[“Might Have Been” is a bi-weekly column by Todd Ciolek that explores the ways in which promising games, characters, concepts, and companies failed. This week’s edition looks at Capcom's Trojan, released in the arcade and NES in 1986.]

History and Wikipedia tell us that Capcom was founded back in 1979, but in every way that mattered, Capcom didn’t start until the mid-‘80s. It was only in the latter half of the decade that the company birthed the games that first defined it: Street Fighter, Mega Man, Ghosts ‘n Goblins, Strider, Bionic Commando and, if you’re charitable, Forgotten Worlds.

Trojan sits somewhere in the middle of all that. It was too successful to join Capcom obscurities like Avengers and The Speed Rumbler, but it didn’t stick around long enough to become a franchise or a cult favorite. Trojan even went one step beyond the usual arcade flash-in-the-pan and missed its chance two times: once as an arcade game, and again on the NES.

Leaving the Bronx

Like countless chunks of mid-‘80s arcade machismo, Trojan wholeheartedly stole from movies and comics, piecing together a post-apocalyptic world from the bleak future of Mad Max, the broken skyscrapers of Escape from New York, and the hulking mutant thugs of Fist of the North Star. As a result, Trojan resembles some sort of Italian-made Mad Max rip-off with a title like Lost World Warrior of the Bronx Wasteland Escape 2000. In the harsh piecemeal future of Trojan, a tyrant named Achilles (who was actually a heroic figure in the Trojan War of the Illiad, but never mind that) rules over everything, possibly with the help of evil spirits, and only a clean-cut warrior named Ryu bothers to challenge him.

Trojan’s biggest inspiration, however, came from earlier side-scrolling action games like Kung Fu and Capcom’s own Ghosts ‘n Goblins. Ryu trudges through relatively short stages while enemies swarm from both sides, overwhelming him if he stops moving for too long. And when those enemies get too close, Ryu can either strike at them with his sword or block them with his shield, which absorbs several attacks before flying away and taking Ryu’s sword with it. Ryu is then left with only punches to defend himself until he recovers his sword. An interesting concept at first, the shield doesn’t really work; it can absorb only a few hits, and defending at all usually lets enemies overtake you from both sides.

The World Hates You

Trojan makes another curious misstep: instead of jumping by pressing a button, the player must move the joystick up. It’s a precursor to the mechanics of Street Fighter, but the idea’s unnatural and confusing for a side-scrolling action game. Perhaps Capcom didn’t want to spring for a three-button arcade cabinet, but whatever the reason, Trojan’s harder to play than it should be.

And the game allows no mistakes. In Trojan’s strangely gun-free setting, Achilles makes do with an army of basic purple-haired grunts, knife-throwers in bondage gear, crossbowmen, human doodlebugs, and flying, bomb-dropping midgets. And all of them will kill you in a hurry. Ryu has a life meter, but it depletes easily, and it’s not always clear when he’s taking damage. Ghosts ‘n Goblins won its fan base by being gruelingly hard, but Ghosts ‘n Goblins had a variety of weapons, multi-directional shooting, and a constantly changing selection of enemies.

For that matter, Ghosts ‘n Goblins also had some personality. Yet there are no giggling devils or underwear-clad knights in Trojan. The rotted post-nuclear backdrop of its first stage is impressive for a 1986 arcade title, and that's the highlight of the entire game. The following stages are a dull array of valleys, castles, and elevator-driven gauntlets, all of them rote in design. Trojan’s just there to kill you, and that’s it.

Ported and Depleted

Like most profitable Capcom coin-op games of its day, Trojan was ported to the NES not so long after it hit arcades. The game’s graphics were diminished, and not always in understandable ways (Ryu’s NES incarnation has red hair and the knife-throwers look strangely androgynous), but the game’s progression is much the same: hack at enemies, jump when you can, and don't stop moving.

And that's where Trojan really went wrong. Many arcade games were greatly improved on the NES. For example, Rygar went from a mediocre side-scroller to a complex rudimentary action-RPG, while Ninja Gaiden’s action-platformer NES version shamed its tedious arcade brother. Capcom’s Bionic Commando saw an amazing change, too; the arcade-born original was a chaotic mess where players died once a minute, but the NES incarnation remodeled the game into a unique marvel.

Whoever ported Trojan to the NES only flirted with expanding it. Hidden bonus icons are strewn throughout the levels, and falling into manholes on the first stage brings you to hidden rooms never seen in the arcade game. After killing the sub-bosses there, Ryu can find jumping boots that, unfortunately, wear off in about twelve seconds. That’s about it. There’s no world map, no item hoarding, no gameplay improvements and nothing to push Trojan beyond its tepid arcade source.

After the Apocalypse

Swept quickly aside, Trojan never made it into the upper Capcom hierarchy. To see just how far it went, look to Marvel vs. Capcom. The game has a pile of non-playable supporting characters, and many of them are old-school Capcom cameos: Arthur from Ghosts ‘n Goblins, the Unknown Soldier from Forgotten Worlds, Lou from Three Wonders, and even Michelle Heart from Legendary Wings. Trojan and Ryu sat out in the hall.

Trojan survives today as part of the recent Capcom Classics Collection, where it's likely played only by people who enjoyed it two decades ago. There's no shame in ignoring Trojan, though. It's just a dull, frustrating relic, good only as a footnote in the rise of Capcom, and perhaps as a source of snickers from children half the game’s age.

Posted by Todd Ciolek at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

[Some fun blurbiness on the latest issue of our beloved Game Developer magazine - which also has the Front Line Award tool winners in it, plus a neat postmortem of Stranglehold, as you'll read later - but the main draw is an article from the Valvettes about Portal-ing, yum.]

The new January 2008 issue of Game Developer magazine has an exclusive creator-written article on the making of Valve's Portal, and Gamasutra has extracts from the piece, revealing how the game's antagonist GLaDOS was originally a placeholder, and how level-of-detail technical constraints were overcome.

