The Trouble With Deckard's Blaster

I wanted to briefly illustrate a point that has been on my mind a lot recently. If you wish to carry on any kind of legacy or intellectual property, you will do your best work by retracing the influences and techniques of your forebearers. The perpetual danger is to mistake certain surface details or gloss for the essence of the thing, but if you understand how the original work was derived in the first place, you're better prepared to follow it up faithfully, but with your own influences and inspirations.

The example on my mind has been one from the new Blade Runner film. Problem: you've got to follow up on some of the greatest prop and mechanical design of all time.
Solution? Immerse yourself in the techniques that gave rise to those designs.



Deckard's blaster (above) is one of the most classic science fiction gun designs ever. Here it is going up for auction, where it may have fetched over a hundred thousand dollars. It is deceptively simple, like a lot of classic designs. The gun is the result of mating a Charter Arms .44 Bulldog, a common revolver, with a Steyr-Mannlicher .222 receiver/bolt. Look at this to get an idea of the sort of devotion that this gun inspired in replica makers prior to the original hero piece resurfacing, whose construction is detailed briefly here.


The trouble with Deckard's blaster is that the working method used to produce it is remarkably straight forward, common prop gun making. A real, working gun is disguised to look like a new gun. In this case, the gun is kitbashed with components of another real gun, plus some inspired amber grips.

Kitbashing deserves its own very heavy book to explicate completely, but in essence it is the art of repurposed mechanical detail. Suffice it to say the enduring legacy of the late 70s and early 80s prop and miniature design in film is almost entirely indebted to kitbashing.
Star Wars, Alien, and Blade Runner are perhaps the most important early standard bearers for kitbashing and remain testaments to the enduring possibilities of kitbashing's aid to conjuring a believable world.

Looking at Deckard's blaster, we see a lot of mechanical detail that looks like it works. Because it does! Or did, anyway, in its original context. But removed from that context, the Steyr-Mannlicher components still retain their air of purpose. This is the trick. To take and recontextualize various greebles, nurnies, and gubbins that had purpose, in their original context, to make something else look like it has purpose.

The human mind is an extraordinary bullshit detector. While yes, an expert on firearms can tell that Deckard's blaster doesn't "work" the way that its borrowed gun components suggests that it would, it is suggestive of purpose and function enough to believe. Most important of all, it looks very cool.


I look forward to Villeneuve's take on Blade Runner, he and Deakins have been on an incredible streak. But I think it's illustrative to compare Deckard's blaster to Officer K's in the new film, seen below:

To me it is clear this is not a design anywhere in the same league as the blaster from the original film. This is of course an extraordinary challenge. One must not be too slavish in devotion or homage, yet still remain in the same ballpark. The mistake is to backsolve from apparent surface qualities. In this case, big, possibly double over/under barrel + "unusual" grip texture or material is not a sufficent formula.
I do not know who designed this new gun nor their working methodology. But the design speaks to what in my mind is a certain lack of awareness about both firearms and the kind of alchemy that resulted in the original. The trigger guard is the most egregious offender, a broad naive slab that bears no relation to the sorts of considerations that inform modern handguns. The barrel section is over-busy with detail, the rear half of the gun disunified with the front. A vague hand-waving of shapes all over.
Critically, there appear to be no donors, in part or whole, from actual guns. The only thing that has been carried over from the original that I wish hadn't is that there are no front or rear sights.

Like the task of Blade Runner 2049 following up on one of the greatest science fiction films of all time, designing a new blaster would be a herculean effort to say the least, and one likely to fail. I'm happy I can comment safe from censure, here on an old blog. But I think the only method that would even stand a chance of competing with the original would be a similar alchemical fusing of some real working gun, plus a non-working component contribution from another gun. A simple formula with potentially endless variations.



[Addendum 1:Interestingly, Syd Mead, whose work is all over the film and well loved for good reason, had a much more unusual and futuristic concept for Deckard's blaster (seen below), which was rejected. Certain kinds of greatness can only be stolen, not willed into being or designed wholesale.]

