It’s like staring into the eyes of the notion of beauty; the eyes are always the same.

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Whew! Have a few lazy moments after an airport-spanning full out sprint culminated in a missed flight. It’s kind of amazing to directly test your fitness barrier by sprinting way, way farther than one should sprint.

My book was accepted! Wow! I’m excited/terrified. It’s going to be a lot of work. The official title is “Game Feel: A Game Designer’s Guide to Virtual Sensation.” So, if you’re a game mechanic designer, give me a holler. I’m interested in your take on the kinesthetic, tactile feeling of steering and manipulating a digital avatar or agent and how to implement it. What are the important factors in creating good-feeling games? Word. I have, like, 30 candy bars. One of them could be yours .

IGF! So, Matthew and I are coordinating IGF this year. Yeah. Again, the blend of terror and elation. Terrelation? Excitified? Those are words now . We’ve been around the IGF since it started, when we were wild-eyed young’uns, drunk on 3DFX’s beer. It’s amazing to be in charge of the shebang. We have some ideas about how to make things run more smoothly, but everything comes from our experiences as entrants and finalists over the years. Things ran smoothly last year, we don’t want to change much.

To Minnesota!

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With a title that high-falutin’, it must be pompous! Oh yeah!

Last Saturday, we were having pancakes with Kellee of thatgamecompany. We were talking about – what else? – World of Warcraft. Specifically, I was wondering aloud if a designer has moral responsibility in the case of a game that has literally caused people to forget their children, ruin their marriages, and all sorts of other drug-addicted types of behavior. I teach, and I’ve seen multiple people drop out of college specifically because of WoW. An interesting point that Kellee brought up was that perhaps drug addiction isn’t as apt a metaphor for a designer’s culpability in the creation of something intended to produce a specific outcome for its players – namely, continuing to pay their monthly fee for the rest of their born and natural lives – as, say, running a fast food restaurant. Is McDonalds responsible when people overeat?

My knee-jerk reaction is an emphatic YES!!11!!One!1Exclamationpoint!!!

But there are shades of gray. For example Matthew brings up the example of Shane, the former Audio Director at Flashbang, my former roommate, and the eldest Wegner sibling. Shane was a bone fide WoW addict. Lately, he has joined the Navy and became some kind of naval cryptologist, but that is a relatively recent development. Before that there was a period of WoW abuse (during which I lived with him.) I observed some genuinely disturbing behavior.

Before WoW came out, Shane would regularly leave the house to go on hikes, hang out, play games, talk with us. After WoW came out, he stopped eating and going to the bathroom. “Hee hee!” He would say “I don’t need food, I ate in-game!” Yowch! And then he’d do things like start a pot of spaghetti on the stove, forget about it whilst on a “raid”, and burn it down to waterless noodles. He lost a bunch of weight and developed a disturbing, ashen pallor. Matthew’s interesting point was this: who are we to take the moral high ground? If I spend 12 hours on my computer working on a game, how is that different? Perhaps it’s the notion of creation that separates the two, the intent. I’m shuffling bits with the goal of self expression while playing WoW is primarily escapism. But the line gets blurry, doesn’t it? People who are geographically separate can get to together and share some kind of mutual experience through a game like that, as Kellee noted. Surely, that can’t be bad? Can it? If they feel the same kind of social satisfaction from that that someone feels from going to a dance club, or teaching a class, or playing board games with friends, how is it different? Physically, it’s sedentary, so that’s one possible answer. Exercise makes everything better. There’s just no counter-argument to that.

The crux of the question is whether or not playing WoW is more or less a waste of your life than creating original games intended to produce the same kind of enjoyment. In this age of digital property, virtual experience, how does one set of bits have value relative to another? How is it that Shane is wasting his life while I am an artist or a game designer or whatever? Why is sitting around making games and digital art different than raids on Molten Core?

All we’re really trying to do as game designers is make meaning. At the end of the day we’re just shuffling a bunch of bits around attempting to create an experience. How is that different? We are only successful when our games mean something to our players. So our currency is experience. We don’t make anything tangible or real. We try to make meaningful experiences that sit on top of layer after layer of abstraction, of a bunch of imaginary ones and zeros. And if we concede that – that what we do has no meaning without players, their feelings, and their experiences – we can only judge the intrinsic value of our work based on the experiences of our players. So we find ourselves in a unique position. We want artistic validation without anything tangible to validate. We want to be treated with respect, as film and literature are. But have we thought that desire through? Our currency is experience, same as film or literature, but a film will still run if no one’s in the theater and a book is a tangible, touchable object. Neither has meaning if no one reads or views them, but the very fact that they are exist without participation makes them seem more real.

