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Think Tank

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Katie Salen

Katie Salen is a game designer and Director of the graduate Design and Technology program at Parsons the New School for Design. She has worked for clients such as Microsoft, SIGGRAPH, the Hewlett Foundation, gameLab, the Design Institute, the Director's Guild of America, mememe Productions, Salty Features, and others. Co-author (with Eric Zimmerman) of Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (MIT Press, 2004), as well as The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology (MIT Press, 2005), she is also member of Playground, a design team focused on large-scale, experimental, real-world games.

Spaces of innovation

Chris Hecker writes code for a living, speaks at a clip usually reserved for the pharmaceutically enhanced, and once upon a time posed a basic question while brainstorming game ideas with pal Sean Barrett: how many really simple sprites (or dudes, if you prefer) could be represented on screen with modern graphics hardware? 100,000 sprites, it turns out, give or take a few. “As soon as we saw that many dudes on screen, a ton of wacky game designs instantly popped into our heads. As we told other game designer/programmer friends about it, they too had zillions of game ideas.” From this humble beginning the Indie Game jam was born.

The concept for the jam is simple: bring together teams of professional game developers for four days to design games around a single technology. Now an annual event, the first year saw participants designing for a custom game engine that could display 100,000 sprites on screen. Christened “100,000 Guys,” the games that emerged from the workshop ranged from the absurd to the sublime.

Figure 1: Red Rover, Chris Hecker, Indie Game Jam

Figure 2: Charles' Chopper, Charles Bloom

“The biggest challenge is finding an idea that is fun to play,” says Michael Sweet of AudioBrain, and an IGJ game jam regular. “Rarely did we say 'we can't do that because of the technology' because the assumption going in is that there are many ways to make a house, it's just that sometimes your making it out of bricks, sometimes legos, and sometimes rather large snowballs.”

Three years and dozens of games later, the event has begun to reenergize an industry overly beholden to the promise of graphics hardware. The introduction of each new console or handheld platform — Xbox 360, PSP, Nintendo DS — has in recent years, been greeted by a dearth of innovative games. As game designer Ernest Adams writes in a follow-up to his three-word manifesto (Technology Stifles Creativity), “The new hardware takes so much time to learn that game design creativity goes out the window while all the developers are busily trying to outdo one another in technological splendiferousness. Most of them are simply old games with new display engines. The result is like watching movies filmed entirely for the sake of their special effects.”

Machines at play

The history of videogames is partially a story of the collision between computers and game players, and for many years, was a story written by programmers. Early games, including Spacewar!, Zork, Tetris, and Adventure, were designed either by a solitary programmer working out his own obsessions onscreen, or by groups of programmers collaborating to modify one another's code. In this early environment, the distinction between players and designers was often moot — games were made in order to exploit the limits of the programmers' own knowledge and the capabilities of the machine.

While much has changed in terms of the development process — video games today are no longer an act of individual authorship but the result of a coordinated effort of a large team of specialists — the residue of this history remains. To see it, we need only look as far as Spore, a forthcoming game from publishing giant EA (Electronic Arts) and the brainchild of game designer extraordinaire Wil Wright, originator of The Sims.

Wright has long been obsessed with creating “sandboxes” — games that like The Sims create contexts for player creativity. Wright was one of the first to recognize that players love to make their own content, and that this process could be made simpler through the use of character or object editors. Players of The Sims, for example, spend countless hours using editors to create new clothing and skins for their characters, or writing stories to go along with in-game snapshots taken of their Sims.

Character and level editors in games as diverse as Half-Life, World of Warcraft, Roller Coaster Tycoon, and Second Life have led players to establish an incredibly rich culture of production that Wright believes is the key to a new model of game development predicated on user created content. So when he sat down to create Spore, he decided to see how he might synthesis the paradigm of player-produced content with a new way of using code.

The demoscene

In order to understand the revolutionary nature of Spore, we must travel to Scandinavia, where a computer subculture known as the demoscene traces its roots back to the era of 8-bit computers. Coders in the demoscene create a lot with very little — a fully animated 3D environment can be as small as 64kB (think floppy disk!) — producing complicated computer graphics directly from lines of code. A method known as procedural programming, it is a technique Wright has wholeheartedly embraced in the design of Spore. Sounds, textures, and graphics are all created in real-time, through the use of mathematics and generative algorithms. Given that the Sims 2 features over 22,000 separate animations produced by an army of animators, Wright was smart to be interested in what the demoscene had to offer.

Figure 3: 96-kilobyte FPS game .kkrieger by Farbrausch

Once his interest was peaked, Wright did what any good demoscener would do: he broke the rules by doing something everyone thought was impossible. In this case, the impossibility lay not only in creating a game that used procedural programming to dynamically generate content, rather than using pre-built content, but also in designing a game that passes ownership of this content over to the players. The character editors in Spore automate the process of modeling, skinning, and animating a creature, allowing players to customize to their heart's content. And because every creature in the game is defined and animated using procedural techniques, the data files are small, around 1kB each. This makes storing, exchanging, uploading, and sharing content easy. When things are easy, Wright found, players are willing to do even more.

In making Spore, Wright has sidestepped the current paradigm of massive teams of content creators in favor of a system of building games from the ground up. Players produce and exchange content that is dynamically integrated back into the game, leading to greater and greater forms of emergent complexity. The model is not only sustainable — the system will generate content as long as players do — but economical. EA doesn't have to hire the army of animators it once anticipated.

