GDC day 2 , Keiji Inafune kicks some serious Monkey Balls

[Gray Fox]

I know some of you might find it annoying that I just made the third thread about some GDC stuff in a short time, but putting this summary David Sirlin made of GDC day two in any of my other threads would not do it justice and get it the attention it deserves, especially the Inafume part.

GDC 2007, Day 2

CliffyB lamented that Gears of War is really the same game as Bionic Commando. Instead of jumping from platform to platform, the game is turned on its side so that you run from the cover of one ?platform? to the cover of the next. Instead of a grappling hook, you have that strange running feature that basically functions like a grappling hook to the next platform. Interesting, ha.

I don?t know what words can even do Miyamoto justice. He is a king among men. He told us how important it is to take risks, as is a corporate philosophy of Nintendo. He also told us that tenacity is important, because there are some ideas that it has taken him like a decade to really get. He showed us his original try at ?build a face? software from some really old platform that I forget what it even was. Then he showed all the tries he?s had over the years from gameboy, to N64, to GameCube about various ?making faces? software that never went anywhere. Most of Nintendo thought it was all horrible, but he kept trying it. Finally, with Miis on the Wii, he got it right. I just said ?Miis on the Wii.?

One random interesting line from Miyamoto was that he proposed that game reviews include an extra score for how much that game appeals to non-gamers. That really put some things in perspective, as Brain Age and Nintendogs would get a 10 in that category, while Gears of War (good game as it is) would get somewhere around a 0.

Introversion software is notable for their win of last year?s Independent Game Festival award, where they said at their acceptance speech that they funded it all themselves because ?we didn?t want any publishers ****in up our gaime!? (Trying to capture his accent there.) At this years awards (last night) they were presenters, and reminded us that publishers will still **** up your gaime. In their 1-hour session, which was great, they talked about how publishers will **** up your gaime. They say that many of the things publishers used to do are now obsolete. Interoversion is doing just fine selling Darwinia on Steam, and you don?t need a publisher to get on xbox live or sell directly on the web, either. In many cases, they claim that publishers are adding zero value, and taking 70%, while Xbox Live takes only 30%. Yeah, yeah, publishers can foot the bill for huge games and pay for QA and marketing that you can?t pay for, but his point is well taken for small games made by indie studios. I guess you really don?t need a publisher if you can someone manage to fund the first game yourself. Publishers would just **** up your gaime anyway, right?

Keiji Inafune is head of Capcom R&D, making him the highest ranking creative person in Capcom, and he?s been there for over 20 years. Rockman (Megaman) is his character. I?ve heard Inafune is a little crazy, but I was totally unprepared for how shocking his lecture was. It was a question/answer session with questions written by?I forget who?but they were damn good questions. Almost all the questions were highly critical of him and Capcom, even to a surprising degree.

The negativity of the questions didn?t even phase Inafune. I think he?s far beyond even caring what anyone thinks about anything, so he just says whatever crazy thing comes to his mind, with even less self-ceonsorship than I have. Within the first one minute of him talking, he told us how Japanese developers are ?cowards.? They are cowardly and don?t have bravery. Also they are cowards. He was very clear that they are cowards.

At one point, an answer to who-knows-what question had him rambling about how we fight zombies and monsters in games, but he fights zombies and monsters and other evil creatures in Capcom management. We all have our zombies to fight, and must keep fighting, he said. He mentioned how Capcom was against doing Resident Evil and even wanted to cancel it when it was almost finished, but Inafune pushed them to release it. The moderator then asked ?What did the?uh?zombies and monsters in Capcom?s management say after Resident Evil was released?? Inafune said that it did really well so of course they suddenly liked it, but that they don?t know anything in the first place. I swear I am not making this up.

Another question: ?The xbox did very poorly in Japan, coming in at last place and getting nearly zero traction. The xbox 360, in Japan, is doing even worse. Capcom decided to release two expensive, high-profile games, each with new IP on Xbox 360: Dead Rising and Lost Planet. Why did you do this? Was it a tough sell at Capcom??

I couldn?t follow Inafune?s answer about why this was a good idea, but the part about it being a tough sell blew my mind. He said he told them it would cost X amount, and ?They said no. They said no very quickly.? So then he told him some lower number, but they said no again. So then he had the two teams start working on the game, even though he had no authority to do so. He had them keep at it ?for six months?maybe longer.? He then showed Capcom management and said ?Look, aren?t these games fun?? Capcom management still said they could not sell these games. He kept fighting them and somehow eventually convinced them. Again, I?m not making this up.

A prominent game designer later told me that Inafune told Capcom management he was working on a driving game during this time, to hide Dead Rising and Lost Planet, but Inafune didn?t a mention that in the talk.

Another question: ?The save system in Dead Rising met with much disapproval and bad reviews. If you could go back in time and change it, would you?? Inafune said that people cannot go back in time, so it doesn?t really matter. If he could though, he would not change it because he has no regrets and the player should just accept it. He then told a story about how in that game, you must save the game by going to a bathroom (inside the game). He originally told the team that he wanted the game to be more realistic by requiring the player to sleep and use the bathroom. He thought you should have to do that. The team hated this idea, refused to implement it, and ignored him. Later when they made the save system, they put it in the bathrooms as a way to give an inch on the whole bathroom idea.

