Original subtitles

All of us are set in our own little

worldview.

We think we see the big picture, but we

all see a little slice of the world

through our own little lens.

I would like to imagine that people have

the opportunity to see a much wider set

of perspectives on the world and that

games might be the mechanism, the

vehicle that brings that to them.

You can take almost anything and make it

a fascinating interactive experience.

What I'm really doing is I'm giving the

player a toy and the player is turning

it into a game.

Every designer has the opportunity to

create something incredibly unique.

At the same time, every designer faces

the risk of creating something that no

one will be able to understand.

As a designer, you're actually dealing

with two computers. First, the

electronic one sitting on the table in

front of you, but more importantly, the

player's imagination, the player's

brain. And that one is far more complex,

and we have barely scratched the surface

of it.

during the course of this class. I'm

going to expose you to a number of kind

of fundamental concepts about game

design. uh basically psychology of the

player, the mental modeling that goes

on. Uh how to use game mechanics as part

of your tool set and how to develop your

tool set as a designer. How to think

about the overall structure of what's

going on underneath the hood. How to

build emergence, surprise, cool,

detailed worlds.

uh and to try to predict what's going to

motivate players of your games and pull

them in and get them emotionally

involved to the point to where they get

into communities that are built up

around these. And so there many

different levels of game design and

we're going to kind of start with the

fundamentals and work our way outwards

towards larger and larger more strategic

levels of thinking around it. Every

designer is unique in some way and my

games have tended to be very uh specific

in terms of real world simulations

generally. Games that tend to encourage

player creativity, player storytelling.

Uh there are a lot of other approaches

to game design, but I think a lot of the

fundamentals that I'll be talking about

in this class are going to be things

that could apply to any genre of game.

And I think by going down to that

fundamental level, it's going to give

you a lot more opportunities to kind of

come up with creative inspiration to

bring in new approaches, new ideas,

basically how to amplify your own

internal creativity in ways that are

coming from a fundamental level rather

than just the feature level. I'm Will

Wright and this is a simulation a

simulation a simulation of my master

class.

So, you're probably watching this

because you have an interest in games.

But what are games? We all know what

games are. We play games. Uh, more

recently with electronic devices, games

have taken a totally different kind of

turn and gotten much more elaborate,

more ubiquitous in our lives, I think.

But games really are something that have

been around for thousands of years.

Different cultures have played games,

board games, social games for a long,

long time for a lot of reasons. Games

really right now have different genres.

We have things like puzzle games,

first-person shooters, strategy games.

These are different subsets of the game

space, but games really are a subset of

a larger thing called play.

Play is just exploring. It's

experimenting. It's trying different

things, usually in some symbolic

representation, you know, some little

toy of the real world with a very low

cost for failure. In a lot of ways, I

think games have been somewhat

misaligned. Uh we've associated games

with violence, you know, something that

little kids play. But that's actually

been true of any kind of new media

that's come along in any kind of media.

You know, radio was actually looking

down on film when film became popular.

Film looked down on television.

Television looks down on games. So it's

really these you know games are the

upand cominging thing that in some sense

is breaking boundaries doing new things

and that's what makes games interesting

to me as kind of a topic as a medium.

Games borrow from so many other

different design fields, you know, not

just entertainment, you know,

storytelling, things like that, but also

things like architecture, product

design, fine art, mathematics, cognitive

psychology. Games incorporate all these

different design fields in an

interesting way. And the more you can

expose yourself to these different

design fields, the better designer

you'll be.

I think game design is probably one of

the most challenging design fields there

is. And I think to be a good game

designer, you first and foremost have to

be a good designer. And so I think just,

you know, getting into the idea, the

mode of thinking of, you know, how does

a designer think? Uh how do they learn?

Uh where do they pull inspiration from?

And don't close yourself into just the

gaming world. You know, look at all

sorts of things all over. I've learned

so much from weird fields like you know

Japanese gardening or biology or

economics whatever you know you can pull

all these things in you know and as a

designer use these as parts of your

creative pallet one of the things I

really would inspire try to inspire up

and coming game designers to do is think

how do I learn continually you know from

other people learn from myself my own

mistakes but then also just do it try it

you know you can do something as simple

as design a little game on a piece of

paper and go show your friend. Let's

play this game. Here are the rules. See,

you know, see how that works out. And

the more you're doing that, just always

inventing little games, you know, even

if it's with toothpicks on a tabletop,

uh you're going to learn a lot that way.

And that's much better than just, you

know, sitting in your head for two years

coming up with your master design and

then one day trying to realize it and

finding out that it's too complex to

realize. you'll be much better off

doing, you know, continual ubiquitous

everyday kind of local game design.

Any designer basically when they're

designing something has to look at a

number of factors. Uh you know,

basically you're trying to balance all

these things against each other. So

think about just a chair and all the

different things that you kind of would

like a chair, you know, different

properties you would like from a chair.

you want it to be, you know, cheap, easy

to move, easy to produce, comfortable.

Uh, and these functions can actually be

kind of broken down into a tree, you

know. So, games have very much the same

property. You know, there's certain

functional things about them. There's

certain things that are economic about

what does it take to produce the game,

how much does it cost, what kind of a

team do I have to build, uh, what kind

of skills do I have to have as designer?

And the designer needs to kind of

understand how to balance all these

different things against each other

because your final design is going to be

a balancing act. You're basically

balancing all these plates on top of

each other and it's the designer's job

to make them balance well. Now, as

you're exploring your design, you're

actually going through this very large

branching tree of possible designs. You

know, there infinite number of designs

that you could be building in your game,

and you're going to end up with one very

specific design. And when you start out,

you might have some sense of about where

you're going or kind of the area you

want to be, but you do not know exactly

how to get there, you know, and you're

basically exploring this branching path

of design decisions, you know, starting

with very fundamental design decisions.

You know, what kind of game am I making?

What's it about? What are the controls

down to very incremental design

decisions, you know, what color is this

button? You know, how tall is the

character? Very, very minor things. And

a lot of these decisions are distributed

throughout your team. And you need to

make sure that your team kind of

understands the vision so that as

they're balancing their little parts of

that tree that they are in line with the

creative vision for the whole product.

Basically, as you're exploring this

tree, there are a lot of different

methods you have as a designer for

figuring out which direction to go on

what branch. Now, you're really trying

to prune these branches as efficiently

as possible. That's why when we build a

prototype, we want an answer from that

prototype. We want to find out, you

know, do we go down path A or B? If the

prototype can't answer that, it's

basically failed as a prototype. So,

we're really trying to efficiently prune

the branches and continue down the right

path toward our final design. You know,

as I said, you don't know exactly where

you're going to end up on this tree, but

the designer also needs to kind of know

when you've gotten there. A lot of times

I've seen, you know, game designs or

even other designs where somebody went a

little bit too far. You know, they, you

know, some movies, you know, I think had

a perfect ending, went a little bit too

far. And the designer is going to know

you've hit the sweet spot.

One of my design heroes is Charles

Emmes. Charles Ray Emmes were design

team husband and wife. And he had a

great quote which was simply that design

is constraint. You know design really is

how do you you know work around

constraint and without constraint

there's no design. Uh you know it's just

pure imagination. So you know to be a

good designer you have to kind of

embrace that constraint and say okay

within this constraint what can I do

that's really cool and you know that

constraint is really going to become

your foundation it's going to be okay

here was my starting point and within

that constraint I was able to do this

the constraint could be you know the

technology in front of you how fast the

processor the graphics but the

constraint can also be you know what

does my player know what kind of skills

do they have uh where does their

imagination take them those are

constraints just as well and the more

you understand your constraints you know

the more you can now kind of use as your

starting point to go off and do

something really cool that nobody else

has done against those same constraints.

In a competitive game, you know, usually

with two players, uh there's a concept

of a zero sum game, which is that if a

player wins, he gets, you know, a

positive one. The losing player gets a

negative one. Uh if it's a tie, they

both get zero. So basically the sum of

the two players is always zero. You know

either I won, you lost, you know, and it

sums to zero or it was a tie, sums to

zero. That's a zero sum game. So you

can't have two winners or two losers,

you know, out of a two-player game. A

non-zero sum game, you can both people

can win. The kind of games I do uh are

not zero sum games at all. In fact, uh

most of the things I do don't even

really have a clear win state. when you

play something like Sim City or The

Sims, uh, what actually I found very

interesting was to leave it to the

player to define the goal state.

When a person sits down to play some

city, I don't tell them they have to

build the biggest city or have the

happiest people or the least crime.

Players in their own mind decide that,

you know, they think, okay, what is, you

know, my ideal city and they try to

build that. So, the player is actually

the one building the rule set and the

structure and the player is the one

scoring it. I'm really just kind of

giving them an open-ended toy. And then

you get a lot of kind of interesting

different play styles. You know, certain

players trying to achieve things. Other

players don't even really try to achieve

anything at all, but try to use it for

creative storytelling or creativity. A

lot of people were playing sport, not

really trying to get through all the

levels, but trying to just make really

cool things within the game that they

would then go out and share with other

players. So for them the win state was

more social. Can I make something really

cool in this game? Maybe even just tell

a story that other people really like

and to me that's the win state. So you

know I think games have the opportunity

to go you know way beyond just this kind

of zero sum approach.

You can take almost any uh technology

that we have and view it as an extension

of the human body. For instance, you

know, television, telescope, our eyes,

our vision, telephone, you know, our

speech, car really kind of extends our

legs. If somebody hits your car, you

know, you don't say that, you know, my

car was hit. You say somebody hit me

when I was driving, you know. So me, you

know, the car becomes me. It becomes an

extension of your body. I think the

computers and games and things that

we're dealing with on entertainment side

can extend a lot of these in a lot of

ways. When I was watching players play

the Sims, initially it was like he was

hungry, then he did this, then he did

that, and they very smoothly shifted to

then I got tired and I went to bed, and

then I woke up. So, they kind of shifted

from he to I very smoothly. We now with

these little micro worlds have the

ability to basically externalize what's

in our imagination and share it with

other people. You know, it used to be

that you had to have, you know, a very

rich skill set. Like you'd be a fine

artist to do that, you know, to paint

something in your imagination and then

share with other people. But now with

these tools, the creative leverage they

give us, uh, you know, average casual

game players have the ability to

externalize, you know, create things out

of their imagination, share it with

other players and actually have these

shared imaginary worlds. In sport, we

actually had all these editors where the

players were making cool things. And

some of the levels, the design of your

creature really influenced, you know,

the way you play that creature in the

world, its performance. Uh, other parts

of it, you know, like designing your

spaceship, didn't really have a whole

lot to do with the performance of the

spaceship. It was purely aesthetic. But

people would spend just as much time,

you know, crafting this very unique

thing that was part of their player

identity in the game. And as they were

playing in the space level, they were,

you know, it was front and foreground

all the time was your spaceship. And so

they really felt, you know, like that

was them. When you get to the space

phase, there are actually millions of

planets you can go to. And we could

never create millions of creatures. So

we decided that every time a player made

a creature, it would go up to our server

and we would use it to populate

everybody else's world. And we were

hoping to get, you know, maybe 100,000

of these creatures. you know, in the

first month, you know, after we had

uploaded the creature editor, uh,

instead it was so popular we got a

million uh, in the first week. In fact,

we passed, I think, five or six million

in the first month, which is more than

the number of species on Earth. So, uh,

it was, you know, kind of extraordinary

how much players embraced that.

Basically, we were turning the average

player into a Pixar artist. They were

able to create a, you know, a brand new

character out of their imagination and

have it come to life. uh and so I think

this is one of the uh examples of the

computer giving creative leverage a

creative amplifier and a lot of people

are using you know computers for

different creative fields but same thing

it's a creative amplifier for everything

they

I don't actually start by concepting a

new game. I read a lot. I like learning

new things and at some point I'll just

trip over a subject or some material

that I find particularly fascinating. So

it's not like I sit down and say, "Okay,

I'm going to come up with a new game

idea." It's more like I'm kind of just

exploring, browsing the world. Then it's

like, ooh, maybe I can make a game out

of this.

When I went to college, I studied all

these different things and, you know, I

don't want to become an architect or an

engineer or an artist, what you know,

and uh by being a game designer, I found

that I could study whatever I want, you

know, and my excuse is I'm making a game

about it. So for me, you know, being a

game designer, you know, turned into a

lifelong learning process where I can go

off in any subject I want to. And it's

taxdeductible. For me, it's usually, you

know, some kind of interesting thing

about the world or in the world that as

I dig deeper, it gets more interesting,

uh, not less. You know, that that didn't

sound that interesting to me, but as I

read about it a little bit more, it

actually sounded kind of fascinating. I

read some more and it actually really

grabbed me and pulled me in. A lot of

the games I've done actually were based

upon cool subjects, usually books that I

read. Sim City, you know, was very

influenced by the work of a guy named

Jay Forester who was the first person to

actually model cities on the early

computers back in the 50s. His models

were not spatial. They were just like

little numbers. How many people did the

city have, you know, how much land, how

many roads, you know, but uh he was

actually the father of what became known

as system dynamics, which I'll talk

about a little bit later. Uh Sam Ant was

very much inspired by the work of Edward

O. Wilson very famous or mmacologist

studies ants uh he wrote this great book

won the bullet surprise called the ants

but he actually in some sense was

reverse engineering the way ants work

you know little ants are almost like

little robots and it's pretty simple to

figure out in the presence of this

pheromone the ant does that in the

presence of that pheromone it does this

and he actually reverse engineered that

and discovered a whole level of

emergence you know an ant colony in fact

is incredibly smart it's about as smart

as a dog an individual ant is incredibly

stupid and so ant colonies are really

one of the few forms of intelligence

that we can deconstruct and understand

at that level. And he was the guy who

did it. These kind of subjects uh are

things that when you read about them,

they they're kind of dry and boring.

They're filled with technical jargon.

And what I always aspired to do was to

take these things and make them

approachable, turn them into a toy. How

can I turn an ant colony into a toy? So

other people come in and start

interacting with it. And when players

are actually manipulating these things

and building them, they take ownership

and they get so involved, so much more

emotionally connected to these and then

the subject becomes utterly fascinating.

As soon as I built the very first

prototypes of Sim City and I was running

a little simulation, it was very coarse,

very crude, but still my interest in

urban planning skyrocketed. All of a

sudden, you know, oh, this is really

cool. I want to find out about traffic

modeling. I want to find out about this,

that, and the other. You know, these

things that would have sounded

incredibly boring to me when I had a

little, you know, guinea pig in my room

to play with. uh became fascinating.

Likewise, you know, other games I did,

the Sims was very much influenced by

Christopher Alexander's work in

architecture. So for me personally, I

find a lot of inspiration in books also

in fields I think that are u

interdisciplinary, you know, or things

that are almost controversial. Sim was

very much inspired by James Lovelock's

Gaia hypothesis. It's about the earth

and the way it regulates itself. And you

know, usually that's where the areas of

science are moving the fastest and the

most interesting. And those are the

things I tended to gravitate toward.

This is me personally as a designer. I

think every designer is going to find

their own kind of pallet of inspiration,

their own direction, their own kind of

voice.

When I was starting out in game design,

there wasn't this thing around called

the internet. Uh um and actually I had

to go to this place they used to call

libraries where they had these things

called books and uh I would read these

books you know and learn about things

that way. Uh nowadays it's so low

friction to go on the web and find

anything you want to anything at all

about anything you want to. So I think

that now designers you know have so much

more uh so much less friction you know

to do research around an idea that you

know for me it's it's almost magical um

that I can kind of pick any topic and go

down any little weird path and find

material about it. On the simulation

side, it was really interesting to me to

kind of go back into the history of

simulation, you know, back into the 60s

and 50s and even all the way back to

Bonoyman and Turing and see what they

were trying to do with these super

primitive computers. And some of the

things they were trying to do were

amazing, you know, way way beyond

anything a computer could do. But they

would imagine that one day a computer

could do this, you know, and right now,

you know, my watch has, you know, much

more power than they ever envisioned.

you know, at least as a designer, I

don't feel like there are any meaningful

limitations beyond my own imagination.

And so I think to me that's, you know,

really the thing that, you know, I have

to kind of flex and exercise and push is

my own imagination. Uh, if I can do

that, it's actually pretty

straightforward and easy for me to

figure out, you know, the research, the

technology,

um, to do it. feels to me like so many

designers always think about and even

communicate their game idea relative to

other games. You know, it's going to be

World of Warcraft on the moon, it's

going to be whatever. Uh I think that,

you know, there's so much more

opportunity out in the world to take

things. You know, you can just take a

rock off the ground and look at it the

right way and it has little microbes

competing on the surface for territory

and there's sunlight and environmental

consideration. you know, you you could

turn that into something fascinating.

Um, you can take almost anything and

look at it the right way, make it a

fascinating interactive experience.

With The Sims, it wasn't really apparent

what I should be researching. But uh as

I started digging into the game design,

we started getting this thing with the

Sims motives and they had to go to work

and all this stuff, it became pretty

apparent that this is really kind of a

game about time management in some sense

on their side. You know, how do you

manage their time to maximize their

motives to make them happy? Uh and after

quite a bit of digging, I came across

the work of a guy named I think uh James

Robinson and he did all these time

studies of Americans, you know, how they

spent their time. He actually kept logs

every day. They spend 20 minutes of

time, you know, doing their stuff in the

morning to get ready, this amount of

time with their kids, this amount of

time in front of the TV, you know, and

he actually broke it down and it ended

up that we were matching those numbers

fairly closely. We took the simulation

and tried to match the real numbers, the

percentage of time that people actually

spend doing each of these activities in

the sims. So, that was something that

wasn't apparent that, you know,

something we could even research.

another area of research. I forgot the

name of the guy who did this, but he was

interviewing all these people about what

their most prized possessions were at

different ages. And it was actually

quite interesting stuff. Some of which

kind of made it into the game, some of

which didn't. It turned out that like

for kids and really old people, their

most prized possession was their bed,

you know, and in midlife, you know, and

TV was second. Midlife, it was like

their car, their house, all these other

things. But it was interesting that the

kids list of their top possessions was

almost the same as like an elderly

person's top possessions. But uh so some

of this stuff will kind of become part

of the game or not. But still as

designer if you kind of understand and

absorb all this stuff it helps you kind

of think about directions you might take

it or you could take it even if you

don't end up using it.

Even when I'm kind of initially

imagining okay I'm make a game about

this thing. Uh I don't start by thinking

what's the game going to be or what's

the game going to be like. I just dive

deeper and deeper into the subject and

the research and then I start trying to

kind of look at the components, you

know, what are the different aspects of

this that are interesting to me and it

might be the process, it might be the

structure, it might be um the science

behind it, uh whatever historical

context from those things I start

imagining, okay, you know, how would I

really like to kind of view this or

manipulate it or play with it or create

it? uh you know if this is a piece of

clay you know how do I want to sculpt it

what are my tools I started just

imagining 10 or 20 different

perspectives on that subject and uh I

think the perspectives are far more

valuable than particular um solutions or

approaches and so actually after kind of

rotating this thing around through 20 or

30 perspectives two or three usually

will start to kind of get traction in my

head and I'll start exploring those a

little bit further So I'm trying to

describe something that in my head is

really a much more kind of abstract

process, but that's how it kind of feels

to me. But I in some sense I'm kind of

circling the idea and slowly zeroing in

on it. I don't dive right at it, but I

sit there and just kind of let it turn

over my mind. I'll sit there and do like

this research thinking about it phase

for a year before I even think about

what, you know, what kind of game it

might be. And during that time, I will

even, you know, I'll build models of it

or draw pictures of it or try to

recreate it in different forms tangibly.

And that again just kind of puts my

brain in a little bit different spin, a

little bit different perspective. And

all new ideas will pop up, you know,

just as a result of me building a model

of something

spore. The original concept was based on

a couple of things. Uh I did a box

design, original box design. It was

actually I called it sim everything. Uh

but there were two things that really

fascinated me especially. Number one was

old uh film Charles Mames powers of 10.

We begin with a scene 1 meter wide. Now

every 10 seconds we will look from 10

times farther away and our field of view

will be 10 times wider.

It was the same thing starting with

atomic scale. everyone a powers of 10

bigger and bigger and bigger. I love

that idea of scale across the galaxy

across the universe and within that

dimension of scale that the most

interesting thing at every single scale

that we know of is life you know

everything else is fairly deterministic

fairly you know uh predictable dry but

life is the one unpredictable aspect in

every single skill you know starting at

the cellular level. The other big uh

inspiration was basically astrobiology.

The idea of you know how prevalent is

life out in the galaxy and what forms

might it take. And so it was those two

ideas that came together and I you know

was really thinking about can I tell a

story about the journey of life from the

cellular level up to you know galactic

expansion and make that kind of

game-like like a toy.

As a designer, I I I tend to of go with

my gut feel in terms of that's going to

be something cool and I can't always you

know express exactly on what dimensions

it's going to be cool but I hope that my

instincts will bring me to a place where

a wide range of people will enjoy it and

I wasn't always that way. It took me a

while to kind of to realize that when I

was first uh working on Sim City by

myself I showed it to a few people and

they thought it was kind of cool. I

showed it to my eventual partner Jeff

Braun and he was like, "Oh yes, we have

to do this. Let's start a company." We

started Maxis and did Sim City. But in

my mind, even at that point, I was

thinking, "Okay, this is a game that

maybe a few strategy gamers or

architects maybe might enjoy." It didn't

occur to me that a wide range of people

would enjoy that. To Jeff, it did. Jeff

kind of understood that, I think, more

than I did. After that, I started

learning to trust my instincts that if

if I really find this cool for some

reason, I'm gravitating toward that.

Just trust that we can find a way to

bring other people and they'll enjoy it

as well. Uh it's very hard as a designer

for me to design for somebody else. You

know, this is how that person thinks.

This is what they want. This is what

they believe. Uh it's easy to do for

myself and then figure out why am I

enjoying this? Why am I motivated? And

you know what about other people's

thought process will let them see this

and enjoy it and experience it the same

way I

Once I have an idea for a game, I start

making prototypes as soon as I can. The

early prototyping is probably the most

important stage. We're trying to imagine

different types of rules that might be

applied to the system that we're basing

the game on. You're basically trying

everything you can think of for how to

turn this concept into a game. Whatever

it takes for you to cheaply get a sense

of that's fun, that's not fun.

Well, a prototype is usually

interactive. Not always, but usually.

Uh, and we're taking like some little

bit or part of the game that we have a

question about. Should we go this way or

that way? And it might be an interaction

question. Is it better to have the

controls work like this or like that? It

might be a visualization or a graphics

question. Should we do this point of

view, that point of view? Should it be

this style, that style? Uh, but it's

something that we feel like we can't

answer unless we actually touch and play

with and interact with a little bit and

even it's just turning the the world

around and looking at different, you

know, camera angles. And that's when we

decide, okay, we're going to build a

prototype and we're going to build the

simplest possible thing we can that will

help us answer that question. As I'm

playing with this one little piece in

hand and imagining the rest of the

experience, can I answer that question?