The postmortem, written by Valve's Kim Swift, Erik Wolpaw, and Jeep Barnett, is described by the Game Developer editors as follows:

"From the game's university-created roots through to its Orange Box-ed release, Portal was an exercise in creativity. Here, three members of the eight-person team come together to discuss Valve's iterative playtesting process, the power of simple storytelling, and clever ways to present new ideas to a mass-market audience."

The Creation Of GLaDOS

In this first extract, the Valve team discuss the evolution of the game's unique story and dialog, thanks to Psychonauts co-writer and OldManMurray.com veteran Wolpaw:

"Before the writing started, we met with Erik and discussed our list of narrative constraints. Since at the time we were using some Half-Life art assets, and because we wanted to leave ourselves the option of someday using the portal gun in a Half-Life game, we decided that the story should in some way connect to the Half-Life universe.

Practically speaking, we didn't have sufficient time or staffing to add any human characters, which would have required an impressive amount of animation work and scene choreography. That meant the story had to be expressed without the benefit of any visible extra characters.

A week after the meeting, Erik came back with some sample dialog he'd recorded using a text-to-speech program. It was a series of announcements that played over the newly-christened "relaxation vault" that appears in Portal's first room.

Everyone on the team liked the funny, sinister tone of the writing, and so Erik continued to write and record announcements for other chambers, while still searching for the story proper. At some point, however, it became apparent that these announcements were providing playtesters with the incentive to keep playing that we'd been looking for all along.

Better yet, in the sterile, empty test chamber environment, players were actually becoming attached to the alternately soothing and menacing computer guide. We'd found the narrative voice of Portal."

Overcoming Technical Issues

In this second extract, the team talks about why the complex nature of the portal system provides particular technical challenges. Having firstly discussed collision detection issues, they move on to other major issues:

"Another problem we ran across was the need to change distance-based systems such as level of detail (LOD) for models, because with our game, distance is relative to the portal locations.

This means that the distance calculations became a choice of three lines connecting two points, rather than just one line. Also, line of sight can pass through a single portal more than once to reach its target.

The Source Engine does many pre-computed visibility optimizations for culling. Allowing users to bridge visibility leaves with portals added another level of complexity.

For better rendering, we implemented a stencil buffer drawing method for portal views, which gave us a lot of flexibility for handling the portal recursion depth. This allowed us to render an infinitely deep number of portals (limited only by performance), which made our "infinite" hallways look pretty neat.

Stencil drawing also helped us solve the problem of integrating properly with other technology in the Source engine like HDR blooming. Since we have to render our scenes an additional two times for our portals we poured a lot of our effort into making portals render as fast as possible, such as special view frustum culling based on the portal's edges, and render list optimizations for portal drawing."

The full postmortem, including much more insight into the game's development, is now available in the January 2008 issue of Game Developer magazine.

The issue also includes a number of other major features, including a postmortem of Midway's Stranglehold by Brian Eddy, the 2007 Front Line Award winners, and a GDC 2008 editor's preview - plus tool reviews, special sections, and regular technical columns from Bungie's Steve Theodore, Neversoft co-founder Mick West, Lucasarts' Jesse Harlin, and Sinistar creator Noah Falstein.

Yearly print and digital subscriptions to Game Developer are now available, and all digital subscriptions now include web-browsable and downloadable PDF versions of the magazine back to May 2004, as well as the digital version of the Game Career Guide special issue.

In addition the January 2008 issue of Game Developer is available in digital form (viewable in a web browser, and with an associated downloadable PDF), and as a physical single-issue copy.

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Ah, you know, this bunch of GameSetLinks is particularly special to me because, well, they're the latest. Does this mean that I will love my youngest child the best? We'll cross that bridge when we come to it, I guess.

In the meantime, here's some vignettes on Eternal Sonata (pictured), what the Swiss think of independent games, various Rock Paper Shotgun-related randomness, and even the obligatory unnecessary masturbation/gaming comparison. See, we have it all, and here it all is:

COPE: James Wallis levels with you » The Song Remains The Same
On Eternal Sonata, expectations and reality: 'Suddenly Polka collides with something that looks like the mutant offspring of a leek and a pumpkin, and can’t proceed until she’s battered it to death with her umbrella, to the swelling sounds of a musical score that is almost completely unlike Chopin.'

Rock, Paper, Shotgun: RPS Exclusive: Soren Johnson on Everything PC
Slight PCG offcuts, but fun stuff nonetheless!

How Halo 3 Changed Game Development - GameCareerGuide.com
'Based on Halo's runaway success, the paradigm for a successful video game studio -- and its relationship to its publisher -- may never be the same again.'

tagesanzeiger.ch | Digital | Games | Computer-Games von den Nachwuchstalenten
Swiss newspaper does indie games/IGF article, yay.

Fun and games « schlaghund’s playground
'Game studios are just porn peddlers. And you? You’re just jacking off.'

VH1 Game Break: The Buzz About Crispy Gamer
New game review/content site headed by ex-GameSpy-er (and nice guy!) John Keefer - launching later this month.

Amazon.co.uk: This Gaming Life: Travels in Three Cities: Books: Jim Rossignol
Jim says, via IM: 'it's about my life as a Quake ninja... it's a kind of [my] greatest hits, via my travels to Reykjavik, Seoul and exotic London'. Nice cover - via Boyer.

VIDEOLUDICA: 'Game Art: Gamerz 02'
New art-game exhibit, including Samorost 2 - January 15-27, Sextius, Aix-En-Provence, France.

Fort90 Journal » Still The Best Mine Cart Riding/Sandwich Making/Dating Sim Ever Made: Love Love 2, aka Love Love Truck, aka Love Love Mine… Part 2
More screens, impressions from the ever-obsess-y Hawkins.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

[Forgive the gigantic post, but Fullbright blogger and TimeGate Studios level designer Steve Gaynor, who we've previously covered for his 'Noir' post here at GSW, among other things, has kindly given us his GDC lecture picks/comments for this year. It's nice to see individual picks, anyhow - yes, GSW's colleagues also run GDC, but this doesn't have any agenda other than informational. Apologies for any formatting quirks, and ping us if you want to do similar.]

