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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Making Games Faster

At last week's Unity engine conference, Flashbang Studios gave a presentation about how to make games faster. To me, it was a surprising and great presentation. Surprising because went against my expectations of what a talk at the Unity conference would be about. Great because it summarized much of the best advice I've heard about project management in one place with nothing extra.

Flashbang decided to make games on an 8-week cycle (!!) and post them at blurst.com. They made 8 games this way. They've now decided to change their model and work on polishing up just one of those 8 games into a full version, but that's really beside the point. The particulars of their situation aren't important because their message is appropriate to a very broad audience: not just Unity engine users, not just people who want to make 8-week games--or games at all--but really anyone who is working on a software project.

Reframing the Problem

Matthew Wegner (founder and CEO) and Steve Swink (game designer and kindred sprit) presented. They started by explaining the importance of questioning the framing of a problem, as opposed to trying to find a solution for a problem. A problem you might have is, "It takes too long to place enemy AI waypoints in each level of my game." You might optimize that process by finding a way to reduce the number of clicks the designer needs to place any given waypoint. But if you use a bit of lateral thinking, you might instead design levels that don't need so many waypoints. Or much better than that, design the AI system so that it doesn't need waypoints at all! What they're getting at is that if you take the problem as given, you will probably limit your solution space--the set of things you would even possibly consider as potential solutions.

What if your problem is, "how do we make games faster?" I think they might have given another presentation about how to optimize various things inside the Unity engine (or at least I think they said they did), but here they were saying that that sort of thing isn't *really* the problem. I mean, when they try to ship games in 8 weeks, is it really the inefficiency of waypoints or whatever that threatens the schedule? There are much, much bigger problems. In fact, the question should really be, "how can I get more things done?" (Not their words, but here's a link to the seminal book on Getting Things Done.)

Two Amazing Hours

The first part of their theory is that we really only get about 2 hours of seriously focused, amazing-quality work per day--if we're lucky. Maybe you can get 2.5 or 3 sometimes, but that's pushing it. There are so many distractions and blockers, so many times when you're too tired or hungry or upset about something, or whatever. Flashbang is saying just be real here: accept that you're only going to be able to do amazing work for a short time each day. Knowledge work as it's called, is the type of thing where you could spend 20 hours on a problem and not solve it, but just *one* hour of your fully charged genius-time could solve it.

Ok, so how do we make sure we get that super-charged-time each day? And how do we maybe get a little bit more of it than usual? Flashbang's answer is that the WORST thing you could do is work really long hours as is common in so many game companies. If you're spending all your time at work, tired, fatigued, probably malnourished, how are you going to have any of that time be the amazing 2 hours? Factor in that you probably had no time for laundry, a haircut, your dentist appointment, or your relationships, and it sounds like you're going to be pretty miserable. Do you think being miserable is a good way to increase the number of super-productive hours you have?

Flashbang tried an experiment. For two weeks, they REDUCED their work hours to 10am to 3:30 pm. The idea is that everyone knew they had only limited time to get things done, and they had plenty of time to live a good life outside of work. At first, they actually kicked people out at 3:30 and turned off the power to make sure people left and didn't stay out of some strange guilt. They measured (though didn't give the details) their productivity before and after this change. If it turned out they got less work done than usual during that 2 weeks, they would cancel the plan and go back to regular work hours. The thing is, they found that productivity really did go up. They kept these reduced work hours for the rest of their projects. It's more informal now and sometimes people do stay longer, but they said "if we're still at work and it's time for dinner, we usually say 'hey, that's pretty weird! This is like crunch-mode day!'"

They said that if you see your time as an unending ocean ("hey, I'll be here for another 15 hours anyway today, and again tomorrow"), then it doesn't even phase you if the solution to a problem would take 5 hours of menial labor from you. But when your time is limited, you think about alternate solutions, or question the framing of the problem that is leading to the tedious work. This is one area where I'm not sure I agree though. I do often see my own time as an unending ocean, and if a task takes me 10 hours, that's what it takes. I asked them about this afterward and Matthew said "yeah, when you work from home, it feels like every moment is a moment that you 'should' or at least could be working." I guess spending long hours of my own time on what I choose to spend it on at home isn't quite the same thing as a game company creating a corporate culture where you must be there 15 hours per day to fit in.

48 Minutes of Flow

This concept of high productivity time is really called Flow. (Here's the seminal work on Flow.) Steve Swink gave further advice on how to actually get down to work. He said what usually happens is

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Unite '09

I attended the first two days of the Unite '09 conference, for the Unity game engine. Unfortunately I'll be out of town to miss the rest, but I saw quite a bit.

In case you don't know, Unity is a super great game engine. You can develop on Mac or PC, and you can publish to Mac, PC, and web. You can also get upgrades that let you publish to Wii and iPhone as well, and they finally announced that Xbox 360 publishing is coming soon, though I've known about that for a while. The ability to publish the same game to so many platforms (in one click) is pretty game-changing in our industry. The web player is especially game-changing because it allows full 3d games in a browser that are just as fast (hardware accelerated!) as the downloadable versions!

