Missing what might have been: a thought about meta-spoilers

An 8 year old sketch. A pretty decent
Geoff Darrow bite if I say so myself.

The neologism "meta-spoilers" is intended to get after that peculiar issue common to both game developers themselves and hardcore game fans: nostalgia for the path not taken. For game developers it is a constant companion, sometimes threatening to grind game production into endless series of retrenchment, feature creep, muddled design, etc.

But because I am pursuing a policy of open development, modeling after the pioneering work of Mount & Blade's development and current peers like Wolfire, this also applies to fans. I think open development is absolutely the best policy for small developers, and might actually do some big developers quite a lot of good as well, if they could only wrest their freedom to speak to fans back from their marketing departments. But there are some downsides as compared to the traditional model.

Meta-spoilers don't even require knowledge of the game development while in progress. I know a lot of people who appreciate Half-Life 2 very much, but have effectively meta-spoiled themselves by perusing that Raising the Bar book once too often... a game that triumphantly exists is overshadowed by the knowledge of what might have been. And quite honestly I have exploited this very dynamic explicitly with my Design Reboots.

Open development means sharing the heartbreak. In the coming months my posts will not be lying to you--if I discuss ideas here, or post concepts, or respond to a suggestion with "hey that's a really good idea" I am not blowing smoke if it doesn't end up in the game.

Rather, it's just a part of how games happen, or get caught in an endless loop like Duke Nukem Forever's original development cycles. There's no way out from that trap. At some point the game must collapse down from the more attractive, purely hypothetical realm of possibilities into a finite game that actually is.

I am really looking forward to people getting to know what's been inside my head for a year or more, but I thought this should be said first.

Also, with some mulling it over, I will be posting devblog updates to this site, rather than spinning off into yet another page to maintain (and sooner than later stop updating as a result). All posts will be tagged, so a simple filtering will allow you to view exclusively the development updates.

Discuss this post in the forums

Duty Calls: Kettle Ops

As a part of a campaign to promote the upcoming People Can Fly/Epic game Bulletstorm, we get the following elaborate send-up of Call of Duty games, Duty Calls. I thought it was funny. But who's really the butt of the joke here?

It is not my nature to be peevish or small about this kind of thing, but there's a kind of mean-spirited angle to the parody here that actively courts it.
So here's a point by point dissection of the above from a developer's perspective very keenly interested in issues of FPS level design. (Also, just watch the video, don't bother downloading, lugubriously installing 768 megabytes for a 4 minute spoof on Call of Duty. There's a metatextual joke about the install size/gameplay time ratio in AAA games here, if only I could find it.)

• @0:33 COD's leaden pre-mission voiceover cinematics are also there to disguise loading--once the level is loaded you press a key to jump right into the mission. It's interesting to point out that the Unreal Engine masquerading as COD, at least in this configuration, isn't able to manage the same; we get a second (albeit brief) loading screen after the pre-mission voiceover/satellite spoof. I think it's interesting that only by way of doing a direct parody does the engine beg this sort of comparison and here, fall short.

• @0:36 Gunhaver tic: having the M4 have the wrong ammo count seems intentional, but it's only off by a little bit--what's the joke here? That we wish we had two more rounds for an in-game M4, or rather a single extra round past 30+1? That the Bulletstorm developers think it is silly to know how many rounds go into a STANAG magazine? 

• Also, the BUIs (back-up iron sights) are folded down, giving the weapon no rear sight. The game gives no option to sight-up on the (missing) ironsights, another COD gameplay hallmark. Or is this not present in the parody because Bulletstorm also features ironsight aiming, like everyone else chasing COD's crown?

• @0:38 The voiceover is consistently funny, to me--but what's the joke about sticking the objective in the player's face? Are we saying that Epic isn't as thoroughly guilty of technobabble comm traffic about MacGuffins in Gears of War, or more pointedly, that we will be free of this in Bulletstorm? The "Story and Characters" trailers seem to suggest otherwise. An easy joke to make but harder to follow through on--leading the player by the nose with objectives is de rigeur now; does Bulletstorm offer an alternative?

