Walking in Someone Else’s Shoes

I uploaded a version of this post a while back (like a looong while back) but recently I’ve been thinking about it in a new way – not as a standalone thing but as part of an overview of my success criteria – part of a SERIES about those criteria. So, with apologies to those who’ve already read this, here we go again…

So far in this series of success criteria talks I’ve written about Player Empowerment and One New Thing in explaining OtherSide Entertainment’s mission – making Player Powered games. And I’ve tied that mission in with my definition of success. This week I want to continue the discussion by talking about something I feel like I’ve always failed at (which is, of course, the reason to keep trying!). That is, letting players walk in someone else’s shoes for a while – someone, in all likelihood, unlike themselves, someone whose life they may not even be able to imagine.

Rather than showing people what someone else’s life situation is like, we can let players experience it, at least in small ways. And that’s something new and very special.

I guess at some level, I’ve always tried to do this, but I started thinking about it consciously on August 25, 2015. Yes, I can pin it down with that much precision.

The reason I can do that is because the August 25 2015 issue of the New York Times featured a column by David Brooks, one of their columnists, where he lamented the lack of empathy in the world. He went on to surmise that this was a result of our inevitable inability to experience the world from another person’s perspective. Here’s what he said in the column called “The Big Decisions.”

“Let’s say you had the chance to become a vampire. With one magical bite you would gain immortality, superhuman strength and a life of glamorous intensity. Your friends who have undergone the transformation say the experience is incredible. The difficulty of the choice is that you’d have to use your human self and preferences to try to guess whether you’d enjoy having a vampire self and preferences. Becoming a vampire is transformational. You would literally become a different self. How can you possibly know what it would feel like to be this different version of you or whether you would like it?”

As that quote implies, the article is about the unknowability of how you’ll feel when you have to make a truly consequential life choice. Brooks has no answer for this.

Now, I don’t know if Brooks plays games, though for some reason I assume he doesn’t. If he did play games, though, he’d know that they may actually be the answer to his question.

Games offer the opportunity to make decisions and try out behaviors in a virtual world that we wouldn’t even want people trying in the real one. When we play a game, we actually take on the role of the character we’re playing, whether that’s an avatar with a name, personality and personal goals, or one without such things created and embodied solely by player choices.

In a game, you don’t just watch someone else unlike you, or read about someone not like you, but in a very real sense, you become someone not like you. This is a critical way we’re unique among media. Books can’t do it. Movies can’t do it. Theatre can’t do it. Painting, dance, opera… Nothing can let you experience for yourself life choices and unknowable, unpredictable situations. Nothing other than games.

How else am I ever going to experience life as a World War I fighter pilot? How else can I become a knight and see what it was like to live in a medieval castle? How will I know (to use Brooks’ example) what life as a vampire might be like?

If we were really trying, through games, you could feel for yourself the sting of racism or religious persecution or gender bias or anything else we have the nerve to offer players. You could even know what it’s like to be the last space marine standing between the Earth and alien invaders. (Oh, wait, we do that last one all the time… Let’s call it quits on that, shall we?)

And before anyone points it out, I realize there are issues of “cultural appropriation” associated with this capability of games, but that’s a topic for an entirely different talk. Let’s just leave it at this for now: I think there’s real value in providing a diversity of experience and holding out the hope that we can increase empathy as a result. Your mileage may vary.

So, to David Brooks I say, take a look over here. There’s a medium of expression that can let you live your choices and see what happens as a result. Maybe you should give it a try. Play some games. You might like it. And you might learn something about yourself.

Next time, I’ll talk about Making a Statement or, more precisely, why that’s entirely the wrong way to think about games.

Find your “One New Thing”

Last time I posted something here, I talked about the first thing I think about when the word “success” comes to mind – empowering players to tell their own stories and create their own unique experiences through play. “Every player a story-teller” basically sums up the Immersive Simulation genre – and “Player Powered” – for me.

This post is a little different. It’s more personal and maybe less generalizable, even to people working in the Imm Sim genre. That said, if you buy what I’m saying, what follows can apply to any game, in any genre. Or you’ll just think I’m crazy. You may be right. In any event, here’s my second success criterion – One New Thing.

A critical success criterion for me is whether I’ve delivered something new – one thing no one on the planet has ever seen or done before in a game. If you’re just copying what others have already done, why bother? We haven’t come close to doing or being everything games can do or be.

If you look at games today, you see a lot of games that look and feel just like other games – sometimes like other old games, just with prettier pictures. Now, I’m not naming names, but even some of the best-selling games in the world feel like retreads, at least from the gameplay side of things.

That’s not good enough. We’re too young a medium to assume games are a solved problem, that we’ve explored everything do-able in a game. We have to keep searching for the unique and wonderful in our medium.

Looking back at Deus Ex, a game I worked on over 20 years ago, the team and I certainly tried to do things that, frankly, a lot of people thought we were crazy to try. You have no idea how many times I heard, “Why don’t you just make a shooter?” or “How many people are really going to sneak? Why are you spending time and money on that?” Needless to say, that was incredibly frustrating.

What a lot of people then, and a lot of people today, didn’t quite get was that, at some level the most important thing we did was mash up the RPG, Shooter and Stealth genres. Doing that, I figured (and think the team figured as well) would result in something that felt – and would really be – new and unique, something that wasn’t as predictable or as coercive as a pure genre-game would be. Letting players decide what their preferred genre was, and supporting them in that sort of play, seemed like a powerful idea.

At the time, I thought that mashup approach was the most mainstream idea imaginable. I mean, if you’re playing a shooter and you’re not good enough, your only option is to stop playing. Ditto for stealth – if you can’t sneak, you can’t play. In Deus Ex, and other Immersive Sims, if shooting is too hard for you (for example), try sneaking. If sneaking is too hard for you, try something else. Allowing players to try different playstyles would keep them playing instead of throwing their keyboard or controller across the room. It kind of worked, at least I think it did. Lots of people commented, and still comment, on how the game “tunes itself” to the kind of experience you wanted to have.

Another thing that set Deus Ex apart – another new thing – was the idea of a simulation-driven, “Problems Not Puzzles” approach. We wanted to take the idea of Shared Authorship further than anyone had ever done before. We wanted players solving problems the way they wanted to, not the way the team and I wanted them to. That ensured that each player could create his or her own unique story and experience.

Those were really the most important things Deus Ex did that were new and different – combining things in new ways and giving players a level of empowerment, which if I can brag on the Deus Ex team, no one had seen before. Let me give you another example. Disney Epic Mickey had One New Thing, too.

That one new thing was our core Paint and Thinner mechanic. We let players decide when or even if they wanted to Paint or Erase things in the world. We created a dynamic world where you could not only destroy things (something a few other games had done before), but also restore them, something no other game we could think of had done. And the consequences for your choice really made a difference in how your game played out – who liked you and who didn’t, who helped you and who wouldn’t, what you knew and didn’t known…

Now, I’m not saying EVERYTHING in your game has to be new: One is enough on the risk/reward scale. MAYBE try two. Any more than that and even I think you’re nuts. But that one is critical.

One way to think about it is to identify (a) the first thing you tell people about your game and (b) the thing you won’t compromise on. Knowing what you’ll tell and work your tail off to make happen is critical. But so is knowing what you ARE willing to compromise (or, god forbid, cut). To that end, I share something with my team I call the Priority Overview (or, sometimes, the Quality Bar Overview). Here’s a bit more detail on the four levels I identify:

The “Innovate” section lists the thing that’s most important to the game – the thing (or things) on which you won’t compromise in terms of quality. We’re GOING to get these right, even if the work is exceptionally challenging for any or all disciplines.

