Brenda Brathwaite
I make games professionally. I play games for fun. I talk about games with anyone who will listen.I have recently become fascinated with belt buckles, the louder the better. I happened to find these things in my search.
- Pac-man Blue Ghost Logo Silver
- Pac Man Belt Buckle
- Pac-Man Chasing Ghosts Belt
- Pac-Man and Ghosts Classic Video Game Tote Bag
- Pac-Man: Head Plush Hat
- Nintendo Controller
The MIT GAMBIT Lab is hosting a Complete Game-Completion Marathon to help Haiti this coming weekend (February 26th-28th) and is accepting donations through its site.
The Love Letter, by Raimundo de Madrazo y Garreta
The question was asked of me this year earlier than it was last year, and let me confess something – I don’t always know. Every year at GDC, I seem to miss some amazing party that I clearly should have been at, because I was doing something epically geeky like playing Family Business
So, to answer the question in a general way, here you go:
- The Member Only Parties: I am going to three of these parties, because I am a member of these respective groups. They’re not groups that you can join, per sae, but you get invited to them. If you don’t already know about these, then you need to wait until next year.
- The Sponsored Parties: There are TONS of these events. Typically, they are designed to introduce you to a product or a company, particularly if that company is interested in recruiting you. The higher your personal level, the more likely you are to get invited to some of the really hip and exclusive recruiting parties.
- The Gatherings: There are tons of people who, like you, wonder where the parties are. In general, people come out or back from dinner around 10. The Marriott and the W seem to be perennial favorites of developers, but since we still haven’t recovered from our lack of The Fairmont, it’s hard to say where a given group will be year to year.
- The Non-Party Gatherings: There are lots of people who gather at GDC early in the morning just to hang out, have coffee and play board games. We used to meet by the escalators on the third floor, but a building change means we’re moving. I don’t know where yet.
So, what’s your best bet? Hard to say. I’ll recommend some things that I think might help:
- Don’t spend $2-3K to come to GDC only to get trashed, hung over and embarrassed in front of your gaming icon.
- Bring business cards (250-500).
- Wear comfortable shoes. I don’t, but I have practice.
- Be respectful of developers who are already engaged in conversations if you just want to introduce yourself.
See you there, and if you know of any parties, feel free to add them.
Superman - from a 1940's postcard
How long will it take?
It is a question we have all asked, or perhaps it has been asked of us. Maybe the question and its answer have happened in your own mind in rapid succession as they have in mine a thousand times.
As long as it takes, and not a moment more.
The answer uttered, the struggle ensues, silently sometimes, as we wait for the design, the code, the art, the idea to rise or the game to finish, and it never seems to come soon enough. This is particularly true if it is something we are passionate about.
This struggle, this tension, is the price of our passion, I think. It reflects our devotion to something we know will come, the dynamics we designers can see and nearly feel even if they are not yet realized. We desperately want the end result, because we believe it will be amazing. We’ve passed through the prototype phase. The systems are all working in their own independent way. It’s just not all yet working together, and the gap is excruciating.
So, we let go and wait. It is a form of creative loneliness. The only way around it is to run it solo like Wonder Woman, doing it all yourself – code, art, design, sound and all. Not everyone is capable of that, and even if they were, it is more fun to make games with friends than alone. After all, Wonder Woman eventually joined the Justice Society of America.
Through it all, we remain devoted to the idea, and that devotion is curious in its demand for pacing.
I was considering this concept the other night as I worked simultaneously on two games, alternating between one and the other, and reminisced on still a third. One game is a commercial product that will likely enter prototype soon. The other one is One Falls for Each of Us, the 4th game in my series The Mechanic is the Message. As I worked on these two, I thought about Wizardry 8 and the world I both blew up and left behind, egged on by a couple articles that have recently appeared on the series.
My devotion to these various products was different:
- The commercial game – it arrives when I tell it to: I push. I stare at it, trying to will to life the design I know is there. I let myself be distracted. I force myself to focus. I shut off all forms of external stimuli save some awesome jazz. This game has to come out tonight, because people are waiting for it tomorrow. My brain has been thinking about it for quite some time, so the game is already there, I’m just trying to tease out the exact functionalities. Ultimately, I finish the edits, and I am happy with the results. I had to chase it into the doc because there is a deadline to meet, but the result is good.