• @0:52 nice gag about gated gameplay areas... but once again, who is this directed toward? All Gears of War levels are rigidly gated this way, and I find it hard to believe Bulletstorm is bucking this trend either.

• @0:56/throughout: an excessively linear slalom of obstacles where enemies appear at random intervals. Again, if the developers of Bulletstorm are suggesting that their game is something other than a very pretty linear corridor slalom with spectacles or special scripting at interval, consider me elated.

• @1:01 I laughed at every one of these leveling up messages. But here again--really? Are we taking a swipe at one of the most successful leveling mechanics for competitive multiplayer games? Not that it isn't worth very serious questions about, as well as a good bit of fun-poking... yet Epic is one of the leaders in this kind of thing. Gears of War 2 features multi-stage Achievements that you grind like any other experience point system, in order to unlock arbitrarily gated content.

• @1:05 I also laughed at the "b-b-b-bloody screen (so real)" gag every time it came up... but again. I guess the joke here is that COD pretends to some kind realism that is undercut by a regenerative health mechanic. Little argument from me on that point... but from what I understand Bulletstorm will, like Gears of War, also feature a regenerative health mechanic? (In COD the effect only vignettes the screen--Gears of War sees fit to place a bloody COG emblem dead center of the screen.)

• @1:12 The M4 is not fun to shoot. The gun is limited to semi-automatic fire at a glacial pace, with a tired "boring" intoning with every shot. How is that fair? COD is king because they have gotten certain details very, very right, and one of those is exquisitely responsive gun handling. People love to shoot these virtual guns, for hours on end. Bulletstorm can potentially get a lot of mileage out of its colorful set of outsized science fiction weaponry, but the 'negative campaigning' here so to speak seems deeply wrongheaded.

• @1:31 "You have picked up a small meaningless stick. Congrats." Incisive for most shooter games but again, Epic's own headlining franchise is equally as cut down here. Intel briefcases in COD single player games are exactly the same as COG tags in Gears of War titles.

• @1:40 a funny cutscene--but aside from the gag about the slow-mo, the same criticism also applies to Gears of War.

• @2:40 Serpentine linear layouts are equally damning to all shooters.

• @3:00 "you cannot shoot me because this a cutscene." Also equally damning to most shooters, and I defy Bulletstorm to do anything with their Story and Characters that is beyond this paradigm.

• @3:28 A player-openable door? Gasp. Everyone knows your COD hero player character, no matter the era, is completely unable to open doors themselves--they can press a context key to plant breaching charges, but not use that same key to open a door. So I guess this is one of the first legitimate criticisms that applies only to COD here?

And that's all of it. Exhaustively nitpicky? Reading too much into all of it? Yes and yes. Even I was tired at the end of this, and surprised at how long of a list I had gathered so quickly. 

But a good parody is about nailing details right: people laugh at a very good impression of say a president or a movie star because he or she nails key elements; offhand mannerisms, vocal cadence. Looking past the wisdom of the stunt of releasing this as playable instead of as a youtube video in the first place, it's hard to see this as an effective send-up of COD when it is so slop. COD games make me very, very angry about certain design practices its developers espouse. Along with Halo, it's the biggest shooter out there. 

This parody seems more than a little backhanded to the fanbase you are no doubt attempting to market Bulletstorm to. "Hey Dicktit (or other such vulgar portmanteau favored by the game's protagonist), we think the game you love sucks! Buy our game instead!" 

Yet at the same time, attempting to have it both ways--vide the "Story and Characters" trailer again. (Or better yet, don't.) Bulletstorm has been very effective in marketing a loose and easy sense of humor, albeit a sophomoric one. Are we meant to deride COD for all its hoary tropes and then buy another Epic game of huge bros and (newly more modest) chicks in glowing armor on bloomed out exotic science fiction worlds and expect it to be this aware of how terrible shooters are now?

If this is some deeply coded message about how People Can Fly and/or Epic are renouncing their endless reliance on movie tropes, spectacle and extrinsic motivators strung through linear levels then I applaud them. 

More likely it is People Can Fly retrenching their position as purveyors of false nostalgia--shooters dumber than the games they claim to harken back to. By which I mean Doom still has more interesting and challenging level design than most shooters of the last ten years--but we always seem to come back to on-screen monster counts and player running speed instead.