The “Improve Upon the State of the Art” section is second in terms of importance to the game and describes areas where you want people to say you’re better than your comps. It would take a disaster for you to compromise on or cut anything at this level.

The “Match the State of the Art” is what Michael Fitch, the ace Project Director on the game I’m working on now at OtherSide, calls “table stakes.” It’s what people just expect from a game of the sort you’re working on now.

Finally, there’s the most controversial level – the “Don’t Have to Match Comps” or things that are secondary to your game. There are what are commonly described as “nice to haves.”

If you think about it, this document is basically a journalism-style “Pyramid” construction or “cut from the bottom” list. In other words, your article communicates the most important parts of the story first with less important information coming after until, at the bottom, editors can simply cut without damaging things. True for journalists, true for game devs.

Note three things:

First, you don’t WANT to cut or compromise on ANY of these things. You want them all, at a very high level of quality.

Second, this is meant as, among other things, a guide to work assignments. For example, if someone is working on a priority 3 task when they could be helping with a priority 1 or 2 task, you’re doing something wrong. Barring something the team identifies as a task that must be dealt with right away, it should be all useful hands on deck for the higher priority items.

Third, there’s room for discussion here and for the addition of new elements. The list is pretty solid, but there’s room for change and expansion if compelling arguments can be made. The goal is to make the best game possible and no one has a monopoly on the ideas or features that will make that happen.

So, know where you’re willing to compromise, but ALWAYS give players a “priority one” thing – something brand new. If a Mickey Mouse game can do it, so can you. Heck, I don’t care if you’re making a My Little Pony game, you can come up with something. Players will thank you and you’ll be advancing the state of our art a bit.

That’s it for this time. Next success criterion – Walking in Someone Else’s Shoes.!–

Player Empowerment is My Most Important Success Criterion, Part 2

A couple of weeks ago, I listed my success criteria, particularly as they relate to “player powered” games—aka “Immersive Simulations”—like the ones OtherSide Entertainment was created to make. This week, I want to talk about the first, and maybe (maybe…) most important of those criteria—Player Empowerment.

My journey to Immersive Sims began in 1978, on the day I played Dungeons & Dragons for the first time. That day was life-changing for me.

My dungeon master was cyberpunk guru Bruce Sterling (before cyberpunk was a gleam in the eye of Bill Gibson or Bruce himself). Bruce was a great storyteller. But what made the experience special wasn’t the story Bruce was telling. What made the experience special was that my friends and I were telling our own story with him.

We had to use our wits and exploit some vague game rules to get around, over or through obstacles Bruce created. The shape of the story belonged to Bruce (and it was a great, great shape) but every detail belonged to me and my friends. Like a great band, we all worked together to create something none of us could have done alone—we all became storytellers that night.

I was completely hooked. I played in that D&D campaign for over ten years. And my entire professional life has (pathetically) been about trying to recreate that feeling I had back in 1978, playing D&D, telling stories with my friends.

Some fellow developers share that mission—something we came to describe as “shared authorship” or, of course, “Player Powered.” (Take the two as synonymous—I’ll probably slip up and switch back and forth. For the purposes of what follows, they’re interchangeable.)

If you look past the surface level narrative framework, every game I’ve worked on has been “about” sharing the storytelling process with players. With each game, I try to give up a little more authorial control, collaborate more fully with players, engage with them in a more equal dialogue.

Here’s the deal: Alone among the arts, games can share the responsibilities (and joys) of creativity with our audience. Games don’t always engage players in this way, but we can and, to my mind, that unique capability means we have a moral obligation to do so.

Sharing authorship involves allowing players to choose how to interact with the game world, to solve problems the way they want to—not the way a designer planned and mandated it.

In my ideal world, those choices say more about the player—the human being behind the controller or keyboard—than they do about some in-game avatar, no matter how artfully rendered. I want to tell a story with players not to players, the way Bruce told a story through interaction with his friends.

Another way to think about this is that games are the first medium of communication in human history that is “two-way”—the first that can turn consumers into collaborators in the creative process. (Think about THAT the next time you work on a game—you’re doing something no one has ever been able to do before. Ever. How exciting is that?!)

In traditional media, characters are funneled down a path, their actions limited by a series of shots ordered by a film director or by chains of words strung together by an author. By contrast, gamers get to make decisions as they play.

Sharing authorship means offering players as many decision points as we can give them and as many opportunities as we can to take control of the experience through their actions.

But games aren’t just about choices or decisions. Player choices and decisions have to have consequences (or you’re just wasting a lot of time and money). If you do thing X, thing Y happens. Or maybe even thing Y, Z or A, in a really clever game.

And in a super clever game, players can recover from consequences they find undesirable (though at some cost—recovery can’t be free…) Recovery is the thing many developers of Player Powered Immersive Simulations don’t consider. It may, in fact, be the most “artful” aspect of creating Player Powered games. But “Recovery,” like the definition of “Fun,” is something we can talk about another time.

Anyway, Sharing Authorship means players aren’t on a rollercoaster—something that appears non-linear but turns into a straight line when stretched out—they’re in a sandbox where choices have consequences, with the aforementioned recovery opportunities.

But wait, there’s more. Choices and consequences are great, but in a Player Powered game, responsive worlds make consequences apparent to players. You get to experience what happens if you pull that trigger, and that should be different than what you see if you don’t pull it.

Sharing authorship means players clearly and unambiguously see the results of what they’ve chosen to do. The game notices and responds to choices logically and appropriately, though not always with 100% predictability. Another topic for another time is how this motive/response dynamic results in games that “tune” themselves to what a player “tells” the game they enjoy. Plenty to talk about there!

There’s much more to the term “Player Powered” than this, but what all this Shared Authorship stuff adds up to is a game in which each play session—each story—is unique. And what makes each play session unique is in players’ hands, guided by, but not forced by, the desires of the developers.

In fact, it may be that the most important thing a development team does is provide a narrative context in which players act. We provide the “why” for player actions, the significance and importance of them.

Like a Dungeon Master in a D&D game, we provide a story skeleton, lacking muscle and flesh, only hinting at what the story will actually look like. By creating that skeleton, that narrative, we bound player experience. We put a box around it within which players have as much freedom as we can give them to put meat on the bones.

I realize I’m stretching the metaphor, but we determine that the skeleton is a human one (or something else) and players get to decide what that human (or something else) looks like.

Alone among media, we can bound player experience through narrative without determining exactly what that experience will be.

We certainly don’t always do this. There are quite wonderful games and game genres that put you on narrative rails that advance the developer-created plot. But we can empower players, and as I’ve said, we should.

So the developer’s part in the narrative dialogue is to define context and significance. Clearly, we’re pretty powerful. But where do players get their power?

Though we create goals—the what and why of the story—players have to figure out the how, their own specific series of steps to accomplish the goals we set for them. They do this using the tools and exploiting the rules of the game, also provided by us. Players agree to make step-by-step plans in the face of challenges we throw up as roadblocks in their path.

Then players agree to act on those plans in reasonable, logical ways. So players decide what they want to do in the moment, decide how to do it, and then give it a go.

