Jeez, there’s been over a full year since I wrote anything here. The main reason is that I’ve been extremely busy working on a game. But things change – the games industry is very “agile” and you never know what lurks behind the next milestone. For good and bad.
In our case, what was lurking was bad. A couple of weeks ago, we got canceled due to the publisher having deep financial troubles (as many, many, many companies have nowadays). This is a huge setback for Avalanche and the fantastic team that has been working on this magnificent game for a year and a half has fallen into pieces. It’s all very, very sad. The material we created is awesome, the project had enormous potential, but now we can only hope that somehow the game can be revived. But given the financial state of the world, I’m not holding my breath too hard.

But let’s talk of something merrier. I went into GameRankings some time ago and checked the review scores for “The Darkness”. When the game was released I watched GameRankings, MetaCritic and all those sites closely but now I was just leisure-browsing the site and started clicking around. And I noticed a few things… The reviews for “The Darkness” is distributed quite widely between 2 out of 5 and 9 out of 10 (averaging 83% on the Xbox 360). “The Darkness” landed on a lower average than “Riddick” (which scores 90.7% on the PC). I read some of the higher scoring and some of the lower scoring reviews and I paid attention to what they said about story (which was my main focus when working on the game). Strangely enough, the story of “The Darkness” divides people into two very distinct camps. Those who think it’s brilliant and those who think it’s almost sub-par – or just downright confusing. The reception of “Riddick” was much more uniform and people seemed to generally like the story qualities of “Riddick”. Very few disliked it. How come, I wonder?

Well, it might be that the sci-fi setting and main character of “Riddick” has a more general appeal to people, but I really doubt that is the case. Instead, I believe it boils down to one single issue: simplicity.

“Riddick” tells a much more straightforward story than “The Darkness”. Riddick is thrown into jail and must escape. That’s it. Jackie, on the other hand, is driven by revenge and is fighting his inner demons (literally). Setting up the premises for Jackie took a considerable effort and if you play the game you will need to spend time with it and its characters until the story starts to really propel. For instance, Jenny plays a major role in Jackie’s story and she needed to be introduced properly. When you fire up “Riddick”, the game opens with Riddick (you) being led into Butcher Bay prison and that’s pretty much all you need to know. It’s that one guy against the system. Now, Riddick is by no means dumbed down story-wise. We spent as much effort getting characterization, themes, motives and story arcs right in “Riddick” as we did in “The Darkness”, but I don’t think there’s any question that Riddick’s story is much more straightforward.

I think that this pinpoints something that needs to be thought, re-thought, told and re-told over and over and over again: KISS. Keep it simple (stupid). And this applies not only storytelling in games, but to absolutely everything. Still, for some reason, game design and storytelling are notoriously hard to keep simple so it’s good to keep the KISS mantra in the back of your head day and night. During the year and a half I’ve been working on the design on the, now dead, Avalanche game we have actively been forced to go through this over and over again. This has been the general process:

• We look at an area of the game and design something that we feel is cool.
• Usually, this design is pretty much crap but you don’t see it at first.
• Luckily, there’s hopefully a golden nugget buried in that pile.
• And fortunately, as we continue to rework and iterate the design and think about implementation details together with the team, we’ll realize that the only way through is by simplification.
• After many iterations and tuning, the final implementation is usually a fifth (or less) of the original design, but it works, feels good and is straightforward and intuitive.

A specific example where a mechanic went through this process was the hand-to-hand combat in “Riddick”. We had two or three total overhauls of designs that were all pretty complex. They locked the player in a “combat mode” (with a modal controller) which featured series of advanced maneuvers, attacks and counter attacks. These were prototyped but dismissed as essentially crap. In the end Jens Andersson (one of the Lead Designers) went in a different direction and created a quick prototype of a combat system that was much more simple and straightforward. The final game ended up a refined version of that system and it worked a million times better than the previous attempts.

It’s easy to analyze in hindsight, but keeping something simple when you’re waist deep in creative golden quicksand is very hard. There are several reasons for that:

• If you’re working on an AAA game, there’s a lot to juggle and maintaining KISS takes a lot of effort.
• You strive to create something unique (that’s fine) – but you want to be unique all over the place (which is a mistake).
• The easiest way to be unique is to be complex (just look at all gazillion spins on “Tetris” and you know what I mean).
• It feels good to play cerebral and design complicated ideas and systems.
• It is hard to kill your darlings (and your darlings are probably not simple).

