Anyway, in the meanwhile, I helped put out a game. It’s doing pretty well. You should play it. Also, in place of a love letter to Marathon, I’m doing a whole blog series with George Kokoris and Brendan Keogh. Both of them are inimitable and excellent, and I’m looking forward to seeing where we go with this.

I am now about to make the most pointy-headed blog post I’ve ever made or likely will make. Fair warning.

I’ve spent a lot of my professional career (and a lot of my academic studies before that) thinking about procedural story. It’s a topic near and dear to my heart, and I was thrilled by how much of it we managed to squeeze into Skyrim (even if it’s just scratching the surface). If you’ve ever heard me start expounding on this topic (especially if I’ve had a few), you may have heard me mention this notion I have of “orders” for procedural stories.

In my mind, it’s essentially a way to break down various degrees of procedurality so that they can be more productively discussed. I’ve seen way too many purists dismiss something as “not really procedural” because it doesn’t hit their particular standard. But the only way this tech will get pushed forward (and eventually disrupt, as I still believe is possible) is if we can acknowledge that there’s a continuum and that a game’s specific position on that continuum need not disqualify it from discussion and study.

With these orders, I’m thinking very specifically of narrative and story at a high level, and not terribly interested in lower-level action-driven experiences. Yes, you could argue that a chase sequence in Assassin’s Creed contains procedural story-like substance, but if we go down that road than any executable code could be seen as a type of procedural story. Once everything is everything, it’s not as fun to talk about.

OK, so here are the orders as I’ve defined them. I know I’ve got some academics who will read this and might have their own definitions that conflict — awesome, let’s talk more! Tell me what about this is useful or not useful. I hate getting bogged down in semantics (I’m sure I’m out of synch with the current academic definitions of “narrative” vs. “plot” vs. “story”), but think high-level frameworks for discussion are immensely useful. (Obviously, my thoughts on this have been pretty thoroughly influenced by the way our tech works on Skyrim. Sapir-Whorf and all that.)

0th Order

Authored Content with Procedural Role-Filling

Potential Uses: Guiding the player towards unseen content; allowing quests to proceed if key characters are not available; adding variety to different playthroughs; providing a degree of repeatable content (though the seams become apparent fairly quickly).

1st Order

Localized, Responsive, Event-Driven Scenarios

Potential Uses: Giving NPCs richer (if still very bespoke) reactions to the player’s immediate actions; providing interesting responses to player’s higher-level choices.

2nd Order

Chained 1st Order Content

Potential Uses: Giving the player a full story experience with a range of expression, while allowing for the same levels of variation we get from 2nd order and lower.

3rd Order

Game-Directed Experience Management Using Procedural Tools

(Of course, the same algorithm could deploy 0th and 1st order content to direct towards purely authored story as well.)

I recognize that this order may seem like the odd man out in the continuum, but I think some level of dramatic awareness and management is key in making procedural story even worth discussing.

Potential Uses: Making sure the player is having a good time; having a higher percentage of content seen; detecting experiences the player enjoys (a difficult task in itself) and helping direct towards similar ones.

4th Order

Chained Content Constructed from End-State

It’s important not to think of this as “the game forcing the player along a set path,” but rather allowing a broad range of story experiences that lead to a defined conclusion. Imagine a Lord of the Rings game, where the player allows Gollum to steal and escape with the ring. Currently this leads to an awkward “Game Over; Try Again; LOL.” But with 4th order procedural content, the game can look at the current state of the world and devise multiple ways the player could still get to the end state of “Player destroys the ring.”

I’m starting to get handwavey here. That’s because this is hard. If it was easy to talk about in a few paragraphs, a lot more games would do it. :-) It’s worth noting, though, that even moderately experienced pen-and-paper game masters can do this kind of thing on a regular basis.

Potential Uses: Letting the player never make a true “mistake,” and just incorporating actions into a larger story that can still be narratively interesting; letting the player own their experience at a very high-level of decision making.

5th Order

Autonomous Assembly of Lower-Order Content from Parameterized Input

That’s 5th order content right there. Letting the game system construct an experience, using all the tools of 0th-4th order content to fulfill a set of high-level goals that are given as inputs.