Oh yeah, this would be much better top

down. This would be much better 3D. This

would be much better with that kind of

player control. Uh, but it, you know, it

really needs to be answering a question

as cheaply as possible. And you don't

want to go spend weeks and weeks

building this. you want to build the

cheapest, simplest little thing that you

can build that you can sit back and say,

"Okay, I'm pretty confident now that we

go this way." As we get further in down

the path, it's, you know, can somebody

learn how to use this interface? And we

can find out what the failure states

are, how we need to change it to make it

work better. And even further down the

road, it's how engaging is this to

players? And that's a much much more

open-ended question and a much broader

range of answers that for certain

people, this is very motivating. Most

people, it isn't. or it's somewhat

motivating for a lot of people but if we

did this it would be much more

motivating or you know the social

component is working well here but not

the individual. So those are much more

uh I'd say subjective in terms of

interpreting the results. the very

initial ones are very clear usually in

terms of okay we go with A instead of B

and uh I think you know we think of it

in those terms

prototyping can take different forms I

mean sometimes it's cutting up little

pieces of paper and these are now game

units and you have you know basically

rules and you can move your thing two

spaces every turn and you might have a

very simple you know turnbased

two-player game that you're moving

little pieces of paper round. Other

times it might be uh a more constructive

experience where you're actually drawing

something on a piece of paper and you

have rules about how much you can draw

and you add up how many things you've

drawn and what the cost is and you're

actually doing like your own little kind

of economic bookkeeping alongside of it.

Uh you know what we call paper pro paper

prototyping isn't so much it has to be

paper. It really more means that it's

off the computer. You know you're not

really programming but you're doing it

with tangible little objects. One of the

things I tried strong a long time ago

was when uh I was first coming up with

the game and starting to pitch it

around. I would actually make two or

three different box designs

myself. You know, I just put, you know,

printing the stuff out, glue it to the

side of a box, put them up there, and

show them to people. Which one of these

games would you like? It's all the same

game in my mind, but you know, these are

three different ways of kind of uh

informing, you know, what the game is

about and presenting it. Uh and in some

sense, that's a marketing prototype. uh

and I would see that oh people really

get box B but A and C they don't like it

all that would just tell me a little bit

about how somebody initially thinks

about this whole idea and which

direction I should go in terms of

communicating it so that's kind of in

some sense a communications prototype uh

you know later on as you start kind of

playing with how I present this to the

player or what's the interface you know

those are things that are fairly simple

and again sometimes these are things you

can just pull off the shelf and say you

know this game uses control scheme A

that one uses control scheme B and

they're both driving tanks which one

feels better as I'm imagining the rest

of my game, which might be completely

different than these off-the-shelf

games, but at least in terms of the

controls, I can sit there and imagine my

game with these controls. So, these

prototypes can take any form. It's

anytime you have a question answer and

you feel like if you could build

something, whether it's, you know, a

fake box or a control scheme prototype

or even two games off the shelf that

you're playing one little part of, uh,

will that help you figure out which

branch down that design tree that you

want to take?

I found that when I make games a lot of

times I it actually helps me to build

real tangible things uh from the game

before I actually build the game. When I

was actually working on the Sims at some

point I decided I wanted to have a

little neighborhood for the original

Sims and you would pick a house and

build a house and you eventually build

little houses in the neighborhood. I

actually first built a real model of a

little, you know, few houses and little

landscape. And this is the model I

actually built for the Sims. And this is

actually the original Sims, what it

looked like. So, it was actually a

fairly close representation for Sim Ant.

I built a giant ant. And for everything

I've made, I've tried to bring it to the

tangible, and it helps me think about it

in certain ways when I'm actually

touching it. And I wonder like in the

game, how can I make it feel tangible?

How can I make the player feel like

they're actually touching something real

here?

As we start building prototypes, we

might find, you know, kind of sweet

spots, really fun things. That's a

really cool dynamic, or I like that

tool, or it's really enjoyable making

this thing. Um, then we start figuring

out how can we, you know, take those

really good spots and spread it out

through the rest of design and make it

part of the spine. on a game like Spore,

you know, we started building some of

the editors very early on and it was so

fun building things in the creature

editor, we decided, hey, let's see if we

can do a building editor. Oh, that's

cool. Let's see if we can do a vehicle

editor. And so, we decided that the

editors would be, you know, consistent

across all the levels. They would

operate pretty much the same. Uh but

each one was its own special thing but

yet it was kind of a core activity that

kind of gave connection across the

different levels because sport really

you know otherwise was like five

different games that happened to be

connected. Uh but the editors you know

gave kind of thematic consistency across

there and player familiarity when I got

to the next level I already knew how to

use the editor. Uh so I think we look

for things like that or you know even

like the tools in Sim City you know when

you're laying down this you know that

tool operates pretty much the same like

you know roads operate almost the same

as the water pipes. You look for things

that you can kind of leverage across the

design so once the player learns one

thing they've learned five things uh but

also gives you know kind of a consistent

feel to the whole experience.

Well, as a designer, I'm going to look

at these prototypes, interact with them,

you know, and come up with some decision

about where we should go. I don't care

what they're built out of. Uh, so

typically, depending on the programmer I

was working with, we be they might be

very comfortable with their own little

codebase, and they could very rapidly

iterate that. So, from my point of view,

whatever was the least amount of

friction for the programmer creating

this uh because the end, I just want to

be able to interact with it for a few

hours and then make a decision. and

we're basically going to throw that code

away or the programmer might actually

take that codebase and evolve it into

the next prototype. There's so many

different programs. It could be, you

know, JavaScript, it could be Unity, it

could be, you know, hardcore C, I don't

care again, but uh that really depends a

lot on, you know, the programmer and

their familiarity, you know, again,

whatever is going to they can create the

fastest possible thing for you at the

least possible cost. So, I'm totally

agnostic in terms of what platform or

codebase it's built in. As a student,

you want to learn prototyping. You know,

again, I would say find some system that

you can program to some degree or script

uh whatever you're familiar with and

then imagine how you could actually

create some simple interactive

experience with that. Do that a few

times and now start imagining, okay, how

can I make that better? You know, what

questions do I need to answer? You know,

so basically this again is a navigation

instrument for you. It's a compass to

help you figure out I want to go this

way or that way. And just playing with

simple rule sets, uh, you can kind of

get a sense of how you navigate the kind

of a tree.

games uh in story I think have a very

interesting relationship with each other

and uh you know I see a lot of game

designers that really are aspiring to be

storytellers uh and I've always thought

that the coolest stories are always

coming from the players. I mean, it's

nice to have a backstory or here's the

world and all that, but really, you

know, you want every player to basically

encounter their own story, create their

own story by what they do in the game.

That's the really interesting story for

me. But as creatures, as organisms, we

are faced uh with this kind of

fundamental dilemma, which is that, you

know, we're here, the world's out there.

You know, basically, we have a limited

bubble of experience. Things that we,

you know, know about the world, will

experience directly about the world.

Basically we take this in through our

senses. We see the world. We perceive it

in certain ways. Uh it goes into our

imagination. You know we actually start

building little models of it. And you

know based upon how we interpret the

world around us, it influences our

behavior. You know how we act out there.

Now that limited bubble of experience uh

is not really enough to for us to build

very effective models of the world. And

it's that experience that we're building

these models of the world from. So over

time you know actually through evolution

I think we've discovered two other

methods. One is to have toy experiences

where we have symbolic experiences you

know and kind of abstract that back into

the real world. The other one is to

learn from other people's experiences.

If my friend the caveman comes back and

says a tiger almost ate me when I left

the cave. I didn't have that experience

but I know the next time I leave the

cave I'm going to look out for a tiger.

Uh I was able to learn from his

experience without having that

experience directly myself. Now over

time through our culture we've come to

call one of these things play these toy

experiences and the other one story. Uh

these are both though fundamentally

educational technologies. I think this

is why we enjoy consuming these things

um because they actually help us build

more elaborate more detailed world

models with a limited experience base.

Now story and play I think have a really

kind of interesting uh two sides of coin

relationship here. Some of the really

cool stories, the ones that really

capture your imagination, uh, you can

deconstruct into characters, you know,

worlds, locations, objects. I watch my

8-year-old playing, you know, with Star

Wars Legos, and he creates his own

stories with the Stormtroopers and this,

all the components from Star Wars, and

he kind of understands that universe,

but now becomes kind of a set of things

for him to play with. I think some of

the best games where players have a lot

of freedom, creativity, lead to really

cool stories. The games are actually

generating stories as the players play.

So in some sense I think you know really

good stories can generate play and

really good play can generate stories.

So I think the two are kind of

self-supporting but they are very very

different actually.

A lot of times you hear that you know

stories have such a deep emotional

connection uh whereas games are flat. Uh

I don't really think that's true. I

think the games really you know haven't

matured as much but I think what it is

is that they have very different

emotional pallets. The emotional pallet

of film is totally based upon empathy.

You know, you can look at characters

these actually simulations on the screen

which we call actors pretending to be

these characters and they're basically

pretending to have emotions and we're

empathizing with those emotions and so

when they feel sad we you know feel that

sadness. Uh when they're happy we feel

happy. Um games you know the emotional

pallet is based upon agency. the fact

that I did it, you know, that I'm

responsible, I have accountability, I'm

the one that pushed the joystick in that

direction. So, I think that the kind of

emotions that we can actually get out of

games are very different. Uh things like

guilt, pride, accomplishment,

um teamwork are things I've felt in

gaming I've never felt in linear media

because they were things that I was

actively involved with. You know, I

remember when I played black and white

the first time and you have this

creature you're doing, you know,

basically raising and you can discipline

it or reward it and I just started

slapping it to see what would happen and

it got really downtrodden and sad and

all that. I actually felt so bad even

though I knew it was a digital

character. Uh, but I felt so bad and I

felt guilty for having done that. Uh,

there was a much earlier game called

Choplifter where you flew this little

helicopter around. You were rescuing

these little tiny people which were

really like 10 pixels high and I'd pick

them up in the helicopter and bringing

them out. They'd get out after I rescued

them. They jump out the helicopter and

wave at me. And I felt so proud and it

was 10 white pixels I'd rescued, you

know, but it was just funny that it was

able to kind of tweak that circuit in my

head, you know, a feeling accomplishment

and pride. Uh, and again, this is

something I've never really felt, you

know, watching a movie. I felt

indirectly you know that some a

character in the movie felt proud or

accomplished or guilty but I didn't

directly feel you know I was responsible

for it. So I think that is the primary

distinguishing factor between the

emotional pallet and both.

As we were getting closer to finishing

the very first version of the Sims, we

were, of course, bringing people in,

watching them play it, just observing.

And uh, as designers, you know, we were

sitting back and watching them play the

game. And as they were playing the game,

they were telling each other the story

of what was happening. And it was

hilarious. I really enjoyed hearing the

stories, you know, and it was, you know,

based upon what was actually happening

in the game, but they would elaborate,

they would add details, and they gave it

almost, you know, themes. And it was

just fascinating to me how readily

people would build a story around this.

I think it's a fundamental way for us to

convey things to another person uh is

through story. And so we decided that

you know we should at the very last

minute we decided we wanted to put a

feature in so players could basically

capture screenshots, write text and

basically build a little comic book,

little illustrated comic book and then

upload it with one click. They didn't

have to know anything about the web. It

was just built into the game. You know

capture a story, write it uh under the

pictures, press a button, it goes on the

web. And so we had, you know, a section

of our website with player stories and

became uh immensely popular and

initially it was, you know, kind of

predictable silly stories about

superheroes or whatever. Um, but very

rapidly we started seeing these very uh

heartfelt deep real stories. You know,

there was one of the early ones was a

woman who got out of an abusive

relationship and she was trying to tell

that story to inspire other women in the

same position. Uh other ones were, you

know, how this guy had a horrible senior

year in high school. Some of these were

just like almost uh rants. One was a

rant about how they hated this one

particular Starbucks in New York City

because the homeless people would go in

there and drink the cream or I mean just

weird things like that. It was amazing

that these are people that probably

never would have written these things

down at all. You know, they didn't

really have a creative outlet. But once

they started playing the game and they

started actually kind of recreating

these things and they found how easy it

was to share. And also these people

would post these stories and other

people would comment on them, you know,

and rate them. And for all these people

who have never once been told they were

creative or done anything interesting to

just have five people, you know, random

people say that was really cool made

them tremendously motivated. They would

go back and do much more elaborate

stories after that. You know, it took

very little uh positive reinforcement um

or recognition for these people then to

dive in, you know, and obviously these

people, you know, had things they wanted

to express. So basically this game for

them turned into a creative tool, a tool

of self-expression and uh so we later

kind of developed that you know in the

Sims where you're capturing movies and

much more elaborate things and of course

alongside of games there's been this

really interesting field of machinima

where people are actually using game

engines to tell stories you know very

very cheaply and so that's something for

the same reason has been growing up

alongside of games and has turned into

its own kind of whole medium.

More than anything else, I found the

psychology to be the really tricky

challenging part of game design. The

technology is advancing every year. What

we can do on modern computers makes me

as a designer feel almost unlimited. You

know, you can do amazing things on these

electronics. Player psychology though,

human brains are not advancing. They're

kind of same they've been 100 years ago.

We have to learn how it works. What are

the inner workings of that computer and

how can we exploit it and use it, you

know, to our advantage.

There's actually a great book, I think

it's out of print now. It's called maps

of the mind. Each page was kind of a

visual representation of one

psychological theory. It might be

Maslo's pyramid or Freud and the id.

Each one of them was a different way, a

different perspective on the human mind

and human psychology and the way it

worked.

Each one is kind of a tool, you know,

and it has its particular purpose and

works well in certain situations and not

well in others. And none of them are

really, you know, the right approach

that I'm going to, you know, religiously

adhere to, but each one contains

something valuable that might be of use

to me in the future. You know, Maslo's

pyramid turned out to be very useful for

the Sims, for instance.

More

tweet tweet tweet. You la

planet planet.

Aha. Very base core of the Sims had to

do with feeding the uh the motives of

the Sims. Hunger, entertainment, sleep,

all those things. Uh we started building

very very simple little prototypes that

was just a set of sliders and buttons

like you know press a button for food,

sleep, you know, entertainment and

basically trying to balance these little

sliders.

At some point, you know, we decided,

okay, one of the major goals in the Sims

would be to have them actually go to

work and earn money so you can go out

and buy more junk for your house. Uh

now, you know, we basically had a reason

to get all these sliders up to some

state that, you know, they go to work in

a good state. The better their state is,

the more money they earn. So, we're

connecting kind of these base motives to

the larger aspirations, which is exactly

what Maslo's pyramid was all about.

The game designer is really kind of

playing with the player psychology, you

know, by giving them certain freedoms,

certain limitations, certain goal

states. you know, you're trying to get

them into a certain motivation within

this little world that you've crafted

and uh make them want to do things or

want to avoid things happening. You

know, you basically kind of want to set

up this structure in their head that

they're motivated to do this and avoid

that. But you want to have an

environment where they start feeling

strong motivations for their actions.

And then now it's up to them to kind of

start testing their model against your

model. and they start building that

mental model against your game. I think

it was PT Barnum that said something

like uh no entrepreneur ever went broke

uh overestimating the intelligence of

the American public.

So kind of my version of that is no game

designer ever went wrong by

overestimating the narcissism of their

players, you know. And so the more it is

about the player, the more the player

celebrated, the more the player is the

center of that universe, um generally

the more they like it.

At the very beginning, you know, one of

the

chief fundamental components of game

design, one of the skills that you

really want to master as a game designer

is the ability to build a mental model

in your player's head. And this is

really kind of an art form. Uh this is

something I've learned from magic

actually for magicians is that when a

magician is performing a trick. What

they're actually doing is they're

getting the viewers, the audience to

craft a mental model of what's going on,

but they're getting them to craft

exactly the wrong mental model. You

know, such that, you know, you think

this is in my hand, you think this is in

my hand, I pull the handkerchief back.

It's not. I've actually through a lot of

different techniques as a magician got

you to build an incorrect mental model.

And then when I do the reveal, you see

that, hey, my middle model was wrong. In

fact, what the magician was doing was

some other manipulation over here. And

as a game designer, we take that kind of

approach in some ways. You know, we were

actually having our players interact

with little pieces of computer memory

and code and interface buttons, but in

their head, they're building a entirely

different model. There's a world that

they're in with verbs and nouns and

affordances and agency and actions and

possibilities and goal states. that's

what we're actually building in our

player's head. And so, in some sense,

the game designer is a much more

elaborate magician uh doing this.

We're modeling things all the time. You

know, you're modeling other people all

the time. I'm imagining what my friend

is thinking about me. I'm imagining what

they know about me. And I try to be

consistent with that. So I'm not only

building a model of my friend, but I'm

building a model of their model of me.

You know, it's recursive. You know, I

can kind of remember what they have seen

me do, how they see me behave, and I

have a very rough sense of what their

model of me is. And I try to be

consistent with that. So this modeling

is pretty deep and recursive in that

sense. Uh you can put any kid in front

of a video game and right off the bat

they start mashing buttons looking at

what's happening they observe and it's

very much the scientific process you

know where they're doing hypothesis

experiment look at the result go back

refine the hypothesis experiment look at

the result and it's that iterative

scientific process that you know and

that is basically model building of a

different sort now you know in building

models we take in a lot of data a lot of

examples and from that we start looking

for patterns in that data and things

that you know are different, things that

are the same and after that we start

building abstractions out of that. These

we call schema and basically these are

patterns that we see in the world. Any

you know kid can tell you the difference

between a dog and a cat and that's a

schema that we have internally and it's

really a very fine set of features to

distinguish the difference between a dog

and a cat. But it's a schema that we

have and so we can look at any new dog

or cat say right off the bat is a dog or

cat against our schema. Now from that we

start building more elaborate things

called models. you know the schema these

patterns now become the components of

the models that we're building and that

now influences our behavior you know we

behave against these models you know

basically running scenarios that you

know should I do this or that should I

get this job or that job should I say A

or B and so all of our behavior really

is based against us playing these models

in our head about what we should do now

schema are really interesting in that we

have schema for so many different things

for instance in a restaurant we have

this rough idea of things that happen

when we go into a

Now, not all these things always happen,

but in general, that's a pretty good

schema for what to expect when I walk

into a restaurant. Some of the schema

that we are dealing with.

Classification, who are the good guys

and the bad guys? Causality. If you find

a pot of gold, you'll be rich. Empathy.

If you see a hungry dog, you feel bad

for it. Agency, if you have control, you

can command your fate. We have schema

for all of these different things. And

you're controlling the player schema in

some sense as a designer by what you

present them with, how it operates, how

it behaves. When I see five turtles

commit me in a row and all attack me, I

start saying, "Okay, turtles are a bad

thing in this game." You know, that's

the schema I'm building as I play the

game, part of the model building. And

games in some sense are generating these

worlds from the models. So a game is

really almost the reverse of science.

Science is really taking all this data

from the world, compressing it down into

a very concise, small rule set, laws of

physics. games take a very concise

codebase and try to expand it into a

wide range of possibilities that the

player is going to encounter in your

game and then the player is trying to

reverse engineer that process and now

build a concise representation of that.

So it's really kind of interesting the

way these models are coming and going

against the data and the operation of

the world. But again, these mental

models are key I think for a game

designer to realize that's what they're

building.

The middle model that we're trying to

create in the player is something that

uh may or may not have a purpose really

for you. You know, I might be building a

mental model for some player of Sim City

about how cities work. But I know as a

designer of Sim City that that model is

not going to be correct. You know, there

are things about Sim City that do not

match the real world.

uh you know a lot of times games and

filmmakers as well will actually uh

build a model that they know is

incorrect because that's what the

players expect. You know we uh since

2000 I know that if the nuclear power

plant caught on fire there'd be a giant

nuclear explosion which doesn't happen.

It doesn't happen that way. Uh there's

fallout but no nuclear explosion but all

the players expected that you know and

when it didn't happen there was like why

didn't it blow up you know so we made it

behave that way you know in movies you

know you see people shooting guns all

the time and never hitting each other or

cars always blow up and they crash you

know all these things that you know

you're building you know the wrong model

in the player's head compared to reality

but as an enjoyable experience you know

they kind of expected why didn't the car

blow up you know so I'd say that what is

correct is really the open question here

you know are you trying to build you

know if I'm trying to build a training

simulator

for an airline pilot, then yes, I want

that simulator to actually train them to

build a model of the way that plane

really behaves, you know, and that's my

target. Uh, as an entertainment designer

and if I'm designing a city simulator

and you know, most of these players are

not going to be designing a city like

this. In fact, real cities are not

designed with one person as the overlord

like that. You know, it's much more

political. So, I'm not that concerned

that we take liberties, you know, like

that.

As an interactive experience, we want

this whole thing to be centered on the

player and, you know, understanding that

every player is different is kind of key

to that. We want every player to be able

to take their own path, have some

freedom, agency within our games. Uh, so

we need to start thinking about, you

know, how the players see themselves,

you know, their identity. Now,

everybody, you know, kind of wraps a lot

of things around who they are. when you

present yourself to other people

depending on the context there's a place

where you live your neighbors you know

I'm from Ohio whatever it is your job

your profession your skill set hobbies

things that you do or brands products

that you you know maybe have some

allegiance to all these things

components of your identity and you know

when you're interacting with other

people you know these are ways in which

you kind of mark yourself you know you

kind of surround yourself with these

things saying you know this is part of

what defines who I am Now we actually

have you know a lot of very personal

aspects to our identity but also we have

communities that we live in you know

sometimes real geographic communities

other times online communities some of

these are based upon location some are

based upon interest profession uh and

then there's the world around us you

know that we all kind of share you know

what's going on in the wider world it's

almost like this target with successive

rings going outward the innermost ring

being the most personal the thing that

most defines me as most unique going to

the very general. We all live in the

same world. Now, we find that uh as

players get into games, you know, they

kind of all come in like in the same

way. They're all kind of casual players.

I'm going to check this out, see what

it's like. Some people really get into

it, you know. Uh other people might play

it for a little while, put it aside.

This game isn't for me. But the players

that kind of keep going down that path

into your game, uh have a trajectory and

depending on what kind of game it is,

you know, they can take different paths

into that. uh what a lot of times

becomes a community. For the Sims, we

actually had a lot of casual players

started to turn into what we called

collectors. They would go on the web and

they found a lot of other people had

made objects or characters that they

could download into their game. And so

they would start collecting specific

things. You know, some people would

actually kind of specialize their

collections. I want to do Wild West

stuff or Star Wars things or whatever it

is. Other people were actually the ones

starting to kind of build these

collections on their websites. And at

first they would make a few objects,

make a website, but then other people

would start contributing to their

website. Some of these websites grew

very large and even became subscription.

People were paying money just to

download content from that other players

had created and the core creators that

were doing the really cool stuff were

the ones kind of feeding these websites.

So there was kind of an ecology that was

happening here over time as the player

got more and more involved, you know,

and they became more and more part of

their identity. The ones that were

actually creating this stuff for the

sums, this was their hobby. They spent

many hours doing this stuff and you know

it's kind of how they saw themselves as

a creator of stuff for this game. In a

lot of ways it's kind of like an

ecological pyramid and the numbers kind

of decrease as you go up. But there's

also a base to that pyramid that's

supporting the upper people. The

creators the very skilled people who are

making cool things are supported by this

very wide base of casual players.

