side and all of a sudden an external force turns the place upside down. That and you being forced to ally with your former enemy is the kick-start. Here is where the procedural begins: say the player takes a right turn and gets separated from the regiment by being knocked unconscious from a shell and getting left for dead. Now that player is free to roam. The player goes lone wolf and takes out several platoons worth of enemies through resourcefulness, but nothing much changes. Now, say the player decides he wants to make a difference. The player starts talking with civilian NPCs and locates a militia group. The player helps decides to bolster the militia. You lead an attack on a stronghold. The AI as a whole then changes tactics in the game. No longer are civilians simply having their weapons confiscated, they are now seized. Because the player helped them defend themselves through a counter-offensive, the game now considers them all a threat and rounds them up into camps. You may have won the battle, but now everybody's lives are harder.

This type of scenario can play out all over and in many ways. You do something, and the game takes note and shifts its focus accordingly. If the player had turned left, he would still be with the regiment and probably take part in a larger battle. If the regiment gets decimated, he may find himself lone-wolf again and the AI would shift focus to from fighting mainline troops to rounding up civilians for being processed and "re-purposed". Should your forces do well, the AI might have to fall back to their primary foothold on the planet and start a series of orbital bombardments to scatter you.

The emotional attachment comes from the player interacting with the NPCs and how the player's actions with them affects them. You have to do this seamlessly to be convincing. The player needs to act. To act, you need help. NPCs are help. You interact with NPCs and that inevitably forms a relationship. The NPCs enable you to act. That act now has consequences for you and them. Your relationships are jeopardized. Those threats can be from within (rivalries over a lady, affronts to honor, etc., etc.) and without (the bad guys, nature...).

You do not "win" this type of game, you can only end it. Ending it is the hardest part because of the innumerable possibilities. The endings can however be classed in two categories: the player is dead, or the player lives. The latter is the problem. To finish the game, you need to make some set pieces. BioWare had the right idea with an end that checked variables, but the set pieces in a procedural story are going to have to be more robust with how they check the variables and which variables they check. You are also going to need to have multiple set-pieces in order to complete the illusion.

E: She reminded me of Claudia Christian's portrayal of Susan Ivanova in "Babylon 5".

[Cortexian]

Ohmygawd, TheGhost
ftfy

[Ifafudafi]

English being my field, I often spend time writing about various things which interest me; naturally, video games are one of these, and I've developed a nice collection of quasi-essays, reviews, and such. Mabye I'll upload them at some point somewhere (I don't have them readily available right now) but one of them (I think I wrote it back in late '08) actually covered my thoughts on how games handle negative emotions; I actually posed the same "must a game be fun" question.

It was one of the longer ones, but since this is a single post on a low-traffic forum hiding in a corner of the internet, I'll focus on one thing. While the presentation was excellent, she said early on that games have never really explored negative emotions, and I simply don't think that's true. There are a number of moments which I've found to be profoundly affecting (spoilers abound, of course; I'll assume you've played everything I'm listing):

Super Metroid
You know the one. The hopeless boss fight scenario has been done quite a bit, but never as well as this; having played Metroid II is somewhat necessary to recieve the full effect, but still, here's the emotional progression:

-Fear. The huge Metroid rapes one of the strongest creatures in the game and then comes after you.
-Confusion. It leaves.
-Warmth. At this point, discerning players will hear its cry and realize it's the baby you saved in the last game.
-Confidence. Oh look, it's Mother Brain! You've kicked her ass before, let's do this
-Terror. WHAT THE HELL IS THAT HOLY CRAP WHAT THE FUCK
-Desperation. Nothing you do works. You're knocked against the wall, energy draining rapidly.
-Overwhelming relief. The baby comes. Metroidrape.
-Despair. That thing saved your life. Your whole goal has been to rescue it, and it just got murdered right in front of you. Its last act is to power you back up.
-Anger. Look at this beam you've got. Hey, MB. Screw you.