If there is a retro backlash in the works for shooter design, let it be an appeal to that lost design craft, not to some wistful desire to mentally regress to the age we were when we played the shooters we loved so much.

I look forward to your comments on the topic in the comments below or in the gausswerks forum.

Against Dilettantism

I've redrafted this about four times now, but J. Shea's combined forum and blog output (recommended reading) have shamed me into rewriting it fresh and just getting it out there. Blog posts that are up are always better than the perfectly drafted ones that never get posted.

So here follows the closest thing to my manifesto--if not that, the guiding principle of my current design philosophy:

Designer, know thy shit. 

The less pithy formulation being that the onus of expertise lies with the designer.

 I suppose that's a little opaque; I am suggesting that a more research-driven approach benefits all game design, that it is central to sustaining the creative lifeblood of the form. And what's good for the form is ultimately good for the business. 

I know what you're thinking already. "Yeah research is cool and all, but I'm not trying to make a simulation," or that perfect chestnut, "it's not about realism, it's about fun." 

Let's approach the latter point first: I'm not the first to point out that the semantic breadth of the word "fun" is so huge and varied as to make it next to useless. Jonathan Blow, in a recent public talk, gave a much more eloquent criticism of game design being driven by "fun", whatever that means--and you'd better believe it means very different things to different people. 

Another developer and thinker I respect is Chris Bateman, who has done excellent research and elucidation of play styles based on the work of Roger Caillois. It should surprise no one that there are greatly differing concepts of fun, some in active opposition to each other. A lot of videogames limit their markets by assuming competition/triumph over adversity as the only model. So if we are going to keep talking about fun, which we ought to, let us be more exacting in our terminology.

But it still can't be the only driving force behind a game, this amorphous conception of "what's fun." To address the former point: the idea that somehow research-driven design is going to end up with dry, simulative games because surely that's the only way we can model reality. Research does not equal realism. 

Research allows us awareness, inspiration beyond our purview, and when the vast majority of game developers are still some stripe of middle class white men, perspective-taking ought to be a serious consideration. Certainly we need more diversity in our designers, but diversity here will only go so far if new voices in the industry arrive only to join the hivemind chorus--making and remaking the same terrible AAA-model titles chorus, their diversity often little more than a potential marketing ploy.

A few examples are in order of what I mean by a research-based approach.

Take one of our earliest and best designers, Lord British (also known as Richard Garriott, I suppose). The man had an enormous influence on the earliest forms of CRPGs, and Ultima series stand as a unique set of games both in startling freedom of gameplay and expression, but also in world lore. Like virtually everyone operating in some aspect of the fantasy realm, he was enamored of J.R.R. Tolkien. 

The difference between Garriott and most other authors or designers in love with the Lord of the Rings is that Garriott didn't just read Tolkien in order to understand what Tolkien did, Garriott researched all the things that Tolkien researched. 

This dodges that fatal generation loss that comes from making your own copy of a good thing--which is that it is worse for being an imperfect copy, a copy of a copy. The foul taste in your mouth when you play most AAA videogames today comes from knowing you've had this meal before, and better--it was a lot better before it had been digested and excreted several times in succession. Garriott followed his idol correctly. If you want to be like Tolkien, immerse yourself in the primary sources he used to create his definitive fantasy world and synthesize your own influences as well; simply reading Tolkien and changes place names or plot points won't cut it.

A quote (from here): "Designers tend to be gamers who want to fix what they think was broken in the previous game. But that's not the way to be a great designer."

Jenova Chen and thatgamecompany are also a worthwhile example of research-driven design, if a less obvious one. Their acclaimed projects are not only built on innovative control concepts, but also on exploring novel emotional spaces in games. There is a research here that is experiential in nature. In order to say, "this game is giving me the sense of childlike joy of playing in a windy field on a bright summer's day," presumably one would have had the experience in question in order to know if the game is evoking the same emotions. Maybe this is obvious; maybe not. Most game designers I know are constantly considering the world in terms of gameplay mechanics, gauging their daily lives in terms of it's potential "game-ness," and most things in life have something going that could be extracted, abstracted mechanically. The key point here is that you need to have had these life experiences to draw upon, experiences occuring somewhere other than in front of a glowing screen. (Turn off the computer and take a walk, weirdo. And stop reading blogs, geez.)