There's flow within this ecology of

recognition. the casual players are

saying, "Oh, that person's stuff is the

best, or this is the coolest website."

And that's what was fueling the people

building these things. They just liked

having that recognition.

That whole thing has given rise to

fairly large online communities around

games. And these communities, a lot of

times, the people involved these

communities don't even play the game

anymore. That's actually kind of

interesting to me is that the people

that were doing the Sims for instance,

some of them were running big websites,

creating all this stuff and they hadn't

played the game in, you know, months or

years, you know, but still these are

people they knew, they had

relationships, they had a place in this

community, they had a recognition, they

had uh reputation and for a lot of

people this, you know, these games

become kind of a hook into a social

network of sorts or different types of

social networks. And there are other

games that are more competitive where

they're actually playing, you know,

professional sports like in these games

and their whole leagues and things like

that. So these games for a lot of people

became a doorway into these communities

which now becomes a very integral part

of their identity, which is kind of a

different thing than having the game

just be focused on what the player's

doing in the game. But now the game is

kind of part of how they think about

themselves and how they present

themselves to the world.

I've heard a lot of stories from players

about how they've taken their game

experiences and how it's, you know,

changed their life. Uh for some people,

they became storytellers. You know, they

started making a few stories either

machinima or whatever, uploaded it and a

lot of people liked it and love their

style or the stories they told and so it

kind of really pushed them into creative

writing or filmm. Other people I've

talked to a lot of people actually who

played some city went into civil

engineering you know just because they

enjoyed dealing with that kind of

system. Other people that have gone into

biology because of you know semant

things like that. So sometimes it's

motivational and in fact in education I

think the fundamental issue we have in

education isn't so much how we teach

kids but it's how we motivate kids. If

you can get a kid motivated in a subject

they have plenty of resources you know

to go learn it on their own. Uh, in

fact, you know, I have three boys at

home and they're learning more on

YouTube right now than they are in

school by far. And they're following

their own interests. You know, once they

get motivated, you know, my 8-year-old

wants to learn about Minecraft and he

finds these Minecraft videos and he can

learn at his own pace exactly what he

wants to learn. So, once you can get

them motivated about something, uh, just

get out of the way, basically. Uh, I

think that's the key.

One thing that game designers really

should know is that, you know, it's

about the player. You know, it's a

player centered experience and the

player is the one driving that

experience. You know, it's the

difference between being on a roller

coaster and being in a car behind the

steering wheel. Uh, now that player,

because they're holding the steering

wheel, they're responsible for where

they go. they have choice, they have uh

decisions to make and because of that

they take ownership and that totally

changes their relationship to whatever

it is. You know, the fact that they were

the ones that decided to steer left or

right and because it went off the cliff,

it was their fault or because they, you

know, won the lottery, they did it

because they picked those numbers. So, I

think that uh that's the first and

foremost thing is that when somebody

feels like they're in control of a

process, um they own it and it now has a

fundamentally more personal connection

to them than something that's one

sizefits-all. Here's the ride. Get on

it. Hope you enjoy it.

Flow is kind of a state that the player

can get into. And I think of it as

basically something that's right at the

limit of your abilities. Uh it's pushing

you mentally, you know, but it's not too

easy, not too hard. If it's too hard, it

seems random. It seems arbitrary. It's

frustrating. Uh if it's too easy, it's

predictable. It's boring. Flow is

putting you right on that edge of your

abilities and really testing them. I

used to actually race cars and there was

kind of a rule of thumb in racing that

if you didn't crash 10% of the time, you

weren't trying hard enough. You need to

design the game such that failure is

interesting and understandable. so that

you go back and say, "Aha, now I need to

avoid the turtles or whatever it is in

the game. And then you kind of build and

grow that model, but also you're

building your ability to problem solve

and strategize. Every player is going to

be different. Different abilities,

different skill sets. Uh, in a lot of

ways, you want to make the game such

that the player is the one adjusting the

difficulty. You know, they can choose to

go a little bit further, try for this

harder thing or stick with the easy

stuff until they're more comfortable.

So, in some sense, a lot of it can be

kind of player paced. Uh, there are more

advanced systems that are called DDA or

dynamic difficulty adjustment where the

computer behind the scenes is kind of

watching what the player's doing, and if

they're failing too much, the computer

can actually lower the difficulty level

or increase it, you know, if they're not

being challenged enough. But in a lot of

games, you know, by giving the player

enough freedom, but also enticing them

to try for the hard things. You know, if

you try for this harder thing, you might

get this bigger reward. So, at that

point, the player can kind of choose

their own level and put themsel in the

flow state.

There is a whole topic known as

failure-based learning you know and you

know we have this you know failure is a

loaded term and that we think of no

failure is bad I don't want to fail uh

there was a great story I heard it was a

art teacher in an art class it was

actually a pottery class and at the

beginning of his class the beginning of

the year he did divided the class into

two halves

And the first half he said, "Okay, your

final grade is going to be based upon

one pot that you make. I want you to

make the best pot you can possibly make,

and your grade is going to be based upon

that." The other half of the class, he

said, "Okay, your grade is going to be

based on how many pots you make. I don't

care how bad they are, just the more you

make, the better your grade." At the end

of the year, of course, it turns out

that the half of the class that was

building the most pots were also

building the best ones by far. They had

built so many bad pots and had iterated

so many times. They learned very rapidly

and by the end of the class they were

building these amazing pots. Whereas the

other half that was spending all their

time thinking about the one pot that

they were going to build you know never

got anywhere. So it was the failure that

accelerated their learning on the other

half. You know when players play games

again they are failing most of the time.

And again, if you can make that

understandable, humorous, enjoyable in

some way,

then that can be an enjoyable process,

especially when you get past that first

failure to the next level.

pass it on.

So, as a designer, we're constructing

this middle model in the player, and

it's important that we ramp that model

up smoothly and gradually for the

player. You don't want to pile all this

complexity on them right at the

beginning of the game. It's

overwhelming. to actually present them a

simpler model. They can start building

from that simple model layers and layers

of complexity onto it in their head as

they encounter more and more things in

the game either through you know more

elaborate uh world items, monsters,

opponents, abilities, tools, whatever.

So the designer in some sense is

responsible for ramping that model in

the player's head. Now, when you're

playing an interactive experience,

you're actually going through this set

of kind of nested loops of success and

failure. When you first start playing

Mario, you start mashing the buttons and

you find out that that button makes him

jump. This control makes him move, you

know, side to side. Uh, about 10 seconds

for you to kind of figure that out. So,

there's a kind of 10 seconds I don't

know how to control Mario. Then, I

succeed and finally know how to control

him, which brings me kind of the next

level of interaction, which is maybe a

more a minute. I start encountering

objects in the world. Is that good? Is

that bad? I learned from that. And then

you go from kind of the very tactical,

very granular to longer and longer loops

of success and failure. Now, at every

level, you're probably going to

encounter failure. And the failure

actually is something that uh most

people are spending most of their time

in a game failing really uh at different

ways in different loops here. And it's

not that you don't want the player to

encounter failure, but you want them to

understand the failure and build a model

around that failure so that next time

they will succeed. That's part of the

motivation is now I understand that

that's good and that's bad. Next time I

will not get stuck by that. Let me uh

show you an example of that on the

whiteboard here

in a game like the Sims. You know,

basically you have little characters

that you're controlling here and uh

initially you need to understand first

of all just how to make them move and

walk around and interact with things,

you know. So in some sense that's kind

of like the very first game loop we're

dealing with here. Um on one side of

that you know is failure

and you know this is me not being able

to control my character and once I learn

how to make them walk around interact

with things you know then I've succeeded

and uh this is you know it's called

interaction loop you know after that you

know I start dealing with they have

these little needs they get hungry they

get tired they want social they want

entertainment and those things fail so

right off the bat you know they're

sitting there and they're crashing on

energy, they're bored, they're basically

unhappy. And so the next level loop I

really have to kind of do is figure out

how to bring their happiness up. So

that's kind of like the happy loop. And

that's a little bit longer time scale.

You know, that takes several minutes

within the Sims. And again, you know,

there's kind of a success side to that

and a failure side to that loop. Now,

there also things, you know, within

these loops and we kind of keep going.

You know, the next one might be

economic. at some point they want to

start improving their house, getting a

job, getting skills, you know, so let's

call that jobs, you know, and that's an

even longer loop here. Uh, but a lot of

games like the Sims or creative games,

you know, also involve uh basically

orthogonal creativity, you know, so in

addition to playing the game, in

addition to kind of dealing with all

these game loops, um, I'm doing just

weird stuff like telling a story with

this or trying to replicate my family or

just exploring, seeing, I wonder if my

Sim can do that. And so there are

probably, you know, other loops that are

uh in a different dimension really than

this, kind of more like there that don't

have a lot to do with me succeeding on

the overall game success curve, but have

more to do with the player exploring

their own creativity, their own

expressiveness. And some players, you

know, get totally invested in this uh

and eventually start ignoring that, you

know, but most games have some version

of these different loops, you know, and

it might be uh learn to shoot, then

learn to unlock the door, then learn to

defeat the evil boss at the end. You

know, this is pretty much, you know, the

same graph of the player building up

this mental model. So the players, you

know, model, the player is up here

controlling this game and, you know, in

their head, you know, they're basically

building this mental model, you know,

kind of one layer at a time

of your game. And those layers of that

model are very much aligned to these

interaction layers.

as players are going through these loops

and slowly building this model, you

know, uh, you know, again, really it's

that most of what they're going to

experience is failure again and again

and again, which doesn't sound very fun,

but it's the game designer's job to

present that in a way that it's

entertaining and informative and that

it's not frustrating. Uh, I don't want

to be failing on, you know, exactly the

same thing over and over and over,

especially when I know why I'm failing.

uh some games, you know, some platform

games, you have to time it exactly right

and it's really hard and those kind of

get very frustrating, you know, when you

know that you have to acquire the skill

and you can't quite acquire it. So,

you're not failing uh because you don't

know what you need to do. It's just that

it's so hard for you to kind of get into

that skill set, that sweet spot for some

people, it becomes frustrating. So, when

somebody fails in a game, you want it to

be understandable. You want to be

something that they can overcome once

they understand it. Uh also again humor

you know can be a great tool uh to

alleviate the frustration. You know when

somebody fails in a certain very basic

thing in the game. Uh sometimes you want

to actually have a variety of failure

states that become humorous. So at least

when they're failing again and again and

again um it's not exactly the same

repetition over and over. You know you

might just have different animations for

the same failure. Uh but again humor I

think can be a great tool here. But um

if presented right, you know, players

get very motivated when they understand

why they failed to then go back and do

it again.

The kind of games I tend to make uh tend

to be more system level games and you

know they frequently like you know Sim

City or the Sims involve you

constructing something that you know

gets more and more elaborate over time.

uh as you achieve success and your city

grows or your Sims, you know, get more

stuff in their house, uh you're adding

more complexity to their world, uh you

know, in the Sims, there's kind of this

promise that, oh, you buy this crap for

your Sims and it'll make them happy. Get

them a big screen TV here or better bed

there. But in some sense, as you acquire

more and more of these items, they

become time bombs. Each one of these

things has a failure state or some

maintenance requirement or whatever. So,

as you fill your house with all this

junk, what you're really doing is these

things are potential time syncs down the

road which add complexity to their world

and make it much more difficult to play

the game. Same in Sim City, you know,

first you're just, you know, zoning a

few little plots of land and building a

few roads and you see a few things pop

up and pretty soon they need power.

Okay, you give them power. Now they need

water. Now they want a school. Now they

want a hospital. Now, you know, and so

as they make progress in the game and

the system is growing, the complexity is

growing as well. And so it's a very

natural smooth ramp in complexity. It's

not like, okay, you finished level one,

now here's level two where we're adding

two more rules. It's, you know, very

smoothly based upon and in some sense

the player's asking for it. You know, as

the player, you know, gets their city to

that size, of course, they need a

hospital now. So it totally fits in. It

doesn't feel arbitrary either. It kind

of feels natural in that way.

It's not just how much difficulty is in

the path, but also how many paths are

there. You know, I think that the really

interesting games are ones that allow

different paths towards some kind of

success. And in particular, the kind of

games I do don't even make success that

explicit. You know, in the Sims, you can

decide you want them to have a good job

or want them to be happy. Same in Sim

City, you can want, you know, the

biggest city you can build or the

happiest residence or least crime. So in

some sense, the player is choosing the

goal state. Now, each one of these goal

states is going to have kind of a

different path of difficulty. And so for

me, it's more about there's a landscape

here of paths that the player can take.

And each one has different peaks, but

none of these have a cliff where you hit

the cliff and all a sudden, you know,

now it's really hard to get up. You

know, they all have kind of different

moderations of slope up those

achievement peaks. And that's something

that, you know, again, it's really hard.

It's an emergent property. So, it's very

hard to just say, "Okay, here's how we

code that." Uh, a lot of times players

will find exploits around it or it'll

turn out that, you know, again, pressing

the red button is not that obvious. So,

this is again something we actually will

capture metrics on. We will actually

have a lot of people as we start getting

more and more testers, we're capturing

metrics. How long is somebody spinning

in that stage or this stage? How many

people are failing on this point or that

point? And so, that's stuff that you all

want to make fairly parametric that you

can adjust fairly granularly in testing.

Rewards in the game can come in many

forms. Uh, you know, there's just the

advancement, how far did I get in the

game? Or there's special abilities that

you might gain that now allow you to

achieve things you could not achieve

before. Uh, I think sometimes rewards

are a little uh overly relied upon. You

know, when you have power-ups and stuff

in a game, it's just it gets, you know,

wrote, boring, a little too obvious. I

think a lot of the really interesting

player rewards are things that they

think they came up with themselves or

they discovered this thing in the game.

Uh and I think discovery is a huge part

of this is that if you leave areas of

the game uh that are maybe closed off to

the player, but at some point you just

open one of these little gates and let

them see that hey, there's a lot of

stuff hidden in here if you look a

little bit deeper or try a little bit

harder. And players love that. you see

things, you know, people playing Grand

Theft Auto or whatever, and they manage

to get on top of places they weren't

supposed to be able to or do things,

exploits. Uh then of course they they

make a movie of it and it becomes kind

of a machinimo of sorts. I remember back

in Sim City 2000, which was a very old

game, uh, we had, you know, of course,

landscape, terrain, rivers, you know,

uh, but we' actually programmed in that,

you know, once in a very very seldom

while, like if you were playing the game

for 100 hours, it might happen for, you

know, a few seconds in 100 hours. We

actually had this little monster appear

in the water, pop his head out. And

there was a kind of rumors amongst the

players that I think I saw a monster in

the water and no, no, no, I've never

seen that. Somebody once eventually got

a screenshot of it. It was like this

very hard to achieve reward just kind of

capturing a screenshot of this one

little thing and it didn't help them in

the game at all. But they were so

motivated to do this and capture it that

um it became actually a lot of players

were trying to discover and take a

picture of Loch Ness Monster.

Rewards are just a mechanism in a game

that you put in there, you know, maybe

to help guide a player in a certain

direction or achieve certain levels.

But the incentive in a game really is

coming from the process of the player

playing that game, whatever that is, you

know, and I think that's something

that's coming internally from the

player, not externally from the game

designer, but the process that they're

going through. And it might be a

creative process. It might be a

skill-based process. It might be a

social, you know, kind of challenging

process. That's something that the

player um kind of innately has a desire

to achieve. And that's a much much

broader thing. And it's a much deeper

thing, too. You know, I think that's why

people really will get really hooked on

a game is their own internal incentive.

You know, I want to get to level 30 in

Warcraft or this or that. They come up

with their own goals really for that. uh

rewards in a game are really like these

little mechanisms the you know game

designer puts in there to kind of

moderate the game play. So I'd say

they're very very different things and

the player incentive is really the much

more important one.

As a designer, you're putting a player

into this world of yours. And through

their interactions and freedom and

agency that you give them in your world,

you're actually kind of developing a

language with the player. The players

are basically learning this language and

playing the game. And it's the designer

that's creating the world that is

defined by that language.

There's kind of an interesting aspect to

games which is and this really this idea

was way before computer games of the

magic circle. And this is the idea

especially in social games that you

have, you know, kids come together and

they decide they're going to play

whatever hopscotch. And the players of

the game are basically now within this

thing we call the magic circle. they are

bound by the rules of that game. Other

people might be outside observing

watching the game and they're not in

that circle. In some sense, you're kind

of building a temporary community with

the players within that game and they're

all basically bound by the game rules

and living in that world together. Uh

this is in some sense one of the

fundamental parts of game language. You

know, are you playing or not? You know,

who's playing in that game right now?

as a language within games. You know, I

think that we do have the same types of

grammar that real language has. In the

world, things are basically kind of

nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Uh I might

go out the door and see this dog barking

at me. The dog, you know, is basically

the noun. It's the thing. The verb, you

know, might be bite. You know, I'm

afraid he's going to bite me. You know,

adjective is mad. He's a mad dog. He's,

you know, barking at me. based upon that

you know I will you know decide me run

fast away from the dog whatever but you

can come almost interpret everything in

the world according to these you know

parts of speech in a game players will

encounter the same thing you know what

is that what can it do what is my agency

allow me to do against it and so that's

the kind of language that the players

need to kind of learn in your game very

rapidly and feel very comfortable and

almost transparent in learning that when

you're designing you know what the

language of your game is the nouns verbs

adjectives uh of course it depends

entirely early on kind of the setting in

which you're placing a player into. Uh

you can kind of describe a setting or

show a player a screen and kind of tell

them, you know, what would you imagine

wanting to do here? You know, I think

that's a good starting point. As a

player, what are the things I think I

should be able to do? What things occur

to me, you know, right off the bat? And,

you know, you can actually just talk to

people and show them, you know, kind of

the setting and and see what they say.

See what, you know, the most common

answers are as they move through your

space, however that space is kind of

displayed. Um things will occur to them.

Oh, I wish I could do that. Can I move

this? Can I pick that up? Uh, can I put

something there? You know, and so for a

lot of people, it's just going to be,

you know, once they kind of immerse

themselves in this little world, they're

going to be a set of things that they

would like to try. And if you give them

a goal state, say, okay, you know, try

to do this, it's going to be much more

specific. Oh, okay. Well, in that case,

can I move? Can I open that door? Do I

need a key? That's where you're going to

start deciding, okay, how much freedom,

you know, or agency does the player have

in this world? Uh, what are the things

which are you going to manipulate? And

what kind of interface are we going to

basically give the player so they do

that very naturally and you know you

also need to present these things in the

world you know such that it's fairly

obvious that these are nouns they're you

can manipulate or part of the game world

you know part of the game actions and I

think that you're informing the player

about these things in a lot of different

ways sometimes it's just the art style

these things stand out a little bit

against the background and so they're

important a lot of times you'll have

like the background trees and landscape

is a little more muted whereas the

foreground ground things like maybe

tanks and jeeps are more uh saturated in

color. So it could just be artistic. It

could be the way you highlight these

things, you know, the way they animate,

you know. So in some sense, you're kind

of informing what are the important, you

know, nouns in a scene by the visuals.

And the verbs, you know, are going to be

very dependent upon the interface and

the point of view of the game, whether

it's first person, third person,

whatever. Um, for instance, you know, I

show somebody a terrain and say, okay,

you're going to build a city here, you

know, and ask them what's the very first

thing that would occur to you. People

might say, you know, I don't know, roads

or houses or whatever it is, but they'll

start telling you, you know, verbs that

they would, you know, expect to play

with in this playset. Uh, if it's a

first-person game, you know, and they're

trying to escape something, they're

going to be looking, you know, for

doors, keys, you know, a whole set of

things will occur to them and a whole

set of verbs will occur to them, you

know, and at some point you're going to

start developing this language, you

know, verbs, nouns, and adjectives.

Also part of the language uh metaphors

are very very useful uh as a tool for

designers so the player can come in and

have at least some grounding for what

kind of a system they're dealing with

you know and even if it's not direct uh

it can be an indirect metaphor command

and conquer which is one of the old

games I used to play a lot basically me

and my friend used to play with our

little model tanks and make up rules and

have these whole little battles with our

little toy tanks and it It was basically

Command and Conquer brought to life.

Game like Quake or Doom or one of these

first prison shooters. It's kind of like

kids running around playing Cowboys and

Indians. It's the same basic activity

and you know when you get in there, oh

yeah, this feels just like that.

The Sims I used to refer to as

dollhouse.

Really? That's the metaphor for the

Sims. When you see the Sims, okay, it's

a little house with little characters

and it pretty much is like kind of an

animated brought to life dollhouse. When

I was building Sim City, I really kind

of felt like in some sense it was a

digital train set. You know, people

these model train sets, these little

recreate little towns. And I had a

little train set, several train sets

when I was a kid. And I wanted Sim City

to kind of have that feel of crafting

this little world that came to life,

this little automa. But I designed it. I

built it. It had dynamics and it could,

you know, live or grow or die. Uh but

for me that that metaphor of the train

set was kind of like a guiding principle

you know for Sim City and even when it

came to how we visualize it and how we

the graphics look we try to kind of make

it look like a little train set. I

reference a lot these kind of childhood

experiences you know whether it's you

know cowboys and Indians or playing with

model trains. Uh these aren't things

that you know were invented during my

childhood. These are actually you know

activities that were probably around for

hundreds if not thousands of years.

people were building, you know, small

recreations of real spaces or playing

games where they ran around and, you

know, played tag or whatever. Uh, these

are kind of basic aspects of play. A lot

of these dynamics and activities and

thought processes that people are doing

in digital entertainment, digital games

are things that they've done before in

other formats, you know, before they had

computers and all that stuff. I'm

certainly not advocating that every idea

that you come up with, you know, has to

be have some precedent, you know, either

in your childhood or in history or

gaming in general. Uh in fact I'm sure

there are a lot of very cool unique

experiences that you know are totally

unique to this medium that we are have

yet to discover.

As you start to refine your prototypes,

you'll reach a stage where you need to

define an aesthetic. The visual

aesthetic is going to add a whole new

layer of meaning and depth to your game.

This is one of your primary ways of

communicating to the player. Finding

your own style is up to you as the

designer.