And one of the best ass-kickings in gaming follows. Film buffs will talk about "pure cinema," where a movie eschews dialogue to simply convey emotions and feelings through the image iteslf; what happened in Super Metroid could just as easily be called "pure interaction." Each emotional progression is tied directly to the gameplay; the initial fear is due to your recognition of the uber-enemy's threat and the mass drain of your energy. The desperation is because none of your attacks function; none of the tools you've managed to combine work, directly conveying a feeling of frustration and helplessness in a way other media can't. The anger is taken out by directly fucking up MB's shit yourself.


Grand Theft Auto IV
This has always been a weird one for me; R* is one of the devs that loves to borrow Hollywood techinques and styles, using very linear plots, well-defined characters, and tons of cutscenes; while they're some of the best writers in the business, the film-like nature of their games stops them from being good representatives of gaming's unique storytelling qualities, but there's one moment in GTA IV (late in the game) which really struck me hard.

It's when you get to meet and potentially kill Darko Brevic. Niko's been spending the whole lengthy game up to this point angsting about his betrayal, and being an extraordinarily well-written PC, I was quite sympathetic to his cause. After some arguing, Niko asks how much Darko was paid. It was $1000, which, as Niko now knows, is quite a trivial sum. He expresses that sentiment, to which Brevic replies: "How much do you charge to kill somebody?"

In a movie or book, that's still pretty nasty, as it exposes Niko for the massive hypocrite that he is, but what this did was call into question not only Niko's (and, by extension, my) misaligned moral compass, but also the inherent value of the bags of polygons and pixels running around LC. Like just about anybody, I had spent considerable time fucking around with the (at the time) excellent animation and physics engines, exploring all the intricate ways in which ragdolls collpase and tumble around cars and bullets, and yet I had come to care for Niko as a character and sympathize with his plight to the extent that for a few moments, each pedestrian on the street seemed equally as valuable. That was a nasty, nasty, nasty feeling.

And just to top it off, the game lets you decide whether or not to shoot Darko. I chose to kill him, but it was pretty clear that neither scenario would have made me feel any better.

Of course, I got over it quickly and went back to murderous rampage, but man. I've read quite a few books and seen quite a few movies, but none of them got to me quite like that. It's a direct attack on the player's values and perceptions; sympathizing with a well-written character is one thing, but playing as him as well adds a completely different dimension that other media simply can't replicate. The choice at the end is just icing on the proverbial cake.


Limbo
All of it. That ostentatiously avant-garde platformer that came out a few months ago. It's not a fun game. The puzzles are clever, sure, and it feels good to accomplish them, but the dark atmosphere constantly makes the game seems like everything hates you. Not hates people, but hates you. Specifically you. That bloody spider elicited one of the widest ranges of negative emotions I've ever had the displeasure of experiencing in such quick succession.


I've written way more than I planned to so I'll stop now, but basically, the ability for games to affect us on levels beyond "is it fun" has already been soundly proven. What remains to be seen is how developers latch on to this, but that's a whole different thing.

[Warsaw]

I've heard a lot of developers say that if a game doesn't nail those first thirty seconds of "fun" and then manage to stretch it for a whole game, then the game is doomed. I don't believe "fun" is what it's all about. People buy games because they want to be entertained. To entertain, you must captivate. If a game is captivating to the player, it has succeeded. That captivation may be achieved through fun, emotional investment, intellectually stimulating storytelling, challenging mechanics, lustful items, and so on.

[Higuy]

Decent presentation.

Not sure if this a thread for now "if you want to be a game designer".... but 2 great books to pick up/download are Hourences "The Hows and Whys of level design" and "The Hows and Whys of the game industry". Both awesome books. (If you don't know Hourences, he lead Toetl Studios, aka people who made indie game "The Ball")

http://www.hourences.com/


I've heard a lot of developers say that if a game doesn't nail those first thirty seconds of "fun" and then manage to stretch it for a whole game, then the game is doomed. I don't believe "fun" is what it's all about. People buy games because they want to be entertained. To entertain, you must captivate. If a game is captivating to the player, it has succeeded. That captivation may be achieved through fun, emotional investment, intellectually stimulating storytelling, challenging mechanics, lustful items, and so on.