As in the past two years, I will be attending the Game Developers Conference. The conference proper (following the first two days of summits and tutorials) begins on February 20th, featuring literally hundreds of presentations on all aspects of the craft, business and theory of video game development.

Last year I shared my personal list of sessions to look out for (along with special guest Harvey Smith!) and this year I'm giving it another go. Below, find the wide smattering of sessions I'm planning to attend, schedule permitting.

They're mostly in the game design track, but also feature a few entries from business and production. If you're going to be at GDC, hopefully this list will come in handy. Maybe I'll see you there!

Theory
Ideas, observations, and what the future holds

---

Keynote
The Next 20 Years of Gaming

Ray Kurzweil has been described as “the restless genius” by the Wall Street Journal, and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes. Inc. magazine ranked him #8 among entrepreneurs in the United States, calling him the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison,” and PBS included Ray as one of 16 “revolutionaries who made America,” along with other inventors of the past two centuries.

As one of the leading inventors of our time, Ray was the principal developer of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. He has received fifteen honorary Doctorates and honors from three U.S. presidents.

I always attend the keynotes (though I've sworn off any Sony keynotes that might occur in the future) and this one sounds like it will be particularly interesting and insightful.

Are Games Essentially Superficial? Exploring the Positive Impact Model of Design

Chris Taylor Louis Castle Peter Molyneux Rusel DeMaria Kenneth Levine

Game Design/ 60-minute Panel

Overview: This panel will introduce the "Positive Impact Model of Design." The Positive Impact Model is, in part, a mindset adopted by designers to consider the ultimate impact of their games, and it is, in part, the beginning of a road map to creating games that add the ability to teach or inspire players while fulfilling the essential requirements of commercially successful games.

I think it’s something a lot of us wrestle with: does our work have worth? How can we enrich a player’s life through experience?

Design Reboot

Jonathan Blow

Game Design/ 60-minute Lecture

Overview: Assaulting you with a variety of different perspectives about what it means to design and build a game, and the consequences of those viewpoints.

I’ve listened to Blow’s version of this talk from the Montreal conference, and look forward to seeing it live. Shares some conceptual overlap with the above.

Designing Conflict Resolution without Combat

Gordon Walton

Game Design/ 60-minute Roundtable

Overview: Many games use combat as their conflict resolution medium. This session is intended to collaboratively explore non-traditional and innovative methods of resolving conflict within games.

Another issue of personal interest to me: how do we make engaging games based on character conflict without resorting to binary combat mechanics?

I-fi: Immersive Fidelity in Game Design

Clint Hocking

Game Design/ 60-minute Lecture

Overview: The immersive fidelity of a game is a quality not well defined in game design. This presentation identifies formal tools for enriching the immersive qualities of games with the aim of enabling developers to make better decisions about how to achieve the desired degree of immersiveness in their games.

Clint Hocking has made the most interesting presentation at each of the last two GDC’s I’ve attended. The Q&A session afterward feels more like a thesis defense. I have thoughts of my own all built up in opposition to the term “immersion,” so I’ll be interested to hear Hocking share his version of the concept.

The Future of Story in Game Design

Matt Costello Tim Willits Denis Dyack Mary DeMarle Matthew Karch Michael Hall Deborah Todd

Game Design/ 60-minute Panel

Overview: The industry has made a quantum shift in what's doable in game design – great graphics and cool mechanics are now part of everyone's domain. And so, more and more developers and publishers are looking to the future and what differentiates their game from the rest of the titles vying for market share. And more and more, the answer is pointing to story and characters, with hot writers brought into the mix to create a deeper dimension in gameplay. Learn how and why hardcore game developers are incorporating the fundamentals of story development into their titles, and hear a variety of takes on why this benefits everyone from the publisher to the player in this first-time gathering of some of the leading names and some of the biggest games in the biz.

Games need effective writing to prop up the player experience, something which most titles currently lack. Always interesting to hear opinions on the intersection of game design and traditional story.

Treat Me like a Lover

Margaret Robertson

Game Design/ 60-minute Lecture

Overview: It sounds ridiculous, but thinking of your player as someone you'd love to love is a very effective shortcut to good game design. A player's relationship with a game is intimate, intense, based on trust, and at risk from boredom and infidelity. Ensuring your game behaves like the perfect date ensures players stay involved, stick with you to the end, and pine, love-sick, for your sequel/follow-up. This session shows how your game can pull this off.

The relationship between the designer and player is fascinating. Haven’t you played games where the designer seemingly regards you with outright contempt?

Practical Application
How-to's and best practices that may come in handy back at the office

'Do, Don't Show' – Narrative Design in FARCRY 2

Patrick Redding

Game Design/ 60-minute Poster Session

Overview: Despite efforts to improve game storytelling, the best game stories remain largely non-interactive, achieving limited branching with dialogue trees and discrete choices. What happens when the storytelling maxim 'show, don't tell' evolves to become 'do', FARCRY 2.

From the title at least, this promises actionable knowledge on a right-minded approach to game narrative. Redding is Clint Hocking’s co-conspirator on the upcoming Far Cry 2.

10 Tips for a Successful Wiki

James Everett

Game Design/ 60-minute Poster Session

Overview: This session will cover 10 tips for building, using, and maintaining a wiki on game development teams. These are concrete examples drawn from experience that will prove useful to teams who are investigating wiki use and those who have already deployed one.

We use a wiki internally at TimeGate, as do probably most developers at this point. Best practices.

Collaborative Writing and Vast Narratives: Principles, Processes, and Genteel Truculence

Ken Rolston Mark Nelson

Game Design/ 60-minute Lecture

Overview: Ken Rolston (MORROWIND, OBLIVION) knows that setting and theme are the fundamental narrative elements of vast, open-ended RPGs. Mark Nelson (MORROWIND, OBLIVION, SHIVERING ISLES) thinks Ken is a dangerous old crank, and knows that story and character are the fundamental narrative elements that drive players to keep playing vast, open-ended RPGs. In this presentation, Ken and Mark share various collaborative principles and processes evolved during a decade's labor crafting expansive RPG narratives, illustrating from their development experiences with gratifying salutary examples and bitter cautionary tales.