[Addendum 2: I'm not going to touch the new Star Wars licensed content delivery transmissions that resemble "movies", but generally speaking they suffer from the same trouble; their designs are almost entirely bounded within the purview of the original trilogy and suffer greatly as a result. The exception being the rebel troopers' small arms in Rogue One, which were (not surprisingly) kitbashed following the method of the original guns in the original film and so are successful for the same reasons.]

[Addendum 3: Here's a video of Adam Savage seeing the original hero gun in the flesh, after painstakingly trying to recreate it from reference material, and largely succeeding. The funny thing here is that he wants to make his copy's finish mirror the dulled metal of the bolt on the original, when it probably has simply rusted/pitted with time. Oil your guns people, even your 100,000 dollar film prop guns.]

You're Getting VR Wrong (And Not The Way You Think You Are)

The central imagery for VR is people wearing the headset. They're In There, they're experiencing new worlds, you the viewer are left pining for whatever special experience they're having, or trying to interpolate the experience of what is clumsily superimposed behind them on a green screen.

"Presence," as we're calling it, after having already used up "immersion," is absolutely real, and is foremost to the appeal of VR, but it is not ultimately what VR is best at. Stay with me for a minute here.

The trouble people have had with VR is that they're being delivered two extraordinary pieces of tech together as a suite. The first and seemingly most important is the head mounted display (HMD), which hijacks enough sensory apparatus to fool our brains into thinking, at least on some level, We Are There, This Is Real (albeit ghostly and insubstantial).
This is what almost all introductory VR experiences focus on, and almost all VR experiences are introductory at the moment.
And like most launch window software, they've got it wrong.

Being In There is great, but with enough exposure a human will acclimate to anything extraordinary. Think of the men having lunch on a girder of a skyscraper in progress high above New York and so on. I believe that's a big part of why VR is stalling out in terms of install base at the moment. Mere spectacle isn't good enough, it will never be enough.
If spectacle plus some headaches and discomfort were enough, we'd all be watching terrible movies on our 3D televisions and loving it. But we're not, terrible movies on flat screens are just fine, thank you.

No, the second and more important part of the revolutionary tech suite bundled together as "VR" is motion control. Real motion control.
Though I'm sure it was a necessary stepping stone, as an industry we cried revolutionary product wolf with motion controls with the Wii and Kinect despite not having it at all.
The Wiimote was never going to cut it because the precision was not there, barely enough for a crude parody of known sports. But it gave us a glimpse of the ubiquitous ease of entry that would come later.
The Kinect was never going to cut it because other than the input lag, you know you look like an idiot waving around in your living room, rather than slouched with a controller looking catatonic as usual. That, at least, your family is used to seeing.

The key point is that in VR you are still going to look like an idiot waving around but you're not going to care, because now you're In There, you can't see the fallen world you inhabit the rest of your waking hours. We've finally got enough accuracy and speed to put your hands in the game, for real, and the results are incredible.
I put my septuagenarian father into the Vive to shoot basketballs like he's done all his life in Nvidia's VR Funhouse and he didn't even blink, he just tried to shoot basketballs. Think of that compared to any experience of handing a non-player a controller, much less strapping something to their head.

That's the trick. We think we are going to have something amazing that is just going to explode the brains of the non-believers and plebians, but that isn't what will get them, or get you for that matter. It's finally being able to use this miraculous head and hands as direct input.
The fact that the environment tracks with our head and we can see it and we feel more or less immersed is important, but secondary to being able to act in that world like we expect to, and on that score the Vive was correct to go completely all-in on roomscale experiences, despite how opulent it seems to some at this point.

So far I sound like most other VR evangelists but I want to point out now that there is no possible near future, no matter who is president, that is going to make my father run and spend the thousands of dollars to get a Vive and the computer to run it.
Your parents, and most of your siblings, and most of your friends aren't going to either. They're going to be amazed by the demo you give them, and probably talk about it a lot, maybe even tell all their peers about it, but they're not going to be the least bit interested in getting back in there themselves. That was a unique one-off. A trip to the amusement park. A thing to talk about on social media. Not a decision point, or whatever the marketing people call it.

