The same little humanoid played the role of astronaut, mother, robot, corpse, James Bond – pretty much whatever the playing child could imagine.

When I wrote that I did the following:

1. I automatically associated the word “astronaut” with men (duh!)
2. I automatically gave a girl’s play with the figurine the topic “mother”. This was to balance the previous male “astronaut” (duuuuh!)
3. I added two neutral type characters, the robot and the corpse (ok)
4. And lastly I included the stereotypical male action character “James Bond” (…)

Holy cow! And I didn’t even reflect over these choices when I wrote them. And what was the subject of that article again?

Wow!

Enjoy (in fullscreen 1080p)!

I’ve been thinking a lot about gender, and particularly how it works in gaming culture and is portrayed in games. For background, I encourage you to check out any of the many great projects and calls-to arms that have dragged into spotlight some very real issues and tendencies that range from the slightly ignorant or oblivious to the downright hostile (look up @FemFreq or search Twitter for #onereasonwhy for instance).

This is a massive subject, and there is a lot of historic baggage to deal with and many things to consider and change. But here’s one simple thing to start with.

What we should do is to question the choice of gender whenever we can. Meaning, whenever we create a character, we should question whether the character has to be male, female – or have a specified gender at all.

There are a number of games where gender is not present at all: “Lemmings” is one example. The important point is that “Lemmings” would not benefit at all from an added gender perspective, so it made sense to let the character design reflect that. Similarly, you can probably find examples where it made sense to make a character male, female or transgender, but very often a different choice would make as much or even more sense. (The original Alien script has all characters written as generic males with a note in the script explicitly stating “The crew is unisex and all parts are interchangeable for men or women”)

When we make our decisions on gender we have to look closely at what our characters’ roles are in the particular context. The context defines how our characters’ traits and actions will be perceived by the player. It is possible to create characters that even express sexist opinions – given that you have a context where you deal with the subject properly. (On the realism of sexism is a good post on this matter)

So, questioning the gender choice will require awareness about what we are trying to achieve. If we lose track of our core idea, it could go wrong. The LEGO figurine is an example of a design that was previously unspecified in terms of gender but that no longer is. (Most) LEGO bricks are designed to allow the child to use them in a million ways. A brick works as a brick in a wall, a part of a tree trunk, a loaf of bread or as a rock outside of a moon-base. It was the same with the iconic LEGO figurines. The same little humanoid played the role of astronaut, mother, robot, corpse, James Bond – pretty much whatever the playing child could imagine.

Unfortunately, later LEGO designs invalidated this core design principle of unleashing imagination by locking the figurines into distinct roles: females, males, robots, Harry Potters, Darth Mauls. I believe this not only helps cement oppressive and square ideas about gender in our society, it also makes LEGO a worse product. There is definitely an appeal in including well known, popular and iconic characters, and I guess there is good business there, but I don’t see why all of LEGO had to be gender specified – there really is no point.

10 years ago I went up to Uppsala and Starbreeze Studios to start working as a writer on the first Riddick game. Since then I’ve had the honor of being part of a number of wonderful dev teams. I have been fortunate to meet, work with and make friends with many absolutely stellar people. Through the years there have been many projects started and quite a few that was actually finished (5 and counting).

So far this has been a great ride and I can’t really see myself doing anything other than games. See, I was seriously bit by a bug that crawled out of my father’s TI 99/4A and since the age of about 10 my dream has been to make games (or draw comics).

Many wonderful games are being released each year and the last few years it has been especially great to witness the indie game scene flourish. The indies show that yet again, you don’t need to work in a big studio to achieve greatness – that is a fantastic thing. But still, the successful indies actually are pretty much exactly like the successful big AAA teams: serious, focused and very hard working passionates.

I have learned many things during these 10 years, but I think the only really important lesson to pass on is this: if you want to make a great game you should take it seriously, work as hard as you can and give the game all your attention. If you are passionate about making games I think that sounds exactly like “do whatever you feel like doing.”

This is the kind of project that has the potential to go totally banana out-of-bounds. It almost did and we’re getting to that soon. For now, let’s see how it all started out on the good side.

Filling the window frames with melted sugar got us some nice tinted window panes.

Also did a Christmas tree and later some chairs (not in this picture).

I decorated the walls before gluing the whole thing together (with burnt sugar). In case you wonder about the weird placement of the window on the gable – it’s half a stair above the ground floor to let light into one of the two staircases.