A related anecdote: Takeshi Kajii, producer of Demons' Souls, quoted an unlikely point of inspiration for the game's highly unusual but praised multiplayer component. In the game, players cannot speak directly to each other and seldom even exist in each others' worlds fully, usually appearing as phantoms--but nonetheless rely on each other by leaving messages in the world, warnings or tips. The designer said the kernel of inspiration was getting his car out of the snow with the help of strangers. "I wondered about things like whether the last person made it home, whether I'd ever meet the people who helped me again... Maybe if I'd met them somewhere else, I would've made friends with them... Many thoughts crossed my mind."

 Here but for the impasse at hand these people would have no interaction at all, but they are forced into collaboration; Kajii has as chance encounter with anonymous strangers banding together to get back on their way and the memory stays with him. 

The intended illustration is that varied life experiences are grist for the mill for any creative person--from poet to filmmaker to game designer. 

The final and probably most straight forward example of research informing game development is JE Sawyer's lead design work on Fallout: New Vegas. Sawyer has been rightfully ascendant as an RPG designer--first on the fabled Van Buren, and later FO:NV. As project director Sawyer has been responsible for the more gun-savvy elements of New Vegas, notably the portrayal of firearms and the reloading bench system.

Since my own initiation into researching and collecting firearms (much to the general annoyance of friends and loved ones), games have seemed maddeningly obtuse in their depiction of guns. Which seems strange, when first person shooters focus on little else than the gun in your hands shooting other people and things--and most haven't bothered to get that right. FO: New Vegas redresses that in a game that most thought unlikely to do so. It both deepens and corrects the flawed gun combat in the original FO3; no mean feat/

 Not that games haven't already had their endless share of gunplay-related mechanics, but so many of them are invented from whole cloth. In a laudable display of a designer's private interests informing his public work for the better, Sawyer's initiation into the world of firearms made an considerable impact on how the game can be played. Peppered throughout the world are reloading benches--essentially crafting stations for ammo, that just happen to actually exist, too. Sawyer understood the myriad "game-y" mechanics all around him with firearms, and the game is both more grounded in the way firearms actually work and also far more distinct in the series of Fallout games. It is not suddenly "realistic," but it incorporates enjoyably "game-y" elements from reality quite admirably.

So what does any of this have to do with the quote at the beginning of the article? It's from the medieval Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides and has echoes in my mind again and again over the years as an admonition of humility in intellectual endeavors. First have to admit you don't know as much as you think you know--about guns or space or marines or swords or knights or what have you--and then you can start learning. And once you're designing from a position of knowledge, rather than of ignorance, you're free to make calls as you see fit, informing your design work with some sense of authenticity, rather than as some interchangeable gloss or slight reworking of the last big game you played. 

Game design will gladly continue to regurgitate and eat itself forever, much in the same manner as film and television does in such a bald and ugly fashion, if we don't strive for fresh material to process. The best way forward I know is research. 

More games need to be built from a position of knowledge, not simply lateral cannibalization with some kind of new conceptual hook slathered on top.

Discuss this post in the forums (please do, it's rather interesting in there.)

GAUSSWERKS / DESIGN REBOOT forums

Now open to the public. I would like to say that I have been tremendously fortunate to attract exactly the kind of thoughtful, intelligent commenters to this site that I was hoping to--so first, thank you all, and second, please let's continue to deepen the kind of discussions we have in the comments more thoroughly in the forums--see you inside.

Design Reboot one-shot: Oni

 

Oni is a lesser-known title from Bungie, released in 2001. On a few points it was ahead of the curve: mixed third person melee and gun combat, tentative efforts at real-world architecture, and that ever so popular anime style that the kids all love now, but was quite a bit more niche nine years ago.