- One Falls for Each of Us – it arrives when it feels like it: I have faith, and I trust. For my non-commerical non-digital games, the game shows up when it’s ready to. I never worry that it will show up. I know the mechanics are coming. I know they will be precisely what they are supposed to be. The lack of the design on my desk or in code or in writing doesn’t mean that there’s no design to be had. It is there, and it will find its way. I am under no pressure to publish these games, so there is no pressure to finish them. It allows me a tremendous luxury as a designer. It allows me to consider the great range of potential in my decisions. Yet, it is not optimum, really. While I play with this game in my head, there is another in the wings, waiting, and ultimately, the complete game is better than the area of transition as the mechanics do their dance with one another, waiting for realization.
- Wizardry 8 – it arrives eventually: I pushed. I loved. We deeply cared. For Wizardry 8, like the other Wizardrys and like the Sir-tech Jagged Alliance games, the completed project was a mix of passion, pushes to the schedule (in both directions) and a deep belief that we were working on something great (when the answer <> great, the schedule pushed out some to accommodate).
Somewhere between these extremes and their compromise, there is a single best path for each game, and that path is shaped by the constraints placed upon it by forces often beyond the designer’s control. In my examples above, I am dedicated to each of these games, and each owns a part of my brain. Ultimately, though, my dedication is borne by passion for an idea, for a design process, or some group of dynamics that I know will rise from all three. I will stand by an idea forever.
Tonight, I work on no games at all waiting for one to come.
My game Train will be at the upcoming Art History of Games conference in Atlanta, Georgia on February 4-6. There will be multiple play sessions of the game as well as a discussion on my upcoming game One Falls for Each of Us.
Tails of the Rampant Coyote pointed me toward an article on Diehard Gamer: Wizardry – Sequel, Spin Off, Start Over or Stay Dead? In the article, four people answer that question. Their result was a tie at 2/2. People wanted a sequel or were content to let it stay dead. I miss the series and wish we had another both as a player and a designer. Clearly, though, I am biased.
As I surfed the open waters looking for a couple designers to join me, including one intern, I learned some lessons that I thought I might share:
- Please, please play a lot of games. If you want to work in the social game space, play a ton of them. There are a lot of people who already are, and they will get the jobs.
- Games made in the social space aren’t nearly as simple to make as it might appear on the surface. There are amazing new dynamics at play here and complicated user behavior. It’s the most exciting and amazing space I’ve been in. I am surprised by how often people regard these as “baby games” of a sort. Sure, like Wizardry 1 was back in the day just because it didn’t have 2 zillion polygons. They aren’t “baby games” by any stretch of the imagination.
- Asking me which games you should play is asking me to do your job. You know what I am hiring for; do your research.
- Asking me to define key terms in my ad (“What do you mean by games in the social space?”) is like saying, “Please, delete this message now.”
- Offering to put together a student team to create a game for me if I need it is kind and even flattering. However, it suggests that you don’t quite get that real companies with millions and millions of dollars behind them are working on these games. We’re not in my friend Steve’s garage.
- Senior designers are typically those who’ve been in the industry 10+ years, have shipped multiple titles and have probably led teams. They know their stuff. Seniors in college are not senior designers, unless you go back to school after some time in. They aren’t mid-level designers either.
- Looking for an internship is like having an argument you don’t get to participate in. You need to show that you totally grok this space (whatever that may be), and give people a way to know that for sure in the tiniest amount of time possible. In the case of the intern I hired, she demonstrated through absurdly regular play (I could see her Facebook updates) and astute conversations that she was passionate about this space and wanted to see through it to the underlying design and emerging patterns.
I happened across this book recently while trolling amazon.com for something or another: The Manga Guide to Calculus
At this point in your career, you may have passed these topics by in high school or college (or suffered through them just enough to pass). I am of the belief that there is much to be learned from number patterns, though, since a) they surround us in nature and in our everyday lives and b) the human brain usually groks them. So, I am a believer in exploration, especially through manga.