We can talk all we want about how this shouldn't be, and ways to fight it, and constantly swallow the lump in our throats about a clear inferiority complex that continues to plague game players and developers, but that's a lot to get into today. It's Sunday, take it easy.

What I want to get out there is VR is absolutely real, and incredible, but it's being wasted right now. We're showing Mom a tiny moon in Tilt Brush that seems to be floating in the room with her. She reacts predictably while we film it on our phones. I've done it too. Filming first timers in VR is as much fun as it is useless in selling more VR sets.

Strain to remember all those forgettable launch titles for every new console generation. A worse version of that is all that is available to play for VR right now. Maybe not quite that dire--for PSVR and soon PC, there's Thumper; for Vive there's Onward. But that's about it.

We need games. Real games that are fun to play once the novelty of VR has long worn off. Games that can't be played with prior control schemes.

The people that are going to pay thousands of dollars for VR right now are the ones that want to crawl inside their videogames, not everyone else who has a vague contempt and suspicion for what we play. They can come too if they like, but I don't think they're going to pony up any cash any time soon beyond the mobile VR market. Which is not going to lead to much beyond an incredible amount of VR pornography. Chiefly because mobile VR currently has no facility for precise motion control, the real star of VR.

Videogames, beyond some hotseat multiplayer and the like, has tended to be a one-slackened-face-to-one-screen solitary affair. Why are we bending over backwards to sell VR as something even more social than regular games? Because we want to prove all of our favorite cyberpunk media wrong? I don't buy it. Strapping something over your eyes is necessarily going to be isolating, but not that much more so than gaming has ever been.

I've got another hundred pages I want to write about how the big companies have been peddling a fundamentally wrongly targeted campaign for VR and have been paying the price for it, or how teleport locomotion was never the right call, but I don't want to bore you, I want to get back to working on a game for VR that couldn't be played in anything but VR.

 See you In There.

Arkham Knight and the AAA Vignette Problem

What I am calling the vignette problem is when so much skill and attention is paid to portray or evoke an uncommon scenario, it overshadows the actual experience of the game.
Watch from 1:40 in this video. We are treated to a extraordinarily lavish evocation of a Gotham at night and in the rain, bustling with humanity. The camera goes into the head of a police officer, and we experience sitting at the bar as him.
Needless to say, things do not go well for everyone not-Batman in this clip. We realize that the entire scene is merely to set up another moment of chaos unleashed on the city by a villain, a wrong that Batman will right.

Is this scene successful? Absolutely. In a very short period we are drawn into the nighttime diner. It becomes the vignette problem when this little moment is a breath of fresh air compared to the entire series of the game. It is so successful, it is an immediate disappointment to return to "business as usual."
 Particularly in the milieu of violent video games, where high action and high stakes are quotidian ("yeah ok, I'm Batman swooping through the sky, stopping the Scarecrow from making the city rip itself apart from some crazy nerve gas"), a moment or seen not commonly encountered in the series or in that style of games draws perhaps a little too much attention.
 It is precisely because it is so believable a scene. Most players know this scene is "fake", in the sense that there is no continuing life in the diner, no gameplay to be had; this entire set-up exists to get knocked down, so we can get back to being Batman saving the city, now our purpose clear, the stakes raised, but that doesn't stop you from being excited from the possibility space of a novel interaction in a game not about the usual stuff of action games.

This might be very telling of a personal exposure to a lot of action games, but I don't dislike action games, or want them to not be action games. I am not advocating a Gotham city diner simulator--but to me the vignette problem is that the game itself seems to hint at a much more interesting game than it actually is.

But this is unfair to an unreleased game. We should talk a bit about the ultimate offender in this regard: Bioshock Infinite. We are treated to an extended introduction into an extraordinarily richly drawn and detailed world, and we are intrigued. We know our character is an interloper here. How will this play out? The answer is "with a ludicrous display of ultra violence". A reciprocating hook weapon goes right into the face of a policeman, and now you know the drill, soldier. This bit is like everything else you've played in this space.