Yeah basically what this guy said. Fun is a broad term also, which can range from pretty much everything you said. It all depends on the spefic player, and what they think is fun and not. Would you rather have a indulging story with little gameplay, or tons and tons of gameplay with little story. The best game will try to balance all parts of the game to cater to as many people as possible and create a enjoyable experience. Valve mastered this in all of the Half Life games, Halo did it great, and so did many other great games.

[Warsaw]

Portal is a lesson for all developers. It has mystery to draw you in, it has puzzles using an interesting mechanic to hold you there, and it forms an emotional connection at the lowest level. Who here can honestly say they didn't hesitate at all to kill the Companion Cube? I delayed as long as I could.

Anybody have any comments on my first post in this thread? I'm interested to see what you guys think of the concept.

[Dwood]

Anybody have any comments on my first post in this thread? I'm interested to see what you guys think of the concept.

A procedural storyline is next to impossible, all I gotta say...

You can do the next best thing but that would take ages, to say the least.

[Warsaw]

It's not next to impossible. You code in a set of responses to known player and NPC actions for the game and update that list with regular patches to keep it fresh. The game idea I have in mind would have a single player that merges into an MMO component, so it is going to be getting regular updates anyways.

Procedural doesn't mean random generation; that's a random number generator. Procedural implies the idea that when x happens, y is the response. The "next best thing" is what we have in Mass Effect, and to be completely honest I feel nothing for any of the characters apart from Tali because the game is so forced and machined. I don't have freedom there, I have a ballot and am forced at gun-point to choose one of the options given to me. This is exactly what Brenda was talking about. The game takes no advantage of m unpredictable nature. It has no twists to make me feel bad about a decision because they ruined them all with excessive foreshadowing.

[Donut]

<games and negative emotion>

having not watched the hour long thing in the OP, id like to add mafia 2 to your post. i kind of give away one of the better story lines iv seen recently, so if you havent played the game definitely do not click this spoiler.
the part where henry is killed by the chinese in the middle of the park actually got me physically angry. my internal temperature increased, and the first thing i did was run the chinese boss guy off the road and drive off right after him, pinned his car against a wall, got out, walked up, and shot him with the thompson 1928 as many times as the game would let me before the screen that tells you you wernt supposed to kill him comes up.

you follow the chinese mob boss back to his restaurant, at which point you can either go stock up on weapons, or run in and raid the place. i ran right in and killed everybody out of passionate revenge.

later you and Joe experience a falling out, then Joe almost kills you, but just as you think youve been betrayed by your best friend who you have up to this point grown to love, he turns the gun on the main bad guy and you both fight side by side to kill the bad guy. then when its all said and done, you and joe march out of the building like great buddies and you feel happy and relieved that its over. you and joe get in separate cars, then the car joe is in veers off. you inquire where joe is being taken, and the response you get is "Joe wasnt part of the deal, kid". camera zooms out, game ends.
we are inclined to believe that joe was "whacked" for his involvement in the chinese massacre.

basically what im getting at here is this game made me feel so attached to the characters that i felt like i was vito having an out of body experience. when bad things happened to him, i felt the weight of them too. red dead redemption did this too, but in a much more spaced out way.

E: dwood that procedural story line idea is not even remotely close to "impossible". for a long time now iv been thinking of both the story explanation and technical side of how to do this, and what iv come up with is a system of forks. every story event of that sort has a fork that can go 2, or possibly more ways. as the game goes on, the way these decisions are implemented is through code that almost simulates a human being looking in on a brief recap of what has happened. the way im explaining it makes me look like a retard, but look at morrowind for a somewhat decent example. not oblivion, but morrowind. first thing i did was travel to balmora and join the thieves guild. the second i did that, people around town that belong to rival factions started to hate me, and i actually got one to attack me one time. i mean, thats not quite a procedural story like warsaw is saying, but it kind of helps to visualize that to see that it is, indeed, possible.