A conference near and dear to the hearts of Applied Game Design: the Art History of Games, an event taking place in Atlanta, GA February 4-6. This will be a great opportunity to delve more deeply and thoughtfully into the intersections, parallels and differences between games and art and their respective histories and futures.
Speakers include Brenda, but also John Romero, Frank Lantz, Jesper Juul, Henry Lowood, and Christiane Paul (a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art). The full schedule is available here.
The conference will also host the premiere of three commissioned games by Jason Rohrer, Tale of Tales and Eric Zimmerman and architect Nathalie Pozzi. Teasers for the games available here.
Brenda’s game Train will as well be at the conference for those who haven’t had the opportunity to play it yet.
The conference is organized by Ian Bogost, Michael Nitsche and John Sharp for the co-organizing institutions, SCAD-Atlanta and Georgia Tech.
For more info: www.arthistoryofgames.com or arthistoryofgames@scad.edu.
— John Sharp
"To be alive at all is to have scars." - John Steinbeck
Among the many games on my desktop, there is a specific game that I play every few days. It is something that’s old and time-worn, and God knows how it runs just fine on my iMac, but it does. I play it out of a sense of comfort, I think, because I know it inside and out, and it knows me. When it was made, game players could speak of nothing else, and game developers were humbled. It is one of the greatest designs our medium has ever seen, and that remains true nearly two decades after its release. I say this not just as a player but as a game designer with nearly three decades in the industry myself. I know a work of greatness when I see it.
And so, it was interesting to me to hear its designer mentioned the other evening in a gathering of fellow game developers.
I wonder how much cred he has among developers now?
The question wasn’t asked in an insulting way. Rather, it was raised as a curious point, a wonder, nothing more. And so, I took the bait, and I wondered what it meant for a developer to have “cred” now or in the past, and what precisely “cred” means to us in the first place.
Cred, by our definition, can be loosely translated to “what have you done for me lately?” It is a taking stock of a developer’s most recent works. Typically, these recent works are called into question – and hence the cred issue raised – when the developer has either a) been silent for a number of years or b) produced something which is less than one would have hoped for. The only way out of this cred death spiral is to a) release a very good game, b) stop making games after your very good game or c) die.
I wondered aloud if people still discussed the cred of the great American author John Steinbeck. His last published work is The Winter of Our Discontent
In short, Steinbeck didn’t give us a Steinbeck. How dare he. Then he died. Two unfinished works were published posthumously, The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights and a screenplay, Zapata. Had he lived, they may have accused him of trading off Arthurian legend since his own well had quite obviously dried up.
Yet, we do not remember Steinbeck in this way. Instead, we talk of his influence. We divide his work and the work of other masters into categories, and we reserve the title of “Major Works” for those contributions that touched our souls somehow. For Steinbeck, these works are East of Eden
Steinbeck’s legacy is judged not by his last, but by his sum. This is not something we have learned to do.
In all, he published 27 novels in his lifetime, many short stories, won the Pulitzer Prize for The Grapes of Wrath, and took home the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, just a year after The Winter of Our Discontent was released. Steinbeck’s influence, like the influence of our masters, is everywhere. Think of the games you play and how they came to be. Who inspired that young coder to enter the industry? Who was blown away by a game he could only play at his friend’s house? Who financed that company? Who invented whole genres that we live and breathe today? Who inspired you? Who inspired those who inspired you?
This is influence and legacy. These two are the important things. They outlive the individual and the games. Cred is but a symptom of our expectations, our insecurity with our own medium. We expect too much from the masters within it; we expect mastery at all times.
Why?
I want to see our masters explore new mediums. I want to encourage their creativity and support their efforts even when they don’t succeed – especially when they don’t succeed. I want to acknowledge that there is something in their brain that doesn’t work like the something in my brain or your brain, and give that brain the creativity, the room, the respect, the love and the support it needs to make genius, make mediocre and make garbage. We must encourage the free exploration of ideas, of patterns, of play, and not beat our masters into the ground with their own legends. Otherwise, they stop. They just stop and go away, and we don’t learn from them anymore. We blunt them, and that is a tragedy.
Steinbeck had this to say:
And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected… If the glory can be killed, we are lost.
- East of Eden
