Borut Pfeifer on accessibility of game AI by design

Borut Pfeifer came to UC Santa Cruz last Wednesday (30th of November) and gave a talk about how to make sure that all the cool AI made for a game is made accessible to the players.



The key factors that Borut identified for making the AI accessible to players are
- the complexity of the input that players can make to the game
- the feedback from the game to the player
- the pacing of the difficulty to play and of the dramatic tension in the game.

Borut used the Sims 3 as an example of  good AI accessibility by design: The interface  is simple and intuitive, but still results in complex interesting things in the game, and also allows for more complexity to unfold during continued play. He continued to, in the talk, illustrate the three key factors by showing example from his own development work, mainly from creating the AI for the companion NPC Eve in the development of LMNO, (such a pity the project was cancelled), and from the game he is currently working on, Skulls of the Shogun. I can't wait to play Skulls of the Shogun, Borut's plan for how to pace the dramatic buildup by careful design of the core game mechanics made me swoon a little! It's in development, due in the spring sometime.



Links:


Description of Borut's talk:
http://games.soe.ucsc.edu/events/event/97

About LMNO:
http://www.1up.com/features/story-steven-spielberg-lmno

About Skulls of the Shogun:
 http://skullsoftheshogun.com/

Clint Hocking on dynamics and meaning in games

Clint Hocking, Creative Director at LucasArts, gave a talk at UCSC last week about meaning, dynamics and games. He took a stance in asking HOW games mean (following Chris Hecker) rather than WHAT they mean. "When we know how they mean, maybe then we can speculate on what a specific game might mean."

Clint explained the Kuleshov effect to us, showing how the exact same image takes on different meanings depending on what context it is shown in.

He then went on to talk about Brathwaite's game Train, in the Mechanic is the Message series, where the train cars are destined to the camps of the Second World War. He asked us to close our eyes and play Tetris in our heads pretending that the boxes are train cars. He hummed the tetris music for us.

This was extremely powerful.

Different strategies are possible to obstruct the cars going to their destinations: leave one free spot in each Tetris-row would save as many as possible for example.

By this example he wanted to illustrate how the expression "only a skin" is a reduction when we talk about fictional themes for a game. Changing the fictional theme but not the mechanics of a game is more than a skin because it can change the dynamics of a game, that is, how it is played. (When saying 'dynamics' and 'mechanics' Clint used the terms as used in Hunicke's MDA model.)

Clint's next example was the novel "The Masters of Go" by Kawabata Yasunari that describes a Go match where the game play express the tension between modern and traditional Japan. We looked at the end-state of the game, which was extremely interesting. I think this is one of the best examples one can point at when arguing that not only creating a game can be art - playing games is also a form of art. In this case the art is created by two players together. I remember an anime series I watched when I spent a guest research period in Tokyo - Hikaru No Go - that anime series expressed a similar view on go-playing as art. The perfect game.

Clint argued that it can be difficult to say what the games Tetris or Go mean, but that it is possible to tell what a certain instance of playing the game can mean. Like in our combination of Tetris with train, and in the Go-game described in the Masters of go.

This was one of the best talks I've heard this year, it's up there at the top together with Brian Moriarity's talk at GDC this year. Thank you Clint :)

Lemarchand gave a talk at EIS about the beaty of systems and of risk-taking

Richard Lemarchand, lead game designer at NaughtyDog, just gave a wonderfully inspiring talk at UCSC. (Talk-description here.) Richard spoke about the beauty of systems and about creative risk-taking, illustrating with evokative pictures and music from games. He referred to two talks that I'll want to check up on, Jonathan Blows talk from GDCE this year about truth and game design (available for free in the GDC vault), and Kent Hudson's talk from GDC'11 on "Player-Driven Stories: How do we get there?" (available at Hudsons website). Richard said so many beautiful things about games, and showed many good examples. I don't think I was alone in the audience in wanting to rush home and make a game once we had stopped applauding him.

Richard ended with a list of practical advice to anyone who is about to make an indie game:
- Don’t listen to people saying it can't or shouldn't be made - Do what you can with the skills you have
- Collaborate, and be persistent
- Say when you don’t know something - people will teach you stuff
- If something needs changing - change it
- Be respectful but direct.
- Be honest, and dare to be vulnerable. (Helps create an atmosphere where it is ok to fail - necessary for risk taking)
- Fail early, fail often.