Honestly, I could have just labeled this as “∞ Order,” since I pretty much just described the holy grail of procedural story, and there are almost certainly other incremental steps between 4th and there.

Potential Uses: Fulfillment of the dreams of every procedural games researcher ever; effectively removing “game designer” from the list of useful professions; providing individually tuned entertainment experiences to everyone in the world.

So what?

While I didn’t mention the holodeck until 5th/∞ order, I really started getting into that turf around the 4th order. While there are examples of 0th-3rd at varying levels of fidelity today, I don’t know if anyone is even realistically attempting 4th.

In Skyrim we did a boatload of 0th, a good amount of 1st, and just started sniffing around 2nd. I think the tools are there for more, though, and that’s one of the reasons I’m excited for the impending release of the Creation Kit ; I can’t wait to see what smart people do with Radiant Story systems.

I meet you at a party. Or a wedding. Or a bar. Doesn’t matter. Maybe we have mutual friends, or just struck up conversation over some humorous occurrence that we both witnessed. We’ll talk movies, football, the weather, and music. Eventually, you ask what I do for a living.

“I’m a game developer.”

“Oh, let me tell you — I have the best idea for a game.”

It’s at this point that our interaction has become terribly unpleasant for me. Let’s go through the possible outcomes here.

Your idea is bad

In all honesty, this is the most likely status of your idea. This is nothing personal; the vast overwhelming majority of ideas are bad. I know you’re convinced that your combination of Prince of Persia with Call of Duty is obviously and undeniably awesome, but there’s a reason new genres come along so rarely. And that really sweet character you have in your head, the one who’s the ninja with a heart-of-gold but a dark past out to rescue his pet elephant? That’s not a game, and neither is your pre-apocalyptic caveman story. Your vague notion about color matching (but on Facebook, you know, like Farmville!) is even less a game than the previous ideas.

And now I have to respond. I try not to be an asshole, so here’s what you’ll see. The eye contact that I was previously maintaining will be broken as I stare at a point just beyond your left shoulder. My eyes widen, my lips purse, and I’ll start nodding a lot. This is as close as I’ll come to telling you that this idea is terrible. Eventually I’ll emit a few chuckles and try to change the subject.

Thanks for adding a big dose of awkward to my night, and making me a lot less likely to accept your Facebook request.

Your idea is good

Congratulations, you have an awesome idea! Nobody has ever topped Derek Sivers’s explanation of why ideas by themselves are worthless, so go read his post and come back.

But now you’ve left me to explain that to you. And how vanishingly few games are made by a single person, especially if that person has no programming experience (which you invariably don’t have). If I was an amateur developer, you might be lucky enough to have a partner in your hobby, but no, I will not leave my steady job with its world-class co-workers and 401(k) to help you make this game.

I’ll recommend a lot of resources for learning to make games, and you’ll either be discouraged by how little those first projects resemble what you have in your mind, or you won’t even look at those resources and continue to try and attract some people by posting on game dev forums about how you “just need a few programmers and maybe an artist” to get it off the ground. The role of the “idea person” is a sexy one, and you’re convinced that could be you. My warning of how that’s not really a role in any creative industry go unheeded and you chalk me up as a jerk trying to destroy your dreams.

Man, it would have been way easier to just tell you your idea sucked. But then I would be lying!

Even if your idea is so good that I want to help you, what now? I am not an executive at my company, and thus can’t do anything to bring you in there. Even if the few people I know who fund game development are interested in a pure idea (which strains the definition of “long shot”), I’ve never worked with you and thus am not willing to stake my reputation on vouching for you to those people. So now I’m an asshole for killing your dream, and I feel guilty for not being able to help you.

Once again, this is at minimum a pretty awkward blip in the graph of my evening.

Your idea is really good

Then there’s the final and most awkward possibility. Your idea is so good that I already had it myself. Or my company’s had it. Maybe I’m scheduled to work on it next week. Maybe I just finished it today. Either way I can’t tell you about it, but I’m going to immediately want you to stop talking, like 5 seconds ago.

Because intellectual property laws in this country are nuts and plenty of lawyers are willing to take the case of anyone claiming they have a suit against a deep-pocketed company, I have to consider the possibility that you might sue me or my company for stealing your idea.