That to me is the heart of the vignette problem, which in some ways seem to happen more and more as bigger games wish to show more of "cinematic" slice of life environments (Ubisoft games increasingly). They suggest a dynamism, an application of their staggering budget to realize something other than clearly what the game is. I wish they wouldn't tease me.

On works in progress

A friend was reticent to post about the game he was working on. This was my response, tapped out on my phone:

never mind the dorks, post that shit. the longer you wait to post anything, the harder it gets, the more precious your work seems to you and then you start making endless excuses and moving goalposts for when it's properly ready to show. I did that shit for years and try very hard to beat the impulse.

because when you post early, and keep posting, people might not pay attention, or they might jeer, but they have a baseline that you are most certainly going to clear, because everyone gets better at what they do. and then one day you'll post something dope becaus you'll have been working hard enough on it, and everyone will be cheering you on because to see the work in progress, even subliminally, gives them some small stake n it getting better. you'll be proud when the work rises above piece of shit status, and so will we, and you might get some decent advice along the way.

or, you could wait until it's "ready to show" (the most impossibly arbitrary distinction, at least among peers) and get really disheartened because everyone cracks on it anyway, even if it is pretty good, because people are selfish at heart, and if they have no stake in something the easiest thing to do is make fun of it and move on. enfranchise them early in the process and you avoid that, as well as avoiding the looming tidal wave of "ready to show people". 

I never expected to be happy about having a smartphone, but brevity is an unexpected payoff.

Legacy skills through the Looking Glass.

I didn't know what he looked like either.

To a late 90's Looking Glass fan, the following quote from an interview about Dishonored would seem perfectly ludicrous:

http://games.on.net/2012/09/dishonored-interview-arkane-on-stealth-ai-player-choice-and-much-more/

GON: When I was talking to the guests, they all just started shouting at me to go upstairs immediately and check the diaries. So I resolved that I wasn’t going to do it, just to spite the game.

Julien: (laughs)
GON: Is that something that you find people doing? I expected the clues to be a bit more vague. Did you find this doing playtesting? Did you put it in because people didn’t know what to do?

Julien: Yeah. We try not to lead the player by the nose, but at some point we found that if we don’t give a little information, people just get lost and don’t know what to do. It’s just overwhelming. So we tried to add this element that gave just a hint, to help a little. But we try to do it as little as possible.

GON: It’s cool because there’s a lot of ways up the stairs, but it still felt a bit railroad-ey. What did people do before you put these clues in?

Julien: People would just walk around. They didn’t know what to do. They didn’t even go upstairs because a guard told them they couldn’t. They’d say “Okay, I can’t go upstairs.” They wouldn’t do anything.

Even from a modern vantage, it's easy to look at the above passage and laugh. But what's really going on here? Are players that stupid, or are a whole younger generation of shooter fans unconditioned to meet  to even modest exploration/decision making tasks?

I would say not likely--given there is a related and hugely popular set of sandbox games that revolve around exploring and deciding all you want. Something else is at work here. Is it the legacy skillset of current shooter fans working against them?

It's taken for granted that legacy skills (keyboard&mouse/two stick aiming) are required for first person shooters now, but what has now been completely bred out of an entire generation of shooter players is any desire to explore or not follow strict orders. I think a whole lot of young shooter players out there don't know how to play a single player shooter and not take shouted orders from a COD NPC Bro.


What do we expect, if it's all the diet FPS players have had for the better part of 6, 8 years? In COD and BF3, you get an abrupt mission over if you should deign to stop taking orders from your NPC comrades, sometimes even if you hesitate for a second. Shooter players are now conditioned to obey NPCs, in exchange for a jarring and sudden mission failed screen.

Taken in this light, the above quote seems a reasonable response from a tester. An NPC has just told me I can't go upstairs. I'm enjoying this game so far, do I really want to slog back through a load and the last checkpoint, just because I want to try, in utter futility, to push past my given bounds?

