GDC Austin: Friday

Friday was a great day. I don't know how to express my day on Friday other than I feel like it was crafted for me. Playfish, Raph Koster, and Damion Schubert.

Koster doesn't have slides up yet, but in a nutshell he says that games are about training the intuitive part of the brain. And to do that we look to mathematical/computational complexity. Games in the NP and higher complexity realms are very engaging. I heard all my CS professors shouting with exuberance. He used Karp's 21 NP-Complete problems as a reference, and boiled down every successful and fun game to some form of an NPC problem. My question then: is any game modeling an NP-C problem reducible to SAT?

Schubert pretty much convinced me that today's MMOs need solo aspects.

And Sebastien de Halleux from Playfish convinced me that I should be making Flash games.

Now to catch up on all my work... (and play Aion)

GDC Austin: Thursday MMO Extravaganza

Thursday saw the Blizzard keynote speech, which was not a very informative session. It was the Universe Behind World of Warcraft, so Brack and Pearce spent their 60 minutes talking about how Blizzard is organized administratively--everything from staffing to the number of CPUs contained in their server blades. The stats were interesting, and really didn't need a keynote, but the most interesting tidbit is that prior to WoW Blizzard had 400 employees. Today they have over 4600.

The disclaimer to the audience was that every studio and company will have a different team structure to them. Blizzard even said that they will reorganize an entire department if they change the people in director or manager positions. The same disclaimer was said at the BioWare session, Come and See the Elephant, given by Bill Dalton. So given that these structures are highly subjective and change frequently, what is the point on spending two-thirds of a lecture on volatile and useless information?

The day wasn't all bad though. Aside from networking with some very nice folks at the Expo, we attended a very fast-paced, highly technical talk on Texturing Massive Terrain. The senior graphics programmer at Blizzard, Colt McAnlis, gave a very informative presentation about optimizations, compression algorithms, and some dangling questions on texture synthesis. I'm not going to post those notes because they are intense.

Another notable session was Petur Johannes Oskarsson's case study on EVE's player elected council. My notes follow:

• the Alliance system was the result of Corps forming emergent alliances without formal system
• CCP wanted to implement governance for New Eden
• decided to design democracy based on Iceland's democracy
• the proposal was written as an academic paper and critiqued by Bartle, EVE's fanfest, and eventually forums and fansites
• the biggest issue that came up was the definition of "democracy"
• resolution was to spam the document with the "you don't have any power"; players were fine
• Council of Stellar Management (CSM)
• - 9 reps; candidates run under RL names; 6 month terms; 2 term limit
• - general, anonymous election outside of EVE available to all EVE players
• - liaison between CCP and players
• - have forums; CSM reviews topics and after deliberation presents issue to CCP
• - council is flown to Iceland to meet CCP occasionally
• 1st CSM election: 64 apps; 11.08% turnout; 24.6k votes
• 2nd: 42 apps; 8.61% turnout; 20k votes
• 3rd: 40 apps; 9.74% turnout; 27.8k votes
• low turnouts, but raw votes actually highest in latest election
• but what can these metrics be measured against? how many elections have happened in MMOs? 3.
• political parties are forming: Voice of Reason
• no attempt from CCP at censoring or directing the topics raised by the CSM
• CSM can request review on customer support polices and forum moderation, but can't bring up specific cases
• role has expanded to two-way communication:
• - CSM used to gather Apocrypha pre-release impressions
• - presented with exploit report prior to releasing to public
• these councils need trust to work
• - in person meetings are a must
• - NDAs help create trust
• future of CSM? (these were just random thoughts by Oskarsson)
• - earmark small budget for good blogs, fansites, or communities
• - possibly increase number of reps as EVE population grows
• - give Dust 514 players a voice?

GDC Austin: Wednesday Flash & Business

After all those writer sessions, I was leery of going to another one on Wednesday. In the event that I don't find a programming job at a game company by 2010, I'm seriously going to explore the Indie model.

We decided to hit up some of the Indie summit lectures and the Flash developement ones, and the non-summit sessions began on this day also so these notes contain some technical and business talks. Even though Dave Mark's presentation was technical and related to AI, it was also a very good design lecture--one of the best we've been at thus far.