I know, I know. You wouldn’t do that! You’re cool! That’s great, but remember, we just met, and I don’t know that you’re cool. I’ve been sued before (non-IP related matter) and it’s not fun, even with good lawyers and someone else footing the bill. Don’t make me call up those memories.

(I fell into this trap myself once — as a grad student excitedly having lunch with some Imagineers, I was talking up the cool robotic puppeteering interface I was working on when the lead got very quiet and said, “Be very careful what you say to me.” Later I would see the interface they use for their “living characters initiative” and well, remember the bit about ideas versus execution. They can execute like mad.)

And now I’ve had to extricate myself from the conversation, and do the IP calculus of whether I need to talk to our legal people on Monday to make sure we’re protected.

To sum up

I will not listen to your game idea.

OK, actually I will. But our interaction is now ruined, and I will want another drink, most likely.

Don’t drive me to drink, please.

If you have an awesome idea, quit talking about it to strangers at parties and go start making it. Learn to program, learn to animate, learn to write. And then go make your game. And let me know about it!

Because while I will not listen to your game idea, I absolutely would love to play your game.

Dear Editor:
I am 8 years old.
Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus.
Papa says “If you see it in The Sun it’s so.”
Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?
— Virginia O’Hanlon, 115 West Ninety-Fifth Street

Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measure by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

You may tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men who ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.

Back when I wrote my post about Games of My Life, I had intended to go back and break down each one and say why it was so impactful. This is belated, but I’m going to get started now. In honor of tomorrow’s re-release of The Sly Collection, I’m going to start of with Sly 2: Band of Thieves, which I’ve previously referred to as “the most perfect and under-discussed game of the 2000’s.” A bold claim, and it’s time to back it up.

Like most game designers, I like to think of the game experience in levels, from the lowest (I am pressing a button to jump) to the highest (I am trying to stop the Klaww Gang from reassembling Clockwerk) and everything in between (I am trying to get to to the end of this level, I am collecting money to buy an upgrade, et cetera).

Sly 2 provides an almost impeccably balanced experience at each of these levels, and, most impressively, manages to have them reinforce each other and support the emotional themes of the story.

Run ‘n’ Jump

At its heart, Sly 2 is a cartoony action platform game. The team at Sucker Punch has shown themselves to be incredibly skilled at creating smooth, flowing control for such gameplay, and making your anthropomorphic raccoon¹ zip through the world is effortless.

Contrast this with the control of Sam Fisher in the Splinter Cell games. Sam is supposed to be a hyper-capable secret agent who single handedly saves the world, yet I could not for the life of me make him consistently do a wall split. Instead he flails about bouncing off the walls until the guards come and investigate him. Not very sneaky, Sam!

(Which one of them would win in a fight? Depends on whether I’m the one controlling them.)

Sly 2, like its predecessor, provides blue sparkles through the world where you can simply press the circle button to have Sly automatically do a thief-y move at that location. You can argue that this is dumbing down the gameplay, or the mark of a kiddie game. I argue that it’s making my onscreen avatar’s behavior match his authored character more closely.

At the lowest level, Sly 2 is almost identical to the first game in the series. So why do I hold it up? For that, we need to look at what it changed.

I Can See For Miles

The biggest shift between the first Sly Cooper and Sly 2 is the move to open worlds instead of linear levels. Each world is the area around the home base of one of the villains, and your goal there is pull off a big heist and steal the Clockwerk piece that they possess. The worlds are elaborately structured so that you do a series of prep-work (taking recon photos, sabotaging alarm systems) before the final caper. There’s some innovative planning here that would put Danny Ocean to shame.

All these objectives are laid out to you with a series of bat-signal-like beacons projecting into the sky — this activates the “cleanup/gotta catch’em all” compulsion loop in a fundamental way. Seeing them blip out as you complete each objective is rewarding to the lizard brain.

This is also where the layers of gameplay come in handy — Sly 2 gets away with highly repetitive gameplay at one layer (you spend a lot of time pickpocketing keys, for instance) by having the lower layers polished (the simple but very predictable stealth system) and the higher layers varied (why you need the keys).