Rather than a full design reboot here I decided to only play with Konoko's character design and see what happened. I ended up with a kind of Franka Potente in Run Lola Run vibe combined with the original  Major Kusanagi/Ghost in the Shell riff, while keeping the distinctive haircut. I was less interested in the kind of high tech armor/bodysuit deal she sported in the original (seen below)--a theme you may notice through some of my other character redesigns, I am trying to keep with more moderate, normal clothing for characters while retaining an iconic color palette.

If Konoko is going to be running around in a game doing a lot of martial arts type stuff it seemed appropriate to have her outfit light, sporty, and practical. Pictured is the point early on the game where she abandons her more cumbersome SWAT-style equipment. As for a few comments on the possible gameplay redesign, Oni seemed to anticipate a lot of what would be done later with Mirror's Edge--emphasized speed and agility over traditional shooter action. Certainly a bright, impressionistic rendering style would be appropriate here as well. What do you think?

Be sure to discuss this in the newly unveiled GAUSSWERKS / DESIGN REBOOT forums.

A dog's life

(Mild spoilers follow. Like you even care, Dad.)

All puns intended, Kane & Lynch 2 is for the dogs.
Admire the poor creatures' appearances in the game itself: briefly and unremarkably, they show up to be gunned down.  They inspire none of the visceral fear of the dog packs in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. or COD4 (or the loathsome retread of the same found in World at War).
They come running toward you and you ventilate them with bullets, and then you wonder briefly why they were included at all. Tellingly, the last two interlopers to attack you right before the game's abrupt non-ending are dogs. The game is nasty, brutish and short, and squarely centered on the de rigueur cover mechanic.

Why would IO put out a game so blind to the company's own best strengths?

Are they so keen to distance their other games from the consistent brilliance of Hitman I wonder? Pressure from Eidos, and then new owners Square Enix? I finished K&L2 on the PC shortly after release, but continued to ponder the design decisions that shaped the game.
Kane & Lynch 1 was chiefly remarkable for the title characters. There was a rare sense of parity between the amoral chaos the duo causes both in the cutscenes and in the gameplay. The game also claims partial inheritance from Freedom Fighters (a well received former title of IO whose IP rights stayed with EA), with a good degree of the gameplay verbs given over to basic squad management. One could swap weapons with anyone in the crew, or resupply ammo; occasionally ordering your crew around made a difference tactically.
Despite the game never really delivering on the HEAT-inspired heisting that it seemed to promise along with the HEAT-inspired gunplay (which it mostly did), there was an admirable sense of belonging. Much of the game's action was centered on working alongside in crew of professional criminals, of which the title characters were in the lead. HEAT was the clear exemplar, as has been repeatedly noted: one only needs to watch the justly vaunted bank robbery scene to see why. Cops and robbers, high-power mayhem among hapless bystanders. In my mind, this counted for a lot of the first game's appeal.

Yet IO chose not to revise and hone that gameplay; it is as if they actually believed everything said about their game and proceeded to rip out all the good along with the bad. Choosing to erode core gameplay until there was nothing but an equally meager and punishing cover shooter subsistence left.
I find this puzzling because well observed iterative design is what turned the Hitman series into such a towering success. There were missteps and false notes in each game, which were gradually corrected until the most recent Blood Money: a classic, highly polished and deeply replayable game with mass-market appeal, strong cross-platform sales. (Hitman is also a remarkable case of a console-centered control makeover making life better for PC players, too. Remind me of that comment for another post sometime.)

So what's with the lobotomy on an already slight game? Virtually all of the heisting and any crew-centric verbs or gameplay/story concepts disappeared. Also missing were the highlight spectacles of the first game--a non-violent ramp-up to a set-piece (the Collateral-inspired club sequence) as well as big shootouts occuring in public with numerous bystanders.
It seems as though in the effort to correct what was critically and popularly reviled about the first title, they trimmed out much of what made the original game admirable.
To be sure there are perfunctory nods to expanding the multiplayer component, and the online co-op and revamped visual style are to be commended. But there again--why so much effort into a multiplayer mode condemned to be a ghost town shortly after release, as most non-CoD or Halo releases are?