This is where we get into trouble, because as we move forward pondering ways to ‘create emotion’ in players, we turn to film and literature because they are our only touchstones for creating enduring meaning, for creating experiences that are considered timeless art. But film and literature are more tangible and less participatory than games. So maybe the whole notion of seeking validation of the same kind is flawed.

If an act of playing creates something beautiful, we have been successful. Kellee’s games are, I think, one great example for striving towards this aim. The act of playing creates something beautiful, for both player and observer. As a counterpoint, I think that something that causes addiction, obsession cannot be beautiful. The clinical definition of addiction demarcates a specific line: as soon as a habitual or compulsive obsession begins to impact other areas of your life, it has become an addiction. That is not beauty or art, it is human tragedy. It’s not glue-sniffing in the streets of Moscow or Darfur massacre, but addictive long-term gameplay is an insidious life-leech. So is TV, I’d say. It’s the same phenomenon: when you’re no longer playing or watching to produce a state of enjoyment, for emotional nourishment, the end has come. You’re obsessed, addicted, and looking only for numbness. You’re dying slowly.

So I guess I think that yes, a designer should be responsible for the resultant behaviors their players exhibit. We’re playing with primal, fundamentally physiological processes of cognition, manipulating them for profit and gain. Should we ban MMOs? No. Should designers own up and take responsibility for the fact that people may abuse their games? Perhaps. Really, though, what do you do? This a fundamental problem in our society. We compromise – we have warning labels on cigarettes, and that seems okay. We can’t trample people’s liberty, telling them what they can and cannot do. You can’t be responsible for people’s lack of self control, but you doing nothing feels wrong too. Is McDonalds responsible for a 150lb four year old? A bit, I’d say. It’s a give and take, and you have to accept responsibility if you’re going to design a product intended specifically to addict.

Design games responsibly. Use your moral compass. If it feels wrong, it probably is.

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More casual game madness. The latest trend is “Hidden Object Games.” I confess, I don’t quite get it. I’ve played a couple hours of Hidden Expedition Titanic, and I’m having trouble finding the appeal. Of course, everything is sequels and branding in the casual space now, so the latest game is Hidden Expedition Everest. It will be interesting to see what modifications they’ve made to improve the game, but the base level appeal is still eluding me. I’ve enjoyed other casual games – Bejeweled 2, for example, or Grimm’s Hatchery – but I’m having a really hard time seeing the underlying appeal of hidden object games. I understand why it should be fun, I guess. There’s some basic neural circuitry devoted to discerning shapes and patterns, especially picking out specific objects from amongst a jumble of objects, but in my mind the granularity feels off for a successful casual game. Especially at the start, it takes a long time to find each object. It makes me feel quite inept and, especially when I’m looking for the wrong thing, as though I’m being tricked. In my mind, a casual game (and just about any game, really) should have very compelling moment to moment game play, a strong presence at the finest granule. In Bejeweled, you sort gems constantly, a constant stream of stimulus. Your opportunity to sort gems never diminishes; you can always sort more gems. With hidden objects, there are always fewer and fewer objects to look for. It’s weird. I don’t get why millions of people are buying these games. I guess I’ll play the new Hidden Expedition: Everest game when it launches and try to figure it out.

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Getting there! At GDC 2006, the Harmonix guys gave a short demonstration at the Experimental Gameplay Workshop about the stuff they weren’t able to fit into Guitar Hero. Namely, a cool system for wanking off and jamming with the guitar controller that was empowering and expressive. Tall order, obviously. So I think that systems like this are getting much much closer. It would be really, really cool to play some kind of more precise strumming game on Wii. It looks like this is fairly complicated and that this gentleman has practiced quite a bit to get this modicum of proficiency, but it looks very compelling nonetheless. What would really make this sing (p. i.) is a bit more sophisticated gesture recognition. A full chord strum versus a single pluck versus a pinch harmonic and so on. And then, of course, you’d have to build some crazy interpreter like the Harmonix guys to get the thing to feel fun for people who don’t spend hours learning it. But hey, getting there.

Or, you know, you could have a band where someone played Wiimotes instead of a real guitar. Hmmm a Wiimote shaped guitar case and a roadie to charge my battrez for me? Hmmm…

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I had no idea anything like this existed! How delightful!

Vinyl Pulse

…and what an excellent resource for inspiration for game visuals. Ever see a game that looked like this? This? Hmm?

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Belittled. Subserviant. Pathetic. Transparent. Also, conflicted. It makes me think of Ellison’s Invisible Man (though I know there was no intent here.)

If ever there were a game that is diametrically opposed to the rippling muscle scantily clad power fantasy drivel of the retail game industry, this is it. This is an anti-power fantasy in the truest sense. And, hey, it still manages to be misogynistic. Yay.