Lets Do the Twist

What keeps bringing me back to Sly 2, though, and why I play it probably once a year, is the way it unfolds its story. The characters are compelling and familiar tropes from Saturday morning cartoons. But there is such care given to the writing of those characters that it retains the feel of some of the best cartoon shows. This is closer to Kim Possible than SpaceCats (and if you don’t think that cartoons can be examples of quality writing, then we probably just don’t have much to debate). There is an unmistakable panache to the dialogue which indicates to me that someone on the staff cared about the writing immensely.

At the higher level, the story never forgets that it is a story for a game. The cutscenes are all payoffs for gameplay, and never include a moment that I wish I could have played out myself. Sucker Punch knows that when the cool stuff starts happening, I want the controller in my hands, and wisely gives me that agency.

Finally, the story toys with player assumptions with enviable prowess. As you start the third world, you feel like you’ve got the pattern down. Bentley gives you the plan with a slideshow, you carry out a bunch of missions, you do a big heist, boss fight, on to the next world. But just a few steps into the third big heist, things go horribly wrong. Everyone except Bentley (the weakest, slowest, character, who the player has likely not enjoyed controlling during his missions) is captured, the mission is aborted, and you’re sidetracked into a jailbreak mission without any of the skills you’ve honed.

It’s a great reversal from a story perspective, and the fact that the game strips away so many familiar mechanics simultaneously means the player’s emotional state (vulnerable, alone) matches the characters’. When you free Sly and Murray, each one feels like a tremendous burden lifted, and the joy the player feels at regaining access to a core gameplay feature mirrors the joy the friends feel at being reunited.

It matches gameplay mechanics to emotional story beats in a way I have seen no other game do nearly as consistently. Positively masterful.

And the Rest

I could go on. The consistent presentation (even the pause menu says “We’ll be right back!”), the superb level design of both the hub worlds and the individual mission areas (“no right angles”), the varying gameplay (even if the vehicle missions can get tiring).

Sly 2 is an exemplary instance of how to expand on solid gameplay concepts for a sequel while retaining what made the original worthy of continuation. The third game in the series was a slight let down, with a little too much gameplay variety and not as much polish on the plotting and writing. But that, too, serves as a lesson in design, and draws the successes of Sly 2 into sharper relief.

So why doesn’t anyone talk about this game? Maybe because it’s not seen as terribly innovative, or because it gets filed in with the kiddie games, or because its lack of difficulty means the hardcore players (which most designers are) stayed away. But just as I think most people would be fools to ignore quality movies or books because they are “kiddie fare,” the Sly Cooper series should serve as an example for how much craftsmanship can be stuffed into one experience. It may not do anything you haven’t seen before, but what it does is a paragon of execution.

¹ I will say that one of the downsides of the game is that it attracts the love of furries. Nothing against furries, but it makes trying to find fan communities a bit more difficult.

No, the spirituality I’m talking about is the sort that appeals even to the most secular of us. Consider The Shawshank Redemption — a movie about perseverance, dignity, and a type of freedom that can never be taken away from us. The end of this movie fills you with the joy of being human, after spending several hours slowly dripping you into a state of hopeless nihilism.

I’ve never felt that from a game. Honestly, most games would be lucky to just get to the nihilism.

Lots of games tell good stories, but I worry as creators that we’re still catering to the same fantasies of the same teenage boys.

Where are the games that remind me of the sheer force of a community believing in someone ( It’s a Wonderful Life ), or how a person can change and improve themselves ( Groundhog Day )? (The last one is an interesting example, as the structure of the movie mirrors most game experiences…)

I know that we can point to things like Flower or Shadow of the Colossus as attempting to evoke higher emotions — but they haven’t really burst through to mainstream popularity. The films I’ve mentioned have all met with strong commercial success, even if it waited until the DVD with Shawshank. (Is this a sign of what the market expects or of what they’ve come to expect from us? Would it be possible to raise the emotional expectations of the market bit-by-bit?)

Really, in mainstream games, the closest we come to spiritual expression is a kind of tepid environmentalism or a vague transcendentalism that’s fairly well divorced from the mechanics — I’m thinking most of Final Fantasy VII with both of these examples, but really we tend to stick to overt power fantasies.

I guess what I’m saying is that simply conquering evil doesn’t sate me anymore. It’s not enough to destroy the Ring; I should learn the power of fellowship on the journey.

I want to play games that embody these concepts. I want to make them, too.