But in a game like Dishonored it isn't futile. You should be trespassing and trying to find your way out and around in spaces you're not usually allowed. The trick is to prompt the players who have been conditioned with swift punishment for straying off a linear path into accepting their widened freedom, and to encourage them to take advantage of it.

A small observation I know, likely not worth the space I've devoted to it here, but it struck me that legacy skills involve what you might also call legacy expectations: what kind of affordance have I been given in all the shooters in the past 5 years, and why should I expect any different of the game presently in front of me?
It seems to me a call to developers to take the poverty of modern linear shooters and reignite the expectation in players for better things, more decision making than which real-world analogous shotgun or LMG to pick for a multiplayer loadout.

There have been a lot of people pessimistic about Dishonored despite it giving every appearance of being a return to form for developers who have always believed in this kind of approach to games. I don't think it's fair to criticize them for having to re-educate a vast majority of their potential player base what it is like to call your own shots in a shooter environment.

Dog name theory

When talking about independent game development, the question of names comes up a lot. Names for projects, names for companies, names for engine tech and so on. Since nobody asked me, here's how I feel about the question: it doesn't matter.

That's not true; in fact, "it doesn't matter" nearly always pains me as an answer to a question as it's a thoughtless response. It matters, but I will argue it matters far less than people think it does. 

Maybe not the best dog name

I liken naming a game to naming a dog. As with a dog, you can name your game just about anything, with a few common sense provisos. A dog's name should be short, have a good consonant sound in there, and probably not be vulgar or obscene. Bonus points if the name seems to decently fit the personality of the dog in question, the more so the better of course, but a standard dog name is nothing to worry about.

So long as it isn't actively problematic, most any dog name will work. At the end of the day, the name means nothing, insofar as it is a vessel into which we pour all of our emotional connections, memories and associations of that beloved pet. The stronger the attachment to the pet, and it's unique personality and quirks, the stronger the name will seem.

Counter-Strike. 

Nobody familiar with CS can see those two words adjacent without a strong association--imagery, memories of particular matches, exultation or frustration. It's an above-average name choice that at least connotes some amount of shooteriness (and fittingly, some degree of sportiness), but to any player of the game, it doesn't feel generic at all. Not because it's a great name, but because of the rightful, arguably inextricable association of the game's character with the name.

Which is why it made me laugh to discover that Minh Le (of Counter-Strike fame) would name his new project Tactical Intervention, an only slightly more specific game title exactly in the vein of Counter-Strike. 

I laugh because it seems goofy and generic now, like a friend naming a dog a completely boring, standard dog name, but I know that with time the players' associations with the game will make that name seem like anything but. Games named in this fashion--the Unreals of the world in response to the Quakes--still tend to rise or fall purely on the strength of the game, rather than because of a particularly apt title or it's clear association with another game. 

Nobody really thinks of the three letters of MOH in the same way as COD, even though the latter title came later, as a clearly analogous naming choice.

Maybe this is all obvious, but I keep seeing independent developers agonize over this kind of decision. Build the game, and the game will fill the name with all the meaningful freight. 

So long as it isn't too cutesy, overlong, or embarrassing to speak aloud in mixed (or multigenerational) company, your game and company name are just fine.

Ask yourself: "does the name I am considering sound like a Dejoban title?" So long as the answer is a firm negative, you've chosen well.

Design Primer: Askhat's minotaur

On Christmas Eve, 2006 I was in Akita, a sleepy town in northern Japan, and posting on the internet.

I know this because yesterday a friend from polycount emailed to thank me for the advice I'd given him over the years, and he highlighted one thread in particular, which bears that date. While I'd like to think that him re-reading old posts of mine to his threads has to do with the endless wisdom one can glean from my writing, the truth is more prosaic. Askhat Mizambekov, aka conte, is an fellow game artist and polycounter (I particularly like his concept art) for whom English is a second language.

 He emailed me thanking me for advice I had given him five years ago that was a little outside his grasp of the language then, and so wanted to thank me after the fact. Other than this being quite a thoughtful gesture, it was also an interesting little window into my own artistic/design thought processes from five years ago.