More thought on setting- and character-focused writing for games. The practice of threading narrative throughout a persistent gameworld is fascinating, and speaks more directly to “game-ness” than most other approaches.

How to Pick a Lock: Creating Intuitive, Immersive Minigames

Kent Hudson

Game Design/ 20-minute Lecture

Overview: This lecture explains how to create minigames that use the controller in intuitive ways, reward player skill and provide variation while also minimizing UI in order to preserve immersion.

Applies to current assignments of mine.

Teaching Players: Tutorial and Opening Mission Design for COMPANY OF HEROES

Neil Jones-Rodway Aldric Sun

Game Design/ 60-minute Lecture

Overview: With games becoming increasingly complex, designers have to work harder to introduce players to the game world and cater for players of all skill levels and experience. Drawing on examples from Company of Heroes, learn the basics of tutorial and mission designs that will keep game players, at any level, equipped and motivated to advance in the game.

How to address the much-hated integrated tutorial? My first impression is to make it avoidable altogether (by way of a skippable path ala Gears of War, or a simple menu option to start with the tutorial or skip straight to the campaign.) But even then, you gotta design the tutorial sometime.

Writing Great Design Documents

Damion Schubert

Game Design/ 60-minute Lecture

Overview: This talk centers on documentation best practices for both designers in the trenches, and offers strong strategies for leads attempting to manage their documentation process. This reprise of GDC 2007 highest rank talk has been updated to include feedback and suggestions from last year, as well as discussion of how to make documentation work with Agile and Scrum.

I’m lucky enough to have been assigned a few system design tasks on our upcoming project. All practical knowledge on how to best create these documents is much appreciated.

How to Go from PC to Console Development without Shooting Yourself in the Foot

Elan Ruskin

Programming/ 60-minute Lecture

Overview: Significant challenges face a studio transitioning from personal computers to simultaneous home game console development for the first time. This session discusses how Valve met these challenges in its first Xbox 360 release THE ORANGE BOX, and offers best practices to help make attendees' first console release a successful one.

I haven’t played the Orange Box on a console, and have been wondering how Valve approached the transition.

Transition to Scrum Midway through a AAA Development Cycle: Lessons Learned

Asbjoern Soendergaard

Production/ 60-minute Lecture

Overview: A postmortem over the change process going from a traditional waterfall development into an agile production environment. The talk will focus on the learnings from the adoption of Scrum on the CRYSIS production - midway though the production cycle. Topic's will include the lead's role in Scrum (how to manage and give creative direction), the signoff process, and coordinating the planning/development process between multiple Scrum teams.

An Agile Retrospective	Clinton Keith	Production/ 60-minute Lecture		Overview: The session discusses the challenges of adopting agile beyond Scrum. Topics include adopting Extreme Programming (XP), Agile Planning, Lean Methodology for production and changes to Scrum that have been made to adapt to game development.

TimeGate currently affects some form of agile development. The more input on the subject the better.

Concrete Demonstration
"Look what we did"-- postmortems, stage demos and hands-ons

Casual Game Design: A Year in Review

Juan Gril Nick Fortugno

Game Design/ 60-minute Lecture

Overview: Casual Game Design is not an oxymoron. And 2007 was a really good year for it. Come and check out what were the key design elements in the top hits of the year.

I don’t pay much attention to casual games. I went to an IGDA meeting focused on casual game development, and the panelists up onstage were congratulating each other on “innovations” such as putting a sparkly gold background in their newest rip-off of Bejeweled. Hopefully this session will point out some worthwhile design elements in recent casual productions.

CRYSIS in the Making

Cevat Yerli

Game Design/ 60-minute Panel

Overview: Cevat Yerli and other Crytek developers will give a behind-the-scenes look at some of the unique challenges that arose during the development CRYSIS, which took place simultaneously alongside the creation of the company's ground-breaking second engine revision: CryEngine2.

Crysis is the best FPS since Half-Life 1, hands-down. How did a game with such forward-thinking design and insanely high-fidelity visuals make it to market as a PC-only title in the current market? I must know.

A PORTAL Post-Mortem: Integrating Writing and Design

Kim Swift Erik Wolpaw

Game Design/ 60-minute Lecture

Overview: Integrating story and gameplay is a daunting task for both writers and designers. PORTAL's project lead and its head writer discuss how they approached this particular problem during the game's development.

Portal, likewise, is an incredible and wholly unique production. The more I can hear about it, the better. This one’s sure to be packed.

Experimental Gameplay Sessions

Jonathan Blow

Game Design/ 2-Hour Panel

Overview: A series of short presentations, where game developers demonstrate and talk about their new and experimental games. Independent games, academic projects, and AAA mainstream games are all represented.

I also don’t give enough of my time to indie/experimental games. This session has exposed me to some truly intriguing material the last two years I’ve attended it, and I doubt I’ll be disappointed this year either.

DataPlay: Living Games

Justin Hall

Game Design/ 20-minute Lecture

Overview: Passive games offer the depth of MMOs without the time or hardware commitment, and the accessibility and easy fun of casual games without the mindlessness. Hall gives a demo of our Firefox browser MMO "PMOG" which follows you online creating a character, economy, and events from your web surfing.

Part of a rapid-fire triple session, I simply want to sit in on this one because the concept sounds interesting. What kind of myopic video game nerd would my PMOG character be?

From DOOM to RAGE: Pushing Boundaries

Matt Hooper

Production/ 60-minute Lecture

Overview: Making games is hard, even if you've done it forever. The constant evolution of the industry keeps even the most veteran companies on their toes, and id Software is not immune. At id Software, we've always pushed technical boundaries and will continue to do so but now we find ourselves growing in many directions. Physically, our team is larger then it's ever been and we continue to grow. This session will address the growing pains and joys as we've moved from DOOM to RAGE and offer specific examples of why id Software chose its current direction, a "pre-mortem" if you will.