Writer’s Roundtable

Every year I attend GDC, I go to the Writer’s Roundtable at least one of the days. Every year I walk away disappointed. I think this year I realized why — it’s because it’s the Writer’s Roundtable, rather than the Writing Roundtable. I’d love to have a greater focus on the craft, but it seems like just a lot of whinging about the plight of writers in the games industry. Questions like “how do you unify tone across seven writers” are just met with blank stares when most people are struggling to get their studios to hire one full-time writer.

<shrug> I’d love this session to be more relevant, but I don’t know how to accomplish that. Getting people to listen to each other and stay more on topic would be a start.

(Also: writers complain that they’re not respected in every creative industry. Not unique to game writers. Try talking to screenwriters sometime about “possessive credits.”)

Permadeath

The Game Design Challenge this year was an odd one for me, the first time I’ve felt truly at odds with the prevailing opinion of the crowd. While I appreciated how he was able to infuse the scenario with humor, Jenova Chen’s Facebook game built around real people’s deaths really struck me as distasteful and borderline offensive. Assigning numeric value to human life (even as part of a game to help memorialize those lives) is just something I find inherently slimy, and I grew increasingly uncomfortable as he went on.

I thought Kim Swift, on the other hand, presented a thoughtful, reasoned game that had the potential to actually do some good. A prescription game to help people come to terms with their impending death and put positive energy into the world is the kind of thing we could use more of. All games teach, whether we want them to or not, and the lessons she proposed are some of the most important we can learn as humans. Should make us all think about what lessons our own games are teaching. I had some design quibbles, but she was tackling an incredibly hard subject as a solo designer, so I didn’t mind it.

The crowd, however, seemed to have the exact opposite reaction to the one I did — humor wins the day, as usual. That’s OK. Kim Swift, I salute you, and you win the official Shane Liesegang Game Design Challenge Award.

Overhead SMASH

My old creative director from EALA, Randy Smith, gave a talk about how he founded and runs Tiger Style. It could essentially be called “how to run a studio without becoming a business douchebag.” I’m not looking to start my own studio (at least not in the foreseeable future), but it seemed like there were lots of indie aspirationals in the audience who were inspired. As always, Randy gave an engaging, understandable, practical talk — the kind of nuts-and-bolts affair that I think GDC should do more often.

Building Open Worlds

Nate Fox, from Sucker Punch (a studio on which I have an eternal crush), gave a superlative talk on how they built their open world city for inFAMOUS. It was just chock-full of little pragmatic nuggets of useful techniques. Sightlines, weenies (the Disney kind, not the hot dogs or the dirty kind), hex-grids, border alignment, etc. Made some good points about cutting corners on the in-between stuff so they can spend more time on “evil lairs,” or the parts that the players remember and care about more. Probably the most useful session I attended this year.

(My notes say “slides available on the internet,” but I can’t seem to find them now, which makes me sad.)

Train

Brenda Brathwaite’s talk has been well covered elsewhere so I won’t go into too much detail. Suffice to say, I was shocked by how emotionally affected I was — I think due to Brenda’s honesty in portraying and discussing her own emotional journey while creating it.

She repeated the assertion that “games don’t have to be fun” that I’ve heard before, citing Schindler’s List as an example from another medium. I agree with the assertion, and that’s obviously a great movie, but I also wonder how that fits in with the different place games occupy in our culture. Everyone in our society watches movies. Everyone. To be considered a literate adult citizen, you are simply expected to have seen movies like Schindler’s List. If you are involved in filmmaking, you would be actively shunned for not having seen it.

Games don’t occupy that same station — even among game developers, I don’t think there are games you are expected to have played. (Sure, we all assume you know Tetris, Civilization, Super Mario Bros., etc., but they’re more as a foundation to the medium than as “something you simply must experience.” [I would say Heavy Rain comes close to that category, but obviously it falls short of Schindler’s List in execution. {No shame in that.}])

I wonder if we can do non-fun games without having that sense of compulsory consumption. Or rather, if they would gain as wide consumption as non-fun works do in other media.

(Definitely don’t think we should stop trying to make non-fun, serious, affecting work — just wondering if it’s futile to try and get them to a wider audience. To her credit, Brenda Brathwaite is unconcerned with audience size for these particular games, and so my bringing this up is a bit of an unfair tangent.)