Other than removing a number of exclamation marks ("An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke" wrote Fitzgerald) and elaborating on a point or two, I present my same post from five years ago as a short primer on logically refining a character design, relevant for artists and game designers both.

Pictured: my illustration for this article about Askhat's minotaur,
not actually his (or my) concept of a minotaur. Wouldn't be very useful as a concept,
 now would it? Where's the rest of him? Is that the star brush from Photoshop?

Sorry Askhat, I am currently in northern Japan and have no access to a scanner or Wacom tablet. Luckily for you, Eric looks to have been on a rather inspired painting streak and has provided some good input on designing the armor and some coloration ideas. Nice paintover, Eric!
I'll do what I can, though: One of the best (and easiest) ways to refine a concept is to think it through logically. Ask what this Minotaur is all about. Where did it come from? Is it a dumb beast, or intelligent in its own right? Does it have a master? If you give yourself an answer to a few of these questions, you can make your concept a whole lot more interesting. Form follows function, right?
Let's take an idea and then just run with it, see where it takes us.
Let's assume that this minotaur is a spin on the ancient Greek myth about the Minotaur, placed in the Labyrinth. Now, without getting into the particulars of the mythology and turning this into a Greek style monster, we'll assume this: there's a Labyrinth where victims/"the hero" are trapped and the Minotaur kills them/tries to kill them.
A Minotaur in a Labyrinth killing stuff is cool, but it still doesn't give us anything interesting to go on. So we introduce a design constraint (often the best way to generate new ideas): in order to really make it difficult for whomever's trapped in the Labyrinth to win, let's say the entire Labyrinth is completely dark. Pitch black.
But the Minotaur has great hearing and sense of smell, so it still manages to catch people in the darkness.
We could also suppose, just for fun, that the Minotaur's hairs covering his body are very sensitive to heat--so if the  hero or victim that's trapped in the Labyrinth is foolhardy enough to carry a torch, the Minotaur will be able to find him even easier. Maybe this is just silly and we'll discard it later, but it's worthwhile to entertain different possibilities, especially in the beginning of this process.
So let's look at what we've got now:

1.) Labyrinth where Minotaur hunts down "the hero"

2.) Labyrinth is completely dark.

3.) Minotaur has very good hearing, smell, and heat sense.

Okay, that should give us more than enough to design the minotaur in an interesting way.
One approach given the lightless environment would be to pull a "Gollum", and make the Minotaur like a slimey, albino cave creature with very little pigment. But that suggests a long time spent evolving in that environment, and frankly  runs contrary to the strong suits and essential character of the Minotaur. Still an option, though.
But let's just assume that while the Minotaur hunts people in the dark of the Labyrinth, it does get some exposure to light intermittently. (Or maybe they turn out the lights during the hunt, because it was getting too easy for the Minotaur to kill people.)
So the Minotaur isn't a cave dweller by nature. The next natural choice would be for it to have a blindfold of some sort, or better yet, some blinders, like a horse. If you go with that, you can create a visually interesting sort of  blinding-helmet, which functions to blind but also protect the Minotaur's eyes and skull. So that's an idea.
Going along with that, the armor should protect him well in this dark environment. He's got a great sense of hearing,  but he can't echolocate like a bat (or Daredevil), so let's say he navigates the Labyrinth because he's memorized the entire layout, from years of hunting people in it before they turned the lights out. But even though he knows the whole  layout, he still needs armor not only to protect him from whoever he's fighting, but also to keep him from injuring  himself too much if he would happen to charge into a wall or otherwise run into an obstacle. Does he keep track of his steps on some kind of counter, like a string of Tibetan prayer beads?
Now you've got a helmet and an interesting possibility for armor/equipment. How about a weapon?
If he's trying to kill something in the dark, he's probably not going to use a particularly precise weapon, either. This suggests maybe a nice big club or warhammer, something really big, blunt, and suitable for a monster in a maze to  use. Something big and capable of withstanding an accidental striking against stone, like the floor or a wall. And it's left in the dark of the Labyrinth, without cleaning or maintenance, so it's probably pretty nasty.
Or maybe it's ritualistically cleaned by cult retainers devoted to the care of the Minotaur, since a dirty weapon would interfere too much with the Minotaur's highly developed sense of smell. Do the retainers/cult members have a supporting role suggestive of gameplay?
Does the minotaur consume the heroes he bests in the Labyrinth after killing them, or simply retire to his lair. And if he doesn't eat the corpses, who does? Is the Labyrinth covered over in beds of fungus in the dark that sprout among the corpses? Some kind of parasitic/carrion feeder food-chain that subsists on the victims of the Labyrinth?
Finally, just to spool out an idea related to the heat-sensitive business, you could give him a really long pelt on his back or around his neck or something, specialized sorts of hair tufts that react to heat. Like cat whiskers or something. That's a pretty bizarre idea so you may or may not be able to do anything with it visually, but it's still a potential feature.
There you go: starting with just a few basic "how about" sort of scenarios, we've been able to come up with a  potentially novel approach to a minotaur design. This methodology (one of many possible) is also nice because it suggests a  whole scene, complete with the Labyrinth and the hero character, and possibly even a game mechanic. Maybe the hero has a torch, but has to throw it around in order to mislead the Minotaur? Maybe the hero uses the Minotaur's memorized knowledge of the Labyrinth against him, and uses something to trip him up unexpectedly?
Blinkered creatures aren't particularly new in games (those wolverine guys in RE4 come to mind, for instance), but it could still make for something that gets beyond just another well-made, but fundamentally uninteresting, obvious Minotaur character.
I apologize for the lengthy posts, but it'll do in the place of my inability to give you a paintover. Maybe even better, since you're able to draw just fine yourself it looks like :) I hope this idea-generation technique proves useful for helping you flesh out this character and future ones.