And then, of course, players agree to move on to the next challenge. Wash, rinse, repeat until the end of the game (or the next level or episode or battle).

And here’s an interesting side note—if developers do their jobs right, players can replay the game, make different plans, use different tools, exploit the rules differently. Do that and the game—that minute-to-minute experience—plays out differently. That’s the player’s power.

When games are at their best, developers and players play their assigned roles. When that happens, neither the developer nor the player can claim total ownership of the experience. Ownership of a game narrative belongs to both player and developer.

In a game, nothing happens unless developers play their part and players play theirs. Gameplay is a process. And at the heart of that process is collaboration.

This isn’t a new thought, just one a lot of us sometimes overlook or forget. In fact, this idea was apparent early in the development of video games—even as far back as 1981, when science fiction author Orson Scott Card expressed the idea with astonishing clarity. Now, I disagree with many of Card’s views on many topics, social and political—he’s not someone I’d turn to for life advice—but in this case, talking about games, I think he gets at something important, something worth thinking about. Here’s what he said:

Someone at every game design company should have the full-time job of saying ‘Why aren’t we letting the player decide that?’… When [they] let…unnecessary limitations creep into a game, gamewrights reveal that they don’t yet understand their own art. They’ve chosen to work with the most liberating of media—and yet they snatch back with their left hand what they offered us with their right. Remember, gamewrights, the power and beauty of the art of game making is that YOU AND THE PLAYER COLLABORATE TO CREATE THE FINAL STORY. Every freedom that you can give to the player is an artistic victory. And every needless boundary in your game should feel to you like a failure.

First of all, how cool is the term “gamewrights?” Even that speaks to the uniqueness of what we do…

Anyway, the crux of the biscuit here is that Card talks about not imposing unnecessary limitations. He talks about avoiding needless boundaries. He correctly says this isn’t about developers abdicating their creative responsibilities. And it isn’t about making a game without any constraints on what players can and can’t do (though many developers think, misguidedly, I think, that constraint-free play is some kind of grail).

No. Card is talking about exactly what I’ve talked about above—about sharing authorship, about giving players the opportunity to think, plan, execute and create unique narrative experiences for themselves inside a “creative box” defined by the developer.

If we accept players as collaborators, as Card suggested years ago, we come back around to the idea of “Shared Authorship”—the heart and soul of what we mean at OtherSide when we say “Player Powered.”

Next time, success criterion number 2—“One New Thing.”

WHAT DOES “PLAYER POWERED” MEAN? KNOWING WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE. AND THE IMPORTANCE OF HAVING A MISSION Part 1

People ask me all the time why I make games or, more precisely, why I make the games I do. That’s summed up in the motto and mission of OtherSide Entertainment – “Player Powered.” Paul Neurath of Looking Glass fame founded the studio with that game style in mind. In other words, he wanted to make what are commonly referred to as “Immersive Simulation” games – you know, games like Underworld, System Shock, Thief, Deus Ex and more – I’m looking at you, Arkane!

I love that kind of game. I have no interest in making any other kind of game. I believe Immersive Sims are… well… important. How could I not join him when he asked me to? I signed on as a partner around the time the studio was created specifically because I wanted to make “Player Powered” games. I wasn’t about to miss the opportunity to make the kind of game I love. So here I am.

End of story, right?

Well, not so fast. I could stop there, but this wouldn’t be much of an article if I did! So I’m going to keep going and talk about what “Player Powered” means, at least to me.

For starters, here’s our studio vision, one of the things you can find on our website:

“We make deeply immersive games that draw players into richly imagined worlds. Games that empower players to choose their own playstyle, making their experience unique. That encourage players to team up with their friends and weave their own shared narrative. The kind of games that are powered by our player’s vision as much as ours.”

That’s a solid description of Player Powered (obviously, given that it’s our public statement of intent!). But I want to go even deeper and, though some might find it obnoxious, get super personal about it. This article is about how my teams and I express that mission in our games. (And make no mistake – all the philosophy that follows is driven by the hard work of the teams that must put up with me. They do the real work, so try to avoid calling me “creator.” That just embarrasses me and probably ticks off team members. Ticking off team members is never a good idea…)

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED?

Lots of people think games are “just entertainment,” a way to pass some time, experience an adrenaline rush, maybe think about optimal strategies to overcome arbitrary challenges.

That’s great. You can’t really argue with it. But it’s a bit reductionist for me and doesn’t provide much guidance for developers. It reinforces the idea that games are relatively simple things with no real purpose.

I think developers need to think more deeply about what they do. I’d argue that when you make a game you must have a purpose, a reason for making that game and not one of the thousand-and-one other possible games. In other words, you need a purpose for making the specific game you’re making.

And from “purpose” you can take the next step and define success – you need to know that, your team needs to know it, your publisher needs to know it and even players should know (though perhaps not consciously). You need to know not just what you’re going to do and why, but also when – or if – you’ve hit your target.

Developers have defined success a variety of ways. I’m going to start by identifying some possibilities that have general application rather than being specifically about Player Powered games. I promise we’ll get to that…

Some people make games to make money or sell a lot of copies (usually a prerequisite for making a lot of money…). Frankly, if this isn’t one of your success criteria, you’re not likely to be making Immersive Sims or any other kind of game for long, so take this one as a given!

Some people define success in terms of team morale – if the team is happy and (I’d argue more importantly) proud of what they’ve done, that’s a successful project. Of course you want your team to be happy and proud. (See earlier comment about ticked off teams. They don’t make great games.)

Some make games for the ego gratification that comes with attention and critical acclaim – or for the validation that comes with recognition from outsiders that they’ve done a good job. Anyone who says they don’t care about kudos is probably lying. In my experience, no one cares about cover stories and awards until they start getting them.

Some make games just to provide people some “fun” (whatever the heck that essentially meaningless word means – but that’s another post for another time…) If a game passes some time in a way that engages and pleases players, that‘s good enough.

So, is that all? Are those the only success criteria?

Obviously, I don’t think so. So let me tell you about the Player Powered success criteria. Not because they’re the only ones or necessarily the best ones, but because they’re a little different and may spark some thinking on your part about what success means to you. Plus, I have a personal mission, I work at a studio that’s built to do this (plus, I admit I like to evangelize!)

Here’s the list of things I add to the list above, as if those weren’t hard enough. Stick with me. We’re playing on Expert now!

• Have I empowered players to tell their stories in collaboration with us – with the developers?
• Have I delivered at least one new thing in the game that no one has ever seen or done in a game before?
• Have I allowed players to see the world through the eyes of someone else, someone potentially unlike themselves?
• And have I made a game that’s about something more than just what’s on the surface? Have I made players think?

My hope is either to convince you to agree with me that these are desirable success criteria or to get you disagreeing so emphatically that you’ll be moved to consider what your mission is. Then we can have a fun little argument in comments or in person at a conference (someday). Just be ready for a knock-down-drag-out argument. Those aren’t just success criteria and Player Powered isn’t just a motto. It’s a mission. On my team at OtherSide, we consider it when we make every one of the myriad decisions required when developing a game.

So in the coming weeks, I’m going to talk about each of my success criteria for a Player Powered game, one at a time, starting with what I consider to be the most important — Player Empowerment. In a sense, that’s the central characteristic of Immersive Simulations.

I’ll warn you up front that this is going to be highly personal. The opinions expressed here may not reflect the thoughts of everyone involved in making Immersive Sims, though I think – I hope – most would agree.