In any event, her talk is the kind that makes you look at your own work and wonder if you could elevate it to a more substantial level.

Gender Breakdown

One final observation. We hear constantly about the gender breakdown in the industry, how more women developers would be good for the industry. I agree with this wholeheartedly; more perspectives will help up make better games. The boys’ club is a self-reinforcing environment, and breaking down those walls will help us create more relevant art.

I noticed that there was a pretty high number of female conference associates at GDC, though. CAs, to my understanding, are predominantly aspiring developers, though there are some full-timers among them as well. On the other hand, the non-yellow shirts at the conference were the expected ratio of men to women (about 20:1) for a games conference.

This is clearly not scientific data in the slightest, but it would seem to indicate that there are a healthy number of women who would like to work in the industry, but they don’t seem to make it in. Why is there such a disparity of gender ratio between aspiring game developers and actual game developers? I’m not sure we can use the “girls don’t want in to our industry” excuse anymore (and it was always pretty weak). Now we need to figure out why that next step is missing.

There are lots of potentially confounding variables here: CA selection could be weighted towards women; professional women may be less likely to attend GDC than their male counterparts; etc. In any case, it makes you wonder.

I think this is one of the biggest problems facing our industry. I often wonder if, 20 years from now, games are like movies (everyone participates) or like comic books (small but devoted fanbase). If we stay predominantly white, predominantly male, predominantly immature, the answer is obvious.

Apologies

Once more, I’ve got to clarify something from my first GDC post. I’ve updated the original article, but wanted to apologize for not giving credit for the initial idea of post-rant group confession to Darren Torpey. We had a good discussion at GDC that was the impetus for that post, and I was remiss to have not given him a shout-out.

Anyway, some thoughts on Sid Meier’s keynote.

I generally don’t take notes at the big sessions since they’re the most thoroughly covered elsewhere. But something Sid said made me rush to pull out my laptop and get a thought down.

Sid is at his best when talking about his failures (if you’ve never seen his talk on the three attempts to make a game about dinosaurs, it’s worth trying to track down), so his section entitled “My Bad” was fairly illuminating. The tidbit that interested me was his revelation that the original concept and implementation of Civilization was a real-time game, but they found that it made the player into too much of an observer. Switching to turn-based play lead to a higher level of player engagement.

Now, as he described a real-time Civilization, I was playing through it in my head, and 100% agreed that it was easy for the player to just sit and watch stuff happen. But the thing is, we typically associate real-time play with higher levels of engagement. So why was that not the case for Civ?

The oft-cited “one-more-turn” phenomenon associated with the Civ games comes from the basic notion of delayed results. I start building a unit; it completes in 5 turns. I research pottery; it completes in 10 turns. I have my workers build a mine; it completes in 2 turns. With enough plates spinning, I’m always just a turn (or two) away from something interesting happening. The game is thus always keeping you from finding a good stopping point. It’s really a mastery of interlocking sine waves that keeps it from having no pacing whatsoever.

If the game was in real-time, you’d lose that quantization of the play experience, but more importantly, you wouldn’t have to do anything to move it forward. Each turn in Civ, you have to do something, even if that something is just issuing “Wait” commands or slapping the spacebar to advance to the next turn. It’s impossible to just sit back and let things happen, and while you’re engaging to advance time, you might as well do something in the world, which sets more plates spinning, etc.

(There’s a similar effect at work in the player-NPC bonding during Planetfall, but I’ll save that for the love letter I plan to post about that game at some point.)

There’s almost certainly more to real-time vs. turn-based Civ; I’m not satisfied that I’ve gotten to the bottom of it. But at least I’ve now recorded my thought process on an interesting design problem after giving it a modicum of attention. Need to do that more often.

Every year I attend the rant. I find it simultaneously rousing and infuriating, and here’s why.

The rant does an excellent job at bringing up important issues. Chris Hecker admonishing game jammers to try and explore depth over speed. Paul Bettner sharing the very personal story of how crunch destroyed his love for games and ultimately, his studio. Heather Chaplin calling us all out for being immature man-children. Nichol Bradford issuing a call for game developers to do more to encourage math and science education. Et cetera.