Original post is here: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=45887

Radiator Yang's Interview with yours truly

There have been mild suggestions that I update this blog. Such efforts have resumed.

In the meantime, Please enjoy this interview piece by Robert Yang wherein we discuss a whole host of designerly things, if you didn't catch it on Rock Paper Shotgun.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/11/01/level-with-me-jack-monahan/

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.

Open world issues Part 3: trust and the player-driven narrative

I confess that every previous attempt to write this third installment has been met with some manner of derailment. Anyone unfortunate enough to have contact with me in casual conversation or on message boards on the subject of games will find me increasingly the ideologue. Any discussion about games seems to lead back inexorably to a few pet topics: the scourge of "cinematic" gaming chief among these, player agency and narrative.

As with the other two articles I hope that in identifying shortcomings in game design principles, in asking the right questions, I will have answers worth considering.

The player-driven narrative

The player in an open world wants to be in the driver's seat, literally and figuratively. I personally would like an open world to be just that: not an otherwise linear game whose mission order can be scrambled, but at the cost of endless shuttling to and from mission locations (AKA the pizza boy syndrome). As with GTA this is where the conversation always seems to turn back to cutscenes and movie-style story content because it is necessarily cost prohibitive and static. Either the movie conforms to the game (enormously expensive even to offer small choices in the main narrative), or the game conforms to the movie, which is how most games end up. Aspirations to "cinematic" games are a dangerous trap because in order to get those movie-like experiences we undercut what make games worthwhile on their own terms.
This suggests that cinematic-style high cost content--cutscenes and their related animation and voice work--have a higher impact on the quality and actual player choice than most people assume. If players and designers free themselves from the increasing fixation on the trappings of the disparate medium of film, likely it will be far simpler to allow the player farther-reaching choice and consequence in the game world.