See you in a few weeks.

Walking in Someone Else’s Shoes

August 25, 2015. David Brooks posts a column called “The Big Decisions” on The New York Times website. It’s an interesting column, to say the least, and surprisingly relevant to game design. Go read it and then come on back here.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/25/opinion/david-brooks-the-big-decisions.html?mwrsm=Email&_r=0

Back? Good.

If you were too lazy or busy or just didn’t feel like reading the column, here’s a pithy quote that’ll give you the basic idea:

“Let’s say you had the chance to become a vampire. With one magical bite you would gain immortality, superhuman strength and a life of glamorous intensity. Your friends who have undergone the transformation say the experience is incredible. They drink animal blood, not human blood, and say everything about their new existence provides them with fun, companionship and meaning.

Would you do it? Would you consent to receive the life-altering bite, even knowing that once changed you could never go back?

The difficulty of the choice is that you’d have to use your human self and preferences to try to guess whether you’d enjoy having a vampire self and preferences. Becoming a vampire is transformational. You would literally become a different self. How can you possibly know what it would feel like to be this different version of you or whether you would like it?”

As that quote implies, the column is about the unknowability of feelings related to consequential choices.  Brooks has no answer for this, but he speaks in laudatory tones about a new book – Transformative Experience – that he claims gives us tools to make better choices and to anticipate our reaction to what he calls “big decisions.”

Now, I don’t know if Brooks plays games, though for some reason I assume he doesn’t. If he did play games, though, he’d know that they offer far more than speculation or advice for the choice-averse. Games offer the opportunity to make decisions and try out behaviors in a virtual world that we wouldn’t even want people trying in the real one.

In other words, games can let you walk in someone else’s shoes. Not watch someone else unlike you, or read about someone not like you, but to become someone not like you, at least for a little while.

In this, we are unique among media. Books can’t do it. Movies can’t do it. Theatre can’t do it. Painting, dance, opera… Nothing can let you experience for yourself life choices and unknowable, unpredictable situations. Nothing other than games.

You can call this hyperbole – I know I’m prone to that. But I truly believe we’re unique in this way. And to my mind, we have a moral obligation, or at least an artistic one, to exploit what makes us unique.

Clearly, there’s room for games that don’t even try to deliver a “walk in someone else’s shoes” experience. I like puzzle games and word games as much as the next guy. And the experience of walking in the shoes of a fat little plumber with a funny moustache isn’t exactly going to convince folks like Brooks of our potential. But we can let you become the “other,” and many games strive to do it. And I love them for it.

How else am I ever going to experience life as a World War I fighter pilot? How else can I become a knight and see what it was like to live in a medieval castle? How will I know (to use Brooks’ example) what life as a vampire might be like?

If we were really trying, we might even be able to give a taste of trouble to those of us who, by virtue of luck, genetics or upbringing, have never experienced hardship. Through games, you could feel for yourself the sting of racism or religious persecution or gender bias. You could even know what it’s like to be the last space marine standing between the Earth and alien invaders. (Oh, wait, we do that last one all the time…)

As I said, some games take advantage of this unique quality of our medium. Sadly, even games that do let you “become” someone else, usually do it badly or inaccurately or in a puerile manner. They don’t do their research or they don’t do it with intention. But they do it. And it amazes me that the mainstream doesn’t realize it.

Maybe that’s because most game developers don’t understand what they’re capable of. Maybe it’s because we don’t think about our medium’s capabilities enough, as we deliver profitable power fantasies and easy adrenaline rushes. Or maybe it’s just that we don’t crow enough about it. I don’t know why people don’t know how wonderful games can be. I just know, by and large, they don’t.

Hey, David Brooks, take a look over here. You don’t need books to speculate about how to predict the consequences of choices. There’s a medium of expression over here that can let you live your choices and see what happens as a result. Maybe you should give it a try. Play some games. You might like it. And you might learn something about yourself.

Hooray for Hollywood

Back before my last studio, Junction Point, was acquired by Disney, I had a grand plan – a mission, really, that I wanted to explore. (I’m going to talk more about mission in a future blog post, but just go with me here.) My mission had two parts:

First, I wanted to take inspiration from television, rather than movies. That meant, episodic content, digitally delivered, with each episode standing alone but also being part of a larger, overarching “season” narrative. You know what I mean – think about pretty much any police procedural you’ve ever seen on television. A crime gets solved in each episode, but the relationships among the recurring characters carry over from episode to episode until by the end of the season, those character relationships have changed in ways that keep us watching season after season. In other words, there’s both completion and open-endedness built into each episode. (I call that approach “limited serial narrative” but that’s so grad school I’ll just leave it at that.)

This approach seemed – and still seems – like a great model for games. Frankly, I don’t understand why games haven’t adopted it. And I’m pretty sure I’m going to give it a shot some day and see how it works “in the wild” rather than just in my head.

But limited serial narrative isn’t what I want to talk about today. I want to talk about the second part of the original Junction Point mission.

That second part was all about partnering with folks in Hollywood – film-makers and television producers – to create what I guess you’d have to call transmedia productions. (Man, do I hate that term, but I can’t think of one that applies better here, sadly.)

The relationship between Hollywood types and game developers is typically one where the Hollywood folks are in control. The game types are reduced to being an “employee of game company #27 making a game based on someone’s last flick.” I had very little interest in a licensor/licensee relationship. (Though there was one IP I would have loved to work with. And, no, I can’t say what that was.)

Bottom line: I wanted to collaborate with folks in LA to create new IP that were designed from the start to work in a variety of media. They’d make the movies and TV shows, my studio would make the games and the property would be co-owned by them and by Junction Point, sharing in the profits both ways.

In working to make that happen, my agents at the time, Seamus Blackley and Ophir Lupu (among others) hooked me up with some Really Big Name guys. Pretty cool, I must say. I had the privilege of meeting and working with them, not in a subservient role, but as a peer and  collaborator. I wish I could talk about this in more detail but the only announced project was a collaboration with John Woo on an IP called “Ninja Gold.” (On that one, we actually had game deals and movie deals, and we built a bunch of prototypes, but In That Way, deals have a tendency to fall apart and so did that project.)

Anyway, what I discovered working with movie/TV creators was that, by and large, they’re Just Like Us — smart, creative, out of do great stuff — and they’re held back by a lot of the same forces that affect many mainstream game developers — rising budgets, shrinking audiences, execs who don’t get it, etc.

I also discovered that some of them totally got that movies and games are different, some didn’t. Some were seduced by the superficial similarities — pictures on a screen, sound, camera, lighting, dialogue, etc. — and thought they “got it,” while some were intrigued by the differences and what they didn’t understand about our medium. (The latter were a lot more fun to work with, needless to say.)

In talking to these people, I discovered something interesting, myself, something I hadn’t thought about before, something that really brought home for me at least one of many important differences between movies/TV and games. (Many of those differences are obvious enough that I don’t need to go into them here, I hope. If I do, let me know and I’ll come back to this in a comment or future blog post.)

Almost ALL movie/TV makers, in my experience, thought in terms of moments. Cool, specific, unique moments. (And they were really, really good at coming up with those moments, let me tell you, even acting them out to show what they meant.)

But what do I mean by “moments”?

