See the video here.

Here it is as a zip file (about 33 megabytes) containing the slides and an mp3.

This lecture focuses on the story-centric paradigm that we use to design a large number of games, and why I think it is problematic. Both pre-authored and dynamic story are discussed. It’s a heavily-revised version of this lecture given a few months ago in Brighton; This new version is probably better.

Perhaps a little bit of ranting makes all the difference. This week on their podcast, Jeff Roberts and Casey Muratori explained the situation very well. (Both Jeff and Casey are in the credits for Braid, for those looking for a Braid connection here).

If you are interested in the future of games, and for some reason you don’t think advertising is bad, please listen to the following excerpt:

(Yes, David Perry, you too.)

Here’s a direct-download link if you want to save the mp3.

Early in this discussion, Casey refers to Sut Jhally’s lecture “How TV Exploits its Audience”, which is available for a small fee at this link. Or, here is a Sut Jhally web site with some free clips.

If you liked this discussion, you may wish to visit: The main page for The Jeff and Casey Show, where you can download any of the episodes (28 so far!).

As a special bonus, as mentioned in the excerpt, here’s David Lynch’s opinion on the matter:

Jonathan Blow gave the closing keynote speech at Games:EDU South on July 29, 2008 in Brighton, England. This one-hour lecture is about three ways in which current mainstream games are inherently conflicted, and how this holds them back from affecting people as strongly as the forms of linear media they are striving to emulate. Art games are used to build a perspective from which to see this problem and maybe attack it a little bit.

You can download the lecture as a .zip file containing the PowerPoint slides, along with an mp3 of the audio:

(Games:EDU Keynote, 35MB).

Unfortunately the recording came out at a low quality; the questions from the audience at the end are difficult or impossible to hear, but hopefully the answers are detailed enough to provide clues as to the questions.

This essay was delivered at the Opinion Jam (organized by Ste Curran of One Life Left) at the Develop Conference 2008 in Brighton, England. It was written to be 3 minutes long when read aloud.

The essay is after the fold. If you want the accompanying PowerPoint slides, click here.
 

 

Just three months ago, Grand Theft Auto 4 was released into the world. Within the first day, 3.6 MILLION PEOPLE had bought copies of the game. They brought the game home; they put the discs into their consoles; they turned on their consoles; and their consoles told them:

Follow the yellow line to Roman’s Warehouse.

and 3.6 MILLION PEOPLE, more or less simultaneously, followed the yellow line to Roman’s warehouse. Why? For no good reason! Because they were playing a video game.

Video games are the MOST WIDESPREAD AND EFFECTIVE FORM OF MIND CONTROL EVER INVENTED.

Seriously, games are amazing. We tell people “Do this!” and they actually do it! Go fetch the skulls of 37 Miniature Giant Space Hamsters and bring them to me for your reward of imaginary little experience points. You know the experience points are fake but you want them anyway. You want them bad. It’s crazy the stuff the players do just because we told them to, just because it’s in a game. Just to gain imaginary rewards and avoid imaginary penalties.

Entire segments of modern society would love to have the control we have. Several of my friends are schoolteachers. Once they were beautiful people but now they look haggard and spent — because they spend all day, every day, trying to manage a pack of wild kids who never do what they are told. But for us, it just works. The kids — or their parents — pay us in order for us to tell them exactly what to do. And then after following our orders for 8-to-40 hours they feel like they totally “beat the game”. Yeah, little Billy, you sure beat that game. You really showed it who’s boss.

Our power may be stronger yet. A variety of historical figures have explored the paranormal effects that may occur when you focus the intention of many people at once.

Aleister Crowley, Isaac Newton…

And more recently, in 1995, Grant Morrison was writing the comic book series The Invisibles. Early on, around issue 6, sales of the comic took a nosedive. The future looked grim, but to save the series from cancellation, Morrison organized a wankathon wherein his readers around the world masturbated simultaneously while focusing on a visual symbol, in order to increase sales. It worked! and the Invisibles completed its 59-issue run.

