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 Nostramus 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 Volatile 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.

Poking from the ground behind an Escheresque parking lot in Pioneer Square, Smith Tower is THE first skyscraper made in Seattle. Built in 1914 it was built from alaskan marble and metal. The doors, which at first appear to be polish mahogany, are actually made from metal to look like mahogany. You see after that fool burnt the city down from his misplaced grease brick, Seattle wasn’t going to go through the pains of building the city again. And so their tallest structure was going to be completely fireproof. The result is a glistening white and grey lobby etched with brass details.
Smith tower, I was told by one of the staff members who followed me around giving me more information that I needed to know, still uses 7 of its 8 original Otis elevator motors. We took the only elevator that goes to the 35th floor; the observation lounge that sits just below the pyramid top. The room is quite sparse and other than the 8th original Otis motor on display behind a locked door and some informational snippets, you won’t find much here. The most interesting thing you’ll find is the cutouts from Seattle’s home magazine showing photos of the top of Smith Tower, a converted condominium that is not open to the public.
Outside you find yourself in a balcony that wraps around the circumference of the 35th floor of the Tower. The Art Deco bars that keep you in add to the feeling that you’ve flown through time. the 360 degree view allows you to see all of Seattle and, if you’ve taken the Underground tour, you can get an idea as to how the old town was made. What struck me first after my first walk around was how compressed the city was. You really get a sense of this as you walk it, especially if you’re from a large and sprawling downtown core like Toronto: Seattle’s streets snap from a neighbourhood like Cabbage Town to Bloor West to King West, all inthe space of minutes. And up on the 35th floor you can actually see this.

The impact of how beautiful and special Smith Tower is is really made by going on the Underground Seattle tour the day before. If it hadn’t've been for Dave, our tour guide, mentioning this building, I wouldn’t've known that I could scale it. And the knowledge of what Seattle went through the years before Smith Tower was built let’s you appreciate the marvel that it is.

(The following is written from memory and is, more than likely, completely inaccurate and should not be taken as truth)

The ground broke away from the clump of trees and fell into the muck just before the Sound. Twice a day the mud and leaves would heave with the changing tide. The place was desolate, barren and unoccupied.

Arthur Denny arrived to this forested northwestern coast and in their infinite wisdom decided that yes, heaving muck, drastic tides and a hill that was so steep that sometimes it was unclimbable would be the perfect place to set up a city.
And so Duwamp was born.
Doc Maynard arrived and with his knowledge of the power of marketing shunned the choice of town name.
And so the city of Si’ahl was born.
Settlers came and set up businesses, people used Si’ahl as a gateway to Canada to possible gold claims up in the Yukon. But their European bred tongues had problems with the name of the city they passed through. And so fearful of the repurcussions of being referred to That Place You Go to Get Shit for the Yukon, they began referring to themselves as the anglicized name Seattle.

Seattle’s business district sat in a pool of muck and mud and shit. This was not only because of the times, an era before paving existed, but because twice a day the tides, and the poorly planned sewage mains, would flood the district.  The advent of the modern toilet did not solve the sewage issues, instead they forced the sewage back up to their source, making  it lethal to use the Crapper at two certain times of the day.
But nevertheless the town was booming: not only was the local sawmill making a mint from San Francisco’s repeated attempts at destroying itself, but Seattle’s business owners took advantage of doe-eyed eager rookie prospectors on their way north and marked up prices accordingly. The richer of folk, and this included the ever increasing business owners, made homes at the top of the hill. Life was good. Seattle was booming.

And then some clumsy twat dropped a brick of grease on the stove and burnt the whole thing down.

The whole town razed wasn’t enough to keep the Seattle people down: nobody had died so spirits were up. and in an effort to thwart the issues of sewage, mud and tides, they decided to build on top of the existing remains. They raked earth from the hill, decreasing the grade and increased the ground level. “Build the buildings higher! We’ll build walls to raise the sidewalks!” cried the city planners. And they did. But because nobody thought that perhaps coming up with a common number was a good idea, the sidewalks were built higher than the first floor of businesses.