I knew Clint Hocking (Splinter Cell) would give a good lecture, but I didn?t expect it to be possibly the best one of the Conference. He talked about how some games explore a physical space (we have lots of those!) while others allow us to explore a system. He even quoted my book with the line ?Playing to win is exploring.? It?s exploring the system of a game to find effective strategies. Anyway, he went on to say that one system we never really seem to explore is a system of morality. 22 years ago Ultimta 4 kind of tried to do this by measuring your valor, humility, etc. It also tried to do some fake 3D. It sort of sucked at both, but it tried. 22 years later, we have iterated the hell out of 3D to the point where it?s awesome. We?re nowhere on exploring moral/ethical spaces in games. KOTOR doesn?t count.

He even went as far as to say that the game Spiderman 2 (a game he really likes) did a big disservice to the license. Spiderman?s premise is that ?Great power brings great responsiblity,? but that the game only offers great power with zero sense of responsibility. That isn?t even Spiderman, Hocking says.

Games are accused of teaching things like murder, mugging, rape and so forth. Hocking says games aren?t teaching those things because they aren?t teaching much of anything, on the whole. They aren?t SAYING anything. He proposes that games actually start to clean up their act, and he didn?t mean by not having GTA anymore. He meant by starting to explore what a game about exploring morality would really be like. This is exactly the topic I am interested in, so this really, really caught my eye. I had the fortune of having dinner with Clint and discussing this further.

It?s late and there?s more tomorrow, so I?ll sign off.

?Sirlin

Sauce

 

[Gray Fox]

I don't know for sure if I should post it, since it could be considered shameless bumping, but Sirlins description of day three is also a nice read.

GDC 2007, Day 3

Some academics showed off what they considered to be the top 10 findings from game research this year. One of them involved the “playing to win” type player, and how even that type of player seeks to even the playfield by self handicapping or teaching the opponent. Another involved a bunch of data showing that a huge percentage of players spend a huge percentage of time playing World of Warcraft alone. It even used the phrase “together alone” as opposed to the phrase “alone together” that I used in my infamous article. A third finding had to do with ethical and moral exploration in games being a big, fertile, and unexplored area in games.

So, uh, I guess game researchers tend to talk a hell of a lot about what I write.

A panel moderated by David Edery (Microsoft) which included Raph Koster, someone from The Sims, and someone else from Neverwinter Nights talked about facilitating user generated content. Raph, always amusing, challenged the title of the panel “sharing control” saying that the users have almost all the control anyway, and that we’re mostly along for the ride. The Neverwinter Nights guy agreed saying that maybe the players will share some control with us game developers. There were really interesting examples of players using content in crazy ways that were never remotely considered by the developers. As one example, Raph talked about how little development time was spent putting in dancing animations in Star Wars Galaxies, yet players made endless dancing videos on youtube and even orchestrated 150 person synchronized dancing scenes. He pondered “why didn’t we just put in more dancing stuff and ship that? It would have been cheaper and we would have been on MTV.” ha.

The creator of Castlevania talked about the advantages and disadvantages of 2D games. He said that 2D games are really good at capturing: 1) distance, 2) timing, 3) position, and 4) direction. In 2D, distance between objects and their facing directions are very, very clear. It’s also pretty easy for the player to understand where a good position is in a 2D game and how to get into it. Finally, because those other things are easy, 2D games are able to focus on timing, rather than fumbling around in 3D space.

He also talked about how 2D, in some ways, is a great help to the team making the game. One person can be in charge of all the background in a level, such as “foggy village.” In a 3D game, you’d have one person doing textures, one modelling just one room of that village, another fog programmer, and so on and so on. The fragmentation of the 3D team means each person feels like a cog in a machine, while the team member on a 2D project is responsible for a big chunk and feels more ownership, so he tries harder. 2D teams are also generally able to be smaller, which helps greatly with management and communication in the team. On the flipside, so much emphasis is put on 3D games that some team members feel they have no career advancement opportunities if they work on 2D games.

He also offered the interesting opinion that because of all the advantages of 2D listed above, that it’s easier to create a 2D game that has the features you want and delivers the experience you want to the player. BUT, it’s much easier to create a 3D game that has a presentation that impresses the player and gets him excited, as opposed to a 2D game where that is very hard. He thinks 2D games are unfortunately mostly for hardcore players who can appreciate the advantages, but that 3D games are inherently better at presentation because of camera movement, so they will remain the dominant form of game. That said, he also thinks 2D games will never die and that nintendo DS, Virtual Console, XBLA, cell phone games, etc all show many opportunities for 2D.

Chaim from Maxis gave an excellent presentation on the design of the editors in the upcoming game Spore. He talked about the difference between tools that let professionals create content and tools that seem to magically create awesome stuff when you hardly do anything. Photoshop can create great stuff is you know exactly what you’re doing, but even a child can create interesting stuff with finger paints. Photoshop requires all sorts of technical knowledge to use to even a medium extent, but if you just put your hand in a paint bucket, then drag your hand over some paper, you get all sorts of interesting forms and shapes.