[Warsaw]

And that's the next step. We have forks down pat. We've been doing them since at least 2006, if not longer.

Shit, I should patent the goddamn idea and the system behind it. In America, you can patent anything you want to these days.

[Higuy]

Portal is a lesson for all developers. It has mystery to draw you in, it has puzzles using an interesting mechanic to hold you there, and it forms an emotional connection at the lowest level. Who here can honestly say they didn't hesitate at all to kill the Companion Cube? I delayed as long as I could.

Anybody have any comments on my first post in this thread? I'm interested to see what you guys think of the concept.

While its an awesome and unique idea, I'm sure its been thought of many times, hell even tried probably. The hard part about games like that is the immense possibilities that can happen, and becuase of this generates MUCH more work that needs to be accomplished, not to mention play testing. The only games that have come close to that are Biowares games (ie Mass Effect) or any RPG game...

I once worked on a multiplayer indie titled Coil, who seemed to be trying something way over there head. They wanted to make a game where as the player would be in almost like MMO (yet FPS), have large scale battles, create bases, and such. They didn't see to get the idea that its insanely hard to do these things becuase of the endless possibilities of work that will have to be done for developers. (As of right now (left about idk 3 months ago?), they have gotten absolutely no where)

[Warsaw]

I'm sure it has been thought of, but I'm not so sure it has been studied recently enough with current technological capabilities in mind. What I am suggesting is firmly within our current capabilities. All you need is a clause that says if the player does something and there is no listed response for it, flag the action for review by the patch team and tell the game itself to continue the status quo.

That team you were on sounded like it had no game plan. It sounds like they were bubbling with ideas but failed to create a design document outlining exactly what they wanted to accomplish and what the core features were going to be. They wanted an MMO-scale FPS...with base-building? That makes it an Massive First Person Shooter Real Time Strategy Role Playing game. That sounds fun, but it's also a Charlie Foxtrot because it has no identity for the aforementioned reasons.

Tl;dr: without a game plan, you are going to fail. The procedural idea is not difficult, but when you try to add every game genre known to man into one title...well, that's biting off way more than you can chew.

[Higuy]

Tl;dr: without a game plan, you are going to fail. The procedural idea is not difficult, but when you try to add every game genre known to man into one title...well, that's biting off way more than you can chew.

They had a GDD, the point is that what they were trying to undertake was possible, but was way to much for them to do, let alone almost any developer.

[sleepy1212]

And that's the next step. We have forks down pat. We've been doing them since at least 2006, if not longer.

Shit, I should patent the goddamn idea and the system behind it. In America, you can patent anything you want to these days.

Ready to play quests for tabletop RPGS like D&D have done this for decades. Many only required a DM to roll for NPCs and narrate without having to make a single decision. West End's Star Wars player handbook includes a mini-quest that keeps players within a 2-3 choice system without actually presenting the choices overtly like video game RPGs do. Essentially the PC and the end-goal dictate the route.

[Warsaw]

That's why Brenda went back to board games. So much more freedom there.

I'm not even dictating a goal. I have one, but the player has to decide what to do through observation, accident, and/or experience and maybe they'll run across what I would consider to be the "correct" or "canon" way to end the game. No higher power is going to roll a dice for anybody, not even the NPCs. The NPCs will have their own individual responses based on a procedural list of character statistics, which then cause the character to draw their dialogue from a pool based on which flags that dialogue has and whether or not they meet the character's specifications for the situation. The only mass response of NPCs will be what the enemy generally does as a whole (like reorganizing for a new strategy, splitting up into small units, retreating into orbit, etc.). A game like this would have a lot of what amount to "if/then" statements being thrown around, more so than a "traditional" game would for NPCs and narration.