I'm particularly interested in turning Yomi and two other of my card games into online free-to-try web games, along with a puzzle game. I was wondering how to integrate the Unity 3d web stuff into an actual website in a nice looking way, but the conference answered that too! Two speakers showed how to integrate Flash (for non-game stuff like profiles, chat, nice menus, etc) with Unity (for the actual game). Very impressive results. Now I just need some way to actually make it all happen. ;)

Unity increased its amazingness today by releasing version 2.6 with a great new animation editor (allows you to carefully integrate script calls with animations), a profiler (to watch cpu usage of everything in your game to find out what's slowing things down), and several more features, fixes, and speed increases. But the biggest news was that their Unity Indie license (which lets you do like 95% of what the full version can do) went from $200 to free. Yes, FREE. That's a bold move on their part, but when you look what the small percentage of revenue that version made them overall, it really does make sense to open it up to everyone for free. Your whole classroom can use it for free. Your garage band of game-makers. Your professional studio even. Pros will surely upgrade to Unity Pro anyway, just to remove the Unity slash screen, but there's no break in workflow by upgrading, so you could start your project for free and work as long as you want with that free version, then make the upgrade anytime. Or never. You can ship commercial products with the free version, ha.

Anyway, I'm really impressed. I just need a team now, and we can get to making things. ;)

Special thanks to Mauricio Longoni for making great looking games in Unity, Paul Tondeur for his work on integrating Unity and Flash (Mauricio too), and everyone at Flashbang Studios for being all-around cool guys. Perhaps the special-est thanks of all to David Helgason, CEO of Unity. He explained that one of the things you can do at the conference is book time with just about anyone at Unity you want and ask them any question you want. Like "why doesn't my game controls work right?" and then show them what you have. Or "how would I make an AI system that does X,Y,Z in Unity?" He said last year someone booked time with him, the CEO, and asked "How did you manage to create a community so infused with love?" Interesting question, but one way or another, that is the helpful vibe I get from everyone involved. Unity seems to want to actually enable people to make games, as opposed to some other game engine companies that seem a bit more interested in making Gears of War. Not that there's anything wrong with that engine either, but hey, it's hard to beat free. And it's hard to beat publishing to mac, windows, web, wii, iphone, and xbox 360, too.

The Design of Things

My girlfriend asked, "When someone asks you 'what do you like to do?' do you ever tell them that you like to imagine the meeting that took place where they designed whatever it is that's in front of you? Because that seems like your main hobby."

Owned. And yes it is my main hobby, more than playing games. Here's a couple examples.

The Emergency Shut-off Valve

I was at Costco, a discount warehouse store (does not mean that it sells warehouses) with its own gas station. The layout of the gas station is designed so that you can only approach the pumps from one side. This is actually fine and not a problem. It has the consequence that while you are getting gas, your car is definitely pointed in a certain direction. Several feet in front of you, away from the pumps, is a sign that says "EMERGENCY SHUT-OFF VALVE." I thought this was well-designed, and I should have taken a picture for you, sorry. Anyway, if something goes horribly wrong at the gas station, you or someone else there could push that button and prevent even more gas from catching on fire or blowing up or whatever.

The sign is red with bold white lettering. The words are in all capital letters. I'm usually against all caps as there is some mistaken impression that this makes things easier to read. It doesn't because when letters are all caps, they look more similar to each other than when they aren't. It also has the connotation of yelling. All caps is way overused, and it has no place on my menu saying things like "BAKED APPLE PIE: $8.99." But if there was ever a time to use all caps, I think a warning sign saying "EMERGENCY SHUT-OFF VALVE" is probably it.

Under the sign is one button. Not a panel of buttons, just one button. And it's pretty big and red. It would be impossible to look at this situation and think, "I'm not really sure how I operate this emergency shut-off valve." Further, there's another sign next to the button that describes in a few more words the concept of pressing this button in case there is a fire. It also tells you to call 911, and some other important people you can call too, while you're at it.

I wondered if the sign started out as white with red letters. After all, red letters are attention-getting right? But the red sign with white letters that they actually chose is better, it really looks, um, emergency-ey. Also, do you think there were early plans that put this button right by the gas pumps? I mean that would make sense, it's a button that has to do with the gas pumps so maybe someone drew up some plans to put it there. Then someone pointed out, "Uh, if you need to push that button, you're probably ON FIRE if the button is located right there. How about not right next to the pumps, but instead ahead, in the direction we already know all the cars are facing?"

My girlfriend suspects there was no meeting, and that a non-iditot silently figured all this out on his own, drew up plans, and no one questioned them. Maybe, but that's boring to think about.

The "Silence Ringer" Switch

My girlfriend just an iPhone (finally), and one of the first questions she asked me was how to silence the ringer. I showed her that there is

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