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Game Devs Burn Another House Down
Another year, and another session of the 'Game Developer's Rant'. Last year saw Warren Spector making some comments that were heavily talked about for months after the GDC had ended. This year, some more talented people got together to talk smack about the industry they work in. (Cussin' and afightin' behind the link, be warned.) From Alice's transcript: "The name of this conference is 'what's next'. This year they're gonna tell me, I'm going back to my desk, I'm going to know what to do, and it's going to be easy! Right? Iwata-san. Totally inspiring. Can't wait to see the Revolution happen. Went to see Will Wright. Love him! Love his process! So intimidated. But his stuff was so hard to think about. I lost some brain cells thinking about it, so I want to say thank you to ATI and the art institute for showing me what's next in games: hawt chix! ?"
Compelling experiences are carved out, made of gaps. We have bathrooms in our environments because it's more realistic. One day someone will think eating and shitting should go into a game because there's a bathroom to use. This is not a good idea.
I agree. The game experience for me is about two things: suspending disbelief and living a fantasy experience. Games that try to mimic life, to me, create complete disbelief. I tried the Sims and all that, but I'm thankful that Civ4 doesn't have toilets. My favorite games still go back to text mode, though, because I prefer my imagination over the "one-size-fits-all" imagination of 3D designers. I'm amazed at the visual quality levels of games today, but they don't suspend disbelief just because they look real.
We don't have an Oscars. We don't have an academy.
Be thankful. The Oscars are a self-serving joke for a cartel-driven industry. The gaming industry does have their own oscars: it is called game sales, game profits, and happy consumers.
You guys are the future, and it's a beautiful future if you open your mind and actually think about business a bit more.
See my previous point. The idea of thinking about business more is of massive importance. Profit for a product you make means you have happy customers who want your product. They're exchanging their store-of-time ("money") for your time, and if they're happy, they'll happily pay. En masse.
We need to make games that people care about so much that people can't not play them.
Yes! We gamers want not just to play a game, we want to be able to have a desire to play it. Most games today look cool, sound cool and have all the jazz but I want to not play them because they don't offer me the experience I desire. Have you seen the drive to return to table-top D&D gaming? That is an RPG. A keyboard and a mouse are not RPG-efficient in my mind, because my mind is not part of the interface.
Maybe we need to become fossil fuel for the next generation to come along and show us how it's done.
They will, but I think it will be taking a step backwards. The more hardware that is needed to play a "coolness-factor" game, the more bugs I find, the more difficult it is to play and the more it works to create disbelief and take me out of the picture.
I have to tell ya, there's nothing better that can be done because the games industry is d.e.a.d.
GIGO - Garbage In, Garbage Out.
We put food in, shit comes out.
See previous 2 points.
The second I'll just mention that I'm going down the corridor to the maternity room where there's an infant that has a better future than the games business and it's called interactive storytelling.
For me a big part of interactivity is letting my brain create the image I believe I will soon see. That is part of fear, part of desire. If I am fed everything, I won't be hungry for what is ahead. Games have to create a hunger and a thirst every step of the way.
Your number one beef with the industry or your job. And tomorrow.. no,, Saturday.. hahah.. do something about it!
Actually, the market will cause you to do something about it. Your paycheck might be great, so that means there are customers. But the big part of a job is also being satisfied in your work, and that might mean taking a paycut in order to find new markets.
but I realise that the people in the audience are actually very intelligent here and only stupid people think that patents is a good idea, so that'd be a waste of time.
Whoa, did your friendly neighborhood anarcho-capitalist just say that? I don't think I did!
I didn't wanna rant, I wanted to rave. Games are really totally amazing.
Yet when I complete a game, I am only happy when I realize that my mind is truly am
And I got modded into flamebait oblivion. (and I will again, I'm sure)
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
All I can say is I want the last 10 minutes of my life back that it took me to read that.
All of this is dumb.
Good games only need one thing. Just one thing. They need to be fun.
If its fun, everything else will follow.
Im getting tired of these overcomplex rants about videogames, when at the core they are simply fun toys to pass time. Developers, authors, the entire industry really only need to focus on games staying fun. If people say "hey, this is fun!" everything else should follow.
The problem with interactive story telling is that to be broad, you need either a lot of well-thought voice recordings and renderings for each variation of the scene, or just strip the audio and keep text dialogs.
As I said before in another story, we need the technology to provide good voice synthesis, as to provide us with "virtual improvising actors" that will act differently depending on the circumstances.
An example I like to talk about is FF-X (not X-2, it sucked), a game I liked a lot. I loved the story, and the greatest motivation i had for going on with the game was wondering what happened next.