I would tend to

approach, you know, finding, discovering

an art style, I think, very much in the

same way that I would approach, you

know, game concept research. uh

basically go out and look, you know,

there are a million, you know,

references out there uh not just games

obviously, you know, back in historical

fine art or in whatever. You can just

imagine all these different areas to

grab visual inspiration from. You know,

we got a huge amount of material

inspiration from those comic book covers

from the ' 40s. And that was a really

rich body of work, you know, that had a

very cohesive style and feel to it.

uh you know sometimes it'll be something

that you find like that um that you kind

of reference and say we want to kind of

feel like that. Uh other times it might

be something kind of up and coming. It's

funny how even you know nowadays I see

kids playing these retro games or they

play Minecraft you know which is

incredibly you know basic visuals but

you know like Lego it has become a style

to them. you go and look at these Lego

movies which are great, you know, and

it's amazing that they make these

amazingly entertaining, very visually

rich movies, you know, out of a Lego

world, you know, rendered, of course,

animated, you know, much more

differently you can do with real Legos,

but yet uh as a style, it's um it's

delightful. So, I think that there are a

lot of things that may not obviously

right off the bat feel like, oh, that's

a good visual style, but uh if you think

about certain things a little more

deeply to the next level, you know, how

could that be a style? You know, what

would it look like? How would it

animate? Uh you might discover regions

that are very unique. I kind of like the

games that I work on to have almost a

toy- like feel to them. you know, like

bringing up a little bit more saturation

on the colors. Uh maybe things being a

little bit more abstracted,

feeling a little more again, you know,

kind of model train like uh to me that

kind of makes it feel more playful and

approachable. Uh one of the things I

really enjoy looking at is things like

tilt shift photography, you know, where

they're actually taking pictures of the

real world and now making it look like a

model by changing the depth of field

and, you know, saturation and a few

other things. It's funny how you can

take one of those photos, the original

photo, and it's of some downtown area,

do tilt shift version of it, and now it

looks like something that I want to

touch and grab and play with and

manipulate. Instantly, I have this

instinct to go in and start imagining

things that I would want to do with it.

In some sense, it's an invitation to

agency. You know, it's saying, "This is

a toy. This is a model. It's here for

you to manipulate, play with, go at it."

you know, so I think in a subtle way to

me by making it feel a little more

toy-like or modellike, um, you're kind

of getting the player into that mindset

that this is something for you to

interact with, not something for you to

just sit back and look at.

One of the things I did on Spore that I

really enjoyed, uh, and this is in the

fairly early stages, is I went back and

I was collecting, just downloading

hundreds of these images that were

appearing on the Pope comic books back

in the 50s and 40s, and these are like

science fiction stories or, you know,

whatever. And it was always like, you

know, some weird tentacled alien holding

a blonde who's passed out and spaceship

in the background. the things in those

images, not just the way they were

rendered, but even just the items. You

know, there was usually some kind of

alien, some kind of spacecraft, some

alien planet, some muscle clad

astronaut. But I loved looking at just

the style of those comic book covers,

you know, in fact, we printed them all

out, put them all over the office, and

it kind of became a guiding principle

for the entire game, and it gave it a

consistency, and almost, you know, I

don't even think it would be nostalgic

for any kid playing this. They probably

didn't even see those covers, but yet

there was almost a whimsy to it that it

brought into the game at a very subtle

level.

The visual style within my games, you

know, initially it was on these 8bit

computers and, you know, we were

counting how many pixels we had, how

many colors and it was really severely

limited. Over time, you know, those

limitations eased up more and more until

at some point we were getting high

powered graphics card with pixel shaders

and whatnot. Uh, in which case, you

know, we got to the point where we could

achieve pretty high levels of realism,

which I didn't really feel like I

needed. But on the other hand, we were

able to use these things in ways that

were kind of unexpected. Like for

instance, in Spora,

one of our programmers uh discovered

that um I think it was Kate Compton that

she could use the pixel shaders in the

graphics card to actually simulate

turbulence on a gas giant and she was

getting like these beautiful turbulence

patterns and it's just very simple

manipulations of the UV coordinates

within the graphics card. So I think

that those kind of opportunities, you

know, things that we never would have,

you know, if we had to just do that from

scratch, calculate it all out, uh we

never would have done it. uh but also

you know things more like getting the

player more involved and more creative.

So the fact that we could do procedural

animation in Spore was really a result

of the horsepower and the programming uh

and it reflected itself in the fact that

you know the graphics looked in the

style but the really important part was

the player created it you know and you

know at that point it doesn't even

really matter so much what style it is

if the player created it it's a whole

different ballgame and so I think I've

been uh on the art side you know kind of

more in the direction of what can we do

to have the player more responsible more

creative more uh involved olved in these

assets, you know, in a way that where

it's natural and fun.

Well, I've actually had uh the luck and

privilege to work with really great art

directors, you know, and generally for

me, it's more been a matter of their

vision bringing really good alternatives

to me, you know, so I usually have two

or three really good alternatives to

choose from. And I don't feel like I can

really take the responsibility for the

quality of how that ended up because I

really think it was my art director

that, you know, had a lot more to do

with it than I did. Uh, but in general,

you know, when confronted with

alternatives, you know, I would tend to

say, okay, which one of these feels more

playful to me? Which one of these feels

like something I would want to go in and

pick up and grab and manipulate? That's

the way I would just kind of view it as

a designer. When we started working on

the very early levels of the spore, the

very first level is microscopic, a

little creature swimming around in a

drop of water. My art director I worked

with for many years, Ocean Quigley,

Ocean and I both as kids had

microscopes. You know, I still have a

microscope and we started thinking,

okay, what would this look like under a

microscope, under a slide? And Ocean

would actually kind of prototype that.

And there's this thing when you have the

old microscopes that, you know, as you

move the focus lever just a little bit,

you know, things here were now going out

of focus and things deeper were going

into focus. You're actually manipulating

the Z plane where the focus was set. And

so you were actually able to move in

that third dimension, you know, through

a drop of water or whatever it was. And

uh we both thought about that. And the

notion went back and found a way to

render it such that he could take any of

the planes and focus or defocus it at,

you know, at his whim. And we could have

several of these in a row. So you could

have, you know, layers of this that were

out of focus, but only one layer that

was really in focus. That actually kind

of brought up the idea that, okay, maybe

as you're playing this cellular game

that you're actually getting larger and

larger, in which case you'd be moving

from one plane to the next. So as your

thing grew, we would now defocus the

layer that you were on and bring into

focus the layer that was above you,

which were much bigger things that you

just saw as fuzzy blobs before. Um, then

as soon as you grew to that size, they

became uh, you know, in focus and now

part of your game world, you know, so

you were only interacting with that

layer that was in focus. So that was

kind of a back and forth thing that

Ocean and I did for a few weeks, you

know, kind of coming up with and then

realizing that idea, but it became kind

of very fundamental to the way that part

of the game worked.

Finding a good art director is probably

going to be very similar to finding a

good sound director. Uh you want

somebody who listens first of all and

tries to understand you know your

vision. Um somebody who can uh come up

with ideas that you can't. you know,

maybe go off in creative areas that they

are aware of because of their specific

expertise, you know, whether it be sound

or art or whatever. Uh, bring them back

to you in a format, you know, to where

they offer you some choice. And, um, I

think that there's no, you know, one

sizefits-all. Sometimes, you know,

you'll want a very very particular style

as a designer and you don't really want

somebody giving you five other styles

when you know you want that style. In

which case, you might, you know, look

for somebody who specializes in that.

Uh, but other times, you know, you might

be a little more open to, you know,

should it be more like this or more like

that? Should it be more Twilight, more

realistic? Should it be darker? Should

it be more humorous? Uh, I think that if

you can speak in that kind of a

language, you know, to anybody on your

team, no matter what they're doing, you

know, that I really think we want to go

for humor and whimsy here or dark and

gothic here. Um, if they can now

interpret that and come back to you with

really good alternatives that feel right

to you, uh, I mean, that's how you know

you've got a good one. You know, if

you're telling them you want to go in

this style, but they keep pushing you to

Disney, uh, then, you know, they've kind

of got their own agenda. They've got

their own, you know, dogma. It also

depends on the size of your team. You

know, if it's a very small team, your

art director is also going to be one of

your artists, maybe your only artist.

Uh, if you're on a big team, the art

director is really going to be more

managing a team of artists. And so, your

art director will have the opportunity

to find the right artist to match that

style for you. Really, you want somebody

that's going to mesh with you in

particular. Uh, I think that somebody

who might be a great art director for me

might be a really bad choice for

somebody else. So, you know, first and

foremost, you have to have really kind

of enjoy collaborating with them. You

know, and I think that's true of, you

know, most of your team that these are

going to be people you're going to be

working alongside of for a long time.

You're going to be putting a lot of time

and passion and effort into this. And if

you don't actually really enjoy being

around these people and enjoy working

with them, uh it's going to be work, you

know, but if you really enjoy the

process of being with these people and

collaborating and creating something

with them, uh it's going to be something

that uh you do for free.

There are tools or mechanisms or

patterns of interaction that you can use

that you give the player this kind of

creativity, this kind of affordance, uh

this kind of agency underneath the hood.

you know, the game is actually doing

some causal connection between when the

player does that, this happens, or

here's the limitation. And it really

kind of comes down to an affordance or

an action that the player is allowed in

a game and how the game responds to that

action. And it kind of defines what the

challenge is.

If it's a locked door, what is the

puzzle or what are the items needed to

unlock that door?

If it's an exploration thing, what path

you have to take through this maze to

get to the exit? If it's a resource

allocation thing, it's what are the

basic resources? How are they being

consumed? How are they being earned?

Each one of these is kind of what we

call a game mechanic. They're like

little closed system uh of somehow

interaction, balance, uh economy that

you can connect together to make a

larger interactive experience.

mechanic is some kind of process going

on between the player and the game uh

that you might attach metrics to. You

might attach a leaderboard or scoring

system to that. Uh but once you have

that that process going on, you can now

use that process either to moderate the

player's progress. Uh you can use that

process to, you know, add difficulty. uh

you can use that process to make the

world more interesting, more mysterious,

more uh kind of tangible. You know,

there are a lot of ways to use these

kind of what I'd call like

microprocesses to build up that larger

process of here's what it feels like to

be in that world. Uh in some sense, I

think of this as the dynamics, you know,

as a player's doing things in the game,

how is that game responding to the

player? You know, what is the

conversation that the player's having

with the game system? And each one of

these mechanics is kind of one type of

uh phrase or interaction or you know uh

word the player can kind of express

within that system against the game and

the game will respond in certain ways

and the player is kind of learning to

kind of uh converse with the game system

through these mechanics.

When we talk about game mechanics, you

know, again, to me, these are parts,

okay? And, uh, you know, it could be a

part that's been used many, many times,

uh, or it could be, you know, a brand

new part that you've invented all on

your own. Um, and to me, you know, what

really matters is the whole that's built

out of these parts. uh you know so I

might have let's say you know a fuel

injection unit and an engine and a

differential and wheels and I start

putting these together to make some kind

of a car and maybe I decide I want a

flux converter you know and I'm going to

invent a flux converter and stick it in

there uh that's great you know uh but

what really matters is the entire car

you know how's that car going to drive

or not um you know with the existing

mechanics that we have right now uh

obviously we can build, you know, a huge

number of different kind of interactive

experiences. Uh, but every now and then,

you know, you might want that flux

converter. You might want some, you

know, brand new thing. I don't think

it's that, uh, you just kind of come up

with a cool mechanic and say, how do I

use it? I think it's more like, here's

an interactive experience that I want to

create now, what do I need to create it?

And if it turns out that, you know,

there's something brand new, you know,

there's basically something you need in

this that uh you cannot figure out an

existing mechanic that will provide

that, that's when you go off and make

your own. I am, you know, very uh happy

to go off and make my own mechanics if I

need to. Um I don't even really think

about it so much in terms of, you know,

this is a new mechanic or not. It's more

like this is the right mechanic, you

know, whether it was invented by me or

somebody else. You know, I just I think

there's always kind like the right part

to fill in that gap in your design.

If we talk about rules for a game, I

think that they're almost like two kinds

of rules. You know, they're the really

overt rules that you want to inform the

player about. You know, you need to

escape the dungeon or, you know, this is

a torch, you know, whatever it is. You

know, certain things you're very clear

with the player about right off the bat.

you're going to say, "Okay, to control

your character, use the WASDY keys or

this or that." Uh, so again, some things

you're very overt about. Other things

that they discovered, you know, a trend

that started 10-15 years ago was that

part of the gameplay, the early gameplay

is the tutorial and you encounter

objects, you know, as part of directed

gameplay early on. And the game itself

is kind of teaching you how to use a

sword in Zelda, how to do this, how to

do that, how to cast a spell. But then

there are a lot of other ones that you

want to hide from the player that are

under the hood that become mysterious.

In a lot of ways you want your game

world to be kind of a black box at some

level. Uh and this is actually kind of

gets to the idea of emergence that uh a

lot of times somebody will look at a

system when people look at the

simulation of Sim City they start

imagining you know this ungodly

collection of mathematics and things

calculating this incredibly complicated

city. In fact it's far far simpler than

that you know in fact we found a fairly

nice emergent system. So, it was a

fairly simple set of rules that kind of

emerge into the complexity of a city

simulation. Uh, if players, you know,

saw under the hood, in some sense, it

would kind of destroy a lot of the

illusion of complexity there, the

illusion of life. Uh, it's, you know,

very similar to the same reason why we

didn't have the Sims speak, you know, in

a known language because as soon as they

started repeating the same things over

and over, they would seem incredibly

simple and robotic. But when you

couldn't quite understand them, you tend

to read in a lot more. Uh there was this

thing that we started calling the

simulator effect uh after watching the

first, you know, kind of batch of

players playing Sim City a lot and then

some of our later games that they would

write letters to us. Oh, I love this

game. And they would describe stuff that

happened to them in the game and the

letters they were writing to us and they

would describe, you know, things like,

you know, the airplane crashed over here

and hit the power line and caused a

surge there and then this thing caught

on fire. And they would describe all

these causal linkages that did not exist

in the game. you know, I knew they did

not exist, but in the player's head,

they did, you know, and nothing about

the game uh dissuaded them from the

fact. And so, they were building up

their own models of the way this

simulator was working, you know, that

were very elaborate and interesting. And

that's when I kind of realized that

there's certain parts of a simulator

like that you want to keep a black box.

You know, the players, you know, can

actually imagine their own simulation

usually far more interesting than yours.

you know, as long as you present them

with enough scaffolding to build that in

their imagination. And so we ended up

calling that the simulator effect that

when players are imagining that your

your world, your simulation is more

detailed, more rich, more uh complicated

than it actually is, uh don't talk them

out of it. And so, you know, part of

exploring the world is in fact kind of

uncovering these loops of complexity and

these rules. And so part of learning the

rules of the game uh are actually

embedded in the game which is actually

very natural.

There's this thing called the Monte

Carlo method uh which is using chance

basically in the place of calculus. You

know a lot of things that would be

simulated in the natural world you know

we have established mathematics which is

linear calculus. Um, but it turns out

that for most of these things with a

computer, there's a whole another

approach that basically can solve the

same set of problems, which is basically

throwing darts at a dart board and you

have shapes on that dart board that are

about, you know, the right area. I'm

going to go to the whiteboard to kind of

give you a simple illustration of this.

And just to keep it very simple, you

know, let's assume that we have some

area and that we have within that area

some regions, you know, and maybe this

is the amount of area developed, you

know, in Sim City or the areas with

police coverage, whatever it is. Now,

um, normally if you wanted to measure

what percentage of this entire area is

occupied by these blobs, you know,

there's some very elaborate mathematics

kind of going down the calculus path

that you would use to measure that and

give you a pretty accurate answer. But

if you have a computer, you know, and

computers are very fast and good at just

doing simple things repetitively. It

turns out there's a much simpler

technique. And they call this the Monte

Carlo method, which is that we just sit

here and we just randomly throw darts at

this board, you know, and then we just

count over time how many of the darts

land inside of these areas and how many

land outside. And you know, you throw a

few hundred darts at there, you know,

and it turns out that, you know, let's

say out of a 100 darts, you know, 67

land outside of these zones and let's

say 33

land inside the zones. That's the basic

percentage. You basically that's 33% of

the area of that. This is the kind of,

you know, simple mathematics, you know,

that we use a lot in simulations. And so

this in fact is relying very much on

just probabilities. And it's uh the way

a lot of the emergence that we get out

of some of these systems works as well.

So from a design point of view, it's

amazing how you can build super simple

things like that in place of what used

to be very kind of elaborate

mathematics.

There's another kind of chance though

that I encounter as a designer which is

that a lot of times I'll be making

something doing prototypes whatever and

something just pops up unexpectedly you

know either we made a put a bug in the

program or it's not behaving the way I

thought or something uh happens that

surprises me and uh through pure chance

I might trip over some new mechanic or

some new feature or that reminds me of

this let's try that you And this is like

serendipity. This is me, you know, kind

of accidentally discovering something

very cool, you know, either in

prototyping or testing or just even on

paper as I'm kind of thinking through a

design that causes me to go off in a

totally different direction, you know,

tangent to where I was going initially.

Now, this is all from the designer's

point of view, you know, kind of how you

use probability to your advantage. Um,

you know, from the players point of

view, you know, again, uh, there'll be a

lot of things happening in your game

that might be purely random. You know,

and you know that they're random. The

players are always going to be trying to

assign causality to something. You know,

if all a sudden that torch goes out or

there's a sound over there, the player

in their head is going to be building

some model of, you know, what caused

that to happen. Was it something I did?

Is it some indicator? Is it

foreshadowing of some event? And I think

that um you actually want a kind of a

balance there a little bit, you know,

kind of signal the noise so that there's

some stuff happening in the world that

again remains kind of a black box to

them. whether you know from their point

of view it's random chance or it's some

elaborate deep you know behavior of your

you know your world um the player is

going to assume it's some deep behavior

of your world I think in most cases but

if it's something that the player did

and you want clear feedback that the

player did this and the door unlocked uh

that's where you have to make sure

you're getting above that that noise

level and it's totally signal to the

player and so you need to make sure that

the feedback you're giving to the player

is signal and not noise against this

kind of random world churning

Well, because my games don't have an

overt instinct,

uh, you know, I don't think it really

changes the nature of wanting to present

an interesting, challenging kind of

creative world. Uh, I don't think that,

you know, I think that's kind of almost

world building is almost a different

kind of uh level to that. uh the chance

and probability

um for a player, you know, again, it can

depend on the game. If you know, you're

playing casino games, you know, you're

kind of expecting these things to be

based around chance and probability. Uh

if you're playing something like a

first-person shooter, you're kind of

imagining that, you know, if I aim at

that guy, it's going to hit that guy

that, you know, I don't want a chance of

having a dud bullet or my bullet, you

know, going off target, you know, just

through random chance. So, I want my

actions to be clearly, you know, kind of

almost deterministic in that sense. Uh,

so I think it depends on the feature of

your world as to what you're talking

about. If it's something like Sim City

and you know when does a fire occur? You

know that actually is a little bit of a

combination. It's a combination of how

much have I done with my fire services,

but there's still a chance. It's

changing the probability of a fire

actually happening. It could still

happen even if I have good fire

coverage, but uh the chance is lower.

And you know, for the player, you know,

that's kind of the expectation coming

into a world like that. And so really, I

think at that point, you're really kind

of falling back into what feels like an

expectation on the player. You don't

want the world to feel like, you know,

arbitrary things are happening for

absolutely no reason. You know, so even

when a fire occurs in Sim City when

there's a low probability, the player

can imagine that occurring. You know,

it's not an unimaginable situation. What

you really don't want to do is you don't

want the game to feel capriccious in

terms of killing the player for no

obvious reason. You know, that, you

know, is really major no. The player

always wants to feel like their success

or failure is coming back to their

agency. You know, it's their fault. They

are the ones responsible for their own

fate.

depending on the kind of game you're

doing, you know, it does put the player

into a certain kind of mindset and they

build a certain kind of model whether

it's like a first-person kind of game

with exploration and combat or it's a

third person game with resource

management. Uh, you know, they all at

some level share a set of features,

share, you know, certain amounts of

player agency. Uh, they share world

dynamics, you know, so that's the level

which these things are all pretty common

across there. But uh you know I think

there are so many game mechanics that

have been used and so many more yet to

be discovered. I think the designer will

develop an intuition for which one of

these things they want to put into their

pallet of tools and which ones they want

to become a master at because I think

that certain game designers you know get

very specialized and very good you know

within certain kind of mechanics using

certain parts to build their games. And

over time you know you'll start

expanding that palette you'll start

trying other ones. you'll play other

games, games that you would not normally

play, and just to kind of get a sense of

what those mechanics feel like. Is that

a tool that I use, a part that I can use

next time I build, you know, one of my

game engines? I think for most

designers, you know, get familiar, get

some mastery and skill at, you know,

using certain kind of mechanics, but at

the same time, always be looking at new

ones and trying to imagine, you know,

could I bring these into my toolbox?

A lot of aspiring game designers come to

me with ideas and their designs, and I'm

very familiar with kind of looking at

them with fresh eyes and maybe giving

them a different perspective on where

they might go with it. So, we've invited

an aspiring game designer to come share

a game she's currently working on. I'll

be looking at her game, trying to get a

sense of where she wants to go with it,

and giving her feedback on it.

So my is a sidescrolling puzzle

platformer.

Okay.

And the premise is that uh you play as

this woman named Nina who has been uh

stranded on this abandoned space colony

and she's trying to find the equipment

she needs to get back home.

Okay.

Um so the game play is definitely like a

traditional Metroid Via game.

All right. And the premise of a lot of

the upgrades are you're changing around

gravity.

Changing gravity.

Yes. So you can change it up, down,

left, right.

So you're jumping and the gravity allows

you Oh, let's take a look at it.

Sure. We can take a look here. Um, so as

you can see

under this giant room and you can change

gravity around.

Oh, you're changing the angle of

gravity.

Yes. Yeah.

Oh, I see. Okay.

So if you fall too far, you can die. So

that's kind of like the main thing. But

the camera doesn't rotate, so you have

to turn in your head. Okay.

Right.

All right.

So, at this point, she's just

So, you're actually pressing something

on here to change gravity. And you can

pick one of the four directions.

Yes.

Exactly.

Okay. I mean, right off the bat,

Mhm.

looking at this game, it looks cooler to

me now than when you first pitched it to

me just a few seconds ago.

Uh, you started by saying it's a

sidescrolling duh. Immediately in my

head, I think Mario, whatever. It brings

a lot of baggage.

Sure. Um, I think and I don't really

care about the character's name, but if

you say she's stranded on this ship

exploring it, but she gets all for

gravity, all a sudden that sounds kind

of interesting, intriguing, something

I've never heard. I think maybe to start

with that and seeing it now, it looks

just so much cooler to me.

Okay.

And I like the style a lot, too.

Thank you. Um,

yeah. So, the idea is you are running

around trying to find like scrap that

you need.

It's a bit dark and that's part of the

game mechanics is that you really need a

light to kind of see Yes.

things. So, one of the mechanics or one

of the things you're upgrading is that

eventually you'll find a light. You

don't always start with it. So, there's

like a lot of danger of just kind of

wandering around in the darkness.

In the dark. Okay. Yeah.

Mhm.

Um, now I'm not hearing any sound. Is

that just part of the game you haven't

developed yet,

right? Exactly.

Because I think when you're dealing with

limited perception like this flashlight,

sound is going to be a huge part of

that. You hear something scary or

creaking. You don't know if it's good or

bad. It might be a door. It might be a

monster. Who knows what? But I think,

you know, the sound is going to be just

as important as the visuals for a game

like this.

Oh, yeah. Definitely. Especially when

you're running around in the dark like

Exactly. And that's, you know, one of

your primary senses now.

So, yeah, for this puzzle specifically,

uh, you're supposed to like go up and

these like boxes will fall upward and

then you have to like race to finish the

other side before they fall back down.

Okay.