Movie guys have to fill just a couple of hours of screen time. We have to fill a lot more, even in a short game. And at least in part, because of that, we have to be about the repeated action, not necessarily, the uniquely memorable one. In a movie, if your hero does the same thing — even twice — you’re probably in territory where the audience is thinking about what a bad movie they’re watching, not about how cool the hero is.

In games, we have a completely different set of constraints. Designers talk about the “core loop” – the sequence of base level actions players repeat over and over during a game, with variations to keep things interesting as the game goes on. But all we do – all we do – is offer variations on the core, not radical changes. I mean, there’s a reason why it’s called a “loop,” right? Players run through the steps, then go back to the beginning over and over again.

Even the most astute Hollywood folks tend not to get this.

I remember sitting in a room, listening to one director say, “the hero should leap off a building, glide down using his coat as a glider thing, land in a superhero pose and in one smooth motion, come up flinging knives.” And, yes, he acted it out.

Sadly, though many games actually do take moments like that and repeat them ad infinitum, I had to tell this guy I didn’t think that was a great game idea. “Yeah, that’d be cool the first time the player does it,” I said. “But by the hundredth time, it’ll be boring, at best, and probably actively annoying.”

Or, to use a John Woo example (not one he and I talked about, to be clear!), in a movie, it’s great to see Chow Yun-Fat, two guns blazing, leap onto a restaurant cart and barrel across a room taking out bad guys… It’s great when guns go off and doves fly… In a movie. In a game, those things would get old, and a little silly, after the tenth iteration.

John Woo’s a genius, and never even hinted that we should borrow those signature moments. I think he realized that such moments just don’t work in games (or, at least, I don’t think they work). Games are about finding sequences of actions that are as fun and exciting for players the hundredth, even thousandth, time they do something. The variety comes from changing circumstances, not a cascade of unique moments.

That’s our magic and our art. The ability to create compelling loops and changing circumstances that keep those loops fresh and interesting for 20 hours is what separates the great designers from the rest of us mere mortals. Recognize and act on this (and have a massive marketing budget) and you can rule the game world.

I’ll leave it at that, but I’d love to hear from you about examples of unique moments that did work when repeated over and over again. In other words, prove me wrong. (No cutscene moments, please.) And even more interesting to me, I’d love to hear about repeated actions that maintain players’ interest despite the repetition, and why they work. In other words, prove me right. Comment away.

Another Narrative Fallacy: It’s All About Choice

If there’s one thing that comes up in all discussions of game narrative, it’s the desirability of player choice.

Sometimes, if a game is built on a branching story structure, choices may be offered independent of game systems or mechanics. (See Telltale, Quantic Dream and others.)

Sometimes, in a game with a more open structure, choices may be expressed through a player’s interaction with simulation elements, systems and mechanics. (See Bethesda, Bioware and — finally… thankfully… – many more).

Happily, finally, everyone involved in games – especially narrative games – gets all that.

However, even with nearly everyone agreeing on the importance of choice as a defining characteristic of gameplay, there’s a trap waiting to ensnare the unwitting:

Simply put, games aren’t, and shouldn’t be, about choice.

To expand on that a bit, it’s important, I think, to get past two widely held beliefs:

First is the idea that choices are of paramount importance, in and of themselves, and by virtue of the nature of the medium.

Second is the idea that choice implies, even requires us to think in terms of, reward and punishment… better and worse… right and wrong… light and dark… good and evil.

I simply don’t get this kind of thinking. I don’t get the exclusive focus on choice. I don’t get the seeming obsession, in choice-driven games, with binary opposition.

Choice. Doesn’t. Matter.

Binary oppositions are boring.

Choices without consequences are meaningless. If they don’t lead to different outcomes – preferably radically different outcomes – what’s the point?

And games that encourage players to think in terms of right and wrong ultimately encourage players to, as I put it, “play the meter” – “Ooh, I’m evil and now I have horns and a bunch of demon tattoos!” or “Ooh, I’m good – see? I have angel wings and a halo.” It’s just ridiculous.

“But wait a minute,” you may be thinking. “Aren’t you one of the guys who’s been screaming about player choice for a couple of decades?”

No. I’m not. If you look closely at what I’ve been saying, choice isn’t the be all, end all. Not at all. And it isn’t the key to what some of us have been calling “shared authorship” all these years.

So what the hell have I been screaming about?

Here it is: The interesting aspect of player choice isn’t the choice itself. The interesting thing – the only interesting thing, really – is the revelation of consequences. Choice without consequence is a waste of time, effort and money.

But wait, you say. Doesn’t the word “consequence” imply punishment, which sends us right back to better/worse, good/evil, right/wrong? Doesn’t consequence require designers to impose a value judgment and maybe even provide a good/evil meter so players know where they stand?

Not at all.

One of the hard and fast rules I lay out for my teams is “Never judge the player.” Never. Players should never know what you think about a question or its answer. (See, this is where last week’s blog post about about questions comes in.) You’re not there to answer the questions your game asks players to consider. You’re most assuredly not there, I tell my designers, to say to players “this is right and that is wrong.” Designers exist to provide opportunities for players to test behaviors and then see the consequences of those behaviors. Given the chance, players will judge for themselves whether the benefits gained by making a particular choice were worth the cost of making it.

It may just be me, but in my experience, there are few, if any, questions or situations that lend themselves to clearly defined, universally agreed upon right or wrong answers or solutions. In most real world cases, there are only shades of gray. Even if you disagree (as extremists and believers of all stripes might) I’m comfortable saying that the most interesting situations are the ones where right and wrong are not readily apparent. I don’t understand why more game developers don’t acknowledge that and revel in our medium’s unique ability to reflect the wondrous, complex lack of clarity of the world in which we live.

FULL CIRCLE

Okay, so let me try to bring the two parts of this trip down narrative lane full circle. Let me close by saying this about questions, choices and the nature of game narrative:

A successful game narrative isn’t one that tells a great story (though that’s obviously desirable!).

A successful game narrative is one that asks questions.

A successful game narrative gives players the tools to answer those questions both locally (in the moment) and globally (in how the entire story plays out).

A successful game narrative is one that shows shows players the consequences of their local and global decisions, without judging players for making those decisions.

There are only shades of gray and, that being the case, all decisions have costs as well as benefits. There is no absolute right or absolute wrong. (And, yes, I’m a moral relativist at heart…) Even if you disagree, games that reflect that will get players thinking in ways no other medium can match.

A successful game narrative is one that engenders conversations not only about how each player solved a game problem, but also why. Most of the dialogue we hear around games is about optimal strategies or about how moving a cutscene was. How limited and dull that is.

What I want – and hope you want – is to hear players debating the rightness or wrongness of their decisions. I want to hear one player say, “How could you have stolen that?” and another player describing her thought process… I want to hear one player ask, “Why did you leave that guy alive after what he did?” and another make a case for Ghandi-like pacifism… I want to hear players who reach an endgame driven by their choices ask one another, “How could you think that solution was appropriate or right or ethical?”

“Appropriate,” “right” and “ethical” are magic words. Other media can make the claim that they deal with those concepts, too – and they do – but in those media, the words belong to authors while in games, those words can and should belong to players.

Wrap your mind around all this, and we’re on our way to realizing the potential of games as a unique narrative form. Clearly, we owe something to earlier narrative models, but we can and must build on their teachings, maybe even leave those teachings behind to create something more collaborative, more moving and more compelling than any other medium can be.

Embracing choice means we’re halfway there. What do you say we go the rest of the way?