I’m quite interested in RAGE, id’s first new IP since Quake 1. I love that they’re breaking their own mold by setting the game in a mildly anime-inspired, sun-bleached desert wasteland, and including buggy racing (??) as a key gameplay element. Can’t wait to find out more about it.

Game Accessibility Arcade: Or How to Do the Jedi Mind Trick (Day 1)

Michelle Hinn

Game Design/ 60-minute Roundtable

Overview: This session will be presented as "roundtables within a roundtable" -- attendees will be encouraged to move about the room, try out the variety of games at each game station and discuss the game design with the creators of many of the games.

The idea of sampling various games and providing feedback to their creators sounds like fun. Hopefully our time spent here will benefit the games themselves.

Game Studies Download 3.0

Jane McGonigal Mia Consalvo Ian Bogost

Game Design/ 60-minute Lecture

Overview: What do we know in 2008 about games that we didn't know in 2007? Find out in the third annual Game Studies Download. A panel of leading games researchers presents the top 10 findings in academic game studies from the past year and shows you how these cutting-edge findings are directly applicable to the design and business of videogames.

A direct feed of the “Top 10” academic game studies findings of the year? I haven’t followed the field too closely myself, so sign me up.

FABLE 2 –The Big Three Features Revealed

Peter Molyneux

Game Design/ 60-minute Lecture

Overview: Peter Molyneux's stated ambition as a designer is to make FABLE 2 a landmark game. In order to achieve this three big design features have been added. The inspiration and rational behind these features will be discussed along with their evolution throughout the development process. The wider context of their impact and influence on the RPG genre with also be examined as the ambition is also to evolve the genre itself. The talk will be supported by retrospective videos as well as live game examples.

Molyneux is a bit of a GDC pariah in my mind. At the 2005 event, early in the conference he showed off a tech demo his people had been working on at Lionhead; then, as an invitee to the Game Design Challenge, he just showed that same unrelated tech demo again, and bullshitted a vague connection to Emily Dickinson. The following year, 2006, he ditched out on his scheduled appearances at the last moment because he was busy being bought by Microsoft. And last year, he took an hour to reveal his big secret feature of Fable 2: “a dog! Yes, a dog.” As far as I can tell, he comes to GDC purely for self-promotion. I think it’s funny that his presentation this year is baldly titled “Fable 2: The Big Three Features Revealed.” It’s nothing but a press conference, a chance to hype his own game. This is not what GDC is about. If I really want a preview of Fable 2 I’ll load up GameSpot. I will not be attending this session.

Storytelling in BIOSHOCK: Empowering Players to Care about Your Stupid Story

Kenneth Levine

Game Design/ 60-minute Lecture

Overview: Here's a secret: If you're making a first person shooter, most people don't care about your story. BIOSHOCK took a genre that isn't generally known for its great storytelling propensities and made people care about the world of Rapture and it's inhabitants. It did this by inviting the players to participate in the narrative through their own investigation of the world of Rapture. Creative director Ken Levine will share some of the secrets as to how it was done.

The storytelling in BioShock, while no different in presentation than its forebear System Shock 2, was nonetheless effective in expressing the history of the gameworld through its characters, characters you never meet but feel a tangible connection to strictly via their stories. I doubt this presentation will give me a deeper appreciation of this aspect of BioShock, but it should be enjoyable nonetheless.

Nuances of Design

Jonathan Blow

Game Design/ 2-Hour Panel

Overview: This session consists of a few short presentations; during each presentation, the audience actually plays game snippets that illustrate the speaker's point, rather than just watching. To participate fully, please bring a laptop running Windows XP with a reasonable graphics chipset (Radeon 7500/GeForce 4Go level or higher), and a pair of in-ear headphones.

Another game sampler. I’ll be interested to see how Blow uses the playing of games to reinforce his points in a way that video couldn’t accomplish. Bring your laptop.

The Emergent Gamer

Rod Humble

Game Design/ 60-minute Lecture

Overview: In this session, Rod Humble – Head of THE SIMS Studio at Electronic Arts – will reveal for the first time ever a new creative endeavor that makes game creation easier than ever before. Humble will discuss the rise of a new class of game creators and games, what it means to games as an art form, and how THE SIMS Label hopes to convert millions of players to game designers.

Another session that’s seemingly just a product announcement in disguise, I’ll be interested to see how “THE SIMS Label hopes to convert millions of players to game designers.”

Master Metrics: The Science behind the Art of Game Design

Chris Swain E. Daniel Arey

Game Design/ 60-minute Lecture

Overview: With the dramatic increase in game complexity, production costs, and team size in recent years, teams and team leaders are more than ever in need of valuable and repeatable development processes, tools, and metrics to create, define, manage, and measure the vast number of play elements that make up a hit game title. But up until now, many of the development processes used by some of the best game developers have been either obscure, unknown, or undefined as an unknowable soft science behind the "creative process." We believe these processes can in fact be defined and learned, and that there are patterns and approaches to game development that dramatically increase the chances of a game's success. This talk is designed to compile and share with the audience the "best practices" of some of the industry's best practitioners.

This sounds horrible and frightening. Using collected metrics to divine a formula for “successful games?” Stare into the void.

Successful Instrumentation: Tracking Attitudes and Behaviors to Improve Games

Ramon Romero

Game Design/ 60-minute Lecture

Overview: This lecture will discuss the approach the Games User Research group at Microsoft Game Studios applies when instrumenting games. Numerous examples from successful Microsoft games will demonstrate how we use instrumentation to assist game designers in achieving their vision.

Another session focused on using player metrics to influence game design, I am again wary. “Instrumenting” just sounds terribly ominous. “Don’t instrument me, bro!” Can’t you just hear it?

Fun & Games
Frivolous sessions, just for kicks

8th Annual Game Developers Choice Awards
Wednesday, February 20th, 6:30pm - 8:30pm
Moscone Convention Center, Esplanade Room

The Game Developers Choice Awards are the premier accolades for peer-recognition in the digital games industry, celebrating creativity, artistry and technological genius. Industry professionals from around the world nominate for the awards, free of charge, ensuring that the recipients reflect the community's opinions.

