MIGS: Ken Rolston

Ken Rolston: Old guy you should listen to.I'm a few weeks late on this report from the Montreal International Game Summit, so let's see what we can do from memory only and no notes!

I found Ken Rolston's presentation to be accidentally highly self-referential. Before explaining that, let's look at his ridiculous summary of what is presentation was about:

The road to success as a narrative designer is long and arduous. But you don't want to hear that. So Ken Rolston, Internationally Celebrated Lead Designer of Oblivion, Morrowind, and other light classics, will reveal the carefully hoarded treasury of cheap tricks and short cuts that enable him to avoid Real Work. In this fast-paced and charming presentation, Rolston delivers the box of tools, lavishly illustrates their use in the production of Rolston's Great Works, and teaches you how to project a shallow but persuasive mastery of the craft of narrative game design.

I read that and thought, "wait, he's kidding right?" He avoids real work, he's charming, he's Internationally Celebrated with capital letters, and he will teach us to project a "shallow but persuasive mastery of the craft"? Ha!

I can't convey the actual content of his presentation because there was way too much. In fact, he started the presentation by explaining the "spew principle." If he spews so much information at us that we can't process it all, we'll have the warm feeling of discovery (of all the tools and principles he will spew), but no time to be critical. This will cause us to enjoy the talk and to like him, he said.

If you want a taste of the actual content, you can check out his terribly designed PowerPoint slides here. But I'd rather give you a sense of his tone. Ken mentions here and there how great he is, and we all know it's a joke (because we are not idiots from the internet, possibly?). He tells us how he manipulates his employees, players, and even us in the audience--and we laugh, but he's kind of not kidding. He's just on the edge of whether he's kidding or not, so you can't really be offended, but he sneaks in the sad truth.

The self-reference comes from these two pieces of advice Rolston gave us about narrative: 1) recognize that you have a distinctive voice, and that you should express it in game-narrative and 2) you probably want your world to be serious so it feels more real, but you also want to have the player and designer wink at each other, too.

I don't think it was really on purpose that Rolston's presentation embodied these two ideas: it's just how he is. He has a unique voice and he can't help but express it in a presentation. Also, his presentation is ultimately serious in that he explained many principles of narrative design, but he also seems to be delivering deadpan humor half the time, too. Take this example. Rolston explained that the type of game he makes involves having a big team of developers so a big part of his job is explaining his ideas to everyone. He showed a few simple techniques for this (making a clickable map of the game made of simple symbols, each location giving info from the point of view of the locals who live there), but he also had some management tips for us....

Bad Chemicals

He said he brings a giant box of donuts to work in the morning. They are the most sugary ones he can find and filled with "bad chemicals." He says

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MIGS: Chris Hecker

Chris HeckerChris Hecker always seems like the smartest guy in the room. Even when the room is big and full of lots of people, he still seems like the smartest guy in the room. He's a hardcore programmer who fights crime at night and can fly. Here's a sample of his everyday conversations:

We use a 4th order polynomial in the squared distance from the sample point to the center of the given metaball for the implicit surface, similar to Triquet, Meseure, and Chaillou. They use a 2nd order polynomial, but we square the main term again to get more continuous derivatives to avoid lighting discontinuities. The actual equation is:
c_i is the metaball center position, R_i is the metaball radius (the function is defined to be 0 outside this radius), and s_i is the scale factor for the metaball, affecting its goopiness.

Anyway, he often talks about non-programmery stuff at conferences so that the rest of us can learn something from him, too. At the Montreal International Game Summit, he talked about the game industry as a whole. He looked at a lot of data and I'm not able to pass that on to you because I don't have it, so instead I'll cover more holistically what his point was.

The Game Industry Is Bigger Than Movies

Hecker started by showing several stats that show the game industry is bigger than the movie industry. We make more revenue per year, our biggest blockbusters pull in as much or more cash than movie blockbusters in the opening weeks, and so on. Even though there's lots of convincing figures that support this overall claim, Hecker says that it's all basically bullshit.

The Game Industry Isn't Bigger Than Movies

Hecker told us about the Sultan of Brunei, a man who owns 6,000 cars

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MIGS: Brenda Brathwaite

Brenda Brathwaite

EDIT: Brenda contacted me and I posted some corrections to this article here.

I don't know what to make of Brenda; I was kind of dumbfounded and speechless after her presentation. Brenda probably would (and should) take that as a compliment because that is the reaction that a true artist hopes to achieve with a work of art. (Does that make her a true artist or does it make her a work of art?) I will explain the big praise I have for her work, the big criticism, the reason my criticism isn't valid, and the nagging feeling that it somehow must be valid. Or I don't know anymore.

First some background on her. She is a professor of game development and interactive design at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Georgia. At 15 years old, she got a job where she played games in order to know enough about them to answer phones at a gaming hint-line. She said she was going to get a "real job" after that, but it just never happened. She went on to work on Wizardry and several other story-based video games.

