1. Publicize Do not Disturb Times
2. The bathroom isn’t always for business, it is also for quiet time.
3. Be firm but friendly to get your point across. A raised eyebrow for emphasis.
4. Never pick up after other people or they will never learn.
5. You will always become your parents.
6. Whenever you have a craving, the food in question is almost always taken by someone else.
7. Your attention is always wanted. Close your eyes and breathe before snapping. And also wear short sleeves.
8. Discuss grown-up things in a separate closed room.
9. You will never get nap time.
10. There is always time for random goofing off.

SENSE OF PLACE
In Oblivion I felt like I was in Cyrodiil: the forests were living entities, the land huge and varied and I felt like this place could exist … until I arrived in the sparse cities and talked to citizens. With it’s forced and unflattering conversation camera, stilted voice acting I was immediately pulled out of the world. In Fable II, a game that is very similar to Red Dead Redemption on many fronts, the situation was the same: look at a character or try and ‘interact’ with one and the game made you very aware that that’s what it was: a game.
Red Dead Redemption is the exact definition of Verisimiltude in gaming. Like Oblivion, the land feels alive: animals are everywhere, the locations varied. Mexico at night feels very different from the bleak and bleached Mexico of the day. The beautiful stillness of Tall Trees and the northern reaches of the mountains is an awe-inspired sight: Sometimes I fire up the game to just travel up there.
Each town has its own character: McFarlane’s Farm has a barren sadness about it; Armadillo is a gutted but alive dirty monster; and BlackWater has the sterile and ordered foreshadowing of what many cities later in that century would become. And one of the main things about Red Dead Redemption which sets it apart from other games that try and capture the feeling of a living town, sandbox-style or not, is that each character feels internally connected to the city. Any cityboy will tell you that you can stop in the main artery of a street of a city they are from and point out characters and formulate how they are connected to the city. Not even Grand Theft Auto IV or what we did in Mass Effect 2 did this to the extent that Red Dead Redemption did. GTA IV had far too many characters that were just background noise: they didn’t have any more life than the flags hoisted on the flagpoles of hotels in that game. They were there to make the city feel alive, yet they didn’t feel alive at all. In ME2 the characters you could talk to in Omega felt completely connected to that location, but the other characters felt stilted and were no more alive than the neon signs that buzzed around. In Red Dead each character had a purpose in that city and you got to know these characters the more you visited these locations. Now the reduced number of pawns compared to GTA and the simplistic interaction compared to ME2 helped in that: the team could develop the personalities of these characters — what they did and when — a lot easier and without as much overhead. But Sam and the team at Rockstar were smart: it isn’t what you say to characters, that establishes relationships in real life, it’s how you interact with them.

Let’s look at some of my experiences as an example. I visited Armadillo a lot in the game: how could you not — it was the center of New Austin and had the most varied amount of shops.  I took to playing poker just about every night and one of the people in that poker game was Herbert Moon. Well wouldn’t you know that the bastard was always winning. And wouldn’t you know that at 10am when I would get up from those drinks and that poker game and go pick up some chewing tobacco from the local shop he would voice his usual hateful anti-Semitic comments. When he was robbed — and he was frequently robbed — I had to stop myself before helping him cos I was sure that that smug bastard was always laughing about  my bad poker playing. “Too bad about that game last night Marsden.” But yet I always helped him. I hated Herbert Moon, yet I always looked forward to seeing him at our poker games.

Now let’s look at how this relationship was established. I never had a conversation with him. I never did a mission with him other than random robbery events. My interaction boiled down to him simply being at a poker game, and the game being coded to react to me if we did, and if he won (which he always did). It’s a small thing, but I felt like I had more of a connection with him than I did with any character in Oblivion.

The game is filled with reaction: reaction to what you did, do and where you went. If I went the righteous path, there was a simple change in how people reacted to me when I arrived. As I progressed through the game, the newspaper boys and the townsfolk would react and comment on some of my larger actions or the events that were happening in, say, Mexico. If I shot a lot of Elk in Tall Trees, it would be some time before more Elk showed up. If I accidentally shot a civilian in a shootout in a town, a lot of the townsfolk would run, like in GTA or sometimes they’d come and inspect the body. But occasionally a gunslinger would pull his gun on me.  If I didn’t holster, he’d start shooting and I’d loose honor if I killed him. One time I lassoed and hogtied a woman (for a certain achievement, it was completely out of character for me) and because I didn’t have my gun out, and it was in a bar, one of the guys in the bar started spitting at me and came up and cuffed me in the ear as I was carrying the woman out.
The point is: the world is alive and reacts to you, through scripted events in the story, and through dynamic reactions. The characters are given little nuances and combined with the high quality of voice acting, models and animation they feel alive. They feel alive. You don’t need long conversations with random people to make people seem real; to pull you into the world. In fact that is so unlike the real world that involving yourself with an arguing couple about what to do with an unborn child pulls you out. Small details that might seem unimportant details like lighting, camera work, voice acting and virtual acting all combine to help keep the player grounded in your world. Red Dead Redemption, while being a game that had very little to do with the citizens of the world has managed to keep that grounding, to keep the player so immersed in the world through a reactive world. And it’s that reactiveness that gamers, critics, and fans will always be referencing in games to come.