But in the end, it was just pre-recorded clips - inside a linear game. But what if we could have a non-linear game, with many different endings and different events happening? This would add a lot of replay value. I would like for example, to make the game change such that Tidus would fall in love with Rikku instead of Yuna, and Yuna would come to become a secondary character. What if Yuna and Rikku could chat about Tidus and what they think about him, or what about some emotional screw up that would split the party and open different possibilities in the game? (Like your quest is to travel thru the mountains so you could simply apologize to your loved one and go on with the quest - yeah, I know, it's crazy, but at least it'd be interesting to watch). Kinda like Silent Hill games where you can unlock different endings, but I want the character interactions and not mere key objects to do the unlocking.
I'm talking about AI. Not basic AI like intelligent enemies, but an "emotion" engine where characters could change their mood and give you different answers, or do different things.
The problem is that with voice actors and pre-recorded audio) this would be either impossible or beyond budget/time. We've reached the point where innovation is IMPOSSIBLE with the current technology.
Game programmers need to stop relying on old formulas and start developing more tools for better games:
* a good emotion engine for character AI
* efficient speech synthesis so that characters can express ideas and emotions without needing a voice actor to have every possibility recorded
* perhaps a better script (as in camera, action) engine for cutscenes
This would work at least with RPG's.
I was only exploring the possibility of interactive storytelling. It is a VERY SPECIFIC kind of games. If you don't like it, well, you're welcome to contribute with your ideas.
The linearity of the Final Fantasy series is what caused me to lose interest in it, aside from my dislike of the gameplay. I felt like I was watching an interactive movie rather than playing a game.
Personally, I hope once the technology that you've mentioned is conceived and matures that cutscenes won't be necessary at any point in a game. This is happening already--Half-Life 2 takes place entirely in first person, and it has some of the best storytelling I've ever seen in a video game, and it's a shooter. You really feel like you're a part of what's going on rather than watching the events go on from the omnipotent perspective commonly found in books and movies. I hope the entirely in-game method of storytelling is one that will spread throughout all story-based games--it's something that's unique to the medium, and should be embraced.
You should check out the Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Elder Scrolls series if you're interested in emotion and open-endedness in your story-based RPGs.
Am I the only one who read the submission, RTFA, and read the submission again and said "huh"?
I can see why you would post that as an AC. Did you ever stop and think that maybe there is a reason they are fun? Well, this is what that's about. How the hell are they supposed to focus on keeping games fun if they don't discuss what makes games fun in the first place?
Silly AC trolls.
They call me the wookie man, I guess that's what I am
Robin: YAAAAAaaaawwwwnnn!!! Games have sexy women in them, sex sells, its disgraceful, yadda yadda yadda.
Frank: I get the idea that people shouldnt be concentrating on realism over the gaming experience but he seems to be against getting to the point where we can simulate reality. In my opinion that will be a grand day indeed. I mean where do you go after that? You cant have better graphics, you cant supe up a computer to get more detail out or rely on some new fangel graphics engine. Its when weve perfected graphics that we will _have_ to start coming up with the truly unique and wonderful gameplay.
Seamus: Really good view and I have to say I havent really thought of it like that much at all. My only problem with it is that its a visous cycle. The developers need the millions to get business up and running with original ideas, the publishers have the millions but dont want to risk original ideas.
The only way the industry is breaking free is actually in a similar way to what Seamus mentions. The stars of the game industry have started to crack open original lines. Will Right Sid Meir Peter Moloneux recognised names that they know will sell and as a result they get away with a lot more experimental stuff. Best article of the lot.
Jonathon Blow: Has some good points games can be incredible without the innovation. However, he kind of ends up pointing out an innovation that would really help games... If its only been used once its still fairly innovative. (Though id say blood lines also managed to give a far more wide spectrum than just Good and Evil.)
Chris Crawford: My lecturers in AI (Marc Cavassa and Fred Charles) Have been doing some impressive work in to interactive story telling. However, I dont see it as this huge reviver of the games industry. Indeed I dont think the industry is as 'brain dead' as he makes out. (Especially in Nintendo's corner.) Its just another innovation that will make games popular again for a while.
Jane Pinkard: Decent common sense. Got a problem then fix it. Wont stop me slagging off shitty games though.
Chris Hecker: I am not in the games are art camp. I certainly dont agree that they can be compared to Movies and Comic Books. He himself points out some massive differences. Yes games are cool but I didnt see much of a point to his rave.
I'm talking about AI. Not basic AI like intelligent enemies, but an "emotion" engine where characters could change their mood and give you different answers, or do different things.