Now one could be mean and say that KISS is hard because we are lazy and narcissistic, but formulated any way you like, this is why I think it’s a hard problem to remedy. The only way to fight it is through awareness, continuous reflection and hard work. So this is my recipe for the future:

• I’ll try to always keep my head cool.
• I’ll remember that there is (almost) always an easier and more straightforward way to do whatever I’m currently doing.

Eventually, I will hopefully learn.

I attended the Develop Conference in Brighton this year and there were some interesting sessions. One of them was called “Emerging Issues in Game Design” and featured four very different presentations. Mark Eyles from the University of Portsmouth did, for example, talk about a genre of gaming that he calls “Ambient Games”. He browsed through a gazillion of slides (the man was bursting with energy) and ended up with a short demonstration of his research game “Ambient Quest”.

First I must say that I initially had a hard time grasping the essence of the ideas he presented.

Some background:

Ambient Games are inspired by the concept of Ambient Music:

Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting. (Brian Eno, 1978)

Hmmm…

I pondered upon the connection and gradually managed to build a vision in my mind. Ambient Games must be sort of like an aquarium. It plays by itself and if you want to, you can go and interfere with it, toy around for some time. An Ambient Game would be a sort of hybrid between game and screensaver, if you will. (A sidenote: Earlier the same day, Tsutomu Kouno from Sony Worldwide Studios talked about the creation of LocoRoco. And recently I saw rumors like this appearing on the web. Interesting!)

However, just as I thought I was getting it, Mark pulled out a step counter and entered his current number of steps into the research game. The number then gave him a number of moves in the game world (which was a turned based RPG).

Whoah! Now I was totally lost. He was obviously not into screensaver/game hybrids at all. Instead, it turned out that he was looking at feeding everyday boring tasks into games so that tedious work could be more fun. He imagined that working with stacking boxes in a big storage house could actually be more satisfying if every box you stacked earned you something (moves, money?) that could later be used in a gaming world.

It did sound very interesting, but it was certainly a bit hard to connect that idea to the initial concept of “Ambient Games” (and “Ambient Music”).

Chores as Games

After the session I kept thinking about tedious work connected to games and a few weeks later, I was busy repainting the kitchen roof. Suddenly I realized that during painting I was doing something quite weird in my mind.

After some reflection about other similar situations: mowing lawns, working out or any other kind of repetitious work, I realized that the same thing very often happens. When I am busy with tedious work, I create a game out of it. And moreover, I think that this is something I have always been doing.

I give you an example. If I am mowing a lawn, I split the whole lawn into separate sections. I mow these sections little by little and I find (some weird) joy in altering the mowing patterns and splitting sections into yet smaller sections on the fly. To me it’s a bit like putting a puzzle together, one where all the pieces are constantly changing – and you’re doing it totally in reverse.

I am really curious to know if there are other people out there who share the same or similar experience. I wonder because if there is, there might be connection points in how the games we create for ourselves look for various work scenarios. I mean, if every single person who mows a lawn creates the same game I do (though I strongly doubt it), then I reckon that lawnmowers should immediately be modified. They should have a screen fitted to the handle, some sensory equipment and a computer collecting all the data, making the game happen in real time.

This idea I realize is pretty far fetched. However, I think that a possibly fruitful approach would be to analyze various kinds of tedious work situations and see if there are some simple ways of measuring and guiding the work effort. A small computer could then use the data and create a live gaming experience, be it when we paint roofs, mow lawns, work out, correct multiple choice tests (on paper), stack boxes, cut and paste between lots of documents or whatever.

I realize that there is a difference between feeding step meter measurements into a game like Mark did and doing what I describe above, which is more like working live within the game world. You might say that the former is understandably “Ambient” and the latter is not…

But go back a second and consider the idea of the screensaver game. What if that screensaver game would constantly monitor your muscular activity? What if that game would run in the background, day and night, creating cool and usable stuff out of your muscular data inside the game world?

What if you had a window into the game world on a screen on your bookshelf? You would be free to look into it at any time. You could watch how your efforts would have an effect behind that screen. And at any given time, you would be able to pick up the controller and play away.

Yesterday, news reported of scientists artificially creating out of body exeriences. This is extremely cool! One interesting thing is that the newscast I watched approached the news from the gaming side. “A discovery that may revolutionize the gaming industry,” they called it.

Well, I’m not sure I see that coming anytime soon. The discovery made by these scientists is probably important, but if you put it into perspective, there are a couple of interesting questions that come to mind.