A Narrative Fallacy: It’s All About Aristotle

Lots of people – even game developers who specialize in narrative games – fall into a couple of common traps when they think about games and stories, and about the roles of players and developers in the telling of those stories.

First is that any series of events, with setup, complication, resolution and denouement constitutes a narrative, in any medium, linear or interactive. By the letter of the law, I suppose that’s correct. But before you plot out your magnum opus, I’d contend that the characteristics I just listed, must be in support of something – something deeper, a meta-narrative. There has to be a subtext (or, to be just a tad judgmental, you’re just making crap and you can stop wasting my time and yours).

Put another way, before you start crafting your story, make sure you have something to say. You’d think this would be self-evident, but I’m not sure it is, given the quality of most game stories. Frankly, for me, the statement I want to make is of paramount importance. Actually, that isn’t quite true. If I wanted to make a statement, I’d write a novel or make a movie. What’s of true importance to me is the issue I want players to grapple with.

Here’s the key for me when I think about game narrative as opposed to traditional narrative forms:

Linear media answer questions; games ask them and allow players to answer them.

Note that the word “interactivity” is nowhere to be found in this formulation of the defining characteristic of game narrative. That word is overused, ill-defined and really kind of useless. Think back to the narrative games you’ve played and see if you can identify the questions they ask you to answer… see if the game empowered you to answer them yourself, as opposed to just divining the answer the developer predetermined for you. It’s an interesting exercise.

Let me give you some examples from two games I worked on.

For me, Deus Ex is “about” four interrelated questions:

1. What happens when you take a guy who believes the world is black and white and throw him into a world that – like our own – is all shades of gray?
2. What would the world – our world, the real world – be like if every conspiracy theory people believed to be true were, in fact, true?
3. What’s the nature of humanity – at what point in the world of human augmentation do we stop being human and start being… something else?
4. What’s the most desirable “end state” for the world? Are we better off in a technological dark age in which people have genuine free will? Are we better off in a world where an all-seeing AI can gift us with total connectivity and, one hopes, the empathy that arises from universal connection, at the cost of giving up our freedom? Or are we simply better off as we are today (IF conspiracies are real), ruled by a shadowy elite, not knowing it, and going about our daily lives none the wiser?

Two things to note:

First, answering these questions doesn’t involve defeating anything or solving anything puzzly or being told anything by an author. Yes, you play a character named J.C. Denton and, yes, there’s an overarching plot that allows these questions to bubble up so players can interact with them. Yes, that’s true, but those questions can only be answered by YOU, the player, not by a PC puppet. At the end of the day, the character you play is of secondary and, basically, irrelevant in narrative terms.

Second, I don’t really care whether anyone knows the game is “about” your personal answer to those four questions. No author wants his/her/their themes expressed obviously and unsubtly. Frankly, I doubt most of the Deus Ex team even know what the game was about for me. All that mattered – to me – was that the game allowed players to answer those questions through their choices during play.

Another example. Disney Epic Mickey asked a few questions, too. Frankly, it pains me that a lot of players didn’t see how similar in intent and philosophy Epic Mickey was to the other games I’ve worked on, but that’s another story… Anyway, Epic Mickey asked a completely different set of questions than Deus Ex:

1. How important are family and friends to you?
2. Is it better to be less powerful, but have friends who will help you do what you need to do; or is it better to be more individually powerful, but alone in the world?
3. Is it better to do the easy thing to solve a local problem, when the fate of the entire world is in your hands; or is it better to do the hard thing in solving local problems, because the small things we do add up to far bigger things?
4. Allen Varney, one of my longtime collaborators, who was critical to the early conceptualization of Epic Mickey reminded me about a fourth question: What happens when you remain rooted in the past, versus being willing to forgive past grievances and move on?

Again, players may not realize it, but they’re answering these questions with every step they take and through every interaction with the gameworld, the characters and the developer-generated situations they find themselves in.

Yes, even a cartoon mouse can be the vehicle for asking big questions…

Next time (pretty soon, I suspect, ’cause I’m on a roll and feeling frisky), I’ll talk about another narrative trap game developers fall into – that games are all about choice.

Telltale May Not Makes Games, But They Do Make Magic

There’s something that’s been on my mind for a while (since GDC, for sure, and long before that, truth be told). What prompted me to share my thoughts now was an email I got the other day from an Australian journalist — Patrick Stafford — about something that happened at GDC 2015. Here’s the portion of his email that led me to this post:

“At GDC, I was at a panel about Telltale’s games – a bunch of their writers were speaking. At one point, Kevin Bruner asked the audience something along the lines of, ‘does anyone here think that what we make shouldn’t be called games?’ I looked around, and I believe I saw you raise your hand.”

Truth be told, the guy was right. I did raise my hand in answer to Kevin’s question, and I have to own up to the fact that I was expressing a sincerely held belief. I’ve often said Telltale makes things that are game-like, but not exactly games. I think of them as some sort of interactive experience (obviously), but does that mean “game?” I don’t think so.

Now, before people get their shorts in a knot about this, let me say a couple of things:

First, the definition of “game” is so broad (and ill-defined… and debated…), Telltale’s work can clearly be said to fall under that umbrella, if you want to put it there. And if you do want to put The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us, Tales from the Borderlands, Game of Thrones and others in the “game” category (or, to cite a non-Telltale example, David Cage’s Heavy Rain), go ahead. I’m not religious about this. Labels, at the end of the day, aren’t all that important, you know? Understanding how something works is important, but labels, not so much.

Second, I love Telltale’s work. The fact that I think of The Walking Dead et al as wonderful experiences but not wonderful games may seem like a subtle distinction, but it’s an important one for me.

So, circling back to Patrick’s email, I figured I owed him a response and, at the same time, thought this was a good opportunity to think through – for myself – my feelings about Telltale’s work. So let’s tiptoe through the minefield.

When I think of games – narrative games — I think of several things: plot (of course), but also challenges, goals and solutions. I think of character progression. Unlike, say, David Cage, I think of systems and mechanics – I think a lot about that. I think of players having some impact on the narrative or, at least, how that narrative plays out minute-to-minute (given each player’s unique skills and the choices each makes in overcoming developer-created problems).

That last one is the most important to me, personally, something to bear in mind here. Nothing else (literally nothing) is more important to me. Your mileage may vary.

I’m absolutely not saying that all games should or must empower players, giving them ownership of the narrative at the minute-to-minute level. However, if you accept that idea, even simple choices can make a difference. You don’t have to go full-on Mass Effect or, if you’ll indulge me, Deus Ex. It’s fine to empower players in small and/or conventional ways:

• Which weapon do I use to defeat an enemy? A perfectly reasonable, if minor experience differentiator.
• Do I go up here before going down there? Again, giving players even this amount of freedom is a small win.
• Do I wait for a long straight piece to fill in a narrow gap or do I drop the L-shaped piece that’s already on the screen? Even Tetris tells a player-recounted story, of a sort.

You can probably think of dozens, hundreds, thousands more of these small differentiating elements, from games that most people wouldn’t think are particularly player-empowering. The ones I’ve listed, and the others you can think of, may be the lamest choices imaginable (though I’m not saying they are). Lame or not, each of these player-driven decisions significantly differentiates one player’s experience from another.

(As a note, the test of whether a choice has made a meaningful difference is whether two players, discussing their experience, describe a unique moment, even if the outcome of a choice is the same for both of them.)

