Results tagged “industry” from Softcore Gamer

"Interesting Interactions" is a term that Jamie Antonisse coined last year - or, anyway, one that he used that I haven't heard anywhere else - and it's something that has stuck with me for a long time. It's a description of what modern mainstream video games don't do well. He was talking about Bioshock in the original context, but it's an industry-wide issue. And it's something that I come back to a lot when, for example, I read this article about the survival horror genre on Sexy Videogameland.

Leigh Alexander has had survival horror on the mind the last few days, which makes sense, I suppose, since she's been playing Silent Hill: Homecoming. I never really got into survival horror, as a genre, in games or cinema. I played a bit of Fatal Frame on the Xbox, and it was interesting, but it didn't really stick with me. I do love Shawn of the Dead, but that's really less a zombie movie than a romantic comedy with zombies. I did just buy a copy of Last Night on Earth, the board game, which I am super excited about trying out. But with few exceptions, survival horror is just not really my cup of tea.

So I didn't get particularly excited about Leigh's initial post about Silent Hill. (Although I admit I perked up a bit at the part where she talks about redefining genre labels, for survival horror games and role-playing games.) And I haven't even read her review of the game on Kotaku. But her follow-up today did catch my eye. Apparently, Leigh attributed some of the mechanics of the survival horror games of the early nineties more to technical limitations than deliberate design decisions, which inspired a response from producer John Tynes, of Microsoft Game Studios. Mostly, Tynes addresses this particular issue, stating that 3rd-person combat is a hard problem, but not for any technical reason. "We weren’t waiting for better chips to enable third-person action; we just had to keep iterating from game to game until we got somewhere that worked."

The really good stuff comes at the end, though:

The fundamental problem here is that videogames have not evolved past combat as their primary form of interaction. The branching-tree dialogues of the BioWare games is the only popular alternative route we’ve found to deliver meaty, game-defining (and game-filling) interaction. The evolution of the survival horror games towards a more action-oriented approach is for that reason: you can solve environmental puzzles, or you can have long, rambling conversations with agenda-defined NPCs, or you can kill things. I would posit that survival horror is not enhanced by long branching conversations with NPCs, so that leaves puzzles and combat. That’s all we’ve got so far in our toolbox for these kinds of games.

That, of course, is embarrassing. There are experiments in other directions, as with Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy. But for now, what console games do well is killing things, and when you look at the survival horror genre, it’s clear that its biggest weakness – without stepping outside the problem set they’ve defined – is in crappy combat. They’ve solved that now, and in the process have exposed the real failure: we don’t know how to make moody, atmospheric games that last 10-20 hours without stuffing them full of killing things. We have to step outside of the initial problem set of survival horror and ask how we can give players meaningful, game-filling interaction in a moody, suspenseful environment without resorting to combat. We have a long way to go.

I think this is a great quote. And I agree with Tynes: violence is old hat. For whatever reason - because it's simple, because it's intrinsically high-stakes, or because it's a form of fantasy fulfillment - combat is the form of conflict resolution that modern games have focused on, more than any other. We've collectively put a lot of cycles into the problem, we've gone through a lot of iterations on various approaches, and we've come up with some great solutions. That's fantastic. But it's not enough. Conflict is broader than violence; drama is more subtle.

(I'm reminded of the character Michael Scott from the American version of The Office, who said on his approach to improvisational acting: "What is the most exciting thing that can happen on TV or in movies, or in real-life? Somebody has a gun. That’s why I always start with a gun, because you can’t top it. You just can’t.")

We need to spend some of that energy developing solutions to the unsolved problems, the harder problems: compromise, debate, passive aggression, perseverance, leadership, wit, lateral thinking, personal growth, politics, love. These are all types of conflict resolution that haven't been explored nearly as much as combat. These are all interesting interactions. (And, to be fair, violence isn't the only sort of interaction that's been popular amongst game designers. Economic simulation has also been iterated on quite a lot, as have competitive sports - though combat seems to be explored the most, by a wide margin.)

Just to be clear: there are a lot of game designers out there who have experimented with interesting interactions, in independent games and in mainstream games. People have done great work in these areas, and are continuing to do great work. But we have to remember, as Tynes says, that we still have a long way to go. I'm not calling on anyone to stop putting violence in your games. But keep in mind, when you're designing, that there's a lot more than combat out there. Ask yourself if you're including an interactive element because it's the best thing for the design, or the easiest, most familiar thing for the designer. Sometimes it's good to get reminders about the more interesting interactions, so that we can work on solving those problems, too.

Yesterday was the first day of the ACM Siggraph conference in Los Angeles, and the first of several keynote talks that will be given this week. Ed Catmull, President of Walt Disney Animation Studios and Pixar, talked about managing creative environments. One of the key points he made early in his talk had to do with the wisdom he came upon early in his career: "The story is the most important part of a movie." This seemed like an important truth to have discovered, until he gave it a little more thought. Movies ARE stories, he realized. Saying that the story is the most important part of a movie isn't wisdom, it's a tautology.