At this moment I started spraying frosting onto the roof. Big mistake – big mistake! The eggwhite I used to glue the decorations with softened the roof and it caved in (no picture on that – too frustrated to bring out the camera).

So, I had to bake a new roof, this time decorating it before glueing it to the house. The icicles are added after the roof’s put into place though. To add finish, we added a marzipan snow man, frosting chimney smoke and some LED lights inside the house.

This is the picture used as a base for the card. From here, all we needed was the residents – and a nice environement. As you see, Henry was at his best photo-shoot mood.

The hat Lotta was putting on snowman’s head unfortunately held up its shape badly, but you can’t have everything.

I tried hard not to look like a total idiot. Don’t know how well I fared.

For some reason I didn’t wear shoes on my picture and I had already started working on it so I didn’t want to reshoot. I added the shoes separately.

Okay, time to bring all of this into Pixelmator. I googled up a stock snowy landscape image, gauss-blurred it and dropped it in. I think it does a pretty decent job putting us all in a nice winter wonderland.

Mission accomplished!

The game arrived a week later and when I opened the box, it was in good condition and everything was there – except one item. A special dice, one with one side blank.

I obviously wanted the complete original package (as advertised) so I sent an email to the seller:

Hi, I ordered a copy of “Guild of Thieves” for the Amiga. The description said it was “used, very good” which it is. However, the game should have included a small dice which was not present and I believe the description did not mention any missing items. If you could refund me some amount for this inconvenience I’d be happy.

I got an answer the following day:

Sorry we didn’t know this came with a dice. We will send you a dice out immediately. Sorry for the inconvenience.

I felt I had to clarify a bit. The game is a collector’s item and to be complete all original items had to be there, any old dice wouldn’t do. I typed up an answered:

Oh, if you have that dice it’s fantastic. It’s supposed to be a special dice where the face with three dots is blank (see pic below).

I didn’t receive any answer but a week later a small envelope arrived.

In the envelope was a small zip-lock plastic bag…

… and in the plastic bag – was this:

A year later I started working at Pixeltales and stayed for about 6 months. During that time I was fortunate enough to be able to put some of the thoughts I’ve been having into practice. I worked on the design of a peculiar action puzzle game. It never saw the light of day, but I tried to deal with the design process in the way I had come to realize was the only honest way to do it. Before talking about what that is I want to summarize what I had come to see as clear signs of bad design process:

• Hard design problems that appear during the process are pushed into the future with the words: “Let’s deal with it when we get to that feature.”
• Hidden problems will require hard meticulous work to find. Work that is not done properly.

This creates an accumulating “snowball” of problems, questions and unknowns that cause severe problems with the projects: delays, cuts, excessive crunch… you know the drill.

Now, there is unfortunately no silver bullet available that will make these production problems magically go away. But I believe we designers can do better. Much better!

I have seen a couple of articles lately (here’s a good one) talking about industry wide disrespect for designers. I have heard the argument that “anyone can be a designer”. I think I know why that is. It is our fault and it is up to us designers to do something about it. We need to evaluate what we are doing and how. Why? Because I believe that the following is true:

Designers are good at creating work (problems) for others. Designers are bad at providing the tools necessary for solving these problems.

In other words, the role of the game designer is not to create “ideas” for the team. It is to provide design. Those are two very different things. Design is not about dumping problems (the “ideas”) on other people and force them to do the actual design work.

I have heard designers say things like “this move doesn’t feel good, it has to be animated better so it feels right” – heck, I’ve said stuff like that myself! And you know what? That is a piece of utterly worthless feedback! If I work on a mechanic, I should know the purpose of it. If I can’t answer why it is in the design, what its function is, how could I ever know what to look for during implementation? It is lack of understanding that leads me to blurt out vague statements like “this has to feel cooler”.

It is my duty to properly drill into the designs. It is our job to sort out unknowns, find answer to questions and make sure that all those uncomfortable issues that appear during the drilling process are called out and dealt with. When our co-workers start to implement the design that we have created, we should give them the answers and tools they need.

When a programmer needs diagrams describing the flows of moves and metrics for speeds, distances and timings, I should be the one to turn to.

If a level designer needs pacing plans and a library of blueprints for combat encounter set pieces – I should create those tools because it is my job to understand the game and answer questions.