Um, so that would be a huge part where

sound is going to be like a

and it feels like you should do that

fairly soon because you obviously pretty

established here on the visuals and some

of the game mechanics

and if you're lacking the sound, you're

lacking like 30% of the experience right

now. So, even if you're just going to

stub in some sound, I would stub it in

as quickly as possible.

Sure. Okay.

Um, yeah. So, that's like it's a pretty

short demo.

Okay.

Um, so if you want to play

What was the inspiration for this? Uh,

yeah. Move it around. Oh, I just moved

gravity way over there. Oh, I killed

myself. So, that's how you change

gravity, right?

Yeah. So, Wazda is supposed to move.

Oh, gotcha. Okay.

So, I I love games like Limbo and Inside

I forgot that I can go that way.

Oh jeez,

this is actually kind of fun. Failing

good.

That's excellent.

No, I think that's actually for me one

of the important parts is not just uh

that I'm failing, but it's presented in

a humorous way. I think humor is like

one of the

like really superpowers that game

designers have at their disposal. They

don't always use. Uh a lot of times

people will be looking for extremely

elaborate technical solutions

to something uh where in fact just a

little bit of humor can solve it.

There was a door there, right? Or maybe

not. So, if I change gravity,

if you can make it to the other side,

there's a door.

Oh, I see. Okay.

You will. Those boxes are deadly.

I really do like the look of the world.

I notice there's almost like a raster

scan quality to the graphics here. Is

that on purpose?

Yes. So, that is a a post uh processing

effect.

Yeah.

Um, so the idea is, and this will kind

of unfold in the story, that you're

being like watched by somebody.

Okay.

So, I wanted to do an effect that was

sort of subtle, like maybe you didn't

notice it at first, right? And uh the

story would kind of give you meaning to

it later.

All right. And uh so one of your primary

mechanics here is changing gravity, the

orientation of gravity.

Um which seems like a pretty rich thing

to explore. How much have you tried

different level designs against that?

I mean, do you have like a level editor

right now for this?

Um so yeah, the system is set up so I

can pretty easily build things out,

right?

And that's where I've just gotten. So,

I've just gotten to the point where like

the vertical slice is complete.

Because it kind of feels like you have a

fairly open-ended design space now of

how to play with that mechanic of

changing gravity. Exactly.

And now, as a designer, what you want to

be doing is trying a lot of different

level designs, just experimenting to

find out which ones really work with

that, which ones don't.

That's going to be a lot of learning on

your part, right? You know, and then

kind of leaning into the ones that work

well. So, you're really maximizing that

dynamic, the game mechanic.

Yeah. I you know I think that and the

sound design feel like to me the two

areas you should really be focusing on

right now as a designer. Have you put

this in front of other people?

Yes.

All right.

Yes.

And uh what is the most typical

confusing thing at first for a new

player?

Um so in my initial play test I think I

had puzzles that were probably more

complicated than a game like this needed

to be.

Okay.

So it was a lot of like struggle to get

through those uh mechanic wise. Like I

haven't found people being frustrated

with the gravity and stuff. So,

and is this basically kind of a puzzle

game where there's one solution? You

have to, you know, unlock that door,

unlock that door. Kind of a gated

experience,

right? And that's something I kind of

have to test out still because

part of the mechanic is you can jump

around to any part of the ship, right,

once you find these like checkpoints.

So, theoretically, you could run through

a puzzle backwards, all right? And so it

still has to be like solvable or right

to to get back.

Right. That makes the design thing a

little bit more tricky.

Right. Exactly.

Um and what just in your overall vision

of this as a product, how long do you

think an average player is going to

spend playing this all the way through?

Um I'm aiming for about three hours. So

three hours experience. Yeah.

Well, that's fairly long though. I mean,

for this kind of puzzle game.

Okay. you know, uh, do you have a sense

of how many levels or how big of a space

you're going to have to build out

for it to be a three-hour experience?

So, how I've been thinking about it is I

broke it down by each of the upgrades

that you're getting.

All right.

And based on the upgrade, I was my

thought is like, okay, well, how cool is

this upgrade and how much time do I

really want to make the player,

right, like to earn it, right?

Tell me what happens when you get these

upgrades. What do they do? They actually

change your abilities in the game like

you're talking about getting a better

flashlight and stuff like that. Uh they

will change your abilities like uh the

gravity ability itself is something that

you will unlock.

Oh, I see. Okay. So the as you move

forward through this ship, you get to

places where you have to have these

upgrades to complete the level. Exactly.

Okay.

Yeah.

And is it always going to be basically

kind of a linear I need this, then I

open B, then I need that, then I open C.

Or is there some combinations that can

give you shortcuts or different paths

through there?

Because that would make it a much more

replayable game, right? And that's kind

of a big question between how much time

do you want to spend opening more player

opportunities in this versus having it

be replayable, you know, and I'm not

sure if this is something you intend a

player just to sit down, play for three

hours, and then put away. That was fun.

Or if it's something, you know, where

you want them you're going back and

trying again, you know, and some of the

Mario games if you collect all the coins

on a level, you know, you get other

things unlocked, you know. So that's

something you can think of down the

road. You don't have to think of right

now, but in terms of the overall player

experience, I think you should be

thinking about. I have thought about at

least in the sense I do like the idea of

them like strategizing because when you

look at the map you can see where like

the scrap is that you need to collect

right so you can

like know that okay well this part of

the ship I'm being blocked because I

can't do this ability and there's all

that scrap there and then maybe this

part of the ship is also locked and

there's all this scrap so they have to

judge like what is the the best thing

for do for them to do at that moment.

Yeah. Yeah. Huh. Interesting idea. You

know, I think that And just one last

question. Is the gravity thing like your

primary game dynamic? Is that really

what you think distinguishes this game

versus other games like this?

Uh yeah. Yeah.

Okay. And you know, obviously you have

some backstory, but that's, you know,

the backstory that everybody's going to

have obviously, but uh I think that you

could do a whole lot with sound design

in this that I'm not seeing right now.

Uh, I think that you have the

opportunity to do a lot of really

interesting level design, but you're

going to have to explore that space as a

designer, you know, and whatever you're

using for a level editor, you want to

make as, you know, kind of seamless and

easy to use as possible. Even if it's

just a prototype, you don't have the

full rendering of the character. If you

have like a little toy prototype of

being able to do this in a very easy to

use level editor,

I think you could probably, you know,

explore that space much more efficiently

than getting it into the full game. You

know, maybe, maybe not. It's just a

thought.

Sure. But uh and just the very last

thing is, you know, I think that I would

refine your pitch a little bit more and

don't start with it's a sidescroller.

You know, start with something like it's

a game about gravity,

you know, or something like that that

right off the bat it's like, oh, okay,

gravity. It sounds kind of cool and

interesting. Uh and you know,

eventually, in fact, it's not

necessarily a sidescroller because

you're going up and down and you know,

all different directions, but uh it's a

cool idea. I love the uh the visuals on

it right now.

Thank you. Thank you.

As we get further down the development

process, the prototyping we're doing is

far more granular. There are a lot of

things that you can do and a very small

subset of that is what you should do for

the player. Scoping really is going to

come down to what is the right sweet

spot for complexity and interest. And so

you're trying to find that sweet spot

with scoping. And prototyping is one of

your tools for discovering that. For

spore, we did 50 or 60 prototypes of

different areas of science that we might

have included in Spore. And again, you

know, most of them were not included.

You know, after playing with the

prototypes, we decided either, you know,

didn't really fit in with the overall

concept or that system as a little toy

just wasn't a very fun toy to play with.

But the ones that were fun to play with,

we figured out, okay, which one of these

can we now, you know, put together and

build into a larger experience. And then

eventually they turn into gameplay

prototypes, you know, where actually

there is a game there.

A lot of the prototypes uh that we

developed for Spore had a scripting

language and in fact I could take the

same little codebase I as a designer

could go in and change the scripting of

it and change the rules within the

simple prototype. Uh, and so I in fact

was doing a lot of the programming on

these prototypes to explore different

rule sets. And in fact, I was able to

recreate like very simple versions of

Sim City and a few other games within

these four prototypes. Some of them were

using very interesting kind of systems

and topologies. Some were network based,

others were kind of grid cellular

automata based. And the fact that as a

designer, I could very quickly go in and

script over one evening. I could try

five or six different rule sets, play

with them for a while, gravitate toward

an area. Once I got roughly in some area

I liked, I could take it back to the

programmer and say, "Now build me a

better version of this." Uh, or maybe

had some limitation. I wanted to add a

little couple more commands to the

scripting language. But in fact, I was

doing some of the programming on the,

you know, the last half of the

prototype. The programmer would give me

like a little scripting engine and

codebase that I could script and change

the rules on. So again, it very rapidly

allowed me as a designer to explore

different rule sets.

A lot of times, you know, I would work

with design teams and, you know, every

week there would be kind of a triage

session and we would kind of say, okay,

what are the biggest risks of this

project? You know, they could be

technological risks, they could be

design risks, they could be production

risks. Um, and then we step back and

say, okay, how do we mitigate that most

effectively? Uh, you know, sometimes

it's technological risk. Can we actually

build this? Let's build a prototype and

see if it's a design risk. Let's see if

we can find some, you know, build a

prototype or find some other game that

shows us this will be fun. Uh, can the

production team, you know, manage these

assets in time, whatever it is. And

hopefully, you know, every week we're

trying to basically attack the top

things on that list to where they get

lower on the list. Now, something else

becomes the top design risk. So, I think

that as you're going through iteration,

you know, it's continually that process

of attacking the highest risk items. One

of the typical aspects of risk in this

kind of development is that the longer

you uh delay it uh the more expensive it

is. Okay, if I can mitigate that risk

this month, it's going to cost me, you

know, $10. If I wait 3 months to

mitigate it, it's going to cost me $100

because all these other things now have

to change around it. So, you know,

again, this is about efficiency. you

know, how efficiently can I prune that

design tree? You know, and I want every

pruning of every branch to be as

expedient as as efficient as possible.

And a lot of times you really want to

put it off. You really want to say, "Oh,

I know it's going to work. I know it's

going to work." But if you can mitigate

it early, it gives you more confidence

later on that you're on the right path.

There's so many times when you you're

developing something and it gets to some

point where it's really starting to

coales and starting to feel pretty good.

Uh but it feels that no matter where you

push it from that direction, it gets

worse. You know, this is you being stuck

on a local maxima. And at that point,

it's it can be kind of apparent

intellectually to you that what you

really need to do is, you know, again,

rip this thing out, add that thing, do

some major change to it. And you feel

like it's going to go here. you're not

sure, but you you you're pretty sure,

but you know that you're stuck here on

this peak. And that's a very hard thing

for you to kind of actually take that

hit and try it. And you know, maybe when

you do that, it's now worse. But with a

little bit of iteration around there,

you find that in fact, you are on a

taller slope. But that's a very kind of

stressful kind of process to go through,

especially with a team who's invested a

lot of time and effort to get you here.

Now, really, you always do have the

opportunity to kind of fall back. If

this is a total failure over here, come

back to this thing and try a different

direction. But that's incredibly

expensive. In my experience, all the

very best games and all the games I

worked on that ended up, you know, as

hits were things where we went through

that several times, you know, where we

really had to kind of take this hit and

say, "Okay, look, we're going to have to

do something pretty radically different

here." And I think it'll get us onto a

taller slope. And in most cases, it did.

A few cases it didn't, and we had to

kind of go back and do it twice. But,

uh, it's almost like you're kind of

dropping little paratroopers in to do

recon. Uh each one of these is very

expensive, but you know, if they land on

a slope, they can now tell you, oh, it's

a good slope or a bad slope. Uh but I

think, you know, that's really the

difference between making a really good

kind of mediocre game and a hit

tuning can be very very challenging. Um

and in fact, you know, it's really more

a process of discovery. uh and what I

was doing for a lot of the things like

for Sim City I would actually build test

patterns. I would say I would expect

with this you know pattern of roads or

buildings I would expect to see this

result on the traffic layer in my head

and I would actually draw these out.

This is kind of what I would expect and

then I would run the model and it would

be nothing like that. And it wasn't

apparent to me how I would change it to

make it like that. But instead what I

found was I had to make it easy to just

explore that space change the rules very

rapidly very quickly and look at the

result to zero in on the right rule set

and again because it's an emergent

system there's no really predictive way

to know which way to go it's more like

you have to learn to explore this space

very very rapidly and in more just kind

of typical parametric tuning uh Sidmer

had actually a really good rule of thumb

which is that uh whenever you're tuning

a variable in a game don't move it by

10% % 20% double it or half it, you

know, initially and usually it's going

to be way off. So you double it or half

it, you know, whichever direction you

need to go until you're in the region,

then you can do the tuning, you know,

but really you're probably way off to

begin with on almost everything. And

don't be afraid once you have it running

to try it. Just, you know, just for the

hell of it, try doubling some value and

see maybe this result might surprise

you. It might not be something you were

looking for, but it might be something

very cool that you discover that way.

Most of the prototypes that uh we've

created, you know, for the games I

worked on were failures, which is good,

you know, because again, they're helping

us prone design branches. Do we want to

go that way? No. Do we want to go that

way? No. You know, if you actually look,

you know, once I've taken this

branching, you know, decision tree all

the way down, most of the branches are

going to be pruned. They're failures.

You know, we don't want to go that way.

We did some really cool prototypes for

SPORE of the galactic dynamics. Uh the

balance between interstellar matter and

stars which I can spend quite a while

talking about it but is a very cool

dynamic of the way stars are formed. The

gas cools it coaleses again into

molecular clouds and starts more star

formation which propagates a wave around

the galaxy. Very very cool dynamics. But

uh as we started scoping the rest of the

game, we realized this really just had

no part in the context of the rest of

the game, you know, with the kind of

point of view the player had and the

tools and all that. So that was it would

have been a very cool part of sport. In

fact, would have been a very cool part

of a different game, not Spore. And

that's what we determined. That's a cool

game, but it's not Spore. It's really

hard when you've invested a lot of time

and effort into you know one of your

just you know kind of passionate

features or components and you know

either through prototyping testing

whatever it just doesn't have a place in

your eventual design emotionally I think

you need to kind of step back and

designer and say okay you know am I

designing something that you know for

myself aesthetically or something that I

really want to impact a large number of

people uh other times you know it'll

really surprise you the very First game

I did involved flying this little

helicopter around this world and bombing

things. Uh, one of the things I built as

part of that was this thing where I

could scroll around and create the

world, you know, to bomb, you know, and

that thing which was originally going to

be a throwaway. This is the editor I

built for bombing the world. Uh, later I

was so into that I had so much fun

playing with that little world builder.

I took that it turned into Sim City. So

what would have been a throwaway

prototype actually evolved into my first

big hit. So sometimes if that thing that

you really passionately care about

doesn't have a place in your design,

that doesn't mean it doesn't have a

place somewhere else in some other

design. It might be that's going to be

you know the thing that you eventually

turn into what it should have been or

maybe even you jump ship and you go with

that instead and throw away your

original idea. I mean there's no hard

and fast rule for this and you know

again that's a lot of times very hard

emotionally when you've invested that

much in a certain direction to throw it

away but uh that's something that's you

know I think every field you need to

kind of learn when to uh fail and

recognize that failure and some

celebrate it you know don't say oh my

gosh poor me I failed it's more like

okay I failed let's learn from this

let's you know kind of make it a

monument you know to learning

any design, you know, at some point

you're going to have to finish it,

finish building it. You know, you have

to scope your design. Uh it's important

to kind of not overreach, but at the

same time, you don't want to make it too

simple. you want to do achieve something

kind of cool, but uh you know it's

really kind of a sweet spot of

diminishing returns in some sense, but

also it's surprising how the simplest

little things in a game sometimes can be

the biggest features that people just

love that you spent no time at all. And

a lot of times you'll spend all this

time and effort on some elaborate thing

that you you think will be cool and it

turns out to just fall flat. Uh if you

can discover that in prototyping early

on, that's the best way to deal with it.

But overall in terms of scope, you know,

I think you want to put the player into

an experience where they have kind of an

understanding of the boundaries to some

degree, you know, and again, it's almost

like you can put uh a kid into any game

and within a few minutes they can kind

of intuit it uh how open-ended that game

is, you know, how much freedom, how much

uh agency they have in that game. You

put a tiger in a cage, first thing he

does is walk around the perimeter to

define his space. You know, how big is

my world? A lot of times people

overengineer things, you know, and

programmers tend to do that. You know,

what if you decide you want this later,

so I'm going to go ahead and put it in

now. And they'll build something twice

as complex as what you actually need for

the game. Uh, and this happens all the

time, especially on the programming

side. Uh, the artists, you know, I think

are a little bit better about that kind

of understanding, okay, here's the

resolution we're working at. Here's the

way the animation is going to behave.

and they're pretty good at like hitting

their mark in terms of the sweet spot,

amount of time and effort and budget

spent on it. I think the designer has to

have some understanding almost as a

psychology of the different components

of your game team. This is the way

programmers think. This is the way

artists think. This is the way the

writers or the sound people think. And

make sure that uh nobody no one side of

that is spinning way too much relative

to the others. So, I think a lot of it

really is more balancing act across the

different components of your game

design. So, players going to come to

your game with a certain expectation as

well. They're going to see, you know,

it's an open-ended game. I expect to be

able to do this, you know, many things.

I expect the world to be this big.

Especially if somebody says, "Oh, I like

your idea. I like your idea." And then

you ask them to describe it back to you

and see which parts of your idea that

they're actually repeating back to you.

And are they adding things to it or

removing stuff from it?

As we're going through this process in

game design, uh, one thing that I found

incredibly useful, and a lot of design

teams do this, is basically a form of

triage. Uh, the designers once they have

some handle around what this game might

be, will come up with a set of features.

It'd be cool if it had this, that, and

the other. Uh, designers will actually

put value judgments. You know, that

would be really cool. That's kind of

cool, that's so so. And so the designers

might go in and give to A, B, and C in

terms of, you know, this is what we

would like to have at the game. Then you

bring it to the engineers and the

engineers will assign a cost to each one

of these things. You know, that's, you

know, a seven, that's a one, that's a

10. That's really hard. And so then you

have to kind of look at the two

together. You have to say, you know, the

designers think that's an A, but the

engineers say it's 10 hard. Uh, you

know, this one, the designers say it's

an A, but the engineers say it's two. So

that's a much better kind of return on

investment, you know. So basically,

you're going for the low hanging fruit

here. And you use this to reorder a list

and say, "Okay, we're going to go for

the things the designers want the most

and the engineers say will cost the

least." And you reorder the list and now

imagine we just had those features. Is

that something, you know, viable?

Probably not. So, we keep going through

this over and over again. And but still,

you know, this might really influence

the order in which we build this because

we could have something playable much

more early, you know, if we pick the

things that are a little bit easier,

faster for the programmers to produce

even as just milestone prototypes.

There have been examples I mean

situations where it was so important to

the designers the cost was almost

irrelevant. You know it was really could

we do it or not and you know can we

afford that cost? Uh when we did Spore

we really wanted players to design the

creatures and we wanted to have a wide

variety of possible creatures and we

basically couldn't figure out how to

animate these things because we didn't

know what they were yet. Uh typically

animation is very data driven. You know

the skeleton, you know how it's moving,

has two feet, you know, a head. Um in

this case, we had no idea, you know, how

many legs does this creature have,

what's its shape, you know, where's the

spine go. Uh so we kind of realized

early on that, you know, we had to crack

this nut of procedural animation to make

it even viable. And uh you know, without

that, you know, we couldn't go down that

path at all. And so we kind of stopped

everything you know put got some very

skilled people very smart people working

on this problem for a few months and

after a few months they had actually

said we can do this and they were

actually showing us you know examples

you know prototypes they had built where

they were doing it and once we were

convinced that they could do it and it

was expensive thing to do we decided to

go down that design path. So that was

one where it was you know basically

imperative you know to have that feature

and we just had to find out if we could

do it. Other times, you know, there were

things in a game where like in Sim City,

we wanted to have, you know, boats and

water traffic in Sim City 2000. And

because the way we were doing the

telegraphics, you know, we would had to

go back and really change a lot of the

graphics system to do that. And the

value was very low for that version of

Sim City. We eventually added in later

versions. That was one where the, you

know, the design value of the feature uh

was really pretty low and the cost was

really high. And it depends also on all

the other features you currently have.

You can't take any one feature in

isolation. you have to say, okay, how

does that, you know, influence

everything else? You know, ideally,

every time you add something to a game,

it's a force multiplayer. It's making

the other stuff even cooler, making the

world seem even richer or more emergent.

So, uh, you know, it's it's important

that as a designer, you're always

keeping in mind the entire design, not

just one little set of it.

Inside of each of us, there's a

subconscious.

There's a whole region of who you are

that is in some sense inaccessible to

you, but drives your behavior.

The game I'm working on now, it's called

Proxy. And my core motivation there is

can I build a gameplay experience, an

entertainment experience where the

computer is actively trying to gain a

deeper understanding of the player

primarily through the player's past

experiences through their memories. Can

I kind of interpret the memories of your

life, the most important memories that

made you who you are? And from that come

to some understanding of how you think,

what makes you behave the way you

behave,

why you connect these certain things in

your mind that most people don't

connect,

what drives your interests, you know,

how much can I get a computer to learn

that about you? And then try to build a

representational avatar of your IT, of

your subconscious that you can now

interact with. And as it learns more and

more about you, it kind of in some sense

comes to life and can now interact with

other people's ids kind of

asynchronously, uh, it can go off in the

world and interact with your friends or

with, you know, real or historic or

fictional characters. You know, how does

your proxy get along with Homer

Simpson's proxy or, you know, the Pope's

proxy or Mother Teresa? I want to know,

can we build a map of that? Can we start

to understand it? We build, you know, a

structural description of how this thing

works and the connections it makes and

what makes you different from another

person. How is your id different than

that person's id? How does it make you

behave in a situation differently than

they behave? Uh if we can start getting

that level of understanding and we're,

you know, I think that analyzing

memories and life experience is the path

there. And I'm not sure about this. This

is just kind of my my theory. Um but

that's kind of what we're trying to do

with proxy.

Today we're going to walk through the

process of creating a game prototype.

Basically, we're always doing this to

answer some specific question about the

design that we're working on. Uh I'm

here with uh my programmer Zegmo and

we're working on this project here. And

in this project, the user is creating

memories that come into this world and

basically turn into this kind of

landscape. And this is what we have so

far. We're trying to figure out how

should these memories come into the

world. Right now, when I create a

memory, it just kind of pops randomly

into the world, right?

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. It feels like it should be more

tangible, though, like this world really

should have more rules and more specific

interactions.

Yeah.

So, uh I want to prototype something

where we try different ways to bring new

memories into the world here. I've been

kind of thinking about the idea of maybe

they come in on boats because it's

supposedly ocean here.

Yeah. And they can wander around and try

to find a good place to land or

something.

Yeah. We could actually maybe have when

I create a new memory, it actually is on

a little boat coming into the world and

it sails around kind of looking for a

place to live. You know, it I'm sitting

here, you know, seeing this little boat

and I want to put it somewhere

and as I'm looking at this world, I get

the opportunity, in fact, I have to

offload the memory and as I do, it will

actually kind of change the terrain.