I would suggest human storytellers. The problem with this is scale--how to have so many DMs accessible to the currently logged in online players, but that could be mitigated by "out of the face" intereactions, like going to the vendor, healing downtime, etc. But what would happen if Blizz were to substitute live quest givers for some of their automated ones?
Until a plot line is so smart that it can pass a Turing test, you'll always know that your game environment has boundaries. But with the kind of money that games can make, couldn't they have live people that move the story along and interact with the players in human ways?
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$tar -xvf
This is a damned if you do, damned if you don't scenario... what's the biggest complaint about games with multiple endings? People feel cheated if they don't have the time to invest in seeing every ending or complain that a choice they made in hour 1 affects the outcome in hour 20. If you make it linear, you make THOSE people happy, but you also make the camp your sitting in unhappy because it's so linear. Who's right? Both are. The answer? There is none. There will always be games with multiple endings and there will always be games with single endings because both feed a specific group. Games industry will die as soon as the movie industry or music industry will die. Never. Change yes, shrink sure, die no.
"Compelling experiences are carved out, made of gaps. We have bathrooms in our environments because it's more realistic. One day someone will think eating and shitting should go into a game because there's a bathroom to use. This is not a good idea."
Guess they never saw Duke Nukem before. That idea's sooo 1995.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
What you're describing is essentially Morrowind. It uses text, but I didn't mind because the result was that sort of open-ended game world.
I think it will be a considerable amount of time before a speech synthesizer can convincingly stand in for a real voice actor. Even now in the 21st century, the best we have are the phoneme-clip based systems that still sound like robots. There isn't even a voice synthesizer equivalent of William Shatner, let alone Ian McKellan.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
What you're describing is essentially Morrowind. It uses text, but I didn't mind because the result was that sort of open-ended game world.
Exactly. This is something I've noticed in modern games. Before, all you required was a good imagination and programming knowledge. After all, we know how to draw a sad anime face, right? But now we need actors, a dedicated 3D team, and games are turned more into movies than games. There's little room left for the imagination. So, if we want to be able to do what we did with simplistic (even text) games, we need to update our tech.
Why does this Crawford guy keep getting invited to these things? What has he actually accomplished lately? Or in the last 20 years for that matter? Geez. Enough with TALKING about interactive fiction. Show us the goods already! Otherwise shut up!
Oh please. So you change the name, and all of a sudden everything's different. What's wrong with "video games"?
We saw this kind of thinking before, in the early 90's. "New Media". "Interactive" (not interactive-something, just the one word. People would go around saying "I work in interactive.")
All changing the name does is attract a bunch of wannabe-"visionaries" who can talk a lot about how they're gonna innovate, break the mold, etc, but when the pedal hits the metal, all they end up doing is schlocky low-content low-production-quality derivative crap. Those are the people responsible for the FMV "revolution" in videogames circa 1994. Do we really need that again?
You want a revolution, come up with a new business model. Seamus is part right, I think, in that we need to recognize REAL innovation with awards. But really, the advent of XBox Live direct distribution and low-cost development models will go much further in spurring innovation than any new jargon will. The whole reason there's no innovation in games is that developing them costs a ton of money. Because the risk is already huge, publishers don't want to incur more risk by going out on a limb with content and game mechanics.
Make game creation cheap, open the distribution pipes so that smaller houses can get their games out, and I guarantee you will start seeing innovation.
if i can get Yuna to fall in love with Rikku i will buy it.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
if i can get Yuna to fall in love with Rikku i will buy it.
Seriously, in NWN I'm playing a female character and none of the female hookers in the brothels will give me the time of day. No, there's one guy hooker that they try to pawn me off on. Look, I'm a bad ass halfling rogue with an attitude. I don't want some used up tired out old mangina.
Besides, what percentage of female characters are really female.
FF-X???? So in your opinion, quality stories:
- Spend countless hours "building tension" to a plot twist that was obvious in the first fifteen minutes.
- Only bother to give any sort of depth or development to the main character and his girl, and then, not too much, buddy. Don't want to make them sympathetic.
- Involve characters moving from point A to point B with no unexpected twists or setbacks.
- Incorporate pointless, repetitive collection tasks with no motivation behind them.
- Leave gaping plot holes.
- Never contest or question anything, and expect you to simply accept anything they throw at you - except the undead, because the undead are pure evil, obviously.
- Star female characters that like to be pushed around.
You truly have your thumb on the pulse of great literature.
Seriously...Branching storylines wouldn't be enough to fix Final Fantasy Ten. It was a mockery of good storytelling. Almost every conversation boiled down to, "The plot is this way." It was like taking an overpriced bus tour through the abandoned streets of a good game.