Premium Flash Games by Daniel Cook

• traditional money in Flash comes from Advergames, working for hire for portals, or collecting ad revenue with Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) of $0.00035
• you could ask for money from the players instead: acquire customers; create value; charge money
• your game is valuable
• there are various payment systems available: Mochi coins, Kongregate; gamersafe
• Purchase Loop: Play Game -> Get Currency -> Buy Stuff -> Play Game
• areas to charge money:
• - Time poor: accelerators; selling currency; utility items
• - Money poor: advertising; dual currency
• - Status: aesthetic items; high visibility
• - More of the same: time gate; content gate; subscriptions
• how to generate value in game?
• most Flash games are low value
• make a hobby, not fast food
• use in-house metrics, not the portal ratings
• need at least 4/5 on the Fun Scale
• need to keep customers in order to retain revenue stream
• - build a brand
• - create a website
• you can actually release the same game multiple times, just change the first 10 mins or plot, or minor tweaks
• game is actually a service
• Facebook, portals, mobile devices are views on the game
• since it's a service you can't think "done!" and move on

Storytelling interview with Erik Wolpaw and Marc Laidlaw (Valve)

• game stories are very much integrated at Valve
• - e.g. the train mechanic was required by level design but was used again in the intro to Half-Life
• a lot of magic happens in level design; you can give all dialog to level designers but that is just to get them excited and imagine what is possible in the world (lore-wise)
• do anything to facilitate staying in the game
• - cutscenes are a no-no
• - no interrupts at all
• - what info is so important that you need to tell me right now?! (they made a joke about interrupting someone having sex to read them a short story)
• the broken panel hint/foreshadowing in Portal was seemingly accidental; it portrayed this "corrupt world" or fascade, but it was mainly to hint at the 2nd half of the game
• on the Bioshock audio tapes: if optional story elements are important enough, then why aren't they in the main part of the game?
• a lot of emotion comes form animators or coders
• storytelling is a team effort

Flash Multiplayer case study with Corey Bridges

• Flash is usually pre-loaded; this leads to large download times
• slow animations, and slower with more stuff on the screen
• Flash handles input slowly, esp. the mouse
• can be a memory hog
• usability challenges: controls, UI, authentication/login
• market challenge: do casual players even want synchronous multiplayer games?

MMO AI by Dave Mark

• goal: make PvE feel like PvP
• how do traditional NPCs make decisions?
• - "aggro" -> really the player is telling the AI when to attack
• - tank, healer, dps paradigm surfaces
• - removes enemy dynamicity and automony
• - to the players, fights become: "read the script... play your part"
• all the agents have the same model, same reaction
• we want a variety of reactions, similar to real life
• we don't need to know why, but differences do exist
• we don't want it to be completely random though
• use a simple formula which constructs weighted randoms to select a reaction
• for groups of NPCs: take a head count (allies vs enemies); judge the perceived strength of the opposition; HP; proximity to home/leader (morale); any other metric
• calculate individually the action of an NPC (fight, retreat, charge, flank, etc.)
• repeat periodically
• the result would be that the players seen one NPC run away; a few mins later they watch another one flee; then 2 more; and then the whole group breaks
• how to do target selection? (to break the tank, healer, dps paradigm)
• use a "Tactical Manager" entity which gives orders to NPCs
• TM might even have goals: "protect x" or "attack y"
• it can be reactive (reposition NPCs if some die), or proactive (charge the PCs)
• you can even have Strategy Manager to give orders to Tactical Managers
• influences maps: store relevant data in underlying grid; periodically update
• you can track PC locations and spawn ambush parties on roads or spawn rarer NPCs in low populated areas -> "strategic disposition"
• influence maps can be used by dynamic quest givers
• - game can keep track of mob locations and key locations or landmarks
• - "groups of orcs are east of X, north of Y" etc.
• you can have a much more "dynamic world" were certain NPC factions will more towards towns, away from towns, towards prey, or away from predators

Browser MMOGs with Nils-Holger Henning, Scott Kinzie and Samuel Loretan

• need to hook players in the first 30s
• need small Flash downloads, fast load times
• can't really go full screen
• more transactions come in through SMS (these games are primarily in Europe)
• more revenue comes in through credit card
• different games for different people

GDC Austin: Tuesday Writers Summit

We spent our time on Tuesday hitting up sessions in the Game Writers Summit. Interesting points were brought up, some more original than others. I'll write up my notes here, but I was surprised at how infrequently game writers actually play games or know what the next step is in their medium. I didn't say everyone, but there are many focused on falling into the same pitfalls they are trying to avoid.