For me, differentiated experience is a defining characteristic of games – maybe the defining characteristic.

By contrast, Telltale’s work, though incorporating a kind of player-empowerment, limits player options in significant ways.
Let’s go back to the list of things I think of when I think about game narrative – challenges, goals, solutions, mechanics/systems and character progression.

If you’ve experienced any of Telltale’s work you’re probably way ahead of me, but here’s my take:

Games like The Walking Dead certainly offer story, challenges, goals and solutions. Isn’t that enough to call them games and put all this seemingly nit-picky labeling behind us? Obviously, I don’t think so or I’d just stop right here and say “Oops. Never mind.” So what is it about Telltale’s work that makes it hard for me to say they’re games?

For starters, they basically have no mechanics (or when they do introduce simple mechanics — shooting while backing up stairs and such — they seem out of place and unnecessary). There’s no character progression to speak of. And there’s no real player control of the minute-to-minute. That last point is key.

Everything Telltale offers is pre-planned — even the game-like qualities they do incorporate. The challenges, the goals the solutions, everything is determined and constrained by the designers through a script that I’m pretty certain utilizes a traditional branching tree structure. (True confession time: I don’t have any inside information about how things work under the hood at Telltale, but I’d love it if someone who did know would chime in and tell me!)

If my experience of Telltale’s work has led me to the correct conclusion, you can’t really go where you want to go when you want to go there and I don’t think there’s ever the possibility of a player discovering a freeform, player-driven solution to a problem.

What that tells me is that Telltale is less interested in empowering players and, like a novelist or film-maker, more interested in the story they want to tell. It tells me they’re not much interested in the player’s impact on the minute-to-minute unfolding of the experience. Nothing wrong with that, though it’s not a choice I’d likely make as a developer. What Telltale clearly does care about is character interaction and dialogue choices that give the illusion that players have a role in directing the narrative. And they clearly value choices that feel meaningful (even when they’re really not). Man, does Telltale get choices.

Paradoxically, these player-limiting characteristics and the focus on linear story elements are, I think, where the Telltale magic happens.

Magic? You bet. The magic is that the choices Telltale offers say little or nothing about the characters’ feelings about a situation… and they’re not about allowing players to min-max or optimize or save-and-reload until they find the “best” solution to the puzzle or problem. Do you know how rare these characteristics are in games?

Pretty rare. The magic of Telltale’s choices – the magic of their work, overall, is that I, at least, and I suspect many of you reading this, forget the character you’re playing. The choices Telltale asks you to make as you wend your way through their artfully crafted stories reveal something about the player’s feelings about right and wrong. Telltale forces you to, within script constraints, think about what would be the best thing to do in a given situation if you encountered that situation in the real world 9or a zombie-infested one…). “Game space” is subordinate to “real space” and character development is subordinate to players’ realizations about themselves.

Despite featuring strong, well-developed characters, Telltale’s scripts force players to think for themselves and about themselves. That’s awesome and, if I may say, what I’ve always tried to do in the games I’ve worked on. I’ll let others decide how successful I’ve been. Clearly, Telltale’s approach is working.

Telltale succeeds at this not because their mechanics are great or their puzzles are challenging or their worlds are open-ended. They succeed because their scripts are flat-out better than other people’s, and even more important, those scripts pose ethical dilemmas that are more subtle and problematic than anything anyone else in the game business has on offer.

Is there more to the magic than talented writers and an interest in ethics? I think there is. Again, I have no inside information, but I think there’s a structural thing going on that’s pretty old-school but still very effective: I’ve already mentioned the branching tree structure. Telltale’s work takes that to a whole new level.

Without meaning to disparage anything or anyone in any way, I often describe the Telltale (or David Cage) approach as jamming several movie scripts together. And, then, refining those scripts so they intertwine with one another to give the illusion of player choice, rather than the reality of it.

That has some interesting side effects that make it hard for me to apply the word “game”:

No matter how convincing the illusion is, I’m pretty sure no one at Telltale has ever been or will ever be surprised by any choice any player makes. Millions of players can play, but because writers and designers carefully craft every choice ahead of time, the possible outcomes all exist, in some metaphysical sense, in “script-space,” regardless of which choices you select.

And no player will ever surprise themselves as they play because they really have very little freedom, if any, to leave the tracks laid by the intertwined scripts. Players will be surprised by the choices and consequences afforded them by the talented, creative people whose scripts they’re experiencing, but nothing can happen unless a writer/designer implemented it in the first place. Being surprised by something – largely a result of interactions between tools/interactions with in-gameworld elements – requires giving players control at a level Telltale simply won’t allow.

That means that the only difference between my experience and yours in a Telltale game is that I chose one script and you chose another. You saw a slightly different scene than I did but, ultimately, your script and my script will converge again, maybe even in the very next scene. In reality, we’re both experiencing a single story, just a well-disguised one. We can compare our choices with other people’s choices – something Telltale exploits in an exceptionally elegant and compelling manner — and the results seem player-driven because branching done in a sophisticated manner works that way. But that comparison of my pre-planned choices versus your preplanned choices is all players can do. They can’t really make a difference. It’s cool that you made the same choices as 42% of players, but that doesn’t add up to a game-defining, player-driven narrative in my book.

That it works at all is part magic trick and part something else (which I’ll get to in a moment – remember the words “familiarity” and “comfort”). And, just to restate in a slightly different way something I said earlier: I don’t believe Telltale’s magic tricks make their work “less than” or “worse than” other interactive narratives or works more irrefutably classified as games – far from it. Magic is cool – cool enough that The Walking Dead was my favorite interactive experience of 2012 and Telltale’s more recent work is compelling as well.

Going one step further, I’m so inspired by Telltale’s work that I actually thought about trying to make a game in that style. I’m sure it’s a lot harder than it looks, but I suspect it would be like writing a choose-your-own-adventure book (with pretty pictures). I wrote some pick-a-path stuff back in my tabletop days and had a lot of fun with it so, yeah, I’ve thought about exercising that muscle again…

Anyway, let me give you a sort of a bottom line (“sort of” because I’m not really done yet – this is just an illusion of closure…).

If you need to put a label on what Telltale does, here’s my answer: No, they’re not making games. They are, as I hinted earlier, making “experiences” (my preferred, if imprecise term). To be more concrete, and at risk of being mocked for resurrecting a term long thought dead, let’s say Telltale is the place that finally cracked the “interactive movie” code.

Terminology aside (and my embarrassment at using it), for those of you who’ve been sleeping under a rock for the last 25 years, the true interactive movie has been the holy grail for a lot of developers and, now we know, the experience of choice for a lot of players. And Telltale’s better at it than anyone else.

I know there’s no great insight in trotting out the hoary old chestnut: “interactive movie.” (I fully expect a fair amount of grief about even typing those words from the deeper thinkers among you.) But I think an accurate hoary old chestnut is better than lumping Telltale’s work in with clearly categorizable narrative games that function in fundamentally different ways and offer players fundamentally different kinds of experiences.

One final semi-relevant thought (and now I really am wrapping up): A large part of Telltale’s success probably stems from the familiarity normal people – i.e., non-gamers – have with existing media like movies and television. People get movies and TV and, therefore, have a high level of comfort with a work that looks like a movie or TV show and feels like a movie or TV show – but one that can be redirected in simple, safe yet still compelling ways by the viewer. A lot of developers – I’ll include myself here – would be well-served by focusing a little more on familiarity and the comfort of our audience. Going to them rather than insisting they come to us makes a lot of sense, something Telltale gets (and I do not…).

