GDC Rant Session 2008

Goal:  to make these underground conversations public.  Do these rants direct the work that we do?  Keep a finger on the vibe of issues that are concerning developers.    Last year’s rant helped IGDA create a speaker’s bureau to help our presence in the community.

This year: game designers ranting.  2008 is the year of game design.  Great lineup at the awards: Portal winning GOTY.  Indy games being recognized was strange but now it has come home.  Not easy being a game designer.  Often they are listed below the people making the code and graphics.  Other disciplines come from other places, art, business, code.  But game designers are ONLY in our industry.  They are the heart of what we are doing so they have a particular animus about being kicked around and wanting to make our industry better.

Clint Hocking:

First idea, ranting about creative stagnation.  But such a tired and generic topic, and not even sure there really is one.   Pound for pound the most creative industry in the world.  “Dude, it’s code… we can do anything”.  Being creative is fairly easy.  Having the courage to create something that challenges people – that’s hard.  Why don’t we make games that challenge people, that matters?  Art and books do this all the time.

Here’s a game that made me cry, heres a game that means something (Marriage).  Effective budget zero.  Meanwhile, we made a bunch of versions of Duck Hunt in the mainstream.  Why don’t we take those techniques and use them in our blockbusters.  What if the things you did in the game supported those relationships in a systemic way, not a cutscene?  What if the goal was to comfort my spouse and the monster was just a metaphor?  Why can’t CoD actually be about Duty?  Or MoH about Honor?  What would it be worth to you if you could put honor in a box and sell it?!  Not Tom Cruise on the front, but package the experience of knowing what it is to be honorable?  Most people in the world have never felt that but they would love to – and they would have to practice it a ton to get a 5-star honor rating.  What if you could get the Medal of Honor in a game that demanded you be honorable to get it.  How terrible it would be to have people who are honorable because of our games?

Meanwhile Passage and Marriage are free.  Sad that these two guys have advanced the industry more than all of us making AAA games.  It’s great that we have little games but I like making big games with 200 people in it.  Not talking about taking action from Halo, but using proven techniques for making emotional investment so that Halo will reach a real audience.  Halo 3 reaching 1/10 the audience of LOTR movies.  The things that move people in LOTR are the dagger that glows and a +5 rope?  People care about the fact that Frodo has to trust Sam.  Mechanics of trust are not harder to model and simulate than the mechanics of rope!  Yet our games are full of rings and ropes and armor and we have this object fetish.  So the most meaningful relationship developed this year is with a CUBE! 

Maybe it’s nothing and creative.  Not creativity that is holding us back from being the dominant media.  We lack the courage to make games to challenge something in us besides reflexes.  Lack the courage to be seen crying in the movie theater when he thanks Sam.  That’s the only thing separating us from the mature medium we will become and the juvenile media we are today.  We have the money and the creativity, and the demand.  Dude – it’s code.  We can do anything.

John Mack(?), Indy game designer (Everyday Shooter?)

(Everyone stands up and bounces balloons around)

Another Person, Kim ??:

Some sort of rant?  Nothing to be angry about now.  

Thus ends John Mack’s rant.

Jane McGonigal

Avant Game

We’ve invented a medium that kicks every other medium’s ass.  We occupy more brain cycles and make more content than anyone else in the world.  People are waking up and pouring effort into these games.  Games have already won.  

Industry spent last 30 years optimizing human experience.  In the past, our brains for playing games and recently our bodies for playing games.  We know our hearts can play games too.  Our experiences better designed for engaging humans than anyone else.  We basically rule the world.

The bad news:  we rule the virtual world.  Reality is too messy and broken, and we don’t want to fix reality, we want alternatives to reality.  For now all of our games work better than the reality.  All our effort into optimizing virtual experience.  We need to change that.

Reality is broken.  Our responsibility as the smartest people on the planet to fix it.  How to make people superheroes in real life?  Make the real life more like a game.  Graffiti – “I’m not good at life.”  I don’t wake up every day with missions and purpose.  Can’t be good at reality the same way.  In the games I have all the information I need and skills and people to count on.  Just better than real life.  New field of “positive psychology” – what gives us a good experience?

Satisfying work to do

Being good at something

Time spent with people we like

Chance to be a part of something bigger.

We are making the ultimate happiness engine.  “Soap Kills Germs”.  Figured that out in 1932.  20% of people in hospitals killed by germs on doctors hands.  Maybe people not on their deathbed but their lives suck – people playing and buying our games, games are their highest quality of life.

“Why should we care about games?”  Because life is crap, makes it worth living is art and play.

“Games kill boredom”.  “games kill alienation”  “games kill anxiety”  “games kill depression”.

Games are the ultimate happiness engine.  Like we invented the written word and decided only to write books, not exit signs.

5 things to fix today

Running, being on a plane, playing fetch.  Running == leveling up?  Flying = going to die.  Virgin has chat system, why isn’t there a game to play on the plane so that you win when you land?  Social network for dogs?  Play games with our dogs, fetch for an hour every day.  If I could play an MMO for my dog.  Trackstick – records where you go and see on googlemaps.  Virtual environments on commute.  Neurosky thing, knows if you are relaxed.  Zap people who are lighting up my brain.