Immediately after Catmull's keynote, I attended another very interesting session, a panel presentation about the production of the movie Kung-Fu Panda. One of the panelists who spoke about his experience on the film was the director, John Stevenson. While talking about production schedules and character design, he prefaced himself by saying that story is king. He said it in an offhand manner, as though it was so obvious that it barely rated mentioning. Story was the first thing and the last thing that they worried about, the most important consideration governing all aspects of the production from beginning to end.

Listening to these two men talk about their medium and share a perspective that relates moviemaking to storytelling in such a profoundly fundamental way, I couldn't help but think about the video game industry, where story is so often treated as an afterthought. Of course, games are not movies, as we well know. But, as a proponent of games as a storytelling medium, I have to ask myself: is story in games the same kind of tautology as story in movies? Or are the differences between the media such that story will always be something extra that must be added to a game in a fundamentally different way than to a movie?

Hearing Stevenson talk about the process of developing the movie's story at the same time as the character models, environments, and technologies was something of an eye-opening experience for me. When I think of movies, I usually think about a traditional live-action development pipeline where the script is written and pretty much set before filming begins. Modern CG animated movies, clearly, are a different beast. More than anything, this reminded me of a talk I saw given by Ken Levine last spring at GDC. At the time, I was shocked at the way he talked about the story in Bioshock evolving and changing in significant ways until very late in the production cycle, even within a couple months of the ship date. Bioshock, at the moment, is one of the industry's most important examples of story in games, so the fact that the game was not built around an already-fully-developed story was somewhat disconcerting to me. Thinking about it in relation to Kung-Fu Panda, however, makes it seem more reasonable. In both of these media, this sort of process occurs because it can: unlike actors and live-action footage, digital models, environments, and technologies can be re-scripted and reimplemented as the scene evolves and changes. In the blockbuster environment in which Dreamworks and 2K operate, overlapping the writing and production is cheaper than having a distinct writing stage. It also allows the writing to be integrated into the iterative design process, which is something I hadn't considered before, but could be an important point in developing interactive media.

Don't look for any real in-depth analysis of these ideas here; I'm still in conference mode and my brain is stuck in an intake-cycle. But I'm eager to hear any thoughts you have to contribute to this conversation, if anyone is interested in taking these ideas further.

Happy April Fools' Day, everyone. A funny thing happened to me today: I got a letter informing me of my acceptance into the Interactive Media grad school program at USC's School for Cinematic Arts. I was introduced to the program by Jamie last summer and worked hard to put together what I felt was a strong application at the end of last year, so I'm both relieved and excited to get this news. I think this program is an excellent fit for me and exactly what I want to spend the next three years doing. I'm also nervous as hell because going back to school will mean completely changing my life around. This is not a bad thing in itself - from the right perspective, it's a very good thing - but change is always scary.

I do want to point out the comedically bad timing on the part of the Cinematic Arts Admissions Committee. Sending out acceptance letters on April Fools' Day? That's a good way to cause a lot of nervous breakdowns. Er, did that come off as unappreciative? Sorry. Please don't send me another letter on April 2nd taking it all back. Thanks!

Seriously, though, we've been conditioned not to believe anything we read on April Fools' Day - especially those of us who are connected to the tech industry and get our news from the Internet. Most of our trusted news sources and the iconic companies they report on have a history of prankishness that comes out this time of year. I like the way John Murrell put in today's Good Morning Silicon Valley: "...maybe we need a day like this each year. Thanksgiving reminds us to be grateful; April Fools’ reminds us to be skeptical. Both qualities are helpful year-round." In case you missed them, there were a couple great April Fools' Day gags today. My favorites included IGN's exclusive trailer for a live-action Legend of Zelda movie (which clearly represents a great deal of effort for a joke and, frankly, makes me wish it wasn't April first; this movie would be terrible but I would probably go totally crazy and I would definitely stand in line for it on opening night); the trailer for Blizzard's new cutting-edge version of WoW, Molten Core; and ThinkGeek's revolutionary Betamax to HD-DVD converter.

Have a happy April and stay skeptical!

Since GDC, Joystiq has been running a feature wherein they "target[ed] various industry folks with a typically contrived adventure game puzzle" in order to, I don't really know, give them a taste of their own medicine? Honestly, it was a half-baked idea. In theory it sounds sorta clever, but when people are asked to respond to a nonsensical hypothetical without context or a common understanding to the rules or purpose, well, mostly what you get is confusion.

Unless you're talking to Tim Schafer, in which case what you get is brain candy.

To be fair, the reason that Schafer's article takes off where the others in the series fall flat has less to do with Schafer than Ludwig Kietzmann, the author of the feature. What makes Schafer's response so much fun is that he actually tries to engage with the question as though it were a game. Ron Gilbert did exactly the same thing, albeit in not quite so playful a way, in the first part of the series, but Kietzmann refused to give him any traction. Essentially, when Gilbert played, the "GDC Quest Quiz" challenge wasn't a game, because it wasn't interactive in any sort of meaningful way. When Schafer played, it was. And it turns out, games are fun.