It'll actually make continents bigger,

change the form, and then the boat just

kind of disappears. The boat's really

just kind of like the messenger, but

then it feels more tangible, right?

Yeah. Uh, so I think if we can kind of

prototype this, you know, this little

world with, you know, landscapes, but at

the same time have new memories come in

as boats and let me kind of manipulate

the memories off the boats. Let's just

see how that feels.

So, show me how this works.

Yeah. So, the players just created new

memory and they've come back and so

we're going to simulate this with a

simple button press.

All right.

And so, here's a new memory they just

made.

Okay. And what do I do with it?

Yeah. So, it's wondering around.

Hopefully, you want to touch it.

Do I grab it?

Yeah. So, there you go.

Oh, I see. So, I pulled the memory off.

Oh, it made it

terrain, right?

Okay. So, can I put more boats in there?

Yeah. So, they made a couple new

memories.

More. Oh, two boats.

Maybe they made two and then they came

back to this area.

And so, basically, I'm grabbing the

memory off the boat. Oh, I see. As I

move it around, I get a sense of the

landscape. Huh.

Yeah. Try some good feedback so you know

Yeah.

what the connections are.

Oh, and I actually get to see the train

before I release it. That's okay. That's

different. That's kind of cool. Um, I

like the tangibility of this. Uh, these

buds could have a lot more elaborate

rules if we wanted to.

Path finding. Sure.

Yeah. We could have shipwrecks. We could

have collisions. Uh, the buds, you know,

maybe have path finding and gravitate

towards certain areas where it thinks it

wants the memory to be.

I could tell you that in another

iteration. Sure.

Yeah. So, this is adding a certain level

of tangibility to our world. And, you

know, kind of going with that landscape

metaphor a little bit more heavily. Mhm.

I'm going to play with this a bit

longer, but I think this is actually a

good direction for us to go now. I think

maybe we're done with this prototype.

I'd like to play with it a little bit

longer and figure out, you know, do we

want to elaborate on this prototype or

maybe go to another one? But I think

right now this feels much Oh, I got to

turn all this stuff down.

Yeah, you know, I had some time. I

finished a little early. So, I'll throw

in a little fun thing like that.

Well, actually, I mean, that's an

interesting idea. It could be that the

memory type is somehow related to the

vessel. You know, I hadn't thought about

that, but just playing with this

prototype.

Just because you threw that in there

makes me think that, you know, somehow

the system could actually look at the

memory type you're doing, put it on a

sailing ship, on a motorboat, on a

turtle, whatever. Yeah.

Uh so it could have different kind of

classes of memory.

Yeah, I could definitely add that if we

want to iterate on this one more time.

That would not be hard to to test out.

Sure.

Okay. We might do one more iteration on

this prototype, but I think uh this

clearly kind of answers this feels a lot

better than it was before.

Yeah, definitely.

And it's a fairly simple code fix,

right? I mean to actually realize this.

Yeah, I could do another less than a

day. I could Okay.

What you're talking about?

Sure.

So, in this case, we've established

basically a resolution to this question

of how new memories come into the world.

And just playing with this for a few

minutes, I can clearly see that it feels

much better than what we were doing

before. And not only that, but it uh

based on just some things that Zegma

threw in there, it kind of inspired me

to think in a different design direction

slightly. So, I'd say this, you know,

was a very worthwhile prototype for the

amount of time spent. And again, it's

not like we spent a lot of time on this

prototype, but uh it gives us much more

clarity on going down the design branch.

So, I think the prototypes like this are

really helping us explore the space much

faster and more efficiently. Yeah.

Um, we're still basically in an overhead

world here.

And I think one of the other things

we're going to want to prototype is

different renderings of the world,

whether we go to 3D isometric.

Yeah.

Uh, where the full camera rotation and

all that. It's going to be a real

balance there, I think, between

legibility of the world and, you know,

the player being able to do interesting,

exciting things in there without having

to worry about the camera angle,

right? Uh,

well, if we're looking at doing a 3D

version, I could take another day or two

to a very simple version where just

simple objects, basic terrain

generation, and just dragging things

around and see how we like that.

Uh, if we can do it without the user

getting too involved in the c the camera

manipulation is the key. So perhaps just

lock it to like 90° 45°.

So freeze them from that constraint but

focuses on just where you placing in the

world,

right? But also this landscape, you

know, it's kind of a pneummonic. So as I

get a sense of that landscape, all a

sudden you rotate it looks different to

me. And I, you know, the memory that I

put in the upper right corner is now in

the lower left corner.

And so that's why I'm a little reticent

to go to full 3D or at least constrain

the camera direction, but we could still

kind of tilt it back. I got some pitch

on it.

Okay. So no rotation, just locked

orientation. I got you. and just had

that sort of gradual pitch that

and probably we're definitely going to

want some amount of zoom in. So the zoom

might be relative to the pitch of the

camera. So maybe one of the things we

might want to prototype is a world like

this where I can now, you know, zoom in,

have the camera pitch change with the

zoom, pull back out, get the overhead

map.

Uh then I think we've gone a long way

toward establishing kind of the user

interaction and the look and feel that

we now have to kind of produce, you

know, at a production level. Yeah, I

think those simple restrictions would

help me produce it faster. So that's

idea.

Yeah. Yeah. And again, we don't want to

spend more than a few days a week at the

most on, you know, prototyping that.

Yeah. And if we had that plus this

prototype,

now we're well on our way to kind of

knowing what's happening in that world,

what the affordances are,

how the users, you know, picking the uh

the camera angle and all that stuff.

And, you know, I think it won't take too

many more prototypes like this to get

pretty far down the design tree and we

can actually start committing real

resources to it.

Sounds good.

Well, as you work on a project, you

know, at early stages, you're going to

want to just get a sense of what does

this thing feel like for me to interact

with or the other people on my team. How

do we feel about interacting with this

very simple little system? Uh, sometimes

it might not even be a prototype that we

made or it might be a game we pulled off

the shelf. You know, what do we like

about that game or this game? Those are

the cheapest prototypes really. If you

can find some other game that has some

aspect of what you want to include, then

as you start building something, you'll

start building not just the system, but

also the interface, the player controls.

Typically, you'll want to bring in a few

people who play games but have never

seen this just to figure out the

interface. You know, can they understand

the control scheme you've got? Does that

make sense to them? Can they understand,

you know, reading the topography, the

landscape? You know, do they have some

sense of what they're supposed to do?

you know what occurs to them as you drop

them into this environment. So it's

actually u can become a fairly granular

process. It's not like you know we build

the game build the game now we start

play testing. It's really like we're

building prototypes from the very

beginning that we're testing ourselves

and then over time starting to test

little game parts with a few people you

know here and there and eventually we're

bringing in larger groups and maybe even

at some point hundreds of thousands of

capturing metrics and building these

fairly complex diagrams of them moving

through the game space.

This is the first time you really have a

little bit of a peak into the player's

mind about how they're going to interact

with this thing that you've built. You

know, as a designer, you kind of had

this idea all along that I'm going to

give them this. They're going to be able

to do A, B, and C. They're going to try

to get to D, whatever. You know, this is

what you're kind of imagining. And as I

am a designer, I'm trying to imagine,

you know, what would I enjoy? how would

I think about this? But I put it in

front of somebody else and right off

that you start learning things. You know

that maybe that wasn't as easy as you

thought or they're not even trying to

get to D, they're trying to get to F

over there for some reason. And you go

back and revisit your assumptions or

maybe ask them why, you know, what did

they see that caused them to think that

way or maybe there was just something

they thought of that you didn't that

would be really cool to try, you know,

and then again, you're learning. So I

think that uh this is you know we're for

the first time designers taking this

concept out of their head and trying to

put it into other people's heads and

seeing how it fits.

It's frequently very hard to kind of

imagine the way other people are going

to see or understand what you've made in

a game. Uh, and there's really no

replacement for actually testing it. Uh,

we did a lot of what we called Kleenex

testing where we'd bring people in who

had never seen the game before, put them

in front of it with absolutely no

instructions and just watch what they

start doing uh, and see where they fail.

See what's obvious. A lot of times, you

know, it's so obvious to you that they

should press the red button, but it will

not even occur to them to press the red

button. and you sit there and watch 10

people not press the red button and you

start realizing, okay, that's not the

typical person's understanding of the

way this thing works. One thing that was

very important is so we put two people

in front of one computer. Uh if you put

one person in front of a computer,

they'll sit there, but they don't talk.

They just get very quiet. You don't know

what they're thinking. If you take two

people and they have to know each other,

there might be friends or spouses or

whatever. Um they'll be talking

non-stop. You know, press the red

button. No, not the red one. That makes

that happen. Oh, no it doesn't. And

they'll be explaining to each other what

they think. And so those two people, you

just sit back and listen to what they're

saying and you understand how they

understand the game in front of them.

After we use these people and learn

these things, we go back, you know, we

make the red button more prominent or

whatever. Then we never use them again.

We bring in a whole different set of

people who again have never seen the

game before. So, you know, they're kind

of unpolluted. That's why we call it

Kleinex testing. We use the tester once

and throw them away. But, uh, there's

really no replacement for that. And it's

amazing as a designer how frustrating in

some ways it is to sit back and watch

these people not do the obvious thing

you were sure they were going to do.

Instead, they're all doing this other

thing. And you have to adapt to that and

start realizing, okay, well, the model

that they're coming to this game with is

different than what I was thinking. Uh,

so that's probably the most important

thing.

Play tests. Usually it's, you know, a

large room. The designers are sitting,

you know, kind of back a few feet away.

And there'll be five or six different

workstations set up. In front of each

workstation, we'll have two people,

again, people that know each other,

friends, spouses, whatever. We put, you

know, each group down. We give them

some, you know, very, very rough sense.

Oh, here's a game about controlling

little people or here's a game about

building cities. Um, and then we just

turn it on and from that point on, we

don't say a word unless they have some

technical problem. They'll sit there as

a pair and try to basically figure out

how the game works. What do we do here?

What does that do? You know, maybe

that'll make this happen. Uh, and the

designers will kind of rotate, you know,

and just be listening over their

shoulder to each group. The designers

also at that point are not interacting

with each other. You know, typically

this will be a design team of three or

four designers and we're all coming to

our own conclusions independently

observing this group. After it's all

over, the designers, you know, will sit

down, kind of collate their notes and

then we will come together as design

group and say, "What did you see?" You

know, what were our biggest issues? And

usually it's pretty clear that there'll

be one or two or three things that we

all agree on. We all agree that, you

know, that was not obvious. This was too

hard. They didn't enjoy this part. Uh,

and those are the things we focus on,

you know, for the next iteration, which

might be a few weeks from then. You

know, these become design risks for us.

You know, we're always mitigating and

triaging design risks. These are now the

top three design risks we've discovered

from our play testing. We will pick

action items. How can we basically

mitigate those risks effectively, very

rapidly do that, you know, and the next

time we bring in a group, we see if we

were right. And if we're right, the next

group is going to have three different

risks, you know, and we're repeating

that over and over. Always basically

looking at the top risk, you know, the

top thing that people were not getting,

not enjoying, getting confused about,

whatever it might be. Uh, and basically

attacking it.

to test the engagement, uh, you have to

have so much of this really kind of

coming together as a whole. And it's so

far down the path that, uh, the early

testing is really nothing to do with

that. You know, the early testing is, do

they know how to operate this windshield

wiper or that headlight control? That's

not going to tell you how well the car

drives. Uh as a designer though, this is

where I think your vision has to carry

you through. Not just your vision, but

your ability to communicate that vision

to the other stakeholders in the project

that you know I know that if we can get

the windshield wipers working and the

steering wheel and the brakes and all

that that way over here somewhere, this

is going to be a really cool car to

drive. And that really is going to be

more right now instinct, you know, and

salesmanship on your part as a designer.

as you get later on the process now you

know and you have your working

windshield wiper control and your

steering wheel and your brakes and all

that now you need to put those things

together and actually say okay now let's

start getting some sense that this

actually will be engaging and as soon as

possible try to get you know some set of

these things working together as a whole

such that you can sit back and see

another person actually enjoy it start

building the model and start trying to

head for the goals and get that flow

state that you're really trying to

achieve as a designer

When you put a tester in front of your

game, you know, they are not going to

sit there and tell you exactly what

you're hoping to hear. You know, they're

having an experience and you can, you

know, again, by putting them with

somebody else, have them verbalize their

experience. But as a designer, you have

to kind of decipher that. You know, you

have to understand they say, "I think

it's really frustrating doing this, but

what they might really mean is they wish

they had another option to do that

instead." You know, so a lot of times

what they will express directly and a

lot of times they'll come back and say,

"Oh, I want, you know, X, Y, and Z."

They'll start describing solutions to

you rather than the problem, you know, I

would love this game if I only had, you

know, a jetpack and a laser beam, you

know, but in fact, what they're really

mean is that they don't like getting

stuck on the ground level when they want

to climb that mountain. So you have to

distinguish them offering you solutions

and from you know what do those

solutions what problem does that

actually point back to and that's the

problem you need to solve as a designer

because probably their solutions suck

but the problem they're referencing

doesn't that problem is real

well when you're looking at a play test

uh the signal noise issue really is

going to be a matter in some sense of

data you You know, if you do enough

testing with enough people, you'll start

to be able to distinguish the signal

from the noise just because that's

consistent. You know, the noise is all

over the place random. But when the same

five people are all saying they didn't

know to press the red button, but then

they give you totally different feedback

on everything else, you know that the

red button is definitely signal. Uh, and

I think that signal comes in two

dimensions, which is why I was kind of

saying that you want to uh listen, you

know, to what all these groups have in

common. What problems and frustrations

are they all having in common? But also

as designers when you go back and

compare notes you know what problem do

all the designers agree that is pointing

to you know because this designer might

think oh that problem is you know their

character creator this problem is their

navigation system you know but if all

the designers can agree that those

results point to the same problem now

that signal for sure too often you know

you're expecting your players to be game

designers when a player is describing to

you that in their head if you added

garbage systems it would be so much

cooler they're imagining it a certain

way that's probably not the way it works

or the way you're thinking about it. But

if you can understand kind of why

they're saying that, what, you know,

what limitation or failure or flat sput

are they hitting that makes them think

that that addition would make it better.

Uh, then that's good, you know, and a

lot of times sometimes they're telling

you to add stuff and in fact it's about

removing stuff. Uh, a lot of times

you've got too much stuff, too much

noise from the player's point of view.

One of my favorite quotes uh about

Japanese gardening is that your garden

is not complete until there is nothing

else that you can remove.

Engagement is one of those things that

uh

has a very wide range. Uh when we

initially have prototypes and we bring

players in to try it out, uh it's more a

matter of getting them to stay there in

front of the computer, keep playing it,

keep playing it, keep playing it. Um

toward the end, if you're really kind of

starting to nail it, it's a matter of

you trying to pull them away from it.

Okay, time to stop. Time to stop. Uh I

think, you know, right off the bat,

there are a couple like very simple

little tricks. A lot of times, if I'm

showing somebody a game and I'm, you

know, actually playing it, explaining

how it works, if they all of a sudden

want to grab the mouse and say, "Let me

try. Let me try." or if I see a game

that somebody's showing me and all a

sudden I feel the urge to, hey, let me

see if I can do it. That's a great

measure right there. You know, right off

the bat, just by watching somebody play

it, I've understood enough to think

that, you know, I want to go in and try

something. You know, I have some of the

model. In fact, this starts even before

you see somebody playing it, it starts,

you know, maybe when you see the box or

see an ad for it, you know, at that

point you're starting to say, "Hey, that

sounds fun. That sounds kind of cool. I

want to try it." You know, so that's a

certain level of engagement right there.

And then later down the road, if you

have, you know, something really good,

you'll start having people writing you

back that I was up all night playing

this thing and I couldn't stop it. I

didn't realize it was 5 in the morning,

whatever. That means you really kind of

nailed it. Uh, but I think along the

way, you know, again, there going to be

uh certain players that maybe just love

what you've made, a few that hate it, or

maybe it's the other way around. most

people hate it, but if you love it and

you need to be willing to kind of

experiment by, you know, changing a few

rules or a few parameters or making the

game a little more dynamic in terms of

the player choosing to try and balance

that out. And there's really no

substitute for capturing, you know,

metrics. If you can capture metrics on a

large number of players, you can really

balance this out nicely, you know, over

a wide range of people. Uh it used to be

much more anecdotal. You know, we would

sit and watch 10 people do it and try to

go with our gut instinct in engagement

and difficulty. You know, some of it

could be player moderated. The player

chooses to go down this path, which is

more difficult. Uh or they choose to

just sit back here and enjoy this. If

they're enjoying it, again, you know,

that's engagement. Uh it doesn't have to

be challenging to be engaging. Some

people like to do creative weird

experiments. Uh and they find that very

engaging. You know, other players are

going to want continual challenge all

the time as fast as possible. letting

that be player moderated is probably the

best choice. Um there are things where

you actually see the players like trying

to make achievement and getting

frustrated. They're failing too often

and that's where I think the metrics

come in a little more heavily. You can

actually kind of measure you know how

many people are filling the first time,

the second time, the third time. Uh and

I think that's something where it's a

little more metric driven, but also it's

player kind of categorized. You know,

certain players are going to go down

that path, other ones are going to be

different. So the metrics will be very

different for those types of players.

And that's where as designer you have to

kind of sit back and say, okay, you

know, here we're dealing with the trophy

seekers, here we're dealing with the

socializers, whatever it is, however you

choose to categorize your different

players, um you need to understand that

they're going to have different metrics.

Sid Meer had a great quote is that uh

some games you design for the players

and some games you design for yourself.

And uh I experienced that I think with a

game I did way back called Sim Earth.

You know I got fascinated with building

this elaborate model of the planet earth

and the climate and the you know the

oceans and the life forms and everything

the geology and uh you know it was a

pretty cool little model for its time

running on a PC and it had all these

little controls where you could adjust

things about the planet. Uh, but it was

very complex, you know, as a model. And

I really enjoyed kind of playing with

that model. But, uh, later I realized as

we were putting this in front of

players, you know, it was kind of like

putting them in the cockpit of a 747

that's in a tail spin heading to the

ground and all the gauges are spinning.

No matter what they do, it's going to

crash. You know, they try everything

they they can think of and it still

crashes. You know, that's kind of what

it felt like to the players. I got so

caught up in the idea of building this

little, you know, planetary model on a

computer for myself. And uh I think that

you know kind of reinforces the idea of

testing but also as a game designer uh

you have to be able to kind of go back

to the drawing board when you see people

interpret what you've done uh in a

totally different direction. The Sims is

a better example of that where you know

I was so fixated on the architecture and

then we started putting in front of a

few people and saw how fascinated they

were and it makes sense that they were

fascinated basically messing with these

little Sims. um the house is a backdrop

for it and it was one of the kind of

challenges and became an integral part

of the gameplay. But the real focus of

the game that the average player came to

it with was on messing with the people.

And so as a game designer, I had to kind

of sit back and say, "Okay, look, you

know, I think that really, you know, is

the way I need to go with this," which I

did. So I think you need to kind of be

able to revisit your assumptions at the

very beginning. uh when you see the way

people are interpreting what you've done

I think in terms of the people we would

type to bring in initially it's going to

be a pretty wide range of people but

still we have some sense of this is a

game that you know older people will

enjoy younger once we get a sense of

like where it's really uh hitting the

mark we can get a little bit more

specific about the kind of people we

want to bring in maybe we want to bring

in more women or more younger players

whatever that is uh and get more

detailed in terms of, you know, also

maybe these are people that are really

creative. They're not so much achievers,

but they want to do creative stuff in

there. More storytelling, more

customization, more personalization. Uh

this other group might be more into, you

know, advancement and showing off in the

social, you know, groupings, whatever it

is. But, uh that's something that you

kind of again discover over time. And

then as a designer, you can kind of say,

okay, we're going to go down that path

or we're really going to focus on these

people or maybe we want to keep it

broad. we actually want to kind of bring

in those other people that weren't as

interested and try to keep these at the

same time. That's when you're making a

design decision as to which demographic

group you're going to be going after.

But even then, the demographics are

frequently uh very misleading with the

Sims. Again, you know, initially sold

this to gamers. The gamers thought, "Oh,

it's a weird new thing. I'll try it

out." They played it for a few weeks,

and what happened is these were mostly

teenage boys, and what happened is their

sisters were watching them play. Their

sisters for the very first time said,

"Hey, I want to try it." they bring it

to their hand-me-down computer and that

turned out to be our big hit, you know,

initially for the Sims was like

12-year-old girls. So, you can't always

predict and even if you can predict, you

might not hit that target demographic

right off the bat. There might be

actually kind of a viral component to

how it spreads to them. Cuz these

12-year-old girls were not going into

computer stores and buying computer

games. they just happen to see it on

their brother's computer.

In my experience, focus group testing

has been pretty close to useless. Uh,

you know, so many times, you know, we

had focus group many, many years ago and

we had like four game designs that we

were basically just describing to this

audience of gamers. And uh, one of those

four was The Sims. Uh, we described each

one of these game concepts, what it

would be like to play, would they be

interested, would they want to play it?

The other three they all liked, thought

was great. The Sims was the one idea

they all hated. No, I would never play

that. Never touch it. Uh, I don't even

remember the other three games, what

they ended up being, you know, but I

know they weren't a big hit at all. So

um you know in that sense you're kind of

expecting your your players to be

designers you know because when we were

describing the Sims to them I know they

could not unpack it in their head and be

playing in their imagination the game

that I was envisioning and there was no

easy way for us to communicate it to

them. So it doesn't surprise me they

hated it because the game that they

designed based on the description was

horrible. Uh and I think that's the you

know one of the real limits of focus

group testing. Play testing on the other

hand, you know, as soon as we brought a

few people in, the same type of people,

same demographic, and put them in front

of the system where they could

manipulate people and live their little

lives, they loved it. They really had

fun getting in and doing it. So, in that

case, you know, they weren't doing the

heavy lifting of imagining how this

would actually work. You know, we had

already done that. Now, they were

actually in the experience.

People have different definitions of

what beta test is. is, you know, in my

mind, I tend to think of, you know, beta

test is basically roughly your complete

game, you know, with all the components,

all the functionality in it that you're

handing over to people, you know,

usually a fairly large group of people,

and you're basically um confirming, you

know, that it has the right kind of

motivational hooks, the right player

agency involvement, uh, that you thought

it would. Uh, also, you know, a much

more mundane aspect is you're

discovering bugs. You know, where is it

crashing? what are people doing with it

that cause it to do things you didn't

intend, you know, and it might be, you

know, a hard crash or it might be they

just kind of got stuck in this game

space that you didn't never expected

they would get into. And a lot of times

you'll discover things in beta testing

that are, you know, serendipitous

upside. You know that, wow, you know, I

never thought players would do that and

it actually works and it's kind of cool.

So there might be things that you

actually decide to lean into as a result

of beta testing, but that's not the

primary purpose. I think the primary

purpose is making sure that you know in

general this thing is behaving the way

you thought it would at scale and that

you know the players might be fanning

out in different directions in there. At

this point you finally have an

opportunity to get a sense of how many

players are going this way versus that

way. You know maybe in play testing it

might have been five versus four and in

beta testing it turns out to be you know

5,000 versus 1,000. Maybe the ratios are

way off from what you thought.