(The next article on Red Dead Redemption will focus on gameplay immersion and diversity)

Thanks Jameson!

http://jamesondurall.blogspot.com/2010/06/what-does-game-designer-actually-do.html

With the arrival of Alan Wake this week, a game that claims to be deep in the horror genre,  ’Horror Games’ are once again on the tips of every gamers tongue. And while this game has yet to reach my hands, and I’ve yet to make a judgement, I’ve been thinking about, and investigating, the types of Horror Games that have been released over the last 2 decades. And while taking an in depth look at each of these games is beyond the scope of this article, a cursory glance and criticism of some of the more popular horror games begs to be written.

Take Dead Space. On paper it should be the type of game made for me: mutated creatures, space, death by dismemberment. Silent Hill too. But these games fall to the same problems that so many horror films fall victim to: because they don’t know what horror should be, they try to recreate the elements of what current pop-culture tells us what a horror movie (and game) should be. They don’t understand or know how to shock the psyche of the gamer, and because they are trapped by the very definitions of what a modern game is, they contrast their frightening jumps with a lack of anything happening at all.

In Dead Space you are alone, trapped on a space-ship infested by aliens that were once human. The ship is quiet, but occasionally monsters jump out at you. That’s the premise, but here’s the problem: what is horrific about humans turning into monsters, if you’ve never met these humans before. What’s terrifying about a quiet spaceship if you’ve never seen it bustling with activity? What is at the core of good horror is context: the Dog Monster at the beginning of The Thing is terrifying not only because it is grotesque, bloody and just strange to the crew of Outpost #31, it is because it used to be the dog that we were introduced to at the beginning of the film. The Norris monster is absolutely terrifying because shit man, that was Norris not 3 minutes ago! In Dead Space there is nobody in the ship that I can connect with: every human I connect with is done through glass, or through communications and video recordings. Nobody is left in the ship and I have no context as to what this strange place was like before. Ridley Scott’s Alien introduces us to the Nostromo as a ship that is fully functional and we see it running in its day to day. So when an alien infiltrates the crew what was safe is now unsafe: it is the predatory grounds for something to which we the audience have never seen before: and it’s in the area that the characters deemed safe.

But it’s not just about giving context. Alien, Jaws and The Thing and any H.P. Lovecraft story all have a deep-rooted theme that the situation is exploiting. Alien is the fear of the unknown; The Thing asks what would you do if you couldn’t trust the  people you were trapped with; Jaws looks at our fear of sharks. What theme is Dead Space or Condemned trying to explore? Most of these games seem to be trying to mimic what was succesful about successful horror movies.

Dead Space and games like it also fall prey to what they think will heighten the fear of a game. In a movie you always fear for the survival of the main character – in Alien it’s Ripley. In a game the point is to survive, so the player knows that there is never a danger of the main character permanently dying. Instead Visceral Games and developers like them relying on ammo and save point mechanics to heighten the fear: you will always be afraid of not having ammo and you’ll have the fear of having to redo an entire section of a game because you cannot save your game except where the developer tells you to. Unfortunately this goes against the root of all sound game design: never frustrate the player. And really it doesn’t make any logical sense: if the player is conserving ammo, doesn’t that defeat the purpose of having the player kill all creatures with the weapons you provided? And why on earth would you punish a player by having them repeat, sometimes over and over, a long section of gameplay that really, you only intended them to play once?

While a poor game in implementation, I think Alone in the Dark had the idea right when it comes to weapons: if you have the player create the weapons themselves then you elevate the fear not by running out of ammo with which to kill your enemies, you limit the player in what they can build by what parts are available to the player. Sorry, looks like you can only attack this creature with a can of spray and a lighter. Pretty brilliant when you think of it. And Dead Rising had the same idea: the entire mall is full of weapons you can utilize, so the fear doesn’t come from will you have enough ammo to get rid of these monsters that you must kill, it’s will this item I just picked up be enough to take out the zombies that are attacking me. Unfortunately Dead Rising’s mechanic and enjoyment was completely exorcised by it’s horrible savepoint system; a system in which you must run to the bathroom to save over your only save point. For many it drove players away because the mechanic was taxing and drove you out of the gameplay.

We’ve seen many attempts at getting horror right. And some fans of Silent Hill or Resident Evil might argue that I just don’t get Survival horror. My counter-argument is that Survival horror, based on Japanese minimalist and psychological horror, doesn’t have a place in games, especially in the current market where action reigns the dollar. The point of a game is to entertain, and you can’t entertain if you don’t have anything happen. And by no means do I think that the solution is to go with the current fad of slasher horror: Rockstar’s Manhunt showed that the gaming community had no interest in that. Instead we need to look where a player feels the safest and jump them there; we need to look at building up relationships with other digital actors, and literally rip them apart. We need to take those situations and make important thematic messages about environmental degradation, a collapsing economy, war, universal health care and poverty because the best horror movies — Night of the Living Dead, 28 Days Later, Jaws, Nightmare of Elm Street —  do just that. Right now our industry is trying to find it’s footing and discover what is a money maker and what is not, and until they do there won’t be many publishers and developers willing to risk the money the way that George Romero, FW Murnau and John Carpenter did.