An evening with Brenda and John

Yesterday evening Brenda Garno Brathwaite and John Romero were speaking at the IGDA Silicon Valley chapter. I got a ride with Chris Lewis from the EIS lab over the hill to Mountainview to listen.

These are my main take-aways:
Brenda: “The rule-set is what separates games from all other art.” Although I have read Brenda’s great book and heard her speak several times i don’t tire of hearing her say this because it is so true. This is the reason why focus on the game mechanics is so necessary.

Brenda and John in a kind of unison: “There *must* be a design lead in a group with several designers. It is great to collaborate in design, but never ever design by committee”. Again, I couldn’t agree more, and in case someone forgets.... just don’t do it, it is so painful.

John: “Fix the second to second game play before you fix the minute to minute.” //boring down to the smallest units of mechanics - I think he means a kind of unit-testing or unit based refinement of game mechanics.

There was a question on how to deal with designers-block, and both John and Brenda were of the opinion that (their) the real challenge is rather to rein themselves in. And that there is always some aspect to work on on a game if another is blocked. Brenda suggested that a block might mean something else: “Games have this way of mercy-killing themselves.”
John: “Don’t name the game in the beginning...don’t force the the name on the game, it will come.

Brenda: Core games will come to Facebook. We can’t ignore that the audience has come to expect certain formats, and games of other types will need to be eased in. //I’m was curious what she’d think about G+ as a platform, but too shy to ask.

About prototyping:
John: I don’t do paper prototyping, I see it so clearly in my head. When the fist version is done I watch players play. It is important to be very quiet, to watch, not interrupt, and write down what the players do. When watching players play Doom and Quake I could see how they would go in certain directions, and I’d redesign and then watch again to see what effects my changes had.
Brenda: I do paper prototyping - I work it in as a milestone. When doing RPGs.


I might have not gotten everything exactly right when I listened - the notes that are not within quotation marks above are not verbatim what was said, it was more what I thought was said as i was jotting down notes.

Digra 2011 Diary Day 1

Eric Zimmerman was the first key-note.
My jotted words: We are not just researchers, we are also educators.
We are still justifying game research. Danger of becoming irrelevant. Gamification, instrumentalization. Entering the ludic century: The necessity of understanding complex systems (gaming literacy).


Jon Manker and I were matched, so we presented in the same session. Jon has interviewed 27 game designers about their prototyping process, and matched different stages and activities to terms used in rhetoric. Parthes, for example, is negotiation, topops is subject, and pistis is trust. Synecdoc is the understanding of the whole.
When I presented we could map some of the terms to the examples that I showed.

We presented on the first session, so we were not really sure about the new presentation format the Digra conference was trying out. I found it really nice with the matching - that was a good thing. But I wasn’t too fond of the “match cards”. I was at the end of my short talk, and just about to deliver the actual research results when one member in the audience interrupted me. She requested that Jon should start discussing. I became so flustered and confused that I only presented the parts of the results that were specific to the game-design I had presented. I never told the audience about what general conclusions that were possible to draw from the play-tests done. Instead i tried to bend over adhering to the “match game” given by that card. As the conference went on the match cards weren’t used, and people tended to just do present their research. I liked that since that’s why i went to the conference in the first place. I’m not sure what to make of that, since I don’t know what motivations others’ had when going to certain presentations. *I* would be interested to hear about the research results, but others might prefer discussions and games loosely related to the research subjects instead. That’s OK too. Anyone who went to the session and is curios about the research I have done can find the paper in the Digra digital library (look for the 2011-paper in the list).



Next, I went to Jonas Linderoth’s presentation. He talked about the importance of gaming psychologies that fits reality, and about affordances. (Norman’s and Gibson’s notions, and how they differ from Jonas’ view on affordances - ie the empty spaces between the puzzle-pieces.)



I had my lunch sandwich in the cabin where the Feminist game panel was. Susanne de Castel and her co-workers are launching a project calling for initiatives where interventions can change local conditions.