Sound design is a huge potential force

multiplier. Sound design can, you know,

take a really good game and make it

great.

If you ask a player why the game is

great, they probably won't even tell you

it's because the sound design.

if it is really that good, it'll

probably be unconscious to the player,

but yet it's influencing their emotional

state. You know, they're actually

experiencing the graphics as being

better or the gameplay is being better.

Everything seems better to them because

the sound design is kind of putting them

in the right state of mind. So, the

sound design, I think, is kind of

queuing up the player's imagination in

the right state for everything else to

do its thing.

Sound design is usually the thing that

gets a short shrift in a lot of game

designs. It's kind of like, you know, we

know we have to do the programming, we

know we have to do the art, the UI, and

all that. Oh, by the way, we need to do

sound some point, you know. Uh, but more

and more, I think sound is becoming one

of the really primary, you know, upfront

components of a lot of games. You know,

more and more games are actually based

upon, you know, music or, you know,

that's the overt theme of the game. Uh I

think that um

sound design, you know, if I'm including

music as well, uh is at least as tricky

as the art side of things nowadays and

at least as rich.

I think the primary

indicator for me as to the quality of

sound design is whether I turn the sound

off or not.

You know, there are a lot of games where

it's just like that is annoying as hell

and I turn it off. You know, maybe the

game's fun and I enjoy the game, but uh

really great sound design is something

that I notice. Uh I mean, I'd say that,

you know, good sound design is something

that, you know, okay, it's tolerable.

It's nice. It informs me. It serves its

purpose. Um every now and then I play a

game where the sound design just blows

me away. Uh there was an old old game, I

think it's Clive Barker's Undying. It

was like a horror game and you're going

through this old house and it's dark and

it was a first person kind of scary game

and most of the sound design in there

was like the wind howling. Uh some of

the windows were open. You were seeing

drapes move, creaking, and it was done

so well. uh the blending between the

creaking of your footsteps and the

creaking of the wind and every now and

then a monster would pop out,

but it would be a little bit slightly

different creek and you were starting to

imagine all these things in the

soundsscape that you were about to

encounter. And so they were really

tweaking your imagination with the sound

design in a beautiful way. And every now

and then I see a game that does

something like that that really just

kind of uh the sound is really adding uh

a whole level of dynamics to what I'm

building in my imagination. And I think

that's an indicator of great sound

design.

Within sound design, there are a lot of

components to it. Uh you know, you'll

have sound effects within your world. Uh

typically you'll have music, you'll have

a lot of times user interface sound

effects which are very different from

the end world sound effects. Uh you know

voices, voice acting. Um

so you know across all these things

you're going to have to have somebody

that kind of understands all these

components at some level and brings them

together. Now from the design point of

view, you know, the designer can kind of

say, you know, I want these things to

sound realistic or deep and I want the

interface to be quiet or I want the

voice acting to be like this. That's

something where you really need almost a

jack of all trades, you know, for your

main or only sound person, you know,

somebody who's pretty comfortable at

doing a lot of different things. Uh,

again, I was lucky to work with guy

named Ken Jolly as my sound director.

Um, and you know, he would basically

oversee the music and the sound effects.

A lot of games, you know, the sound is

going to be very localized, very, you

know, in the world. You know, these are

the objects in the world making noise,

and as you move the camera around, they

need to kind of fade up and fade down.

You know, a lot of it's very kind of

tactical like that. Uh, other times it's

more global. It's like, I want to have

this zen experience and I want to hear

this soothing music as I play this and

all the sound effects are going to blend

into the music, you know? So there's

pretty wide variety of approaches

depending on what kind of game you're

doing that you would take to sound. But

uh I think that your sound director

probably has the opportunity to present

you with even more options than your art

director. Uh because it's pretty easy

and quick, you know, to prototype some

of these things on the sound side.

Well, I think for the sound to really

immerse the player effectively in a

game, it has to live alongside, you

know, the art and, you know, even the

player interactions, you know, but it

has to feel like it's part of the same

world. You know, the sound feels

cohesive with what you're seeing on the

screen. Then it comes together and

that's when all a sudden this becomes a

real tangible world and I can kind of

mentally displace myself into it. So, I

think that you can't just deal with the

sound apart from the art. The two

basically have to live in the same kind

of universe together. You know, what's

this world's made of? What's the scale

of this world? Is it, you know,

whimsical? Is it serious? Is it spooky?

Is it uh, you know, fantastical? So, I

think that there's like the style of the

sound, but there's also, you know, how

overt is it? You know, is this, you

know, a very foreground sound? Is it a

background ambience? Is it something

that um

sounds very consistent through the whole

world or is it something that indicates

something special here? That kind of

thing, you know, again, it's it's very

brittle in a way and that, you know,

it's a little bit too much and it

totally blows it. A little bit too

little and you don't hear it and there's

a very very narrow sweet spot I think

that you have to achieve on the sound

design, especially when you're putting

sounds against each other. on the music

side that is you know kind of a much

more subjective decision I think on the

designer's part but um one of the things

we want to do in sport again was to make

each one of these worlds seem unique and

special and uh you know we couldn't

really have music coming from these

little cities that were supposed to be

on different planets playing the same

tune so we decided we took a stab at it

uh and I'd say reasonably successful

We had a generative music system. We

actually had Brian Nino come in and help

us design the music system in uh he had

been actually doing generative music for

many years and he worked with my sound

director Ken Jolly. Kim was actually

coding up these systems that Brian had

been doing manually. And so in fact in

sport you could actually open the little

city hall building and adjust the

parameters of the procedural music. But

every city in fact has a different

little melody played because it's all

computer generated.

in sport. In fact, you know, depending

on where the camera is, how high it is

above the ground, you get kind of a

different layers of effects that would

come in and out. You know, way up high,

you'd get more environmental wind

effects. You know, like you're up in the

clouds. As you came in, you'd start

hearing the things, you know, creatures,

people, whatever, moving on the ground,

vehicles. Uh, if you came all the way

down to ground level, there was another

kind of ambience of almost like, you

know, gravel going blowing across the

terrain or, uh, wind, you know, going

through leaves, that kind of thing. But

it's actually a fairly technical system.

And I think more and more of sound

design in games is getting to that level

of sophistication.

And uh so you know I would kind of

describe to Kent, you know, oh I think

that should sound more like we're going

into space. What would it sound like?

You know, if I was going from the

atmosphere

with the camera all the way out into

space, what would the sound do at that

point, you know, and we basically had to

cut out all the environmental sound

effects and we actually went to music at

that point, you know, and there was a

whole different soundtrack for the music

depending on what scale you were at in

the space. So we kind of figure out you

know where does the music inhabit

different parts of the game and what is

the transition really the transition

between those is the trickier part uh

because especially if the player is

moving or move the camera between these

you want a very smooth seamless you know

sound design and that's why sound feels

kind of more brittle in a way. It's

pretty obvious that you know when this

object goes behind that object it is

oluded. You know the visuals are pretty

obvious in terms of where they should

appear and when they should appear. The

sound is a lot less obvious.

It seems like every game you kind of

expected to have some background song

playing. Uh, you know, I think that when

we watch film and somebody scores a

film, there there typically is, even at

a very very low ambient level, a little

bit of a film score kind of running

through the whole thing, you know. So, I

think part of this is maybe the

expectation we bring in from film. Uh, I

think that um there's maybe this thought

that, you know, more is always better.

So, the more music we have playing, the

longer it plays, the better the game is,

which isn't necessarily true. I think

it's in fact a delicate thing. I think

in terms of how you approach it and you

bring it in to a product. When I was

working on the Sims, one of the things I

really wanted to try and I did try and

it was a failed try, but it was fun to

try. I wanted to put a laugh track in.

And in fact, I put a laugh track in the

Sims during certain things. And I

actually started study I spent some

time, a few weeks researching laugh

tracks, which turns out to be this

amazingly secretive thing. There are

just a few people that really do most of

the laugh tracks. They're very secretive

about how they do it and the machines

they use are customuilt. I mean, it just

surprised me that it was such, you know,

a black box. But, uh, yeah, it just

didn't work, you know. But, and it was

because it was so abrupt, you know, cuz

people were building in their head these

whole little stories of these people

doing these things and the player

stories, it would be like, oh, her

grandmother just died because of this,

that, and the other all of a sudden

laugh kicks in, you know, and so it

would actually interrupt and conflict

with their stories. And so one of the

reasons why we never, you know, we took

it out forever was the fact that we

realized that it was stepping on the

player stories that seemed like the most

emotionally engaging part of the

product.

One of the general things I found as a

designer that's actually very useful is

that a lot of times we'll hit a problem

that's seems almost intractable or how

do we solve this? It's really messy

problem and so many times we just fall

back on humor and humor is so underused

in some ways. Some games, you know, are

trying to be comedies and all that, but

uh even just a little bit of humor every

now and then when you're dealing with a

hard design problem sometimes can make

it work okay, you know, in the Sims they

had to pull things out of drawers or

whatever, which is really hard to deal

with. So we had them always reach behind

their back and pull it out of their

butt, whatever it was that they needed

in their hand. Uh, and it became like

this humorous little kind of uh thing

cliche about the Sims and The Voice kind

of supported that a little bit. You

know, the way they talk, they sound like

a little teeny little, you know, strange

people speaking some weird language that

you never heard of before. So uh I think

that you know if you know kind of the

metaphor the unconscious metaphor we

were promoting was this was a dollhouse

then you know these wanted to be like

little tiny people and they want to have

high pitched little voices and sound

like little tiny people you know walking

around inside a little dollhouse. Uh

again this is kind of a little bit more

subconscious subtle but I think it kind

of supported the idea that you're

dealing with a little toy world in front

of you and little toy people that you're

manipulating.

friend of mine designed this game that

we published called Sim Life many years

ago and it was an evolution game, fairly

serious evolution game, you know,

actually tracking the genetics of these

little creatures and they could, you

know, mutate and evolve over time. One

thing he just threw in at the last

second before he shipped the game is

that whenever two creatures came and

mated, you know, at first they would

just kind of do this little mating uh

animation that was, you know, very PG.

He threw in the sound effect that uh he

made with his wife, I think, but

basically a little sound effect was like

la, you know, just a little silly little

thing.

And everybody who played that game, that

was the one thing they remembered about

it, you know, and every time they heard

that, they would just laugh

hysterically. And for a lot of players,

that was like 10% of the entertainment

value of that game was that one little

tiny sound effect, you know, that took

him five minutes to throw in there. Uh

so it's really funny you know and in

that case you know it was actually the

whole game was so serious that that one

little bit of humor really stood out to

people and surprise them

on a game like the Sims. You know we

obviously wanted to kind of hear the

Sims. You know initially we thought you

know do we want to record people saying

real things? No. That's going to get way

too repetitive. you know, it's going to

break the illusion because really the

idea was that, you know, if you were

watching people from a balcony and you

couldn't hear what they were saying, you

could still kind of get a sense of their

emotional state by the way they animate,

they gesture, their body language, and

the tone of their voice. Not what they

were actually saying, but the tone. Are

they excited? Are they sad? Are they

quiet? Loud. So, we basically wanted to

go in and record something that sounded

real, but was not understandable. Uh I

initially brought in a few voice actors

using languages that we just were not

very familiar with. Uh we first tried

Estonian because Estonian sounds very

strange. You know, it doesn't sound

Slavic. It doesn't sound European. Um

but we couldn't find enough Estonian

voice actors. Uh then we found actually

a few voice actors that actually spoke

Navajo. Um but that sounded actually a

little too American Indian. Uh

eventually we found these two voice

actors that were also improv comedians

uh that knew each other. uh a ma a man

and a woman and you know we tried to

describe to them you know what we wanted

and you know they just started kind of

speaking of this gibberish to each other

and you know we listened to it for a

while and we started actually giving

them a little bit of direction sound

direction and I was on the sound stage

with the other designer uh Claire

Curtain and we were kind of saying okay

can you do a little bit faster can you

make it a little bit more cartoonish and

we were kind of giving them a little bit

of direction but the whole time they

were kind of developing this whole

gibberish language. Um to the point

where they were kind of speaking the

same language. You know, the kind of

things he was saying sounded like the

things she was saying. They were kind of

basically meeting. They were both

starting with like random gibberish, but

they kind of met in this area where they

sounded like they were speaking the same

thing, you know, in a male and female

voice.

It was just through the talent of those

two actors that we kind of zeroed in on

what we ended up with. But that was very

much kind of a discovery and an

exploration that we were doing on the

sound stage.

Whenever I got to the point where I

decided, okay, I'm building a game about

this, I started imagining, how do I

present this idea to other people? What

am I kind of imagining the process to

feel like the activities, the agency I

have in this? I'm starting to actually

play that game in my own head at a more

and more detailed level while at the

same time trying to imagine, okay, how

do I offload or download that play

experience into somebody else

effectively? And that becomes kind of

the part of the pitch

whether you're trying to communicate

your design vision to your team or to

executives or to your audience.

uh you need to kind of remember why you

want to do it. What got you excited? You

know, what is the key thing that's

really motivating you? And then you kind

of step back and say, okay, how can I

recreate that process in that person's

head? You know, how can I make them, you

know, see or understand or feel the way

I feel about this design direction? And,

you know, maybe it's not the, you know,

explicit overt description of what your

game is going to be. you know, maybe

it's more a, you know, getting into

their head into the emotional motivation

that drives you and, you know, maybe

it's more about the creativ creativity

you'll have in this or the

expressiveness or what it's going to

feel like nostalgic to go back to your

childhood playing this thing that you

used to play. You know, there might be a

lot of direction you should kind of take

that, but in some sense, you know, like

game design itself, you're hacking

psychology. You know, you're trying to

imagine, you know, what does it take to

make that person feel the way I feel?

Uh, it's almost like reverse empathy,

you know, how do I push, you know, my

feelings into that person?

Interestingly, you know, most of the

hits I've had, the really big hits, Sim

City, The Sims, were the ideas that I

got amazing amount of, uh, push back

from with almost everybody I described

it to, uh, initially and, uh, at some

point I actually had to kind of

reformulate the way I was thinking about

it to then communicate it effectively.

Uh, and I did, you know, I kind of

thought, you know, okay, what is it

about the way I'm talking about this

thing that's not hitting the mark in

their head, the way it hits it in my

head? And eventually I found ways to

actually communicate what I was really

thinking. Um, which wasn't an explicit

description of the game design, but more

the feeling I was going to have playing

this game. And if I could now figure

out, okay, now how can I make them

imagine that feeling? And what do I say

to them to imagine that feeling that I

would imagine feeling playing this game?

So, it's like one step deeper really.

Right off the bat, as soon as you think,

"Oh, I have an idea for a game." Tell

your friends, see what they say. Tell

other people. Tell people you meet. Uh,

and you can just observe and learn from

the result of what they, you know, the

questions they ask you, what they seem

interested in or they want to know more

about it or they want to talk about

something else. You'll learn very

rapidly. And then when it comes to the

point of now you're pitching to team

members or executives, you will have,

you know, refined that idea quite a bit

up to that point already. You don't want

to wait until you're actually pitching

it to somebody who matters. Typically,

we try to go for what's called the

elevator pitch eventually. You know,

initially when I'm working on a game,

I'll sit there and I'll describe for 10

minutes. Oh, there's a game where you do

this, that, and the other, and it works

like that, da da da da. But eventually,

you want to get that down to like one

minute or 30 seconds. There's no easy

formula for that at all. Uh I think

repetition or trying, you know, 100

different things is probably the most

effective thing I found. Uh one thing

that we uh would do on the larger games,

you know, we would go to trade show like

E3 and a lot of times, you know, we

would be talking about a game before

release pretty early on to certain press

members. Uh a lot of times I would be in

there kind of giving a description, you

know, to interviewers. Uh but it would

be you know every five minutes a

different interviewer comes in and then

another one comes in another one comes

in another one comes in. So that

actually became a great opportunity for

me to figure out how to refine the

pitch. You know I would try a pitch with

this person. I would notice them getting

kind of bored looking at their thing

during that part of the pitch. They'd

get wideeyed and look at me attentively

during another part of the pitch. So the

next person that came in the room I

would kind of expand on those areas

prune the other ones try on that person.

So I was actually iteratively evolving

the pitch you know rapidly over the

course of one day and that I found

actually and we would also across team

members other designers or team members

might be there talking to people about

it and they would come back to me and

say oh they really got you know

interested when they heard this part but

they didn't seem to care about that part

and so we'd actually compare notes and

we'd actually together as a team try to

refine that pitch okay let's you know

talk more about this lean into that lean

away from there uh so The pitch is

something that, you know, I think will

be evolving over time. Initially, you're

going to come up with this idea and you

might, you know, tell somebody uh at

your company or a friend or whatever and

that's going to be the very first time

and it's going to be horrible. I mean,

you're just not going to convey it very

well. And maybe the idea in your head

isn't very well formulated either. Maybe

you just have a very fuzzy idea of the

kind of game you're thinking of. So in

your head as well, you're refining that

model and trying to make that thing more

and more fun. As you interact and tell

more and more people about it, uh I

think you will naturally evolve it,

naturally discover the most effective

way to communicate it. So I'd say

repetition is probably the best rule of

thumb.

frequently uh the game designer is also

the person that's starting to assemble

the team that's going to build this

product. And as you're building that

team, you know, one of the very first

things skills that you really have to

have is the ability to communicate your

design to your team. And continually,

even when you're refining your idea or

changing it, you need to make sure the

team is aware of that. And it's more

understanding the direction you're

going, not the destination. And you know

over time as they come to you with you

know should we do A or B and you start

saying you know BB B they'll start

learning you know to predict your

decisions and they'll start making more

and more of those decisions. Uh if

they're unclear they'll still come to

you. So in some sense you're educating

your entire team ongoingly about what

the design is and where it's going to

head. Uh this is a more granular version

of the same process you're going to use

to pitch your idea when you go out to

other people and try to sell them on the

idea to fund it or whatever. uh you're

going to basically try to communicate

very clearly to them what's in your

head, you know, what you're imagining.

When I did The Sims, uh it was a big

challenge for me, you know, and I was,

you know, within my own company, it was

rejected many times because I was

describing this game. First of all, I

never after the product uh was about

halfway done, I never once called it

this again, but I used to call it

Dollhouse. That was the initial name for

the game. And I found that it was such a

loaded term that you know any male gamer

you know they you hear a game called

dollhouse they're not going to play that

game. So that was uh one thing I

learned. Uh also as I pitched this to

executives and stuff you know I was

talking about this cool game where

you're managing these people and they

have limited time and all this stuff but

what they were hearing was here's a game

where you take out the trash and load

the dishwasher. Uh which didn't sound

very aspirational. So uh you know I

found that I had to kind of rethink the

way I was presenting the whole concept

and idea to somebody you know that now

it's little people you can mess with

them and they live lives in your

computer and it's up to you you know to

make them happy and that was kind of a

much more interesting rich kind of

metaphor for them to kind of wrap their

heads around. So you're not just

learning to pitch to your design team or

your production team but also to people

outside within your company and then

eventually to the end consumer. You

know, eventually you're gonna put an ad

on the web or in a box or whatever, but

you're g have to clearly and concisely

communicate to somebody, you know, what

this game is, why they want to play it,

because they're going to start playing

in their head as soon as they hear about

it. You know, before they even see the

game, as soon as somebody describes, oh,

you should check out this game. It's

about X, Y, and Z. They're going to

start imagining, okay, that sounds kind

of fun, you know, and they're actually

playing the game, a very simple version

of the game that they're imagining in

their head. And that game has to be fun.

That's the first game you're actually

designing is the pitch.

If you're pitching to your team members,

designers, whatnot, you know, they want

to know, they're going to want to hear

something that's unique and interesting.

They're going to be proud to build. Uh,

and something that's buildable because

they're going to be responsible for

actually having to build it. Uh, and

something that sounds creatively

challenging. you know, that's what

they're, you know, they're looking for.

And so, you have to pitch, you know,

here's something that's going to be

really cool to build, unique, people are

going to love it, uh, and we can make

it. When you're pitching to the

executives, you know, you know, it

depends on the company, how big it is,

and all this stuff, but basically, you

know, whatever the big hit was last

year, it's like that but better., you

know, that's kind of the the cliche.

Obviously, the the most successful genre

in any format almost is the sequel. So,

you know, if it's a sequel, they're just

going to want to know that you're going

to execute it well and not screw it up.

Uh, if it's an original thing, you know,

they're going to basically be measuring

against that. You know, should I invest

in this original thing or put more money

into the next version of this, you know,

popular franchise. And, you know, at

that point, you know, a lot of it's just

going to be based upon your track

record. Now, as you're pitching to an

audience, you know, of course, now

you're kind of saying, "Try my game

out." Or a journalist is a whole

different thing. You know, pitching to a

journalist, you know, they're going to

want to write an interesting story. Uh

something where they can actually

exhibit a fair amount of creativity in

their review or their writing of it. Um

so, if you give them something where

they can all a sudden take a creative

spin in their writing, that sounds more

attractive to them. There's actually a

pretty big distinction, I think, between

what I call game journalists and general

media. Uh when you're pitching to a game

journalist, they're gonna be very jaded.

Everybody's coming to them saying, "Oh,

I'm gonna build the next big hit and

it's gonna be duh duh duh duh, you know,

and they're gonna want to hear something

that to them actually sounds, you know,

like creative, unique, uh something that

really is fresh, you know, within the

game industry and because they hear all

these ideas within the game industry,

but also they want to uh believe that,

you know, whoever is pitching them can

actually execute this. You a lot of

people can give a great pitch, but they

can never build a product." Um, digital

media, you know, I think it's a little

bit different story. You know, for them

it's going to be more like, why does my

audience care? You know, it's a game.

Uh, so there almost has to be a hook

into them where, oh, you know, people

that don't even play games will be

interested in this because of X Y and Z.

Maybe it's topical or maybe, uh, it's

involving some new technology or

something, whatever it is. but they

almost need another hook to understand

why their wider audience is also going

to tune in to this thing that they kind

of think of as a niche product. So I

think you need to kind of understand the

motivations of each of these groups.

The pitching style I eventually

developed um which I'm not sure is even

that successful is trying to get people

back to the original topic. you know,

here's why I think ants are cool. Here's

why I think, you know, it's cool to, you

know, construct little buildings and put

little people in it. Here's why I think

evolution is cool. So, I try to usually

start kind of with the topic, why I

think I got motivated in that, and then

kind of back into and here's a game

where you get to make this and do that.

And I found that the more we could

reference, you know, the player in the

pitch, generally the better the pitch

went. You know, it's not like, you know,

here's a world in which this happens,

but here's a world in which you are the

mayor and you get to decide where to put

the roads and you get to do this, that,

and the other, you know. So, if you

start saying these are the things that

you can do in the game, uh, and make

that sound interesting. Uh, that kind of

reverses the whole thing rather than

here's this thing I want to sell to you.