Ladders to climb these great walls didn’t work  for businesses. Death by falling storage barrels took customers at a rate of 25 per year. And so the local city planners and businesses agreed that they would move their first floors up a story and the city would reflect that with their road planning. Everything below this first floor was piled over with bricks, dirt and cement.

And thus the Underground was born.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

Coming again from Top Pot, nursing a cup of coffee. This article was almost written on my cellphone due to the laptop not being plugged in all night: note to self, give a copy of Holmes on Homes to our hotel, with the sections on plug installation highlighted.

A third day of rain. A third day of cold. We made our way down to the waterfront once more to the Aquarium which, upon retrospect, is probably what we should have done before we went down there for dinner the other day. The Aquarium is what you would expect…or at least what this boy would expect, coming from a city that suspiciously lacks an aquarium and working in a city that while landlocked, has a tiny overpriced aquarium in the local mall.

If you come to Seattle then there’s one restaurant you must hit: Tavalota. Opened by renowned chef Ethan Stowell, the restaurant follows the Italian tradition of small portioned plates. And if you end up here, make sure you do the dinner family style: order to share.

Our dinner party was 5 and at the suggestion of the very enthusiastic wait staff, we opted for 2 antipastas, 2 Primis and 2 secondis. Which, after the food arrived changed, by the end of the night, to 4 antipastas, 4 primis and 2 secondis.

Antipasta
Soft boiled eggs with anchovies and pickled onion
Chicken meatballs
2x Geoduck salad

Primi
Spaghetti with anchovies and chili
Gnocchi alla romana (the star of the evening)
Ravioli with English Pea

Secondi
Seared scallops
Duck leg confit

My android photos in the candlelight don’t do the food justice, but believe me you should go and ask the waiter for advice on what you should do. Our waiter took the time to question one of our party about her taste for wine and taste the wines himself before bringing a glass for her, to ensure she had one that she liked. Fantastic. And ask for the bartender or waiter to make you an Old Fashioned. They do a good one.

Let’s get this out there right now: dinner was okay. With a desire for fish and chips and a name on the list we went to Ivar’s Acre of Clams. Now this isn’t the type of place I usually go to, whether as a traveller or not: it goes beyond my normal seat capacity threshold (it sat around the 4o table mark) and was in an area that was probably more prone to tourists than Seattle regulars.
But maybe it was the fact that I had had only a donut and a coffee to fuel me for the day, or maybe it was the salt air. Maybe it was the fact that the fish is really good in Seattle. But the dish was not what I was expecting. In a good way. Flavourful cod outweighed the light breading, not English in any way. A good solid, different and not greasy, Fish and chips. But would I go back? Probably not.

Speaking of donut and a coffee, I’m writing this while making my second visit to Top Pot, a local coffee and donut shop housed in a gorgeous glass fronted building, two sides of the interior flanked with 2 stories of books. The coffee? Well let me clarify something that Jon wrote on his post. I’m not a coffee snob, I just know and recognize the difference between a cup of coffee from Transcend, where they roast to enhance the flavours of the bean, and a good cup of diner coffee. And Top Pot has a good cup of diner coffee. The donuts however, were massive. Giants of fat fried dough, made in the factory housed in the year of the cafe. Ambience is made up of the eclectic crowd that used to frequent the places I haunted along Queen Street 10 years ago. It’s a great little place and I’ll be back again before the week’s out.

Now what does a music and Science Fiction geek do while he’s in Seattle? You go to a museum that houses the history of the Seattle music scene, and a hall of fame of speculative fiction. I felt the need to put away my camera in the Experience Music Project once we entered the Jimi Hendrix Experience, a soundproof room devoted to the life and music of Jimi. I wish I could accurately describe the feeling as you enter the room, Jimi playing live at Woodstock and everyone, and I mean everyone in the room stopped dead in their tracks and were either watching the screen or they were sat, head down, wrapped in the psychedelic. A gallery of photographs of musicians was something to take in.

