Brenda Brathwaite
I make games professionally. I play games for fun. I talk about games with anyone who will listen.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
In my recent post, Deep Critique Without Play, I lamented the caliber of criticism leveled at a variety of media with which the critic has no personal experience. This lack of experience is exacerbated by a failure to question one’s own or another’s assumptions or to explore the topic deeper. As developers and players, we take up arms when outsiders to our industry or our medium critique it scathingly (video games cause [insert terrible thing here]), but sometimes deal out our own friendly fire.
While criticism is valuable, phrases like “That sucks” aren’t really criticism, and I shouldn’t have labeled them as such. Without supporting commentary, they are merely insults.
They suck.
Artwork by Jimini Hignett, Wikipedia Image Commons
I’d like to offer you my opinion on a game I’ve never played. My opinions are based purely on the collective conscience and on my interpretation of the game’s play by viewing screenshots and photographs of it in development and in play. I heard its designer talk about it, and I suppose that should be enough. If not him (or her, in my case), certainly the many other people I’ve heard talk about it should suffice. I don’t know whether they played the game either.
Now, there are already a number of you wondering why I’d ever do such a thing. Perhaps you’re wondering why anyone would ever do such a thing. Yet, it happens all the time. In researching a game that it seems most haven’t played, I’ve now counted 100 negative comments in a row, not a one of which resulted from actual play. The conversation usually goes like this:
Me: Yeah, I am studying a bunch of games for my thesis, including Daikatana.
Critic: Oh my goodness. That game sucked.
Me: What did you think when you played it?
Critic: Oh, I didn’t play it.
Literally one hundred times without interruption. I counted.
This is curious to me. I suspect that a lot of the opinions on the game have more to do with surrounding drama (the advertisement, the articles, the personalities involved) than the actual gameplay. It was the game people were waiting to hate. On its release, it needed to provide only a few morsels upon which to feed, and a bad game meme was born. Play be damned. In pressing my 100 critics further, when I asked what was wrong with the game, only a very few people (10 perhaps?) were able to respond with concrete gameplay examples. Yet, in the rare instances where play was actually cited in their critique, the citations simply weren’t enough to warrant the wrath that the game received (and putting aside for a moment that all these play observations were second-hand). Bugs, AI issues, criticisms of design choices. These are universal design issues. Fail to die, keep making games, and you will have your own. The amount of wrath leveled at the game makes it sound as if it spurted acid directly into your nostrils upon installation. Truth be told, it was the marketing that shot acid. The game was not that bad.
For me, the game that inspires deep critique without play is Train. It is fascinating to watch. Without having experienced Train, I see reviews and comments on its interactive experience. People suggest that my inclusion of one element or another was for some specific reason. They discuss “spoilers”, and there are none. Play patterns are assumed from photographs. Single endings are declared. Lack of replayability is stated as an absolute. Reasons for my design decisions are given as fact. In one recent piece, it was noted that I won’t provide the game’s rules due to an artistic drama which I was, apparently, trying to deliberately engineer. Of course, that isn’t true.
So, this whole process of deep critique without play is fascinating to me. By deep, I don’t necessarily mean that the critic discussed it at length, though that could also be true. I also mean that the critic pushed the blade with conviction into a wound he was not personally sure was there. It is telling that we don’t often profess our opinions similarly for things we loved:
Me: Yeah, I just saw Avatar.
Critic: Oh my goodness. That movie was awesome!
Me: What did you think when you saw it?
Critic: Oh, I didn’t see it.
You see what I mean?
I think of the dozens of comments I’ve heard about an artist whose work I love, Jackson Pollock. He throws paint at a canvas, no? Anyone could do it. Rothko paints imperfect rectangles over imperfect rectangles while Mondrian at least got the perfect right. Is this all these artists were trying to do? Could there be something more? (There is.)
It is something – something good, perhaps – that these works inspire critique without play. It is, after all, a contract we enter into when we choose to offer our works for consumption in a public space. It tells us of the impact they are making for better or for worse. It tells of the potential people believed they had for good or for evil (whether or not they lived up to them is immaterial). It tells us the passion of the audience. It also tells us about ourselves as a culture of game players immersed in a collective internet conscience. It tells us something interesting that we would offer opinions on the interactive creative work of others without actually having experienced that work at all.
To be among the critiqued is to find yourself a place with good company.
I am surprised by how many people still love and remember this series fondly and have yet to give up hope of its return. I have always loved it since I first played it in 1981, so I count myself among those people. I worked on the series for 18 years, though, so I have an obvious bias.
A few RPG outlets picked up my last post on the reasons I selected the ending I did for Wizardry 8, and even though it’s been 8 years since its release, it created a surprising flurry of traffic here as well as a number of emails asking me if I was going to make Wizardry 9. The answer to that question is multi-class but rests on a single answer: no. I can’t imagine a future in which I don’t eventually make another RPG. However, I am very happy making what I am making now and chose it for a reason over RPGs. This isn’t the time for me to fight fight fight parry parry parry. Also, I don’t own the license anyway.
Ironically, however, I am also learning to code in C++ and am writing an RPG which will never see the light of day (seriously, and it shouldn’t). So, any latent RPG desires I might have are hidden in a sometimes error free compile. Other times, I invoke a segmentation fault. Mostly, I selected an RPG because I needed to work hard on the code and not on the design.
Regardless, this is where I wanted to go. Tolerate the level 1 coder statements:
// Set up story
printf( “\n\nThere is silence.” );
printf( “\n\nIt is a silence you don’t remember hearing before.” );
printf( “\n\nThere are objects, places and creatures that are quiet, but silence is an absolute.” );
printf( “\nIt is an absence of anything at all. It is pervasive, it is unpercussive,” );
printf( “\nand it is all around you.” );
// Allowing players to input their name
printf( “\n\nWho you are, where you are. Nothing seems very clear right now.” );
printf( “\n\nYou struggle to remember your name: ” );
cin >> playerName1;
printf( “\nThe last thing you remember thinking was the impossibility of it all, that someone” );
printf( “\nwould just write the universe out of existence.” );
printf( “\n\nYou remember your friend turning to you and saying:”);
printf( “\n\n’%s? Is this it?’”, playerName1 );
printf( “\n\nThere were tears in his eyes. There were six of you then. Remembering,” );
printf( “\nyou start to cry in the darkness, and it breaks the silence. It is evident “);
printf( “\nthere is only one of you now.\n\n”);
And we all know that’s way too much text by today’s standards. Rewriting it for 2009, the DD would read: “Insert cutscene here.”
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