I'm going to list the authors of these sessions rather than their titles because often the titles were misleading.

I am leaving out one session because it was in a bad format, and the moderator couldn't get past his agenda. He opted to stop a beneficial conversation in order to move on to his next small-group question. I know my explanation is vague, but it was a bunch of writers sitting around in tables talking about morality in games and missing the point completely (at least at my table).

Aaron Oldenburg

• counseling as a model for interactive narrative
• challenging mechanics trivialize narrative (Mots: This is the point the morality folks missed.)
• silhouettes as conversation choices rather than seeing speech options
  
• player doesn't know exactly what they've said
• they fill in the gaps--story grows in their imagination
  
• non sequitur responses also create gaps

Stephen Brock Schafer

• theater metaphor for the conscious and unconscious
• game image is the stage--the conscious
• the stage actors interact with the audience (unconscious) to form richer experiences
• even if we have a design to have "open endedness" or the illusion of (in terms of story elements; "if I am Oedipus and want to take a bath in jam..."), the technological resources to manifest that design are not present
• you can't express all those emotions without procedurally generated animations
• you can't have NPCs saying all this dynamic dialog without good text-to-speech

Steve Danuser & Tracy Seamster (NB: This pertains to MMOs)

• nobody wants to read what writers write
• Play is the shared experience: communal narrative or dialogue
• MMO challenges:
• - story arcs without conclusions; need to keep threads dangling
• - lack of single protagonist: everyone is a hero
• - pacing is up to the player
• Solutions:
• - don't cross playstyles in an arc (solo to group to raid)
• - provide satisfaction to players with different playstyles
• - "build a soap opera"
• - frame the narrative to emphasize teamwork
• - e.g. building towers in eq2; sunwell opening in wow
• - don't trick the player into believing they are the world's only hero
• - narrow focus: don't Christmas Tree
• - create urgency with event-based or time-limited quests
• player stories are more memorable than anything the writer will tell
• not about the written word; it's about the experience
• quest journals: good intentions, but where is the focus among 100s of quests?
• non-verbal story telling elements to create atmosphere and mood
• - dark portal in Hellfire
• - scar through Blood Elf starting zones

Mary De Marle

• what does a game writer do?
• - help develop game story
• - write dialogs
• players say, "story getting in the way of the fun"
• goal of a story-based game: make the player live writers' story
• won't work if story and gameplay are separate
• the player story conveyed through: mechanics, levels, placement of game challenges, NPCs, ...
• Who's really creating the player's story?
• - core mechanics: designers
• - levels: level designers
• - NPC behaviors, movements: AI programmers
• - look and feel of the world: artists
• - sound
• The writer is the "keeper of the story logic"
• - ensures the story remains consistent across all other disciplines
• How to make stories into game stories:
• - divide into playable sequences
• - dissect intentions so other disciplines have clear understanding of the story logic
• - how many "blocks of gameplay" are needed to portray intention?
• - writer sits back and listens to designers and artists discuss blocks

GDC Prelude

After a very uneventful journey, Evizaer and I are here in Austin for GDC! We also just had the best salsa we've ever had.

Of all things I could forget, I left my camera on my desk at home. I'm irked about it since GDC was one of the reasons I purchased it.

Regardless, I plan on taking notes on all the lectures and panels I attend. We are still ironing out a schedule. It's looking like we might diverge occasionally.