When Espen Aarseth and Bart Simon was matched for a session the cabin was full. Bart toyed with the concept of games as a platform for social imagination. Espen tried to “steal back the term Ludus from Caillois misuse”. He showed Mark Twains paint-the-fence as an early example of the idea of gamification. ...Caillois and Huizinga as romanticists, seeing games as something other, something better... Magic Circle backlash. Then, Espen pointed at Eric and stated that the concept of the magic circle wasn’t very central to Huizinga anyway, that it became so because Eric and Katie pointed it out as such in their rules of play book. Espen said that Huizinga only mentioned the magic circle twice, but then Jaakko had to interrupt and say that he indeed mentions it *three* times. Espen then moved on to saying that we should stop being an apologetic club and start doing critical work, after which he indudec a bashing of how Goffmans theories are used. Somehow the discussion came into gambling, and Frans said that it has been considered too simplistic and random by researchers to be interesting as a research subject. Then, Gordon stuck in his head through the window and said a few words to Huizinga’s defence:

IRSGD day 1

Yesterday we had our first symposion of the International Research School of Game Design (IRSGD). In the morning we met in the mocap studio. Steven Bachelder, (he is our über-chair) had made sure that Richard Bartle, Mike Sellers, Ernest Adams, Pär Ågerfalk and Masayuki Nakajima and myself were all in place. Our first task is to work out how we see the subject of game design and game design research. The goal is not consensus, rather to establish a workable agenda.

In the afternoon Richard, Mike and Ernest gave talks that were open to students. Again, our students make me proud. They always toss themselves into game development like there was no tomorrow. The big hall in the library was packed, and relevant questions were asked. When we had to make a small break just to make sure that people could get some air.



We will continue our discussions today, and for that I am making a notes of yesterday to keep in mind as we continue:
- Mike: A unique aspect of games is that they produce goals relevent internally in the system. Research agenda very close to my own; social agents, emotions in games, meaningful narratives. (We are so on the same page)
- Richard: Games with soul. The importance of talking to designers. Importance of formally describing game design elements. (We are too on the same page. Operational logics etc.)
- Ernest: gave a great list of what game design is, and what it isn’t. Very useful. Then, after mapping several optional approaches for games research he zeroed in on focusing on game design problems. (erm... We are SO on the same page.)

Today Else Nygren, Mikael Wiberg, and Patrick Prax (all three from Uppsala) are joining us and we will all give mini-talks in the same spirit as yesterday. I’ll take the opportunity to talk about AI based game design.

GDCE’11 highlights

I saw tons of talks at this GDC, and scribbled piles of notes. But ignoring notes, to-do exclamations and note-to-selfs these talks stand out in my memory:

- Dean Tate’s talk on Dance Central
- Carl Callewaert’s hands on demonstrations of Unity
- Richard Garriotts keynote on the three eras of gaming




Break it Down! How Harmonix and Kinect Taught the World to Dance; The Design Process and Philosophy of Dance Central
Dean Tate (Harmonix Music)

The red thread in Tate’s talk was how the team had focused on making the learning of how to dance - the tutorial of breaking down the dance moves - into something fun, into a game in itself. Tate described clearly, and with a good balance of detail vs abstraction, the different iterations of development and testing was done in close tandem. Everyone who played Dance Central know that they really succeeded too - the result was awesome, and Tate did a great job describing what they did and how.

The Three Eras of Gaming and Why This One is a Game Changer
Richard Garriott (Portalarium)
Richard Garriott make one of these speeches that left me feeling inspired: Seeing small things in their right perspective - small, and that which sometimes seem unimportant - such as exploring ad hoc ideas that might not lead anywhere - as important. As for what he actually said: here is a link to the gamasutra summary.

What i found most intriguing was that he wants to reinvent role-playing for this new era of social gaming, starting with understanding the new players and help them along. (whereupon i made mental jazz-hands piping “me tooo! me tooo!”)

Carl Callewaert’s hands on demonstrations of Unity
Callewaert’s talks were my highlights because I’ll start using Unity this autumn, and Carl gave an excellent introduction. It wasn’t this tiresome “mumble-clicktety-click-mumblemumbleclick” but rather a clear and concise walk-trough. Thank you for that Carl!