1. Have people already experienced out of body sensations while playing games? I think it’s fairly probable that it might happen in the right circumstances. The experiment referenced above is extremely simple so an out of body experience while playing Half Life, for instance, might happen by accident. It might also be possible to induce the experience by other, equally simple, means. Does it have to be visual and physical input that matches? How accurate need it be?

2. How easy is it to ruin the sensation? Firstly, I suspect that the VR goggles used in the experiment are really important since they visually isolate the subject from the “real world”. Secondly, the physical sensation that induce the out of body experience will, most likely, need to be consistent. This means that in a game, everything that happens to the player character must be felt by the player. Furthermore, I suspect that no other physical input than those the game induces should be experienced while playing. It might work if the player is put into a float tank with some nifty suit that can induce physical input, but this sounds like lots of new technology that I believe are still pretty far off.

3. How adaptive is the brain to these types of sensations? Can humans learn to separate the sensation from the induced experience from real life? If so, it would probably be possible to make better equipment to get more accurate results, but if the brain can adapt to that, we have an arms race going. And then – is there a reachable border where we can’t make that distinction anymore?

Still, I think it would be very interesting to create a gaming experience that utilizes this experiment’s results in a clever way. Maybe all it takes is a pair of VR goggles, a Wiimote with rumble and some clever game design?

Persuasive games receives quite a lot of attention, and rightly so. The videogame “platform” is in many respects ideal for conveying messages in a powerful way. The idea, as I understand it, is this: if you could turn your message into an interactive experience, that will make your message more contagious. This is because games add interactivity to the power of ordinary video (sound and moving images) and interactivity done right engages us. This seems to be what people are doing with games such as “Fatworld” and “Airport Security”.

I have just begun reading “Persuasive Technology” by B.J. Fogg and cannot say that I know anything about the theories and ideas behind persuasion in interactive media, but I hope that the book will shed some light on the subject.

There is, however, one thing that immediately came to mind as I browsed through the foreword. I played a lot of “Brain Trainer” on my Nintendo DS a few months back and I was stunned with the efficiency the game captivated me and persuaded me to come back to it time and time again. At the time I thought a bit about what the game was doing and how it affected me. I came to the conclusion that the key was the guy on the screen – Dr. Kawashima. He actually got to me like he was a real person.

When I started up the game and the good old Doc greeted me, he said something like “Hello Mikael, good to see you again. It seems like you have been away for almost five days now.” He could as well have added “Shame on you!” because that’s how I felt. The next day I fired up the game. I must confess I did it partly to keep the Doc happy.

That, to me, is persuasive power!

Of course, there is a fine balance here. The good Doctor in that game is a double-edged sword. It’s been months since I played the game. It sits in a drawer at home and I am reluctant to start it up again. Why? I am half-expecting the Doc to tan my hind for being away for so long.

I feel that there are immense powers here that just waits to be unleashed. Cleverly designed games can convey powerful messages efficiently. Furthermore, I believe more “traditional” games can benefit by applying techniques for making better tutorials, create more intuitive interfaces and generally hook the player to the game.

I played about four hours into “Okami” this weekend and boy is the game cool! Some initial impressions:

The game is absolutely stunning visually. The graphic style is beautiful. Radiant! The only setback was the lack of 16:9 support.

The controls feel a little “flimsy” at times. I noticed it mostly when getting inside houses and trying to maneuver through doors, up ladders etc. In combat they are absolutely spot on, though, and while running around, they do feel very good – not as tight as in “Twilight Princess”, but almost there.

Storytelling is good. I played “Animal Crossing” and was already somewhat used to the semi-synthetic bubble-bobble voices. The main problem is that the game opens with a lot of cutscenes. The first two hours or so are heavy with narrative but after that the game loosens up and becomes more about gameplay.

Some of the puzzles are overly simple and the game goes a long way totally explaining exactly what you should do to solve a puzzle, and it does so several times.

The “Celestial Brush” gameplay feels fresh and tunes extremely well into the tone and style of the game. There are so extremely much about “Okami” that makes it a close cousin to “Twilight Princess” and the Zelda series. “Ocarina of Time” had the ocarina, “The Windwaker” had the windwaker and “Okami” has the brush.

The RPG elements are certainly interesting and adds a layer to the game that is different from Zelda. I guess I need to play more until I get a grip on how it works in the long run.

I picked up the game for a bargain. It was released in the EU early 2007 and can be bought for about 20-30 Euro (at least here in Sweden). Although I haven’t played that long, I can definitely recommend the game. It’s very interesting and one of the most beautiful games ever.