Spore wants to be more like finger paints. They want it to give you disproportionately great creatures/items/whatever for how much effort you put in. This way, your grandmother and other non-gamers can see what it’s like to CREATE something, and once they do that with some success, they will be excited to try a little more complicated tools.

Imagine a large circle representing the set of all possible things a tool could make. The 3D program Maya, for example, has an enormous circle of possible things to make, as it could make any object/character/environment in any currently existing video game. Now imagine a much, much smaller circle representing all the “good” things one could make in 3D. Pretty much all of those are inside the first circle, meaning pretty much all the good stuff you could ever want to make, could be made in Maya. Too bad that the “good stuff” circle is damn tiny compared to all the really bad stuff you could possibly make in Maya. Even worse, imagine a third circle representing the content that an average users is *likely* to make. Unfortunately, there is zero overlap between what a new Maya user is likely to make with the set of “good” things that could be made. You are about 100% likely to make crap.

Spore wants align these three conceptual circles. They want the set of all likely things you’ll make to be smack in the middle of all possible awesome stuff that you might want to make. Furthermore, they want as much of the awesome stuff you can think of to be inside the “possible to make” circle. At any given stage of their progress, they could look at the catalog of all the items made by various average people who get to play with Spore and see how “awesome” the resulting content is. It took a lot of iteration on the tools to get where they want to be.

One of the examples shown was the character creator tool. It was a hard problem because if you give the user the ability to make, say, *any* body for the creature, then players will tend to make very terrible bodies because the space of all possible bodies is so large. Furthermore, if the players could somehow assemble a bunch of polygons into some type of creature body, the animation system would have no clue what to do with it. So this very open system would be confusing to both players and the animation system.

Chaim (the prototyping master) asked one of the artists for help. This artist had a lot of drawings of creatures that Maxis hoped could be made in Spore (so they represent that circle of “good” things that we hope are all possible to create and even likely to create). Anyway, the prototyper knew that the artist had some kind of pattern he followed that let him always make good creature body shapes, but he didn’t know what the secret was. The artist explained that all his bodies start out as a bean shape, and are then modified in only three different ways of extruding or bending or whatever.

The next creature editor prototype gave the player a 3D “bean” and a few controls to modify it in exactly the way the artist described. This structure, though very limiting relative to all the things you could make in Maya, turns out to pretty much always make good stuff. It is also very clear to the player what to do, and it’s clear to the animation system how to animate anything that comes out of this structured system.

He also gave many other examples along these same lines. Quick notes are like, if you want to add legs to the creature, then allowing the set of all possible ways to put legs on would be difficult (how to place them in 3D space using a 2D screen and 2D mouse), it would lead to mostly bad placement of legs (the set of all bad places to put legs is way bigger than the set of all reasonable places) and furthermore the animation system would have too much trouble dealing with these wacky legs. So, what really happens is that all legs have feet that touch the floor. If you try to add a leg, the editor automatically puts the foot on the floor, and you move the leg around on that plane, which is very easy with a 2D mouse. It’s fortunate that this gets rid of tons of bad places to put legs by not even bothering you with them, and the animation system is very happy too. They applied this same principle to many, many aspects of the editor.

I heard some people muse that creating doesn’t mean anything if every choice is “right,” but I think the overall approach is very good. It really will lead to empowering people like grandmothers who don’t know they can create things at all, and will lure them into the experience. If they want more power, there are a couple levels of extra layers in Spore with more advanced features. If they want TONS of power, they can use Maya.

Next up, Ernest Adams talked about how he sucks at games and he wants more games for him and other people who suck but have money and want to play anyway. He talked about how a goal-oriented game can still allow diversions and sandbox stuff that is fun. Yeah we all know that but he’s saying designers can take the sandbox activities more seriously and embrace the idea that it’s perfectly valid to play around without a particular goal and not treat the notion as a second-class citizen.

Adams talked about FarCry takes place on this beautiful island with sandy beaches and blue water with fish and how he’d like to explore the game. But FarCry is, he said, allows you to explore that island if-and-only-if you want to be in a world entirely based on quickly shooting people before they shoot you. Of course, FarCry is simply not the game for him, but his point is that apparently MOST games aren’t for him, which is a narrow state of affairs.

A game that offers a series of moral choices was an example of giving the player meaningful choice, but not requiring “skill” or challenge obstacles. I happen to be very interested in this exact type of game, but I guess that’s for another time.

Oh, Ernest had a good line when he talked about how first person shooters have some of the most beautiful environments in the game industry, so “we have awesome nouns…and yet we have hardly any verbs.” Rather than just shoot, he wants to ride a horse, climb a mountain, scuba dive, explore caves, go fishing, and other various activities involving tourism and exploring. He’s saying that this style of play–that is play without gameplay–is way too uncommon. The reason, he says, is obviously because game developers are obsessed with games having to be hard challenges, which is less and less true as the market expands.

Everyone I’ve mentioned said a lot more than what was noted here, but I think I’ll call it a day and get some rest. Game Developer’s Conference 2007 is now over.

–Sirlin