@Higuy: Like I said, it was a Charlie Foxtrot. A procedural thing like I've been rambling about is only going to work for two genres as far as I can tell: first person shooter, and role playing game. And actually, it has to be more of an RPG because the player has to interact with people on a deeper level than simply shouting orders or obeying them. I'm not trying to shove way too many mechanics into one game. All I am considering right now are shooting mechanics, physics, destructible environments, and NPC interaction. Consider this: Vindictus has all of those features, but it's a traditional MMO. Mass Effect is only missing the destructible environments. I'm not thinking of doing something so immensely complex that it would require a Microsoft-sized fortune and a decade to accomplish. It would take longer to make, for sure, but it's not like certain traditional games don't already take longer than you would think they would have to (Diablo III, DOOM 4, Half-Life 2, Halo 3) for the level of interactive complexity they offer compared to what I am proposing.

Now, another idea I've had is an RTS that scales from the interstellar to the planetary using the scroll-wheel in real time, so you have to manage a galactic conflict in space, on the ground, and among continents. The story is that you are Faction A at war with rebellious faction B and new hostile faction C and you must secure your empire against B and then take the fight to C. You would not need individual missions. Since traditional RTS games already have what one might consider procedural AI, all you need to have is a player with a keen strategic mind. THAT is mind-blowing. That would be system intensive like you have no idea and is probably beyond our technological capabilities right now (needz moar CPU), but again it's not next-to-impossible to program. Take the Sins of a Solar Empire system and combine it with Supreme Commander and you are half-way there. It's really just one giant technology tree with three branches and then some branches within those branches.

E: Best thread on Modacity right now, tbh. Needs more participants.

[Donut]

you know, its really not as much work if its pulled off right. i just thought of a good example. secret of mana 2 had 6 characters you could choose from, one as your main where the story is derived from, and 2 others as your buddies where the less significant story comes from. so there are 6 main stories to play through, and like 20 different little nuances you can change based on the two buddy characters.

im not talking about this in terms of procedural story, im talking about this in terms of things the designers had to make. the game's layout, enemies, music, etc, is all a laid out world that all exists and is all played in regardless of what story youre playing. what i mean is with the exception of a couple of small areas and sprites, there was nothing extra the designers had to make to accommodate the choice of characters and story the game gives the player. the real difference is in the scripts that control story and dialogue and stuff.

i almost see it as a production team coming up with a rough idea, talking about it, thinking of story a little, then just building a massive fucking world, even some places that might not end up being used. THEN they deal with the player's interaction with the environment, so the "only" heavy work they have to do is on the programming and testing side (and sound files for dialogue if we're talking a newer game). i mean of course they would also add areas and adjust stuff if it becomes necessary. maybe im just misunderstanding what higuy said, but i dont see this as an impossible amount of work for a team of people, especially professionals.

call me naive, but i really do believe that huge game companies like activision or EA (not saying i want them specifically) have enough money that putting some money into a team thats allowed the time they need to making something like this happen. just as an experiment, if nothing else. theyre choking the life out of interesting fps titles with, for example, yearly cod releases, and thats basically a guaranteed couple hundred million bucks for them yearly. i dont think its too much to ask for them to try to be good game developers and put money into unique projects like this, even if the time tables make it so there wont be yearly releases.

also, i agree with you warsaw. this thread has me very excited. im going to college for game design this fall so im having a field day in here.

[Warsaw]

I would like to go to school for this. Presently looking at NC State because that whole area is apparently a hotbed for budding game developers. Looked at USC, didn't like the reviews. I don't want to go to a trade school because if I can't find work, I need something to fall back on. I'm taking community college classes for engineering but the I'm not doing so well in the engineering specific courses because they just plain don't interest me. Not where my passion lies.

I think the industry needs a title or three to really shake things up. It seems like the idea of instant-gratification has been taken to a whole new level and now all we get are $60 pieces of garbage that nobody is going to want to buy until it's $5 bargain bin material. I also think that problem stems from publishers and developers trying too hard. If you have a straight A game, you can't improve a whole lot on the formula. Cases in point: Halo 2 vs. Halo, UT2004 vs. UT3, Empire Earth 3 vs. Empire Earth 2, DA2 vs. DA:O.