Beyond point and click

Procedural programming is just one technological paradigm of many influencing the design of games today. Another accepted tenant is currently undergoing reinvention, as industry giants Sony and Nintendo push technologies of interaction beyond the traditional point and click interface of keyboard and mouse, or the complex button-mashing required of console controllers. Low-cost sensors, built in microphones, and camera peripherals that track motion and gesture are rapidly finding their way into the hands of players. In WarioWare Twisted, for example, a title for the Game Boy Advance, players play through a set of 5-second mini games by tilting and rolling their GBA. A built-in motion sensor detects the rotation of the system from its standard playing position, giving players the freedom to twist and shout their way across levels.

Then there is Boktai: The Sun Is in Your Hand, another GBA title which uses an innovative sun sensor to literally get kids to go outside and play. In this 16-bit style action adventure game, players must harness the power of natural sunlight to recharge a weapon known as the gun del sol. If players fail to expose the game cartridge to sunlight, they will run out of ammo and be left with no way to play. Designed by Hideo Kojima, creator of the popular Metal Gear Solid series, Boktai embodies the saying “Keep the sun always in your heart.”

But the granddaddy of all game controller invention is the EyeToy a color digital camera device for the Playstation 2, which took the game industry by storm when it was released in 2003: players could suddenly interact with a game simply by moving their bodies. Using a technology known as computer vision to process images taken by the camera, this low-cost peripheral ($39.99) uses motion tracking, color detection, and sound (via a built-in microphone) to translate player movement into onscreen action. In AntiGrav, for example, a hoverboard racing game from innovative developer Harmonix, players play hands-free, moving their heads to jump, duck, and perform aerial maneuvers. The EyeToy tracks the position of the head to determine how far and in which direction a player is turning and whether she is ducking or jumping into the air. Without the encumbrance of a wieldy handheld controller scheme, players of games like WarioWare Twisted, Boktai, and AntiGrav have been quick to find new forms of physical grace in what has long been perceived as a lazy space of inactivity.

The edges of innovation

Technology always creates a context for game design and it is often the limits of technology, rather than its promise of possibility, which truly inspires designers. When Warren Robinett sat down in 1979 to write Adventure for the Atari 2600, the first graphical adventure game, he not only spawned a new genre but demonstrated that deeply meaningful game play could be born from technological constraint. The single button at the base of the Atari joystick severely limited player interaction: rather than storing objects in an inventory and toggling between items (the standard for any game designed today) players could only carry one object at a time. As Robinett notes, “The limitation of being able to carry only one object gave the player some interesting strategic choices: which object should he carry — the treasure or the weapon?” This choice, as it turns out, was the only choice that mattered, spawning hundreds of hours of game play from players intent on mastering its form.

Figure 4: Adventure for the Atari 2600, Warren Robinett

Thus technology conceived as both limitation and strategic choice can provide a powerful context for innovation. “One of the ways I like to think about it is that a lot of technology is about changing how you see the world, shifting your frame of reference. Once that shift happens, new things become possible not just because you have these new tools, but also simply because you are looking at the world differently,” notes Frank Lantz, co-founder of Area Code a New York-based company pioneering an emerging genre of games known as Big Games. Part of a small but growing group of designers like 42 Entertainment — the minds behind the alternate reality games The Beast, and I Love Bees — and Blast Theory — an artists group based in the U.K. — Area Code is interested in the design of large-scale, multiplayer, real world games. SuperStar is the latest in their big game roster: a massively multiplayer real-world game designed to weave itself into the complex fabric of Tokyo street life via Japanese Puri Kura stickers. Players compete to shoot as many of the stickers as possible with their phonecams, earning points and linking to other players. The game relies on a visual recognition system called Mobot which “looks” at an image, compares it to a database of predefined target images, and indicates when there's a match. In this way, the phonecams can “see” when an image had been photographed more than once, and reward the players accordingly.

Figure 5: SuperStar, AreaCode

Superstar, like other big games of its type, relies on creating low barriers of entry for players, which means taking advantage of current technologies that the designers might modify or extend, or tapping into existing technological structures. Japanese photo-sticker booths were already part of Tokyo's technological landscape; Superstar simply co-opted them for use by the game.

Figure 6: Image Analysis, Mobot

In the end

The origin of game design innovation is not always so easy to trace and many designers struggle daily to define the terms of their own engagement. As Lantz notes, “Because of the kinds of games we are making, we have a complicated relationship to technology. First of all, there's a gee whiz factor to a lot of stuff we do. We are taking advantage of new technology (mobile, pervasive, location-tracking, proximity sensing, smart objects and spaces, etc...) to make game experiences that weren't previously possible. So in that sense, we are very much about technology. But at the same time, a lot of this stuff doesn't work consistently enough to be a robust platform for general access game play. And, while we like doing small scale, experimental work, we also want to make real games that are accessible to a general audience.”

As computer game worlds continue to evolve, the boundaries are being pushed not only by advances from technology developers, but also by the players themselves. In the case of games like Spore, technological innovation is simply a step toward the design of opportunities for players to become designers too. For players of Superstar, on the other hand, innovation lies in the ease of participation and the integration of play into the rhythm of everyday life. These are lessons to be learned, then. When it comes to balancing the delicate equation between design and technology in pursuit of innovation err always, on the side of the player.

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