Sure to bring a smile to one's face, though the awards played out better in San Jose’s civic auditorium than they do on the flat ballroom floor at Moscone. Still, looking forward to it. Hopefully they'll bring back Mega64's interstitials again this time.

The Game Design Challenge: The Inter-Species Game

Eric Zimmerman Alexey Pajitnov

Game Design/ 60-minute Lecture

Overview: In the Game Design Challenge, talented designers tackle an unusual design problem. This year, returning champ Alexy Pajnitov faces off against two new competitors. The challenge: design a game to be played by humans and at least one other species. At the session, each panelist will present a unique solution to this game design enigma. In addition to the presenting designers, the audience plays an important role as well—by voting in the winner of the Game Design Challenge 2007. Expect to hear brave new game design ideas and unpredictable debate and dialog.

The Game Design Challenge is always great—luminaries engaging in pure game design without any commercial boundaries. Alexy Pajnitov stole the show last year, and I’m looking forward to his reappearance.

Business
The nuts & bolts of making and selling games

Early Stage Funding for Gaming Start Ups

Matthew Le Merle

Business and Management/ 60-minute Lecture

Overview: Funding a game company is often the last, and most crucial step in realizing the vision of an independent development studio or gaming start-up. This session focuses on what independent developers and gaming start-ups need in their investment pitches to acquire the early stage funding they need. It involves a discussion of what works, what does not, and how companies can bridge the gap to VC funding. The session will include recent examples including arena.net, Telltale Games, Animated Speech, QB International, and others to give developers keys for success in the private equity market.

Might be useful someday.

Digital Distribution – From the Basement to the Boardroom Sponsored by Macrovision

Cal Morrell

Business and Management/ 60-minute Sponsored Session

Overview: Advertising, retail, technology, production budgets and IPs all have a significant impact on the market, but what will make the difference in the games industry projected growth mark for the next 5 years? This session discusses the next set of trends that are expected to shape digital distribution for games.

Digital distribution is the future.

Small Studio Survival Stories

Jesse Schell

Business and Management/ 60-minute Roundtable

Overview: Small game studios have it tough. The only ones that survive are either smart, lucky, or more often, both. This panel is an opportunity for developers at small studios to share stories about what has worked and hasn't worked to keep their studios alive. Please come and share your story!

Working at a relatively small, independent studio, this seems applicable.

Culture
Sessions that address the history and broader social context of games

Developers in the Crosshairs: Mature Content, Censorship, and Design Choices	Daniel Greenberg	Game Design/ 60-minute Roundtable		Overview: New studies show that although Mature rated games make up a mere 10% of the U.S. retail market, they have both the highest average gross sales and the highest average MetaCritic scores.
Censorship of Game Content - A Report from the Trenches	Lawrence Walters	Business and Management/ 60-minute Lecture	Overview: Get ready for a frank discussion of sex and violence in video games; and the government's recent attempts to censor speech. Included in the presentation will be an overview of the legislative attempts to restrict the sale of violent or erotic game content, and the continuing antics of industry nemesis, Jack Thompson.

As someone interested in making games for players like myself, I feel invested in the state of “Mature” games.

How to Create an Industry: The Making of the Brown Box and PONG

Allan Alcorn Ralph H. Baer

Game Design/ 60-minute Lecture

Overview: The year was 1966. Television had a huge installed user base, but only featured a single, passive application with only a few channels. Ralph Baer decided there needed to be something more. He created the Brown Box, the world's first electronic console that enabled people to not just watch, but play Ping Pong on screen using connected controllers. In 1972, Magnavox launched it to retail as the Odyssey. Later that year, Atari and designer Allan Alcorn separately released PONG as a stand-up coin operated arcade unit. The success of both directly created this industry. Join Ralph and Allan as they describe what went right and what went wrong in engineering, designing, and championing their vision – and our reality -- of interactive games.

Sure to be a fascinating retrospective.

Stories Best Played: Deconstructing the Best Interactive Storytelling

Richard Rouse III Steve Meretzky Marc Laidlaw Ken Rolston

Game Design/ 60-minute Panel

Overview: This panel demonstrates that the best game storytelling can stand up to the best storytelling in any medium. A group of seasoned writer/designers will present their favorite storytelling games, with each being analyzed and deconstructed to see what make it work so effectively. In the end, a common theme emerges: the most successful storytelling games fully integrate their narratives into their core gameplay experiences.

An “expert look” at successful storytelling in games. Hopefully inspiring.

Hentai, Hardcore and Hotties: Sex in Games

Brenda Brathwaite

Game Design/ 60-minute Roundtable

Overview: The international popularity of hentai titles and the North American fascination with "hotties" in video game world points to an increasing exploration of sexual themes in video games. On the hardcore fringe, dozens of virtual sex games are available for subscription or pay-per-play download, and the first MMOEGs have launched and are drawing players in the hundreds of thousands.

Again, I feel that mature issues shouldn’t be off-limits to video games. Is not sexuality and gender relations a more integral part of your own everyday life than violence and killing? Judging from the title, I’m really not sure this session will address the topic in a satisfactory manner. Could this issue get some thoughtful representation at GDC?

Preserving Games: Saving the Past and Present Now

Henry Lowood

Production/ 60-minute Roundtable

Overview: This roundtable will seek participation and ideas from developers, publishers, players, collectors, and academics.

Game preservation is becoming a reality as more games are stored on commercial servers and made available through digital distribution. Even sites like The Underdogs are a great resource for games that are no longer available in any other form. I’m interested to hear expert opinions how the current state of game preservation in all its forms.

Finally, if you’re able:

(301)Game Design Workshop

Marc LeBlanc

Game Design/ Two-Day Tutorial

Overview: This intensive 2-day workshop will explore the day-to-day craft of game design through hands-on activities, group discussion, analysis and critique. Attendees will immerse themselves the iterative process of refining a game design, and discover formal abstract design tools that will help them think more clearly about their designs and make better games.