In the games industry, we have the equivalent of these wankathons several times a year, but the energy is never focused toward a long-term goal. It just dissipates, like seed spilt upon barren earth.

Bertrand Russell, in his 1925 essay “What I Believe”, while discussing society and its laws, said this:

Your act springs directly from desire for an end together with knowledge of means. This is equally true of all acts, whether good or bad. The ends differ… but there is no conceivable way of making people do things they do not wish to do. What is possible is to alter their desires by a system of rewards and penalties (among which social approval and disapproval are not the least potent). The question for the legislative moralist is therefore, “How shall this system of rewards and punishments be arranged so as to secure the maximum of what is desired by the legislative authority?

If you’re interested in participating, you’ll want to download and play the game soon; they’re discussing the game in four parts, and the first discussion happens on July 7.

In case I didn’t make it obvious enough, the Kotaku link introducing the new Game Club assignment is here.

Coincidentally, I just downloaded Beyond Good & Evil a few weeks ago when I was procrastinating prior to the final Braid crunch. And I played exactly up to the point Brian has set for the first discussion. I have to say that I don’t like the game very much, and I don’t understand why it’s so acclaimed, except that it has a personality and style that is different from most games. But a lot of people do like it; and it’s worth keeping in mind that I dislike almost every video game that gets published these days, so if you like a lot of games, I am not the person to listen to. This game also does not strike me as being especially meaningful, so I’m not sure why it is Game Club fodder; but then, I’m still early through the game, and there’s definitely still time for it to get deep. (When one chooses to adopt the title of one of Nietzsche’s most famous works, one is sort of expected to live up to that, you know?)

He raises the concern that Braid might not find a large audience because it is so different. I think there is a danger of this, but at the same time, Braid’s being different is what makes it worth playing in the first place. Commander Hate had a strong positive reaction to the game; if there are enough people like that, and they tell their friends, then Braid will succeed.

Braid isn’t about trying to appeal to the maximum number of people — it’s about appealing to exactly the right people.

We’ll see how that works out. Then again, my favorite Xbox Live Arcade game of last year was Space Giraffe, which sold quite poorly. So, there is that.

This was a good interview to do, because I managed to clarify several points in my thinking about game development.  Here’s an excerpt:

Marketing is not, in fact, a need.  Getting enough people to buy your game such that you make money is not a need, if you really care about the integrity of what you are making.  That integrity is the primary need; earning enough money through selling that thing, such that you can make more without taking up another job or whatever, is a luxury. People bend to this luxury all the time.  There are lots of ways to rationalize it.  But I think it is usually due to weakness — or rather, lack of commitment to principles.

Among indies there is some kind of desire to be more like bigger companies, to be “professional” about making games.  Owning a business and making money and having business cards is all part of that.  But if you really care about games, it’s a huge mistake, and being “professional” will only hurt your work and cause it to be mediocre. Business is, inherently, a corruptive influence on everything that is non-business.

Here’s a zip file containing an audio recording of the lecture, as well as a PowerPoint file containing the slides:

“Design Reboot”, Jonathan Blow, Montreal International Game Summit 2007

Unfortunately there’s nothing embedded in the audio telling you when to flip slides. Hopefully I will make a video version soon, which will be easier for people to deal with (and they won’t need to worry about having slide presentation software installed).

A number of news sites have written stories about it and people have started commenting on what they feel is the validity or the invalidity of the arguments. However, I don’t think this really works, because the news sites are only reporting about 2% of the lecture; the rest of the lecture is very important in terms of providing context and setting examples. So if you are interested in this kind of subject, I recommend you get the full lecture.

In a recent posting, Stephen Totilo lamented the absence of landmarks in games:

Thirty, forty years in, video games, I am sad to report, are without many famous landmarks and places. N’Gai, can you name a single famous video game building? Princess Peach’s castle (and courtyard) from “Super Mario 64,” maybe? Anything else? Yes I can recall locations in games. For example, I remember the giant vat containing a massive, submarine-sized floating mechanical shark in “Banjo Kazooie,” and I remember the green hill zone of “Sonic: The Hedgehog.” But the truly great places — the postcard-worthy ones — include, for me, just the moon in “The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask,” the big sword bridge in “God of War,” Sanctuary Fortress in “Metroid Prime 2: Echoes,” and, not much else. Almost every other spot — even the fun ones — from Dracula’s Castle to Vice City feels generic, familiar, or plain unspectacular.

