Game Design Advance

I’m sure most of you have seen this by now, but I just thought I would link to a great post by Anna Anthropy on the level design over at her blog. Basically she dissects a small portion of one level from Super Mario Land, and shows the care and craft that went into designing even such a small corner of the game.

The piece reminds me a lot of the stuff that Richard Terrell has been doing over on his blog Critical-Gaming, which should also be referred to for some great insights into level design.

She mentions at the beginning of her post that she was partly inspired by a conversation she and I had about the lack of any real discussion about level design. The truth is that, as I’ve said before, I think the real problem is that most people who talk about games don’t actually make them. Anna Anthropy, Richard Terrell, and Steven Gaynor over at Fullbright have all written great pieces on level design, and they all have at least one thing in common: they all make games.

Also, if anybody’s wondering about the podcast she mentions, Noah Sasso and I are in the process of recording a dozen or so interviews which we’re going to edit all at once and then start releasing late August or early September.

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I guess I don’t really want to be in the habit of just linking off to my own blog, but here we go…

One of the projects at the Eyebeam Mixer last Saturday got me thinking (and rambling) about a topic which has interested me for a while: Applying “game-like” design to creative tools, especially to musical creative tools. The post is a bit long-winded and almost certainly full of misguided opinions, but it seems apropos to this venue, so maybe you’ll get something out of it.

“Game Design & Musical Play” @ Auscillate

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Unless you were living in New York City this past Spring it’s unlikely that you were able to attend any of the series of lectures by game industry luminaries hosted at NYU’s new Game Center and moderated by the Center’s Director Frank Lantz. Well now each of the lectures are available as a podcast through iTunes, which you can find by simply searching ‘NYU Game Center’.

The lecture series included:

• Dr. Ian Bogost, author of Persuasive Games
• Jonathan Blow, creator of Braid
• Warren Spector, creator of Ultima: Underworld, the Thief series, and Deus Ex
• Marc LeBlanc, creator of the MDA framework
• Eric Zimmerman + Katie Salen, co-authors of Rules of Play

 
Highlights from the series include Ian Bogost literally speaking Greek (which is hilarious when you think about it), Jon Blow confessing that he doesn’t really play test his games, and Warren Spector saying that the most important story in a game is the player’s and then saying that he’s more interested in making games with authored stories. Also, if you want to know what I sound like, I’m the guy that asks a question in almost every Q&A session (and isn’t Eric Zimmerman).

The lecture series will be returning in the Fall and those will also be made available in podcast form!

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An interesting conversation is going on in the world of Chess, where rules modifications, including something called a “slight win”, are being proposed to address issues like too many draws and general watchability/playability issues. It’s interesting to watch how this “authorless” game undergoes design evolution through a process of player activism and institutional policy.

I found out about this via Tyler Cowen’s blog. Tyler is a well-known economist. His angle on the proposed changes, and the econ-centric comments on his post, are fascinating.

One commentator put it: “Great. Having screwed up finance and economics beyond rescue, you guys now want to screw up chess too.”

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Sometimes you have to make your own fun.

Gears of War 2 is not a hard game. In fact, it would be fair to say that on its default settings everyone will see the ending cinematic if they’re willing to sink the time. With this in mind I decided to give myself some additional challenge in my second playthrough, so I increased the difficulty to ‘Hardcore’, meaning when enemies took me down I would actually die instead of being revived by my AI companion. On top of that I decided that I would see how far I could get without taking cover (with the exception of vaulting over barriers, which requires it), expecting to make ample use of the ‘dive’ mechanic. A couple of hours into the game I discovered something surprising:

The cover mechanic in Gears of War 2 is completely superfluous.

In Gears 2 the most effective way to take cover is to simply stand behind something, and there is always something you can stand behind. This is actually more advantageous than ‘taking cover’ because it allows you to quickly dart in and out of fire without having to re-aim. It also helps that there’s almost never a need to flank in Gears 2;  if you can get behind something you can stay there for the entirety of an encounter.

This situation is probably because all the level designers at Epic grew up with and got jobs making levels for first-person shooters. As a result they’ve created maps, perhaps unconsciously, that can almost always be played without resorting to Gears of War’s signature mechanic.

The real question is whether or not these additional contraints made Gears of War 2 more interesting and unfortunately the answer is ‘no’. Maybe I should try ‘Insane’ difficulty with no cover in co-op?

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Gears of War 2 is the bloodiest casual game ever made.

The cover mechanic, which if done well could add a level of tactical nuance to a shooter, does nothing so much as turn the game into a multi-million dollar update of Hogan’s Alley. However, if that’s too complicated for you, then you can spend large parts of the game simply standing out in the open and firing. Since you and your opponents are basically bullet-pillows able to take a full clip to the chest without pausing, this is in many cases the easiest course. Even if you do end up being taken down it’s nothing to worry about as your AI buddy is always there to revive you.