A couple years ago, we at Flashbang Studios were tracking the casual space very closely. We ultimately decided to depart for greener intellectual, monetary, and creative pastures, but at the time we knew quite a bit. Following a single game is a bit pointless because in the swirling clone-froth of the casual space, the only way to get ahead is to follow and predict the larger trends. A game comes out, like Nanny Mania, and it’s a big hit. This is unexpected; from the publisher’s point of view, if they’ve done their homework they will know that a certain game will be a big hit in the marketplace. This does not mean that said publisher knows what kinds of games to make in the first place, what kinds of games will catch on. No one does, to the hair-pulling consternation of the big players. So they put a ton of games out there and see what sticks. A game comes out, and it’s a big it, and three months later the clone armies crest the rise: the slaughter is on. The water runs red, and tons and tons of knockoff product is sold. The consumers don’t know any better; people who download and buy and love Cake Mania or Mystic Inn have no idea whatsoever that Diner Dash ever existed. And so it goes.

Anyhow, one trend I was tracking is the migration of retail industry-style games into the casual space. This is one of the many ways casual publisher and developers strive to cash in on the Casual Cash Cow. The “casualification” of games, if you will. On game that seemed particularly ripe for exploitation in this manner was The Sims. I mean, the Sims’ audience is already the audience they’re after. It’s a no brainer. So I was unsurprised to see that things like Virtual Villagers had caught on and was going strong. Enter Nanny Mania. Ouch.

I mean, it’s kind of a Diner game, but it takes advantage of the thematic familiarity and humanistic aspects of The Sims. Simply put, though, I find it horrifying. Go play it. If you wanted to make the anti-Gears of War, here’s your template. Something tells me that when the Clone Armies line up for this one, they won’t have that in mind.

*sigh*

Download Nanny Mania

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Ahh TED.

It was interesting to me that despite loving every minute of this talk, I left feeling slightly deflated. A pejorative potshot at video games in the middle: “If you only get the BFA, not the MFA, you go home and continue playing video games.” Those of us who design said games sigh collectively. But I suppose I’m in an odd middle ground, as I am an educator of and about video games and their design. Not only that, but about creativity, the kind of creativity Gentleman Sir Ken is espousing. Game design is a profoundly creative enterprise. Designing games was thing I did in school instead of what I was supposed to be doing, the thing which was stigmatized. It was clear that I was pretty smart, but no one had any idea what to do with me because I wouldn’t sit and memorize multiplication tables. I just wanted to make games in Logowriter all day.

The first thing I hit students in my Game Design class with is the concept of looking for the second right answer. And the third and fifth and twelfth. This comes from Roger Von Oech, and is, I would argue, the first step in a long process of unlearning the wheel clamps public education has put on your Porsche of Creativity. When you look for one and only one answer to a problem – as we have been taught from day 0 hour 1 in every classroom – you’ll grab the first answer that pops into your head that seems like it might be serviceable. If instead youlook for twenty different answers to a problem, the simple odds that you’ll come up with something original that has value increase drastically. Plus, once you exhaust the staid, boring, obvious answers to a problem, you’re left only with things wild and wacky. So increase your failure rate. Lose the fear to fail. If you had to find it, you can lose it.

And so it goes. Even in what one would assume would be a profoundly creative field, the lack of creativity is staggering to me. At an art school. Where people are studying video game design. Anyhow, wonderful talk. My kids at least will have their creativity nurtured and supported, possibly at a Montessori school.

Much love to my parents who did their best to keep my brain out of the public school manure.

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This weekend I spoke at the CHI 2007 conference on the subject of virtual sensation. Specifically, I was at a workshop called “Supple Interfaces”, which was put together by my friend Katherine and Kia Höök. I had a really wonderful time; I met a ton of rather blindingly brilliant folks who are working on an amazing smorgasbord of interactive ‘supple’ research projects, got to chat with Nicole from Xeodesign, whose work I’ve admired for some time, and had the distinct pleasure of meeting Adrian Chan, who made me reconsider some long-held assumptions about the way people interact with complex systems and with one another through complex systems.

All in all, it was sort of a bizzaro version of GDC for me, as it was held at the San Jose Convention center. I knew exactly which room to go to, where to find refreshments, and where the best and cheapest parking was to be found. A great experience all around!

The slides from my presentation can be found here:

http://steveswink.com/PPT/Swink_CHI_2007.swf

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Download Drawing Test here!

This is a small test Matthew and I did. Well, Matthew did the VSL and I made suggestions and then packaged it up and fiddled. It’s really pretty cool.

Click and drag to draw geometry lines. When you release, it becomes physics geometry and the ball will start rolling. Other controls:

R – Reset the ball
Right click – delete/erase
Space – pause time

Even without real camera control, you can get into a nice rhythm of drawing and testing, making pitagourasuichi-style ball rolling contraptions. I find myself drawing large humanoid figures with faces and arms as I go as well. Can’t wait to show this in the context of the full project .

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