I attended the Game Design Workshop last year, and it was extremely enriching. The workshop takes a holistic approach to game design, focusing not just on video games but on creating systems of rules and rewards as a discipline unto itself. It feels like a companions piece to Rules of Play, if you’ve read that text. Participants collaborate to create one small analog game every hour or two of the session. My favorite aspect was making a flashcard version of Guitar Hero, which ended up being fun and expressing the original game well. If you can make it to the first two days of GDC, and you’re a designer or interested in design, I highly recommend you attend the workshop. That's it, barring announcements of further sessions. Only another month and change now...

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

[The Aberrant Gamer is a weekly, somewhat NSFW column by Leigh Alexander, dedicated to the kinks and quirks we gamers tend to keep under our hats – those predilections and peccadilloes less commonly discussed in conventional media.]

Last week, the Aberrant Gamer was forced to acknowledge spending an alarmingly significant number of hours on games. And not just playing – thinking about them, writing about them, chatting about them and making amateurish game-related craft projects. In and of itself, it wasn’t so alarming.

What gave me pause was how nervous the idea of stopping made me.

To that end, the Aberrant Gamer declared a week-long moratorium on gaming of any kind, in the hopes of learning something about a chronic, habitual game user’s relationship with the behavior, the nature of gaming, and the abiding nature of the soul, or something. In other words, I wanted to see what would happen. And I invited readers, both in the original column and in a challenge extended to the readers of my workblog, Sexy Videogameland.

So how’d we do?

You Mean All Games?

Some of the questions and early feedback I received from participants about my experiment were rather telling. There were a few people who wanted to know exactly what I meant by “gaming.” One email respondent wondered if tabletop RPGs count, and a commenter wondered if he’d have to give up chess and monopoly. “Is Brain Training really a game?” He asked. “Is My French Coach a game? Is it because it’s electronic?” Chess and monopoly are not video games; Nintendo DS cartridges are. Semantics were still the order of the day, however – numerous respondents said they’d love to try the experiment, but they couldn’t, because they just bought an anticipated title, or because they’re halfway through another right now. They were apologetic, but the message was clear – they couldn’t give up video games, because they were too busy playing video games.

I’d soothed my anxiety ahead of the experiment by ordering myself, online, a copy of Sega Genesis Collection for PSP. Scanning and sharing the pictorial evidence of my juvenile enthusiasm for Phantasy Star II made me rather urgently desirous of playing it again, and I figured the shrink-wrapped game would arrive as a tidy reward for an abstinence experiment dutifully conducted. Defying my expectations, it arrived the following afternoon, wrenching my plans by sitting there shiny and plastic-scented on my coffee table, promising me hours of handheld zone-outs if only I’d rescind my commitment.

I almost broke. In fact, weakly deciding that a column wherein I failed to make it seven days might be more interesting than one where I succeeded, I slit open the packaging, put in the UMD and turned it on. Just as the splash screen appeared, the doorbell rang. Dinner. If not for serendipitous timing, I would not have made it 24 hours.

Just Something I Do Automatically

One respondent, with the best of intentions, found himself breaking his vow entirely on accident and habit. “It turns out that picking up a gamepad and switching on the console is something I do automatically,” he wrote, ruefully. “It's strange that I hadn't made any conscious decision to play a game - I just did it, unthinkingly. It's just What I Do at the weekend, these days.”

I was not immune to force of habit, either. On my second successful day of abstinence – it had already begun to feel like an eternity, by the way – I, with equal thoughtlessness, reached out my hand to demand a turn at Umbrella Chronicles. Fortunately, my friend was aware of my efforts and refused to yield me the Wii remote. I was surprised, a bit, at the level of frustration I felt at being denied. Watching him play had created a certain investment in me, a certain bundling of my nerves in preparation for a fight. I would describe it as primal, like how domesticated animals might feel at the scent of blood, but it was less physical than it was a humming at the nape of my neck, a gathering of intangibles in the tendons between the bones of my hands, something agitated stirring a little under my sternum, demanding resolution.

This is the frustratingly tough-to-identify sensation that characterized my go at gamelessness. Like the respondent who emailed me, gaming is What I Do on the weekend. I began the experiment on Thursday, and by the time Saturday morning came around, I had begun to feel preoccupied. I felt the palpable urge to reach for my DS after breakfast as if it were a cigarette, laying on the couch in front of morning cartoons that presented the same absurd, eagerly sincere characters that populate some of my favorite titles.

The Fallen Hero

Instead, I went for a long run, hoping to exert away the restlessness through exercise, thinking as I went that When I Quit Gaming, I Exercised More would make a sparkling takeaway. Instead, my iPod decided to play all of my Guitar Hero music. With rhythm titles, eventually you develop a relationship with a song proportionate to your level of challenge or success at the level in which it features. Playing music from rhythm games when I exercise never fails to give me an adrenaline rush that no other psyche-up tactic can approach. This time, though, it just made me want to play Guitar Hero. Badly.

And I started becoming aware of another kind of building pressure. Not the sort of constant preoccupation, restlessness of the hands that had taken up residence in my body, but an awareness of the gaming community around me. Many of these things take skill. And skills lose their luster with time. What if, the next time I played Guitar Hero, I was rusted? My friend and I had been eagerly planning some online co-op, and I’d even fantasized numerous times at getting good enough to enter local competitions – how embarrassing would it be to fail horribly in public, online, in front of people? I became painfully aware of all the games I had not yet completed. Games that came out in December, and this is January, and how can I be a writer if I don’t stay on top of things? What am I going to do at the end of this week, I wondered? Go back to blogging about BioShock?