Now you might ask yourself just how to drill into design and how to deal with these kinds of problems? Luckily, there are some very smart people in the games industry that has put a lot of thought into just that. I would recommend you start by watching the following two speeches by the brilliant Jonathan Blow:

Truth in game design

Designing to reveal the nature of the universe (with Marc Ten Boch)

When I was a kid my father subscribed to “Reader’s Digest” (maybe he still does, I don’t know). I used to read it and remember particularly enjoying two types of articles. One kind was a type of story that typically told the thrilling story of some guy who went out into the wilderness, got stuck under a fallen tree and eventually had to carve his limbs off with a pocket knife to get loose and then crawl all the way home without bleeding to death.

The other kind of article I enjoyed was “IQ tests”. The tests they published was pretty standard ones where you had to try to figure out which image out of 3 or 4 that belonged in another series or images. To solve them you had to find how the series progressed – this was usually by rotations, additions and subtraction of elements in the pictures.

Now, I don’t particularly see the value of “intelligence tests”, but I do enjoy the puzzle aspect of them. As a kid I was very thrilled by these puzzles – they gave me a lot of fun challenges.

If you google for “IQ test” you will find many that are similar to the ones “Reader’s Digest” published. However, most of these tests are constructed following a few standard patterns (rotations, add, subtract etc) and I recently started thinking that it might be fun to try to construct similar puzzles – but without following the usual patterns. I started out and quickly realized that the process of creating puzzles like this is a great, fun and different challenge. Hopefully they will be fun for you too, trying to solve them.

So, here is a set of three puzzles. The objective in all three is to find out which image (A, B, C or D) that is supposed to replace the one(s) marked with ‘?’ in the image grid.

Please post feedback in the comments section. Enjoy!

Puzzle #1

Puzzle #2

Puzzle #3

Enjoy!

About a year ago I worked on a very interesting project which involved creating a unique world with all its history, people, physics, metaphysics and so forth. I like fictional worlds that are thoroughly created and I have always marveled at people like Tolkien or Richard Garriot who go such great lengths and even create languages for their worlds. I have since I was young thought that it would be cool to one day create my own language.

When I started studying linguistics and computational linguistics many years ago I learned a lot about the behavior of language. I got more acquainted in the world of languages and learned what I needed to cover to construct a language of my own, and roughly in what end I should start. I also realized the daunting scope of such a project.

However, a year ago I was thinking about the game world we were creating and I briefly returned to the idea of creating a language. I though about it and wondered if I couldn’t be much more efficient. I mean, I wouldn’t wanna spend a couple of months on a language that would just be a minor background element in this fictional world. It would add some depth to the world, but few would probably fully appreciate a proper constructed language.

One evening I began to do some basic research, looking for ways to cheat and sidestep what would ordinarily be required in the process of creating a language. I figured that for my specific purpose I could fake quite a lot. This lead to some quick tests and after spending another evening I was done with my language. I had created a fictional language in (less than) one day.

Linear B

First, I wanted a language that felt real. It should reek of history. In the end I turned to Linear B and figured I could use it. (Of course I could have drawn my own set of symbols and worked out their pronunciation, but this time I decided to go with Linear B as it is)

This is not the whole Linear B writing system. There is a set of logograms and special characters in the system as well, but I decided to ignore them and just go with the symbols you see above.

One interesting aspect of this part of the Linear B system is that each symbol corresponds to a syllable. This is quite different from our Latin alphabet. Whereas Linear B uses one symbol to denote the syllable “wo”, we would in English write it with two symbols: ‘w’ and ‘o’.

Translating syllables

Now, what would happen if I could just somehow translate English syllables into Linear B ones? After some more digging I found a list of the few hundred most common digraphic (two character) syllables in English. The 10 most common being:

That’s well and good. Now, If I could set up a table matching the 60 most common digraphs in English against the 60 Linear B symbols I might get somewhere. Piece of cake! Python (or Ruby or Perl for that matter) to the rescue! These are excellent languages for these kinds of tasks. Here comes the translation table:

translation_table = [
    ('en','a'),  # Digraphs
    ('er','e'),
    ('nt','i'),
    ('th','o'),
    ('on','u'),
    ('in','da'),
    ('te','de'),
    ('an','di'),
    ('or','do'),
    ('st','du'),
    # ... more pairs like these ...
    ('ll','za'),
    ('ng','ze'),
    ('me','zo')]

I can pretty much pair these as I want since Linear B syllables always have a vowel in them. So I won’t end up with long strings of consonants ("jfdksjfdf") however hard I try.