Do you like robots? Do you know who Frederick Pohl is? Do you understand the importance of Blade Runner on not only Science Fiction, but Science Fiction films overall? There’s lots here for the fan, but a lot of information for the casual or non-fan as well. There were things I learned (James Tiptree is a woman?) and movie props that made the geek in me shudder with delight.

The evening ended getting together with an old friend, someone who I was lead to at my old Toronto studio and who is now a Lead at Microsoft Games Studios. Von’s, a roasthouse that doubles as a bar and houses 1000 types of licquor and innumerable amount of taps of beer fueled our conversation and after a beer with our friend, we took to the completely bare streets of Seattle and walked the mile back to the hotel at 3 in the morning.

I’m editing this article and I’ve spent an hour in Top Pot. I could stay here forever. Fake Gary Busey just came in, got a coffee and then promptly got a parking ticket and flipped out just like real Gary Busey. Genesis’ Abacab was playing when I walked in, The Cure played while I wrote this and The Ramones I wanna be Sedated just finished playing. I could stay in this place all day.

So the end of Mass Effect 2 saw me with 5 days of vacation and enough airmiles to get me to Vancouver, to take a 4 hour bus ride with my long time friend Jon to Seattle, a city I’ve never been to but wanting to.

The bus ride was full of freaks. What is it about public transit that brings out the nutcases: old ladies that talk to everyone and nobody. There was a skinny guy in second hand clothes muttering to himself about how ‘he’ll be back, he’ll back’….and most confusing was when he brought out a blackberry and a kindle. The most terrifying of all was the giant we called the Russian Ex-Boxer with a taped up nose. He turned and eyed us through for the entire 4 hour trip, and while nothing much puts me Ill-at-ease, I wasn’t going to fuck with Mr. Zero.

Seattle is wet, grey and a lot like Toronto except with obviously better planning, more hills and a more apparent gap in income levels. Older buildings mix with new, buses with Monorail, running shoed female power suits with fur-coated, gold teethed pimps. Wait … What?

With the rain overhead we opted to leave cameras today at the hotel and just scout. We immediately found ourselves at Pike Place Market and were just enveloped by the atmosphere: fish callers throwing fish, artisans selling wears, tourists taking pictures by the pig. A big building that sells custom cheeses. Cheeeeeeeeeeses! There were so many vendors and so much life…  and this is coming from someone who grew up with St. Lawrence Market. Then again, aside from the coffee place, St. Lawrence Market is full of people who hate you.

We were both craving seafood: I’m prone to eat shellfish before fish, but I’m starting to build up a fondness again for the slick doe-eyed morons of the sea. At the back of Pike Place Market we found Place Pigalle.

The maitre d’, a pirate of a man who said everything except ‘Yar’, guided us with his toothy bearded grin, through the (almost tasteless) black and white tile, to a seat that overlooked the docks and a series of apartments, one which sported a red indian chief. The raised bar of Place Pigalle lorded over the room like a king.

Paired with a scotch, I started with a calamari in a Dijonaisse sauce. I’m a fan of well cooked squid — well cooked as in a good chef, not as in overdone because they don’t know what they’re doing — and  meeting my unknown and lofty expectations the calamari was soft and tender. Laden  with cremini mushrooms in a light cream sauce, the ginger was unexpected. But there was another flavour I couldn’t put my finger on that reminded me of a heady cheese. Jon and I pecked at the dish with fists of bread like hens at a trough….er….MANLY hens at a trough. Roosters. We called over our waiter who, for the entire evening, had seemed to mull each sentence and weigh each word he said to us as if he was trying to call up the spirits of the waiters of America’s past, reminded us about the Dijon mustard. Ahhh…Of course. And what was the name of the dish again? Calamari Dijonaisse. The mystery was solved like the murderer in a book that named the villain: Miss Marples and the Case of the Butler Who Did it.