The essential relationship between the two misfit lead characters also goes under-served. Despite a lot of the anti-cinematic rhetoric evident in my personal design philosophy I am not against a game that tells a good story, by whatever means appropriate. I like hearing these characters connect--or fail to, seeing as how they are both emotionally crippled, horrible men.
IO have taken time to establish these characters through extraordinarily nuanced choices--the costuming choices throughout the game are frankly industry best--and give us well directed cutscenes only in order to serve up variations on the same template: Oh shit, we're in another firefight. Oh Kane, oh Lynch, we've made yet another poor decision involving a shady underworld boss' daughter getting shot by one or the both of us. Is this really the only plot point IO writers can avail themselves of? Why go through the trouble of drawing the characters so vividly when the player behind them is availed even less expression than the first, "casual"-centered action title?

The game seems to have gone in precisely the wrong direction. Reduced and pared down where it should have expanded; reined in where it should have extended. It succeeds in giving us wall-to-wall action, but isn't that where all the biggest blockbuster titles make their money? Why beg the comparison?

I want to finish by talking a little bit about interstices and infrastructure. The former is where the game misses out, the latter is where the game profoundly disappoints in a way that we see over and over again in these kinds of games.

By interstices I mean the space between things; in the case of Kane and Lynch I am referring to both the gameplay and the gamespace. These interstices are suggestive of all the possible gameplay variation the game so desperately needs, as well as the connective tissue to the story.
 In a key sequence, teased from the very first viral video for the game (though the video promises far more variety than the game delivers), Kane and Lynch have been savagely tortured and must escape, naked and wounded. It is one of the game's startling high points, if only for a moment. In short order the two are re-armed with found weapons and the game proceeds exactly as a few minutes ago.
Surely, the extraordinary circumstances might offer variation, but no such luck. Not even a darkly comic sequence of these two tortured men A) in some back alley stealing ill-fitting clothes off clotheslines in the back alleys of Shanghai, weaponless, and then perhaps B)breaking into a hospital or clinic to seek pain relief or other supplies.
Instead we have another perfunctory albeit in-the-buff shooting sequence exactly like the rest of the game, and cut to Kane and Lynch walking into their next ambush/firefight already with their mismatched clothes on and hasty bandages.
If IO meant to place us in panicked, caged-animal feeling of these two men in their attempt to escape Shanghai with you-are-there immediacy, surely the game would have benefitted from more careful attention to the nuts and bolts of that escape. Instead we are treated to the traditionally jarring videogame cut-to-next-level, all promise of those tantalizing interstices erased. Just press fast forward.

More often than not, the scene we fast-forward to is some kind of lazy level design staple: industry and infrastructure. It makes sense in more strictly military-minded games--after all, American warfare is increasingly fixated on attacking and defending infrastructure for sound reasons.
But this does not excuse most action games forcing us through an endless gauntlet of industrial or infrastructural spaces. I do not mean to single out K&L2 solely for this offense, but to underscore how endemic it is to many videogame level designs.
In K&L2 there are some interesting, highly evocative and quintessentially Shanghai-type locations, but there are also all the old favorites. Over the course of the game we visit a parking garage, a construction site, several warehouses, a shipyard/drydock, a rail yard/depot, a skyscraper's HVAC workings, and finally an airport's hangars and baggage handling.
One cannot help but yearn for the thousand times more interesting and mayhem-filled action to be seen on the other side of the walls one is cattle-gated through. It is appropriate to the story--Kane and Lynch are rotten bastards, trying to escape from this city at all cost--and it is also a highlight from the first game bafflingly left un-revisited in the sequel.
If only there were the checkbox on the application to work at a UPS warehouse, [X] Yes, I have played most action games over the past fifteen years and am therefore an expert in virtual warehousing (specialty in demonic warehousing). [X] Yes, I do know my way around containerized shipping, I have spent close to a month in real time around virtual shipping containers, shipyards, and commercial shipping vessels.

Much as one finds in relationships, one cannot help but feel as though while it may not strictly provide a positive portrait of what is the right path ahead in game and level design, our past nevertheless continues to furnish us with example after example of what not to do: what we have done again and again and hate ourselves for and swear we will avoid next time.

Please let my action games have breathing room enough to admit gameplay beyond shooting.
Please let my action games be set in places other than industrial/infrastructural areas.
Amen.