Gears 2 is also a prime example of the mini-gamification of the shooter. In addition to the little timing puzzle that you play each time you reload (which is an excellent innovation), and between the rounds of the lightgun-game-with-controller, there are numerous vehicle and turret sections. While the turret sections are all basically similar, every vehicle section has its own quirks, each of which are explained to you at the beginning of the level, none of which are really explored (thanks Half-Life 2).

The story of the game gets a lot of ridicule, with all its unselfconscious jingoism, but it wouldn’t be surprising if one day it’s appreciated for its camp. If that day comes soon then the makers of Gears will mostly likely say it was the plan all along. They’ll probably be lying, but it doesn’t really matter.

Gears of War 2 may be a sign of things to come, where single-player games are more a collection of smaller games and mechanics that don’t relate in any meaningful way. If that’s true, then let’s just hope they keep supporting multi-player modes.

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As some of you may already know New York University has recently begun organizing a new department that focuses on game design and development called the Game Center. To kick things off NYU has been hosting a series of lectures by game industry luminaries such as Ian Bogost and Jonathan Blow, hosted by friend and founder of Game Design Advance, Frank Lantz.

So far the talks have been very interesting, with a good back-and-forth between the speakers, Frank, and the audience. The talks are open to the public and there are a few heavy-hitters coming up that would be a shame to miss:

Thursday, April 16th from 6 – 8PM
Warren Spector, influential game designer presently working with Disney Interactive.

Thursday, April 23rd from 6 – 8PM
Marc “Mahk” LeBlanc, creator of the MDA framework, a powerful conceptual approach to game design.

Thursday, April 30th from 6:30 – 8PM
Eric Zimmerman & Katie Salen, co-authors of the groundbreaking book on game design, Rules of Play.

Friday, May 8th from 6 – 8PM
Clint Hocking, pioneering game designer whose work explores new directions for blending narrative and gameplay.

The talks are being held in the Tisch Building, 721 Broadway, in Room 006.

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There are a couple of interesting things happening in New York City soon:

Frank Lantz, the founder of Game Design Advance, among other things, is giving a talk this Friday in Tribeca. This is a great opportunity in that Frank rarely gives long, solo talks, especially on some of the more esoteric things that go on in his head. The talk starts at 8pm this Friday, March 20th; tickets are $10 and can be ordered online or purchased at the door.  More info is here:

Frank Lantz – How Games Mean

Another upcoming event is The New Museum of Contemporary Art’s first triennial exhibition, which is going to feature Mark Essen’s brilliant game Flywrench. I’ve sung my praises for the game and am happy that it’s getting some great exposure. The exhibition is featuring a range of artists and will be mounted sometime next month. You can read about the event in The New York Times here:

Art of the Computer Generation

I’ll post an update when a start date gets pinned down.

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Where is ‘games criticism’?

This is a bigger question than it seems at first, with a few different ways it could be posed. With the closing of Electronic Gaming Monthly and the inevitable decline of its print brethren, the question could be about whether authoritative opinion on games is moving permanently from the analog to the digital world; or, as it becomes more and more obvious that the audience for video games is much larger and diverse than previously envisioned, the question becomes much more plaintive: “where is a voice to tell me what games I’ll like?” The proliferation of game-focused bloggers with a specialty in serving specific readerships rather than large ones turns this question into something a little more existential: games criticism is now everywhere, and as a result is it nowhere?

Still another way of asking this question is from the perspective that game criticism is always happening, and as a subject is much larger than the various forms it has taken, is taking, and will take in the future. The question could pre-suppose that all the work that’s being done right now exists within a history that stretches back to maybe not the first game ever made, but certainly the second. After all, what is creation but something of a critique of the past? This implies that perhaps the question posed is really a shortening of the real question at hand:

Where is games criticism right now?

I’ve tried to summarize here what I think are the dominant approaches to game criticism at the present moment. I refer to these approaches as ‘modes’ because we tend to shift between them, often without realizing. This effort is in no way meant to trivialize the work of any individual critic, but simply to give context. The easier it is for us as a critical community to see where we’ve been and identify where we are now, the easier it is to think about where we are going.

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Things have been pretty quiet here at GDA for a few weeks, so I just thought I would pass on some of the things I’ve been reading that might be overlooked.

The first is a piece by Chris Bateman over on iHobo where he does a great job of summarizing some of the research that has been done on how the human brain reacts to games.

Over on Applied Game Design, Brenda Brathwaite has an interesting post on the difference and tension between a game’s system (what she calles the ‘database’) and its story. Be sure to read the comments!

Taking a closer look at narrative in games is Emily Short on her blog. The question here is what is the most effective way to use dialogue to create characterization in interactive fiction. However, what I found most interesting were the parts discussing the reaction of ‘casual’ gamers to dialogue trees.

On the other side of the system/story coin we have David Sirlin’s thoughts on Street Fighter IV. Sirlin gives the sort of expert opinion that’s always necessary with games as complicated as Street Fighter.

Finally, the last link isn’t a specific post, but a new blog that our friend Noah Sasso pointed me towards: SHMUPtheory. Dedicated to shooters, it’s just started and only has a few posts up, but hopefully the author will keep going!

Hope you all get as much out of reading these as I did!

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