My main course was a pan seared halibut (caught locally) in a lemon herb sauce, paired with finger potatoes, morels and brussel sprouts. The halibut was light and buttery and the morels a perfect pairing. The waiter, having carefully chosen the phrase “How is our meal being enjoyed” informed me that the morels were not in fact morels but were fake morels. I hope he was wrong because according to wikipedia a fake morel can “cause severe gastrointestinal upset and loss of muscular coordination”, and that doesn’t sound fun at all. In any case the meal was incredibly good and I had paired it with a Pinot Noir from Oregon that was not as blackberry as some of the Pinot Noirs I’ve had, but still pleasant with its light airiness (it tasted good). After soaking up the sauce with bread I was hard pressed to leave the restaurant.

Tomorrow sees us hitting the Sci Fi museum like good geeks and hopefully a lot of photos. You can access my Flickr page via the tab to the right.

And now, the traditional trip to the Grocery Store of Another Land to pick up junk food. BabyRuth here I come.

But I hate careless game design. And while Dante’s Inferno doesn’t have a lot of that and I’ve been enjoying the fuck out of it for a while now, at one specific moment  they got careless and pulled you out of the game; made you realize that you’re just playing a God of War knock-off, with almost no story or character progression. And you ask yourself as you sit there in your sweats, stuck in your house in a cold northern winter that won’t end: Why are you playing this again?
Take last night. I’m playing the Greed layer of Hell. I’ve just managed to skip over a jumping puzzle and fend off waves of enemies. I have no save at this point.
The idea is to pull a lever to pull a lever to pull that first lever so that you can run, jump twice, go on the lowering platform and get back up to the top doors before the doors close on you and you have to do it again. If you touch any of the blades that are lowering while you’re doing this, you die. Simple as that. I tried this 15 times with different variations, but always missed one part of the timing mechanic. After the 15th time I punched the controller and turned everything off.

Here are the underlying problems with this shit.

1. No Save:  I just killed waves upon waves of enemies and while I do get a ‘restart point’ if I turn it off in frustration,  like I did, I’ll have to start at my previous save point.
   NOTE TO FELLOW DEVELOPERS: Stop being lazy and using save points to  make your game more “challenging”.
2. Redundant Redundant Redundant: I have to pull a lever to pull a lever to pull that first lever. And if I fail, WHICH I WILL, I do it again.
3. One shot kill: after pulling these levers I have to try and make it under the blade that is slowly falling down. If I don’t, I die immediately.
4. Time Mechanic: A time mechanic is fine, but a time mechanic that makes me have to do all of the above again is not. I managed to pull the lever to pull the lever to pull the lever, to double jump under the blade before it killed me, got on the platform, but by the time I got to the door, the door was closed and I had to do it all again!
5. Cone of Error, how small it is: I need to be exact, and with a response system that isn’t I can’t be as exact as they want me to be.

Listen. I’m not saying make games uber easy, I’m saying design for your PLAYER, not for you. Too many times in games I’ve made and played I’ve seen designers make game levels for what they find fun. But listen bub, you’re playing the level 20 times a day. Your average player is going to play this once.

Remember Cel Damage? I worked on that game. We balanced that game for us, new game developers on a new platform with one QA guy. And to quote American McGee when I met him at GDC after we released that game “You made that game too fucking hard!”

And we did. Because we made the game for us: developers who played the game 20 times a day. And for that we got ridden hard in reviews. For that, we sucked.

When you make a level you have to say to yourself: besides what would be cool, and visually interesting, what would make this fun. And 9.99 times out of 10 that will not be to punish your player. And that’s what this mechanic is doing in Dante’s Inferno. It is punishing the player for not playing EXACTLY the way the developer did. The cone of error is so narrow that the player MUST play it exactly how the developer played it, and this only leads to the 10th ring of hell: frustration. And my controller thrown against the wall.

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.