So does Telltale make “games” or “experiences” or “interactive movies?” Honestly, despite having just spent pages making some sort of case, I really don’t much care what you call them. Call them poodles for all I care. As long as Telltale keeps doing what they do as well as they do it, I’ll be a happy guy.

BTW, I was going to end this post with something along the lines of “If you want to comment on this, I’m eager to engage in a dialogue about Telltale, games and narrative. However, I beg you to refrain from using the terms ‘narratology’ or ‘ludology.’ Those words make my skin crawl. I’ll probably ignore any comments that go there.” I was going to do that, but thought it might be too obnoxious, so I didn’t. Well, now that I think about it, I just did end my post with that comment (foolishly, no doubt). First mine, triggered, I guess. Have at me.

I’m done now. Got to go play some Game of Thrones…

DSGA year one recap, part 5

We had a focus. We had a staff. We had students. So how’d the first year go?

The short version of the story is it went really well. Things weren’t perfect of course – on day one of the first year I told our 20 participants they were part of the DSGA Beta 1.0 and part of their job would be to help us make Beta 2.0 better. They did a terrific job of that, letting us know through their words and actions where we were succeeding and where we were falling short. Let’s just say they weren’t shy!

On the plus side, our plan to split each day into morning lectures and afternoon lab worked pretty much as planned.

In the morning, we lectured, laying out the concepts of leadership and management. We covered the mundane (what the heck is leadership and how does it differ from management?… how do you brainstorm?… how do you create a compelling resume; how do you interview; and how do you network effectively to enhance the odds of getting a job?… even how to run a meeting so everyone isn’t driven mad!).

We covered, well, whatever the opposite of mundane is (how to conceptualize, flesh out and pitch a concept… how to deal with interpersonal conflict… how to communicate across disciplines… how to turn a bunch of individuals of varying skill levels and diverse backgrounds into a great team with shared goals… how to set up the conditions in which positive studio cultures form… what bumps, challenges and changing expectations you should expect to encounter as you advance in your career…).

And in between, we covered the nuts and bolts of project management (strengths and weaknesses of various team structures… strengths and weaknesses of various project management methodologies… how to work with QA… how to deal with requests from executives who can be, let’s be honest, random at times… how to parse a P&L…)

Obviously, we tried to provide tools for taking the conceptual aspects of these leadership and management issues so they could be applied in the practical environment of actual game development, as experienced in the lab.

The lab itself worked pretty well, too.

For sure, those of us who’d been through building start-ups felt right at home. We had too many people in too little space. We had people with varying levels of knowledge of the their disciplines as well as the softer skills necessary to make a game together. We had people feeling each other out to determine who would be buddies and who wouldn’t. We had people complaining about chairs and where they had to sit. Like I said – it was just like a start-up studio.

But there were some differences as well. Because of our lecture schedule, we didn’t start lab time – actual game development – until after lunch (1-ish), and though the participants all felt they were working hard, their experience didn’t exactly reflect the reality of game development, where hours tend to be long and expectations high. Let me be clear – several of our students put in a lot of time and worked as hard as I would expect any professional to work. But there was a definite tendency for the lab to empty out around 5 p.m. except for our stalwarts. The staff expectation was that the whole team would be in there longer, working until tasks were completed rather than to a time limit. Next year, we’re going to make sure our dedicated few don’t get left alone “after hours!”

Another big difference between real world development and the DSGA was our commitment to giving everyone a chance to lead the team of 20. To accomplish that, we put into practice a plan involving a rotating leadership structure. Every three weeks a different pair of participants would take on the roles of Producer and Game Director (Creative Lead), and those new leads could (if they made their case to the staff) actually change the team structure during their tenure. In practice, this didn’t happen often, but it did happen. Though roles and team structures do change in the real world, they rarely change that often or that regularly, and participants had a hard time maintaining the kind of consistency you look for, both on the management and creative sides of game development. We have some ideas about how to address the artificiality of that approach in year two, without compromising on the idea that everyone will get a chance to lead the team of 20.

Finally, as far as the class/lab split went, we didn’t always see people putting into practice in lab the lessons learned in class. There were communication, skill level and creative clashes exactly like you’d expect in the real world. But where we expected everyone to go right from concept to practice to address those challenges more effectively than untrained (or experientially trained) leaders might, some of the participants had trouble with that. To be clear, many of them were able to use the tools we gave them to lead our diverse team members effectively, but others of them foundered when putting things into practice. This coming year, we’re going to use a lot more exercises and roleplaying to ensure that more of our participants are successful in bridging that concept/practice gap, to their benefit and to the benefit of team and project.

At the end of the day, despite some hiccups, I think it’s safe to say that all 20 participants left with an understanding of how hard the jobs of project leadership and management are. They learned how hard it is to keep a team motivated during an extended development cycle. They learned what it means to be an effective team member and a leader regardless of title and position on a team. All wins…

And here’s one of the most amazing things to me: Despite hiccups, despite radical (though not unrealistic) creative changes along the way and some team restructurings implemented by different leadership duos, the end result was a complete, playable game – The Calm Before (which you can check out here: http://thecalmbeforegame.com/). I told everyone at UT that a completed game wasn’t the product they should expect at the end of the program – the students and what they learned would be the product – but a good, fun, replayable game DID come out of it. (It actually had some of the multi-solution/multi-path stuff I love so much in games.)

So, that’s the high level on class and lab. There were two other aspects of the program that I thought worked really, really well – mentoring and guest visits.

Taking that first one first, the staff met with participants one-on-one on a regular basis, discussing the unique challenges each of them experienced, as a team member and as a lead. The personal and professional growth I saw in our participants as a result of these one-on-ones was inspiring. Of all the things we did, I think these sessions may have been the most valuable.

And then there were guest lectures. We had over 30 industry folks come in to talk about their experiences as game development leaders, as entrepreneurs, as business experts, as discipline leads, and as industry pundits. I’ve been making games for over 30 years and I learned a TON from these folks. Each guest stuck around for an informal lunch, where students could ask questions, engage in conversations and just hang out with people most game developers never even get to meet in their entire careers. I mean, we had the Creative Director from Harmonix come by… founders of Bioware, Bethesda and Certain Affinity… the co-creator of Words with Friends… the President of the Entertainment Software Association… legends like Richard Garriott… industry analysts like Michael Pachter… experts in analytics, HR, game law, contracts, games as a service and even more. The varied viewpoints were critical to what we were trying to accomplish at the DSGA – “there’s no one right way” was one of our mantras – and our students were able to make some amazing connections.

Oh, yeah, and when the program came to an end, many of our students made effective use of the tools we taught, the career fair we organized and the networking opportunities they had and got some really good jobs – at Telltale, Gearbox, Turbine, Disney, 2K and elsewhere.

So that’s it. The first DSGA year is behind us and we’re rocketing toward year two. There’s more information available at http://moody.utexas.edu/gaming-academy and you can always check my blog posts from December 2013 through April of 2014 – https://warrenspector.wordpress.com/2013/12/. If you already know you want to join us you can apply at http://moody.utexas.edu/gaming-academy/apply. But act quickly – the application deadline is just a week away and the class is already filling up!

And with that, maybe I can now get back to blogging about things other than the DSGA!