I'm steering a Flash/indie route in case I don't land a job in the next few months. But some of the other talks dealing with MMOs we plan on attending:

• Techniques for Improving Large World and Terrain Streaming
• Finding The Right Rewards To Sustain Player Engagement: A Close-up Look At The RPG
• Browser MMOGs - the Experts Talk
• The Universe of World of Warcraft
• Texturing Massive Terrain
• EVE Online's Player Elected Council Case Study
• A New Social Era for Games: How Your Friends Are Changing the Way the World Plays Games
• Games are Math: 10 Core Mechanics That Drive Compelling Gameplay
• Randomness: The Danger and Value of Chance Elements in Game Design

Some of them are technical, but we like that stuff :)

Better MMOs in Three Words

TED talks are some of the most inspirational pieces of video I have witnessed throughout my travels on the Internet. Dan Pink’s talk tickled me a couple of days ago because it articulated exactly what I thought were the design principles that will steer the next generation of MMOs. He presented three words as the keys to higher knowledge worker productivity and happiness: Autonomy, Master, and Purpose. It turns out these three words crystallize the design guidelines I have been thinking about and working on for at least a year.

Autonomy

Let players enjoy what they want to enjoy. Give them the ticket to a place where they want to be and let them have a ball. Barriers like long vertical advancement may make more money, but they lead to less fun. But if we harness Autonomy well, we don’t need long vertical advancement because the well-designed game engages the player in a happy cycle of finding goals that the player thinks are fun and interesting to solve—and this goal-renewal will happen organically.

Mastery

Give players the tools they need to learn to accomplish goals that they want to accomplish. Learning is crucial. Players get excited when they master a difficult task or encounter a unique challenge and complete it. Without sufficient mastery being possible, games become boring and trivial.

Yes, this does echo Raph Koster’s Theory of Fun. I agree with him that learning is what makes games fun. Mastery is all about learning.

Purpose

Tie together player actions with broader purposes. Allow players to create social structures that are purpose-driven and suited to do what players want to do. The game tasks need to be tied together by larger goals shared among players. A success or failure shared with others can become a great memory and a reason to keep playing.

Harnessing Familiarity to Breed Excitement

I enjoyed playing Lord of the Rings Online for the three months I played. I didn’t get a character to max level, but I did bring a Captain and a Minstrel to around level 40. I found that once I had chosen a character class and set out into the game world, playing the character was fun and the content was good enough that I had little problem soloing my way through most of the character advancement I saw and engaging in limited group play when it became appropriate. The standard MMO leveling process that LotRO leads its players through is familiar to me, so playing the game was a comfortable fit.

Where LotRO failed: Never did I fully grasp the capabilities and intended roles of each class. It seemed to me that the classes had a diversity of abilities to fill different roles to varying—mostly quite small—degrees. Every class can solo effectively and every class has some usefulness in a group scenario—probably more so than in WoW—but I did not find myself getting excited about potentially playing any other class. Never did I look at their abilities and think that such a class would be able to fill the role I’d like to fill in a group while being fun to play solo.

Why did I feel this way? Because the classes in LotRO do not feel familiar to me. If they do not feel familiar, my expectations don’t match up with reality. The Minstrel class is an instructive case of this. Minstrels (or Bards) in Dungeons and Dragons and in most RPGs are utility characters that use their song to buff friends and use their guile to manipulate NPCs. Bards have a small cadre of arcane magic they can use, but those incantations are usually tricks to help them with their previously stated roles. In LotRO, Minstrels are basically clerics. This dissonance forced me to throw out my knowledge about the roles and goals that a Bard or Minstrel should have—I cannot be excited about the potentiality of playing a class of which I have no ground-level understanding. Excitement occurs only when you can project an interesting and vital future for the decisions you make—if you can’t perform this projection, the dissonance that results saps excitement and, in my case, my motivation to roll a different character. I find myself in a similar situation with every class in LotRO.

I should be able to answer this question: “What is this class designed to do well and how will it do that?” If I can’t, my motivation to play the game suffers significantly. If I can’t answer that question even after playing the game for two months, there must be a problem there.

It doesn’t matter how well-designed and balanced a game’s classes are: if I can’t get excited about starting a new character, I will not care.