With the game pressed and waiting for January 26th this week has been about reflection and planning. During this time it is customary to sit at an email and spew hate for the things you didn’t like while working on this project, ignoring everything that was great about what you did. Some would call this a ‘post mortem’ – a dissection of how the project faired in terms of production. I call this unproductive bullshit.

Listen, the point of a post-mortem is to have a retrospective look at how the project faired: We are a young industry and we’re still making all this shit up, so it’s important to aggressively criticize the methods taken to make the game. Writing down emails of ‘and then this person did this and I hated it’ accomplish nothing. Sitting in a room with 30 people and having a shouting match about what you hated accomplish nothing. You need to break it down to what worked and what didn’t. But also one more thing that many studios forget: you have to create action items for everything on the list; you need to ensure that every complaint, every kudo has task to fix it or continue it.

But it doesn’t stop there: you need a production or management staff that will use those action items as tasks for the next project. In 2005 for Full Auto, the art team filed me (as Art Lead) emails that were broken down into such categories and combined and filtered them into what ended up being a 55 page document with action items for everything. This was then sent to the managers of the studio, where it sat and wasn’t looked at. Which then created more emails of hate. The Art Team did everything right and all the work and effort that was put into it was put out with the heel of a boot.

BioWare, and more specifically the Mass Effect team’s preferred method, is to gather everyone in a room for half a day and with a Producer at the helm gather the feedback. (I should note here for others in the gaming industry that we have the best producers in the world here. Your preconceived ideas of what a producer is is completely shattered at BioWare). Usually doing this causes chaos and a Kill Cloud of negative energy gathers in the room. People start talking over each other, others become quiet and irritable, even worse is when some people’s comments are negated because someone has a louder voice. But kudos to our production team for finding a way to resolve this. Yesterday our Project Manager Corey Andruko split the giant whiteboard into 4 sections of development: tools, workflow, systems and communication (usually the whipping boy of these meetings) and like a conductor, a stinking and sometimes unworking marker his baton, brought in the the ‘What went rights’ with the ‘What went wrong’. Everyone had a chance to speak and every item was boiled down to the issue at hand, sometimes being combined with other issues into a larger task. Even though we were trapped in that dark meeting room for the entire morning, we all left feeling that someone had listened to our thoughts.
And here’s the thing…every item brought up were things that would make the next project better. There was nothing disastrous brought up and that really showed how well this project went. We were all sitting in that room wanting things to change, or stay the same, to make the next project better.

So now the poor production team has to collate not only our feedback but the feedback of every department and discipline on Mass Effect 2. And this is where we’ll see if our minimal effort and productions hard work goes further and is rolled out as tasks for the next project. Seeing as how this process and a post-mortem of Mass Effect 1 created Mass Effect 2, a game and process we’re all immensely pleased and proud of, I’m optimistic.

But for those of you entering the industry or working at a studio that doesn’t have any or a productive post-mortem process, here’s my advice. It is critical that we do this: we are a young industry with gangly arms trying to get the respect of the adults. If we don’t seriously criticize ourselves and work to fix those issues that arose; if we don’t research how other studios resolved those problems and envelop the successful studios processes we will not only not get that respect we’re asking for, we will never mature as an industry. So gather your people after a project, ask them what went right, ask them what went wrong and take those tasks to heart as to how your next project will work. Don’t make this a shouting match of hate because that will do nothing but piss people off.

—edit–

Let’s try some links that actually work, shall we?

—edit—

The final of my 4-part article on ‘What I do’ and ‘How I got here’ is up on Bioware’s blog, though I do have more coming. I’ll mention now that the intent was to have it in 2 pieces, but I ran a little long at the mouth and shot the shit a little too long. For best absorption read 1&2 together, then 3&4, with a Scotch and Soda and cigar in hand.

http://blog.bioware.com/2009/06/22/the-long-road-to-bioware-a-designers-origin-story-p4/

Previous posts:

http://blog.bioware.com/2009/06/22/the-long-road-to-bioware-a-designers-origin-story-p3/

http://blog.bioware.com/2009/06/22/the-long-road-to-bioware-a-designers-origin-story-p2/

http://blog.bioware.com/2009/06/22/the-long-road-to-bioware-a-designers-origin-story-p1/

The posts on BioWare’s Blog  featuring articles written by yours truly continues. This is part three of the 4-part series and in this I discusses what a Level Designer does.  CLICK IT!

http://blog.bioware.com/2009/06/22/the-long-road-to-bioware-a-designers-origin-story-p3/

Previous posts:

http://blog.bioware.com/2009/06/22/the-long-road-to-bioware-a-designers-origin-story-p2/

http://blog.bioware.com/2009/06/22/the-long-road-to-bioware-a-designers-origin-story-p1/

http://blog.bioware.com/2009/06/19/the-long-road-to-bioware-a-designers-origin-story-p2/

http://blog.bioware.com/2009/06/18/the-long-road-to-bioware-a-designer%E2%80%99s-origin-story-p1/