Armed with ability

If we are to commit ourselves to greater player agency outside the bounds of movie-styled static content delivery, then we may find ourselves looking around for something to do. I do not criticize GTA's increasing emphasis on mimetic/lifestyle fantasy elements because there are fascinating, unique experiences allowable within that context.
An example I give that is similar to other stories I have heard about playing GTA4: once I had just fixed myself a sandwich but also wanted to play the game. I started GTA IV and then hired a cab to a mission destination across town, and simply did not skip the ride. It was an oddly inspired, unique experience to sit within the POV of the passenger, looking out on this well-realized virtual city traveling in real time, and eat a sandwich. While passive it was an experience I chose, one that made me reflect on various cab rides in cities in memory--unlike much of GTA4 it was not a movie-inspired element.
This is not to suggest that I want to play a slow boat to China simulator replete with various 1920s socialite passengers as the boat travels in real time (scratch that: now I do). But there are very strong elements in GTA, as with the other open world games, that are somewhat overlooked but do more than their share to immerse the player in the world.
Replacing the cinematic with the experiential would seem a critical step in vitalizing open worlds. Far Cry 2 is a game I otherwise enjoyed tremendously, but for the general shallowness of what I needed or could do within the visually lush environment. Tie my character further into the socio-economic fabric of the world he inhabits--not in order to simulate, but to create play economies, interactions with an otherwise static world.
In FC2 I am a mercenary who outside of the inspired malaria mechanic sought only weapons, ammunition, and morphine. What other needs or mechanics would serve to deepen both my immersion but also the playability of unique environs of the game?

Player input required

I would like to close with a contemplation of skill and performance. Not as an appeal for so-called "hard fun," or a return to outrageous difficulty ramps/endless trial-and-error gauntlets, but as an appeal for games to recover a capacity for the player to use their wit and intelligence. Both in rewards and in penalties.
Perhaps this marks me as too old-school of a PC gamer (or an inveterate hoarder) but I feel this is deeply intertwined with above concepts of agency, of choice. In order to let players be extraordinarily clever, I suppose it means you might have to let some players lose.
A story to illustrate: I remember playing Gears of War and first encountering the Hammer of Dawn weapon. It was enormously powerful, but clearly restricted by the vagaries of a weapon that called down an attack from a satellite. In the game Marcus can only carry two weapons, so it seemed a very clear moment of choice to me: do I drop the Hammer in favor of a less powerful gun that I can use frequently, or do I give up that second slot on the chance that later on I will be able to use the Hammer's enormous damage? I chose the latter--I was carrying two weapons of a similar performance profile so I decided it might come in handy.
Sure enough, it did come in handy later--but when I needed it there was of course another Hammer, lying conveniently on the ground just before an encounter with an enemy who could only be defeated using the Hammer.
I felt cheated. As a designer, I understood what had happened: if the player was to experience an interesting special encounter (we've got to get this enemy out in the open and then use the Hammer), they couldn't risk the player not having the weapon handy. But in making sure anybody playing the game had access to the Hammer when they needed it, the game also removed any sense of reward for my own initiative to keep the weapon.
Certainly I don't suggest that players just be screwed over with an unwinnable encounter without the Hammer--but couldn't the encounter (or similar encounter) be structured to reward cleverness or foresight, while still allowing other players an alternate, possibly more difficult solution to the problem? Say if you didn't keep the Hammer, you might still be able to whittle the Berserker's health down conventionally, or there might be another entertainingly "hardcore" method of dispatching it, like crushing it with a boulder.

 Choice needs to come with its own realm of variable performance. In order that there be real benefit to cleverness, to foresight, not all players can reap the rewards.
A positive example is in RE4, with the multi-part treasures: if Leon held off on selling what looked to be components of a larger whole, he'd make considerably more money later, once he had assembled all the pieces. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this element has been "streamlined" out of RE5. Sooner or later we'll get to "streamlining" most anything resembling a conscious decision or choice out of mainstream games, but it doesn't have to be this way.

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To restate the above points: the essence of a game apart from traditional media is the player's interaction. The more a game allows the player to choose, to drive the story, the more it is a game and not a counterfeit of filmic experience.
If the player is to drive the narrative, he will likely require a greater range of possible interactions with the world--something to do that replaces the "cinematic" straitjacket of before--and these interactions will comprise much of the meat of the game, moment to moment.
If then the player is in the driver's seat and has an array of skills and interactions available, the final step in adding depth to the play experience is to take the training wheels off, allowing variable performance beyond rote or mechanical. Hope springs eternal.