My first reaction to this statement was that I could only think of one truly stand-out location: the final level of Painkiller, which contains a unique vision of Hell: the entire history of warfare, played out from primitive rock-bashing to a modern nuclear war, frozen in time for the player to wander through.

But after sleeping on the question for a few days, this occurred to me: if we judge landmarks by their visual impressions, we tend to ignore what games are about, a large part of which is interactivity, and the player’s understanding of the way things work within that game world. If locales are really going to be game landmarks, rather than fanciful imitations of real-world places that you could experience as well in non-game media, then the impression they leave needs to happen through gameplay; they need to be memorable because of the things they encourage to happen within them, not (just) because of the way they look.

With that new way of looking at things, right away I thought of two places that clearly fit the bill: de_dust from Counter-Strike, and 2fort from Team Fortress. Each of these maps has been remade several times through different iterations of these respective games; though the visual elements have changed, sometimes drastically, the core spirit of the levels remains consistent. Visiting 2fort in Team Fortress 2, running through the halls and up onto the battlements, I instantly recognize it as the same place where I spent so much time in the original Team Fortress.

When Wikipedia editors wanted to make a visual comparison between the original Counter-Strike and Counter-Strike: Source, they used screenshots from de_dust; using another map would seem a little bit wrong, because de_dust is the canonical Counter-Strike map. In a sense, de_dust is Counter-Strike, and it doesn’t matter which revision of de_dust you are talking about. (This is especially striking because de_dust was not in the original game. It is made for the Bomb Defusal gameplay mode, which was not added until Beta 4, about 5 months after the initial release).

So it seems to me that these places are landmarks, but not in a visual way. Rather, they are landmarks in a conceptual space, a space of understanding where to go and what to do; that when A happens at location X, then probably B at Y and then C at Z.

Here’s a sand-castle that someone made of de_dust:

Note that it’s a model of the full space (possibly from memory). Pictures of what the view looks like from particular places in de_dust, as you might get as a photographer in a virtual space (or in the screenshot above), are not so compelling. The landmark I am talking about is the entire structure of the level, along with the collected experience from playing it, not a view from a single point in the level at a single instant in time.

It’s worth pointing out that these maps became canonical because they were so compelling to play. They survived the tests of time and rose above the other maps.

Now, I realize that my definition of “landmark” has come pretty far from the meaning that Stephen originally intended. But to me that’s what is so interesting about games — they help us to see things in new, possibly deeper ways. What I have described above is sort of the super-nerdly version of a landmark, but I tell you — if back when I was 15 I understood that “normal people” in the year 2007 would be spending so much time doing the modern version of the same things that I, in 1986, was so shunned-as-a-nerd for (logging into BBS systems and typing messages to people!) then I would have had a very different view of my life at that time. So if anyone out there understands what I am talking about in this post, let’s just think of ourselves as trailblazers.

Stephen casually mentions fame as being one criterion for landmarks, but I’m not sure that’s a good gauge. Most Americans have heard of Niagara Falls as some kind of great waterfall, but Victoria Falls is much more spectacular. (Just to take one measurement for example, Niagra Falls is about 60 meters high, while Victoria Falls is 100). Victoria Falls is a better landmark, but it’s harder for Americans and Europeans to access, so it is less famous for us (though it is considered to be one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World, whereas Niagara just isn’t on that list. [Though there is no full consensus on what the Seven Natural Wonders of the World actually are, some items are on pretty much everyone’s version of the list: the Grand Canyon, Victoria Falls, Mount Everest, the Great Barrier Reef.])

Then again, de_dust is the most famous Counter-Strike map, so, who knows.