But here’s what bothers me. Every year, we listen to the rants. We applaud wildly at their populist assertions and give standing ovations to their celebrations of the yet-unrealized potential of the medium.

Then we all go back to our jobs and don’t change a damned thing.

The rants are just pure catharsis without actually encouraging action. We listen, we debate, we argue over their merits, we deliver mini-rants against them, we blog about how right they are, and we noticeably modify our respect meters for the developers giving them.

But we don’t change ourselves.

All the steering committees, whitepapers, and surveys in the world won’t make as much of a difference as individuals making changes in the choices they make in their daily lives.

So I propose the following.

Next year, after the rant session, while all the impassioned speeches are still fresh in your post-catharsis mind, go out with some fellow developers. Have a few drinks. (This proposal is made easier because it’s leveraging something we all do anyway.)




And then confess your sins.




Determine which of the rants most applies to you. Of which crime against games are you most guilty. Then offer a suggestion for how you, YOU PERSONALLY can work to not commit that sin in the coming year. This is not the time for “the industry needs more women developers” but rather the time for “I will consider gendered perspectives of my own work and strive to make my games less sexually biased and demeaning.”

Then, the following year, meet up with those same developer friends at GDC. Recall your post-rant discussions of a year earlier, and share how you have atoned for your sins. If you have failed to do so, feel no shame, for these are difficult matters. But share the difficulty of your efforts so that we can all become more aware of just how large these mountains are.

If anything, it will keep the important elements of the rants alive longer than it takes for their effects to stop rippling through the blogosphere.

There’s nothing stopping you, of course, from doing this right now. No need to wait until next year’s rant — do the same exercise. You’ll have less time for atonement since GDC falls earlier in 2011.

Which just means you’d better get cracking. Let’s fix our industry.

1. I used it to complete a non-trivial project
2. I spent the majority of my day in it for over a year

#1 Means I have to have actually gotten into the guts of it and made it work for me. For example, while I had toyed with Python several times while in grad school, it wasn’t until I integrated it into Angel that that I could really say I knew it, thus it gets a date of 2008.

#2 allows me to include languages I learned for games that haven’t shipped. :-)

• 1998: TI-BASIC
• 1999: Visual Basic
• 2000: AppleScript
• 2001: C and C++
• 2002: x86 Assembly
• 2003: Objective-C and PHP
• 2004: Cg
• 2005: ActionScript, Java, JavaScript, and C#
• 2006: Unreal Kismet (yeah, I’ll call it a programming language)
• 2007: Ruby
• 2008: Python
• 2009: Whatever we call the game scripting language we use at Bethesda

So now the question is… what should I learn this year? Everything else has been inspired by a project (either personal or professional), and I don’t have anything on the horizon that would necessitate learning something new.

So I ask you, internet, what is worth learning? What new paradigm should I consider? What will expand my mind and my programming chops?

It had to be something:

• broad enough to appeal to digital humanities scholars who may not necessarily follow games
• engaging enough to interest people who do follow games and would likely end up coming to the talk because they saw “game designer” on the poster
• unrelated enough to my work at Bethesda that I could talk about it without tipping our hand as to our current project

In the end I decided to talk about procedural content, its current place in game development, and where it might be going in the future. I could try to sum it up, but here’s a video of my slides set over the audio from the talk.

My own feedback:

• I still talk way too fast.
• When speaking off-the-cuff, I have a tendency to preface too many statements with “I mean.” I should to work on that.
• The “character choices” segment is still pretty hazy and doesn’t make its case very well.
• My final conclusion could benefit some from more concrete examples, even if they have to be hypothetical.
• I need to do better keeping up with the blogosphere, even when spending all my free time prepping a presentation, since I only found out after the presentation that Clint Hocking has been making most of my final points, in a characteristically far more thoughtful and articulate way as part of his Click Nothing Tour ’09. Ah well.

BIG THANKS to:

• Joe Gilbert and Bethany Nowviskie from the Scholars’ Lab for inviting me.
• Liz Bernard for making an example animation for me.
• Jesse Schell, who first introduced me to the Innovator’s Dilemma.
• Joel Burgess and Ben Cummings, who served as invaluable sounding boards and test audiences. If you didn’t like it in its current state, you would have hated it before these guys were able to tell me all the problems it had. :-)