A Game That Meant Something

Now let's cover what I consider to be her awesomeness. It starts with a story about her daughter and then half-way includes what she did next. Her daughter came home from school one day and when Brenda asked what she did, her daughter said she learned about the Middle Passage. I think the students were learning about slavery for a whole month, and this was one part of it. The daughter then recited in detached textbook voice how Africans were taken from their homes, put on boats, taken to America, made to work, but then Abraham Lincoln freed them with the Emancipation Proclamation.

Brenda was horrified. Her daughter just DIDN'T GET IT. It was not some vacation cruise. It was not something you even talk about in the tone of voice the daughter had. That's understandable though because the daughter is only 7 years old, so it's hard to grasp a topic like this. Still, Brenda felt extremely uncomfortable that after a month of school about this sort of thing, the message wasn't getting through.

She decided to do something about it. She devised a simple (non-computer) game for her daughter. First she got a bunch of wooden pawns of various sizes (she has things like this laying around for prototyping things) and pained them different colors with her daughter. A big green pawn and two small green pawns. Two big blue pawns and two small blue pawns, and so on. When she had several sets of these (that obviously represented families), she took some at random and put them on a piece of wood she called "the boat." Her daughter thought her mother was doing it wrong already because she didn't take all the green ones, but just one or two. The colors were now all mixed up and there sets weren't complete anymore because some were on the boat and some weren't. She told her daughter that that's how it was. You didn't have a choice to go on the boat and you didn't get to be with who you wanted. "Will the green one see the other green ones again?" the daughter asked. "Probably not," Brenda said.

Brenda devised some simple rules about making the ocean journey. It takes 10 turns to get to the other side, there are some certain number of food-units, each person needs X food units or they die, there was some dice mechanic somewhere in there to make it less deterministic and a bit harder to figure out.

Half-way through, the daughter said, "Mom, we aren't going to make it." Brenda said that maybe it would be possible to make if farther if we "put some of them in the water" (so there's more food for the rest). Brenda reports that her daughter had a look of understanding on her face, the same look she should have had when talking about the Middle Passage earlier. Her daughter cried, and Brenda did not continue the game any further. Brenda cried too.

It's a powerful thing. A simple

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MIGS: Every Click Counts

I was invited to speak at the Montreal International Game Summit, which happened earlier this week. My topic was called Every Click Counts. The idea is to OMIT NEEDLESS CLICKS wherever you can.

A video game is a system of rules that are codified in the form of software that runs on hardware. A player is a human being, a separate entity from the game. That player's experience is heavily influenced (even defined?) by the interface--the thing crosses the gap between game and player. We spend millions of dollars on some games, focusing on the development of their systems and their software, but somehow the part where the player actually presses buttons or clicks through a non-terrible menu often slips through the cracks.

Can you imagine if instead of games we were talking about writing, and writers were so busy telling their stories that they ended up with goofy, semi-unreadable fonts and page layout so terrible that you get annoyed just looking at it, much less trying to read it? Somehow the magazine and newspaper industries have figured this stuff out, yet in our industry, I still see lots of wasted clicks in games that should know better.

"Actually Flossing"

I started my lecture explaining that I would take the unusual path of telling the audience what they already know. I mean, we all know that making the command to reload a weapon be 5 clicks would be a terrible idea, right? It's like when you go to the dentist and he says, "You really should floss your teeth more." You probably already knew that. So the point of my lecture wasn't to tell you floss more, it was to get you to actually floss...so to speak.

I explained to the audience who made me "actually floss" when it came to concise writing: Professor Strunk from The Elements of Style. I went over many things that annoyed Strunk, things he hated, things he thought showed that a writer didn't understand the craft. Don't say "the question as to whether," instead say "whether." Don't say "used for fuel purposes," say "used for fuel." That's only a savings of one word, but more than that, it shows that you understand your purpose as a writer: to deliver a message cleanly, efficiently, and vigorously. Vigorous writing is concise.

When I see a sentence that's a just a bit bloated, sometimes I think, "maybe that's ok." Then I see my mental picture of Strunk and he says "No! It's not ok." He's a constant reminder to me that in writing we should all try harder. He reminds me that the reader is "floundering in a swamp," as Strunk says, and that the reader needs all the help he can get. If he can be confused somehow, he will be. If he can be annoyed somehow, he will be. Strunk's contempt for bloated or ill-conceived prose keeps me on track, so I prosed to the audience that my contempt for extra clicks could be their tool to do better. Picture me (or Strunk if you prefer) with head-in-hands, or quivering in revulsion at whatever tragic UI decision or game mechanic is at hand.

Examples

Armed with that, we were ready to look at examples. I showed an extra click in Burnout Revenge every time you want to restart a mission, then compared it to

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