Ok, we also need translation functions. translateWord() translates single words syllable for syllable and translate() iterates over a whole string (sentence) and translates it word by word:

punctuation = (',','.',':',';','!','?')
 
def translateWord(word):
    def trans(str):
        for (ep, lp) in translation_table:
            if str.startswith(ep):
                return (lp, str[len(ep):])
        # didn't find a syllable. chip off one character and move on
        if str[0].endswith(punctuation):
            return (str[0], str[1:])
        else:
            return ('', str[1:])
    tword = ''
    word = word.lower()
    while word != '':
        (syl, word) = trans(word)
        tword = tword + syl
    return tword
 
def translate(str):
    return " ".join([translateWord(w) for w in str.split(' ')])

Now we can try to translate sentences:

This is my new language

translates into

oqe qe je teze

This looks promising, but we need to fix one thing. Since there is no corresponding syllable to “my”, the whole word “my” gets consumed. Adding the single vowels (‘a’, ‘o’, ‘u’ etc) to translation_table and have them correspond to Linear B syllables does the trick.

Why is this your new language?

now becomes

o qe oqe opi je tezeanesi?

Giving the language more flavor

It’s a good start, but we can get a bit further. First of all, the translation table could be expanded a bit with entries for semi-wovels (‘w’, ‘j’, ‘l’) and some consonants. But there’s also things we can do with the language structurally. There is a linguistic term called “agglutination” which means that instead of isolating a word of some syntactic meaning, it is instead tacked onto another word as a prefix or a suffix. English does this with the plural marker ‘-s’, for instance, while pronouns like “your” and “us” are separate words.

Some languages are heavily agglutinating, like Finnish where “talossanikin” means “in my house, too” whereas a language like Mandarin isolate everything (these are also called analytic languages).

For the sake of making my language more exotic than English I decided to have it use suffixes where English uses separate words in a number of cases. Another table does the trick:

switch_table = [ 
    'a', 'an', 'the', 'my', 'your', 'his', 'her', 'its', 'their', 'your', 'our',
    'i', 'we', 'you', 'he', 'she', 'it',
    'one', 'two', 'three', 'many', 'some',
    'not']

(My final table is a little bigger than this but this illustrates the point)

If any of the words in the table are encountered, they switch place with the next word and joins it as a suffix. The function intermediate() handles that and creates the “intermediate” English form:

def intermediate(str):
    i = 0
    s = str.lower().split(' ')
    s2 = []
    while i < len(s) - 1:
        if switch_table.count(s[i]) > 0:
            # Make suffix
            n = s[i+1]
            nsuffix = ''
            if n.endswith(punctuation):
                nsuffix = n[-1]
                n = n[0:-1]
            s2.append(n+s[i]+nsuffix)
            i = i + 1
        else:
            s2.append(s[i])
        i = i + 1
    if i < len(s):
        s2.append(s[i])
    return ' '.join(s2)

So if I run the string Why is this your new language? through intermediate() I get:

why is this newyour language?

And feeding that through translate() yields:

o qe oqe jeopi tezeanesi?

Writing it out

Now we only have to get it written into the nice Linear B symbols. Fortunately, Unicode covers Linear B so if we only have a font that includes its symbols (You’ll find one called “Aegean” here), any web browser will be able to display the text. First, we just add the Unicode codes for each entry in the translation table:

translation_table = [
    ('en','a', '𐀀'),  # Digraphs
    ('er','e', '𐀁'),
    ('nt','i', '𐀂'),
    ('th','o', '𐀃'),
    # ...and so on...

We also need to modify the translateWord() function to return tuples of Ascii and Unicode (exercise left to the reader). Then we can easily dig out either the written or “spoken” version of the text and put it all in a HTML page (another exercise to the reader) for your favorite web browser to render.

Let’s try it…

It is a dark time for the Rebellion. Although the Death Star has been destroyed, Imperial troops have driven the Rebel forces from their hidden base and pursued them across the galaxy.

(Intermediate form) isit darka time thefor rebellion. although deaththe star has been destroyed, imperial troops have driven rebelthe forces theirfrom hidden base and pursued them theacross galaxy.

qewo rotawine kuzo osinita tasikisuina. reopise qokotasi duma mo kime qodutioja, ruzeerure titazeso nejo rosojo tasikisuosi nitariso owetati raroqo kimosi diro zesesoaja osi oqatisoso sereneo.

Now we are done!