I also began to wonder what, exactly, I would have to tell people about how it felt to stop playing. What if I suffered very badly? Could I admit that? Could I admit that it seemed I’d lost my ability to sit still long enough to watch a TV show? Confess that I found movies a slack-mouthed, lackluster, unrewarding waste of time, now that I bothered trying to watch some? How would I describe the creeping unrest in my heart that I began to become just slightly aware of – and more with time – that surfaced slow and sinister now that my hands and mind were not engaged in constant activity and obedience to the laws of a digital world? Things I avoided began to push up against my awareness like water swelling behind a dam. Sometimes it was good to stop avoiding those things – like laundry, or dishes, or phone calls to family members. Other times, it was things I would decidedly prefer to avoid. The experiment was evolving into something uncomfortably personal, and I wondered about my duty to explain it.

Ladies and gentlemen, I could not endure seven days without video games. All right, all right. I made it to the end of three days. That’s it.

And in the end, it wasn’t the infuriating psychosomatic humming in my ribcage, the restless urge to translate kinetic energy onto a screen for relief. It wasn’t envy, or the feeling of exclusion from my friends or my community, and it wasn’t fear of falling behind, nor was it fear of what I might have to share if I pressed on.

Homesickness

It was a simple need for comfort. I had an upset stomach Saturday night, and there was nothing to be done for it. There was nothing on television, pain distracted me from reading, I’d already called everyone there was to talk to, I was too uncomfortable to go out and not tired enough to sleep. I remembered being nine, and home sick from school, playing Phantasy Star II in the quiet of the empty house.

I’d put the Sega Genesis Collection on a low shelf under my coffee table, but it was still within arm’s reach of where I lay, under a blanket, with no idea of what to do with myself. Feeling guilty, apologizing internally to the loyal readers more stalwart than I who’d been emailing me dutifully on their successful progress, I put it on. And amid the simplistic chiming music and the soothingly repetitive grind, the feeling of illness did not subside, but a mantle of quietude, of contentment, settled on me.

I played the damn thing for what might have been ten straight hours on Sunday, as if all the more fixated for having been deprived. And, pointedly refusing to consider the ramifications, I’ve played it every night since then. I’ve avoided playing anything else, as if that’s worth anything given that my fixation seems to be singular right now, experiment or not.

So what was it all for? Have I answered the question as to whether or not gaming is an addiction? Or, further, whether it’s a harmful one? To the first, yes, and to the second, probably not – but in all fairness, I chickened out just as my life in the absence of a retreat route into games began to frighten me. Who knows whether I was really sick at all, or whether my temperamental digestion was really a psychosomatic manifestation, just like the tension in my shoulders and the urge in my fingertips.

The World Opens Up

What I did learn – and this was the primary aim – was just a little bit more about why I play, and what gaming means to me, does for me. I thought that without games, the world might open up just a little; that I’d divert that gaming energy into learning new things, visiting new places, developing more relationships. But, even given only a few days to experiment, I realized I felt then, at least for that moment, content with the size of my world and the people in it as they are.

On the other hand, the absence of games left a distinct sense of feeling stranded, as if bridges I had made from my imagination into worlds made by others had been closed for repairs. I didn’t have a bad couple of days; more ordinary than I would have expected, and neither more nor less fulfilling.

But it did feel like my world was a bit smaller; there were emotions, impulses and dreams that had nowhere to travel to, that languished amid the everyday. It’s true that I learned perhaps gaming has cultivated in me a lack of long-term patience, a need for more regular stimulation, a poorer attention span. It’s also very possible that I zone out with games to avoid dealing directly with things that cause me frustration or sadness. But I’m now certain there is a singular fashion in which games engage both mind and emotion – not only for the purpose of play, but for personal reasons both creative and therapeutic – that no other form of media approaches. It’s a quality unique to gaming, it speaks to the power and responsibility game developers have assumed, and it makes sense out of the intense, often perplexing personalization we feel toward the games they make.

Perhaps those that have been thoroughly introduced to gaming in a way that builds that connection really can’t do without it thereafter. And probably, it doesn’t make sense to ask them to. I’ll never ask that of anyone again, and nor will I ever make a similar endeavor myself.

[Leigh Alexander is the editor of Worlds in Motion and writes for Gamasutra, freelances intermittently for a variety of outlets, and maintains her gaming blog, Sexy Videogameland. She can be reached at leigh_alexander1 AT yahoo DOT com.]

Posted by Leigh Alexander at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (13)

So, as part of the recent New Year's game company card selection here on GSW, we noted that the card from translation experts 8-4 was designed by Jake Kazdal, that rare Westerner who's played a key role in Japanese game development - as a concept designer on both Space Channel 5 and Rez.

Big sister site Gamasutra has actually previously interviewed Kazdal on his fascinating history developing for those two excellent titles, as well as Astroboy and other games, and now we notice Kazdal has an official portfolio site up which includes some wonderful art - even rare behind-the-scenes pics from those very Sega titles. In particular:

This original concept montage from Space Channel 5 shows off some of the alternate, spikier, slightly scarier looks for lead character Ulala. But... where's Space Michael?

A montage of Rez sketches, screenshots, ship models, and more detailed concept art, showing that a fair amount of predesign really does need to go into the more complex whole.

Anyhow, Kazdal is working at Electronic Arts Los Angeles on an apparently unannounced title right now, focusing on concept art and visual development. It'd be interested to know about the history of some of the other titles on his profile page - I wonder if any of them, such as this 'Wizard Of Oz' character set, were for planned but unfinished games.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Aha, the links have been piling up again, so it's time to unleash them in a focused burst. Among the interesting things this time - 'Surfer Girl' seems to know the name of the Rodney Greenblat/Masaya Matsuura comeback rhythm game for Majesco, if she is to be believed, and GamesRadar makes a fun stab at explaining what game names really mean.

Also worth noting - sister site IndieGames.com is rattling through the freeware picks, with the cutely named EverEternal WinterWorld getting plenty of discussion, and there's a variety of other crazed links to be poking at. Like these:

Surfer Girl Reviews Star Wars: January eight things
Claims that 'Major Minor's Majestic March' is the name for Greenblat & Matsuura's new Wii music game for Majesco. Believable.

Dan Hsu's 1UP Blog: Banned
The actual EGM editorial, fortunately.

Games Radar - 'From Katamari to Mass Effect, we reveal games' secret meanin