Can make games that interface with reality.  Yes we should fix it. Will we?  I have no idea.

Alter your reality.

Chris Hecker:

“take a civil tone next time you speak, and even if you make the same points maybe more people will listen and find that they agree”

“Maybe the art that games could be isn’t some sick mishmash of what has gone before?”

Computation power is not orthogonal to game design – last year’s rant.

Still into ranting… complacency = death.  Games could be the preeminent art form of the 21^st century.  But on our current trajectory, will we get there? 

Take our boat and sail it between Scylla of thinking we are all that, and the Charybdis of being too scared to talk to the human condition.  Sextant for this journey is harsh and honest criticism.

Ranting has to be followed by acting.  Constructive criticism is the best thing.  But just criticism by itself is valuable.

Speak your mind and tell the truth.

Genova Chen(?)

Job is not to start fires, but to make fun stuff.  2008 hard to rant about, great year of games and innovations.  Current talk about input device is just no longer true.  Games are innovative, are art, can engage gamers with emotions.  Digital Distribution, barrier to entrance quite low.  Lots of indy games moving to the console!

How to come up with better game designs?  Not just a designer to rant.  But can rant as a gamer, just a guy playing games.  Less games in the past 18 years.  Interest dropping.   Excited to play first racing game , but no feeling at all in new racing game.  Excited to kill nazi’s, but now not exciting. 

Learn.  Brain engineered for sucking information.  Games can teach.  But more than toys?  Never say too old for you to read books or play sports, why too old to play games?  Intellectual, emotional, social. 

Grown-up gamers?  Don’t want to be abandon game because too old.  Need more mature content for people who still want to play games.  Not talking about manhunt or DOA.  That’s really for 18 yr olds.  Average game age is 33.  What do you need – intellectual, emotion, social content.  WoW == social doing OK.  Last year, feeling.  This year == intellectual.  Can games make you learn something?  Make you think?  We don’t need Three Little Pigs, we need Little Prince.  Make you think about your life.

What knowledge do we have beyond making weapons or level design.  Other great art comes from author’s own experience in their lives. Passage is awesome == gameplay makes you think.  Think of gameplay, not story.

What do you want to share with the mature gamers?

Daniel James, Three Rings

GDC is inspirational.  That’s nice.

Played with Lego as a kid.  Now they are making Lego MMO on the internet.  Brilliant!  After Lego, played Elite.  Used to dream of playing that with other people – now we have Eve.  Fantastic!  After that played a Mud.  “go north”.  Chat with people – now there is 10 million people playing WoW!  WTF Amazing!  “The Tomorrow People” – we are in the future.

20 million people using this Facebook app!  Totally awesome!  People given money by investor types – that’s incredible.   Sea change in how we bring games to the world.  If US econ fails, hey there is always China!

Grandma saying now she plays PP with her grandkids instead of watching TV alone.  Kill TV is a mission we can all appreciate.  Virtual environments set off the same mind patterns as those things to in the real.  Line between the two is very thin.  Puts us in an incredible place.  People do things and then justify reasons afterwards.  How does that apply to you?  Observer is the pivotal point in shaping the real.

Q:  game design touching real world already in a bad way – frequent flier miles.  Now everyone has it and it’s a leech on the system, you get the money back that you never should have paid in the first place.  What if I just want to run and enjoy the simplicity of things?  People who want to run can run anyways – but a lot of people would be happier if it were less painful or embarrassing.  Making things difficult for people better.  Example of flier miles is great – gamelike isn’t just points or rewards.  Promotion people aren’t game designers.  Beauty of play, those who understand it should be teaching others how to be more engaging.

Q: Reviews of Flow give bad score because not enough boss battles.  Failure of discourse?  Role of game criticism?  Game review community needs to grow as fast as the developers.  As designers we are a bit head.  Majority of review can be bought?  How do teach game reviews?  Movies have classes, degrees for this but reviewing games has no education.  Needs to catch up.

Q:  Growing rift between hardcore gamers and everyone else?  What happens as we age?  Hardcore gamers are fighting a losing battle.  Want to play games with increasing convolution and that’s cool, but that isn’t where growth is.  Don’t have time to play those games anymore.  Only going to reward XP for time, rather play Passage.  If maker of Far Cry 2 is saying the same thing as the guy who makes Flow, there is something there.  Retaining people when they get to be 35, you need to make it something they care about.  Can get XP in a hundred games, can’t get honor in any of them.  Want to explore that in games, whether we would really stand up in a tough situation.

Q: What is stopping us?  What’s the barrier?  Biggest one is what we think about as a “sexy” game, how big and how much graphics it has to have.  Think of other things as being sexy that would be a good start.  Barrier is thinking that there is a barrier.  That there is something you have to do, to do it right.  Figure out what makes you happy and do that.  Tweaking numbers, or complex rulesets – just do it.  Don’t worry about this rift, who cares?  This is your art, your expression – own it!  Make it your own!