One of the fundamental questions that

you're probably going to get um

especially if the pitch is very

unrefined is you know why is that going

to be fun you know which is a hard

question to answer because if your pitch

you know really conveyed what it needed

to convey they wouldn't be asking that

question you know it would already be

fun in their imagination they wouldn't

ask you that question so that that

really indicates you know a key part of

your picture missing people will try to

triangulate your idea against other

games and they'll say, "Oh, is it kind

of like this game but a little bit of

that or this game that's turnbased, you

know, instead of real time?" In their

mind, they're kind of looking landscape

of all the games they know about and

trying to figure out where yours falls

into that landscape, you know, by

finding landmarks nearby, saying it's

somewhere between there and there, you

know, and uh that's going to be very

common. And if your game is not in that

landscape at all, if it's an outlier

over here, um that's both good and bad.

It's hard for them to triangulate

because they've never seen anything like

that. But on the other hand, it can feel

fresh if you can pitch it the right way.

You can almost kind of take the outliers

in that direction and say, "Oh, it's

kind of like this, but we took it in a

totally different direction that

nobody's ever done before." Now, if it's

understandable, and you can basically

again download that it's totally

different in this way, so they can

actually start imagining why that's

good, why that's fun. That can be very

successful.

a lot of startup pitches, you know,

somebody says, "Okay, here's the cool

new trend that's just popped up, you

know, in social media or in platforms or

whatever it is, and we're going to, you

know, be right on it." You know, we're

going to be riding that wave. And so, I

think that the people that are really

involved in these industries, again,

they're kind of jaded. You know, they

know that every pitch coming this month

is going to involve Facebook or this or

that or whatever the hot thing of the

month is going to be. So, I think that

you have to be a little bit careful

about that. Uh, in particular, I think

you need to feel like your thing,

whatever it is, is standing on its own

legs, on its own merits, and it's not

just going to be successful because it's

part of this trend that's happening this

month. There's another actually really

important part to I think pitching,

which is that uh recognizing when you've

sold your idea, don't continue and

unsell it. Uh, a lot of times if you

give somebody a fairly brief explanation

of your idea, leave a lot of blanks in

there. Um, the person you're pitching to

will generally fill the blanks in in

your favor. You know, this is the way I

would fill in those blanks. They're

probably going to do it the way I would

want to. And so, if you leave those

blanks, they're going to imagine those

filled in the way they would want to

fill them in. If you keep going with

your pitch and start filling in those

blanks in a different direction that

they don't like, you've now unsold the

idea after you just sold it to them. So

I think you know it's very important to

kind of realize when to stop.

The one thing that I think um is the

biggest mistake that I see is when

people lead with genre, the first thing

they say is I want to build a firsterson

shooter that does da da d d d d d d d d

d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d

d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d

d d d d d d d d d d d d um you know to

me as soon as I hear genre you know in

my mind that they've already basically

compartmentalized you know how far

they're going to go they not even

willing to think of it outside of that

genre an expansion of the genre but

they've already put themselves in a box

you a fairly limited box that's been

very thoroughly explored. You know, now

it's okay if it's a first-person

shooter. That's fine. But maybe it's a

first-person shooter with relationships

and social networks and, you know, it

might be a lot of other things involved.

But when they say first-person shooter,

in my mind, I'm automatically putting it

in this very limited little box of

experience. I think other ones is people

tend to be too verbose. You know, they

tend to add way too many details way too

early. Uh there was that saying about,

you know, your garden is not complete

until there's nothing else you can

remove. you know, I think for your

pitch, you want to remove every possible

word, you know, that is unnecessary and

refine it down to that level of

conciseness. And uh those are, I think,

the two most common mistakes I hear when

people give pitches. The third probably

comes more down to energy. uh that if

the person giving you the pitch doesn't

really feel excited about it and it's

more like oh yeah I got this game idea

you know uh how can they expect me to be

excited about it you know but if

somebody comes up to me with a very

concise idea they you know lead with

kind of the topic or what's cool about

it to them they don't say anything

unnecessary and they're really into it

that's an effective pitch

Now, let's check out another game from a

different aspiring designer.

So, my game is Flooded Market. It's a

multiplayer strategy game where you're

going to enter the cutthroat real estate

market of the sinking city of San

Francisco.

Yeah. So, you're going to be out bidding

other players. You're going to be

renting. You're going to be renovating

these properties. And all the while,

turn by turn, climate change is going to

cause the sea level to rise as it is in

our starting screen.

This is fast global warming.

Yeah. Accelerated global warming. And as

it moves up, it's going to transform

these properties from their their

regular selves into pristine highquality

beachfront property and then destroy

them right afterwards. And so you're

trying to catch that that wave of

inflated prices and uh that along with

paying off the right politicians will

let

multiplayer

it's multiplayer up to 50 players can

play in a game.

Uh we haven't tested it with 50 players

but the the system is there to support

it. Uh and the notion is that you have

all these players creating an economy uh

that you're then going to try to

optimize and act inside of. And ideally

all the player actions are driving the

simulation while the simulation drives.

Right off the bat, I love your intro

screen. I mean, it looks fun already.

Just look at the intro screen.

Yeah, the intro screen is supposed to to

make that that striking first

impression.

Okay, so let's see the game.

Yeah, let's get into it.

So, you're playing. We're going to

create a game here.

I like the pitch, by the way. I mean,

it's very succinct, concise, and it

sounds fun.

This Will's game. So, we can launch in

here.

So, right now, we're going to kind of

get the gist, the lay of the land.

There's San Francisco for those who

recognize it. And

so, you have a real map of the real

city,

right? Yeah. We pulled from map data to

help get elevations and and um locations

and also house prices to start off with.

So we have a house in downtown. It's

worth 1.3 million. It's five stars.

Are these all things for sale?

These are all things for sale. Yeah.

So I have a budget and I'm choosing how

to spend invest in real estate here.

That's right. Yeah. You have $3.8

million up here. And let's say we can

even select this house. We can bid on

it.

Uh this one we can take a look at and

say, "Okay, it's got some nice views.

It's got decent quality. We can upgrade

that later if we want. It's kind of

getting close to the water. 20% water

level. Yeah, we can check its

elevation's at 50 m. The water right now

is at 0 m, but that'll change as soon as

the turn ends, which is fast approach.

So, it's turn based.

Turnbased game.

Okay.

Uh, so we can also place a bid here. And

then our first property, what are you

thinking? You want to list it? Get rid

of it? You want to upgrade it? You want

to start renting?

Let's upgrade deals. Okay. So, we're

going to put that up to six stars. And

now it jumped to 1.4 million. So,

I really want to go one turn to see how

far up the water is going to go.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. So, we can zoom out. If

I can zoom out here. So, the water only

went up 2 meters. So, we got some time

that will increase uh as the game goes

on. So, it will be kind of this

building.

So, I'm guessing it's kind of like a

sweet spot I want to get in here where I

hold it long enough for it to appreciate

before it's inundated.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And it takes a

couple turns to kind of do the actions

you want to to kind of flip these

houses. And so,

now am I buying and selling these houses

to other players or from the computer?

So, you're doing both. Uh if no one bids

on it, the computer will pick up the

slack and buy it. There's kind of this

secret economy guy who's making sure

that everyone gets paid, right? Uh, but

other players can buy your house once

you list it. Okay.

And so right now we have, if we zoom

out, we have all these different player

icons and those are all the 49 other AI

players that are playing with us. Okay.

And so if I hit the end turn, you'll see

them actually kind of run around. So

they'll all move around the map buying

and selling properties. We can also do

that. Uh, these green properties are the

properties we can move to. They're

adjacent to downtown. So we can hop over

here to Civic Center. And now we have

new properties that we can buy in, new

neighborhoods we can buy in, and new

properties or new neighborhoods.

Oh, so we have a location in this world.

Yeah, we have this tiny little

bing stuff from near me,

right?

Okay.

So, right now we're we're trying to

incorporate as much player to player

interaction as possible. Right now,

they're kind of uh using this middleman.

That's the simulation. So, I buy and

sell properties. I can upgrade and

affect properties and then other players

can interact with those properties, but

I can't interact with players so much. I

can outbid them,

right?

And if we

I presume you played mule.

I have played mule

way way back. I mean, that cool auction

interaction.

Yeah. Yeah. No, that was

almost expecting, you know, some kind of

like exciting point here where I'm

trying to bid with other players for a

property that's very desirable.

I I think showcasing that might be might

be a good direction to go or creating

some sort of moment where everyone's

throwing money at each other.

Dramatic tension. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And that might that could be

broadcasted out to other players where

they get to watch this this battle of of

bucks and dollars go go back and forth,

right? It was actually also an

interesting combination of kind of

turnbased and real time. Yeah.

Because that part of the auction was

real time. Rest was

turn based. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you had

this constant uh tension between whether

or not you were paying attention to the

real time component of the game.

Yeah. So if I'm playing this online

against other players and you would be

playing this,

how long is a turn?

So a turn is an average of about 35

seconds. The early turns you have more

time.

Oh, so it's fast.

It's fast. Yeah. The early turns you

have more time. You have 45 seconds and

then near the end of the game you have

about 25 seconds.

So that's a lot of your dramatic tension

is how much you can accomplish in 35 40

seconds,

right? I'm not sure how much of the game

I want to be about time management,

right? I would like players to feel

comfortable enough with the time they're

given to make the decisions and choices

they have. So that was one of the

reasons why we limited it to five

properties. Right now we have two of

five max.

Much easier to Yeah.

Yeah. Previously you didn't have a limit

and I got up to 40 properties and so I

had 45 seconds to make decisions on 40

properties and I was having a very

stressful time of it.

Tell me a little bit about what you've

learned in testing.

So we've learned uh that people really

like they see houses as almost like

people.

Okay. They see houses as having

identities and having stories and

locations as having those identities and

stories. They see this as a tragedy

playing out before them, right? This is

a train wreck happening and they're

trying to profit from it, which is

uncomfortable for some people.

You know, I think it's going to have a

whole lot to do with the pacing of it.

Uh, you know, 35 seconds is a new player

going to feel like it's overwhelming.

All the other people are know exactly

what they're doing and I haven't even

started in 35 seconds.

Yeah, exactly.

Is there some way to kind of moderate

that?

Yeah. some some delicate onboarding is

probably a good next step because

that'll also let us get to new testers

without having to sit them all down like

this and walk them through all the

steps.

I almost wonder I've never really seen a

game like this. I could almost imagine

something where you're interle players

are in certain zones where they get a

minute and one of their turns is equal

to two turns of an experienced player.

Oh.

And so you keep it in lock step, but the

new players actually get longer and

they're on the same time cycle, but it's

kind of a interled.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And maybe they're

okay. I can certainly see some really

interesting balance point being reached

there. We could even use them as the

generators of content for the players

who are playing faster games. So instead

of having that invisible economic agent

behind the

maybe they're buying the cheaper

properties, maybe the residential

properties are on this every other time

scale, you have a minute, when you get

into the more expensive commercial

properties, it's every 30 seconds and

that's experienced player.

Yeah. Yeah. And so we have a way for

them to play together but also at their

own

at their own pace and they don't feel

like they you know it doesn't feel too

fast for the beginning player or too

slow for the experienced player.

I hadn't thought of that.

I grew up playing turn-based games and

some of these like you know turn-based

war games I'd spend an hour sitting

there playing every little thing. You

know other times they go a lot faster

but when you're having to wait for other

players and I've done all my stuff in 30

seconds and I'm waiting for the

fiveminute turn to end. Yeah.

You know it's incredibly boring.

Absolutely. So, I think figuring out

some way to where players can kind of

select the time uh scale at which

they're comfortable, which also might be

the level of experience or risk, you

know, that they're encountering.

Can I zoom into the visuals like where

the water's coming up? I just want to

Let's get in there.

Oh, yeah. That's cool. I like this.

Yeah. So, we can look around.

Can you rotate the map or is it

Right now it's staying north to west to

southeast. Um, it's staying kind of

locked.

You can kind of zoom in and see this is

where I live. All the water. Um,

you know, you mentioned it right at the

beginning that some players found it uh

little macob or uh

a little distressing.

Distressing.

Yeah.

I find that interesting and actually I

think that's kind of cool because that

in indicates a level of emotional

involvement that they're emotionally

involved in what this is.

Back when uh Kubric did Dr. Strange Love

way back

a lot of people criticized him for

making fun of nuclear war,

but at the same time he actually got a

whole generation of kids, you know,

aware of how stupid nuclear war was. by

making a dark comedy about it, you know,

and uh I think that is one of the things

that really attracts me to this concept.

I think that the turnbased thing is kind

of old school,

but has a lot of cool opportunities. I

really enjoy turn-based gaming.

And I think that uh there might be some

opportunities to kind of do things with

turn-based gaming that haven't been done

before.

And I think in some sense you might be

able to attract a lot more players to it

if I have a spin on that kind of thing.

They're expecting

but and keep it approachable like this.

But uh I think it's a very cool unique

idea and I think that you know the

biggest challenge I would see right off

the bat is going to be um moderating the

player involvement and skill level such

that new players don't feel overwhelmed

by the pace of the game. Yeah. Or the

opportunities that the other players are

taking from them, you know, that you

don't have the new experienced players

preying on the the newbies, you know.

But I I really like the idea and I think

uh your pitch was very effective and

intriguing as well because right off the

bat you didn't really uh talk about

genre. You just kind of talked about

here's the topic, here's how it plays

and in my mind I was starting to play

the game and it sounded fun. So I think

it's a a great idea and I I think you'll

learn a lot you know watching the

players as you scale up.

As I think about platforms, you know,

and maybe I think about them in a

different way than most people, but uh I

think of the technology as just one part

of the platform. Um I think just as

important is the cultural platform. What

kind of culture is this being played in

China, in America? Is it being played by

serious gamers in Germany? And the third

being the actual demographic, the

person. Is this being played by young

girls, by older men, by a whole family

together? Is it a very social

experience? So really there almost like

three platforms we're dealing with here.

There's the technological platform, the

cultural platform, and the kind of

demographic platform. Understanding all

three is totally important. You know, I

think that we are getting a lot of

freedom on the technological platform

that we did not have before. If it's a,

you know, really big game, you can

eventually put it on any platform you

want to really. you know, it's a matter

of where you start. You know, the other

ones, you know, are really going to be

much more constrained over time. You

know, if this game is really targeting

12-year-old girls, it doesn't matter

whether it's on an iPad or a PC. You

know, that's kind of what the game's DNA

is about. So, I tend to think of all

three together as the platform.

The whole world has changed so much you

know in terms of you know app markets,

mobile tablets uh online and you know it

looked you know with console development

and really big PC game development you

know the teams were getting larger and

larger the budgets in the tens of

millions of dollars and uh all of a

sudden you know it looked like you know

we were doomed that you know you had to

have $50 million and a team of you know

100 people to design a game. Now it's

totally reversed. Now, you know, we're

back to where a small group of

passionate people can create a cool game

on an iPad or whatever and release it

pretty effectively on the app store.

Now, it's a matter of, you know, press

and marketing and how you actually get

people to download it and try it out,

but at least you have the ability to

create and have it available to people

and also to learn about it, you know,

very quickly and iterate on it. So the

dynamics have changed dramatically and I

like that idea just as a design point of

view that um now I have the opportunity

to learn much more effectively and much

faster for our players and shift

directions you know pivot very easily

whereas before pivots were incredibly

expensive. So to me and you know also

the fact that it's now kind of more

ubiquitous in terms of I might have my

you know my laptop my laptop my uh iPad

or my phone with me in my pocket. I can

have, you know, parts of the game that

are very interstitial. I can pull out of

my pocket, my phone, and play for a

minute or two, go home, pick up my iPad,

do something else, but still play it,

you know, in a browser on my PC if I

want to. So, the fact that the game is

becoming kind of more platform

independent, uh, is very attractive to

me as a designer.

I think nowadays we actually have a much

wider range of potential business models

than we used to. You know, it used to be

that you basically had to put this in a

box and sell it for $40. You know,

unless it was something that people

would pay $40 for and go to the store

and buy off the shelf, you know, it

wasn't going to make sense. Now we have

a wide range of ways, freeto play,

monetize incrementally, you know,

whatever it is. But uh I think from the

designer point of view, you

fundamentally have to create a

compelling

uh excellent unique experience. And if

you really hit that mark now, you have

all number of opportunities for

monetizing. You know, I I don't really

think in terms of let's first decide how

we're going to monetize this and now

let's design it. I think in terms of

let's design something that's going to

be just so damn cool that people are

going to want it. And now we have this

whole range of ways in which we can

choose to monetize it, you know, and

over time as we're developing the game

and the world around us is changing very

rapidly as well. And look at the

platforms we're on, we can zero in on

the right monetary model or we might

even offer several different monetary

models. It didn't have to be just one.

We have this wide range of economic

models now, how to monetize your game.

Uh, and a lot of that's going to be

relative to your player base. You know,

who who are expecting to buy this game

or play this game. And these people,

depending on who they are, are going to

be have certain comfort zones and

certain kind of uncomfort zones. And

some people, they were coming from World

of Warcraft and they're used to, you

know, subscription. Other people aren't.

You know, for them, they have to

download it for free and be able to play

it for 5 hours before they will spend a

dime on it. Uh, that's going to depend a

lot on that. So, I think once you start

zeroing in and getting a sense of who's

playing this game, what their prior

experience is, and how they are used to

monetizing their entertainment, then you

can figure out I think it's easier to

now adapt your game design to that

monetary model than it is to pick a

monetary model and then force it on

people that are uncomfortable with it.

I tend to not want to get too uh

dependent on specific affordances, you

know, through interface or otherwise in

a platform, but uh if they're there,

happily use them, you know, and again,

the goal being that the interface and my

agency through into this game should be

transparent. So, if anything actually

makes that, you know, agency feel more

transparent and disappear in my head,

fine, I'll use it. uh whether it's VR,

whether it's an accelerometer, my phone,

or a joystick on my desktop, I'd say

that I would not want to build a game

concept that's just built around the

accelerometer for instance. I mean,

maybe parts of the game could be used

that uh but not a critical part. You

know, if I have to have the phone, but

maybe I'm using my iPad, I don't want to

tilt the screen, whatever it might be.

So, I'd say I would use these things as

kind of like upside or um affordance uh

should I say lower the friction of the

interaction with the player, but not

something that the game features are

totally dependent upon. But, uh

occasionally, you know, I'll find things

like that that change the way I feel

about a game. I played a lot of racing

games on the PC and they're kind of fun,

you know, and all that. And first time I

played a racing game on my iPad, I was

actually holding it and just turning the

whole iPad. And it felt so much more

natural to me than using a joystick or

the keyboard. I really enjoyed it. I

found that I actually enjoyed racing

games on my iPad more just because it

felt so natural tilting it back and

forth. So sometimes these things will uh

zero you in on something that gets you

into a different dynamic than you had

before.

I always preferred PC development just

because it was in some ways a lot more

malleable. It was easier to iterate,

easier to kind of try out and go

different directions. You know, the

consoles, you know, were in this very

kind of lockstep uh generation release

cycles. You know, every 5 years it'd be

the next Xbox or the next PlayStation.

Uh the PC was something that was kind of

slowly ramping the whole time. And uh

also the PC initially was a much better

platform for social sharing and things

like that. People on their PCs were

connected to the network uh much more

readily until the consoles were and even

the consoles typically was like these

walled gardens where if you did on this

platform you couldn't really cross over

to that platform and a lot of licensing

restrictions and things like that. So

the PC just you know to me was always

kind of a more free open-ended design

platform. to become a console developer,

you also needed to buy an expensive

console system and so many workstations

and you know there's a lot of expense to

it you know and you know we started my

first company Maxis on a shoestring and

you know it was we can always just buy

PCs cheap get programmers you know so

economically it was much uh easier entry

but uh also you know in the early days

we were actually developing most of our

stuff on the Macintosh first and we

would convert to the PC later uh the

Macintosh was just kind of a joy to

program it was very clean system didn't

have all the different, you know, video

card and configuration issues. But there

turned out to be something else that was

actually really to our benefit, which is

that in the early days, most of the

journalists out there had Macs, not PCs.

And since our games were released on the

Mac first, they were some of the very

first decent games on the Mac. And so

writers that were writing for these

different magazines, you know, they

would tend to, you know, see our games

as one of the few they could actually

kind of try. And uh then if they liked

it a lot, they would write about it

because that's what they wrote on was

the Mac, you know. So our first big

break was I think it was in Newsweek

magazine. You know the first full page

review of a computer game was in

Newsweek and it was because the writer

happened to have a Mac and our game was

available on the Mac, one of the few

games and he loved it and he wrote about

it. know the Mac was kind of in a sense

a hidden advantage for us and that we

tended to get more press because of

Within these games, within these worlds,

there are a lot of moving parts, you

know, a lot of dynamics. You want this

to be a rich, interesting environment

for the player to explore. My approach

has always been to kind of step back and

think of this whole thing as a system.

You know, what is the system that's

happening here? And actually, when you

get down to the engineering of things

like simulations, you really do need to

think of it as a system. And you need to

kind of think about, you know, what is

my paradigm? What is the way in which

I'm going to structure the world? How is

it going to operate? What are the parts?

How do they interact with each other?

Systems are interesting. Uh, in some

sense, what they're going to lead us to

is this idea that everybody in a game is

going to be exploring the possibility

space of that game. What are all the

possible states that that world could be

in? uh for something like chess uh it's

fairly obvious although it's a fairly

big branching tree it's a you know it's

a branching tree every move in chess

leads to another set of possible moves

and you unfold that branching tree of

all the possible moves of chess and you

come up with an astronomical number but

it's still finite there are finite

number of kind of possible states in

chess um the very early games had very

simple branching trees you know very

much like chess basically structured

branching trees that were explicitly put

there by the designer And this is very

much like one of those old choose your

own adventure books. You know, if you're

going to go into the cave, go to page

seven. If you're going to go to the top

of the hill, go to page 20. But

basically, the writers having to fill

out every possible branch of that book.

So, it's a very limited kind of

structure, a very limited world to

explore. Later, games started doing what

I call gated experiences. uh a game like

let's say Quake or Doom, you're within a

level and you have all this kind of

agency and freedom within that level,

but until you get through the level and

get to that locked door at the end, uh

you basically you're in this little

room, this little small regional

possibility space. Once you get through

that, it opens another regional

possibility space. So, you basically

have these like little islands of

possibility space with gates between

them. Uh and then there have been basic

hybrids of these two models over time.

But then as players and designers

started building more open-ended

simulations, it opened up a lot more,

you know. So as we start building

open-ended games, uh, sandbox games,

Grand Theft Auto, The Sims, we're

actually looking at a possibility space

that's vast, large. And this is when we

really have to now view it as a system,

not as a branching tree of poss. You

know, we're not going to map out every

possibility. What we're going to do is

we're going to build a set of things

that interact in a way to basically

generate these possibilities for us. For

the Sims, the way I visualized it was

that basically you had kind of two

directions you could go for achievement.

You could go for social achievement or

material achievement. You know, you

could try try to make a lot of friends

in the Sims, build a big family, have

people like you, or you could try to

make a lot of money, buy things for your

house, grow, acquire that. Uh, and

really the way I visualized it was

almost like a bowling alley here. and

that if I went down one path or the

other, it was like getting stuck in a

gutter. To achieve maximum success, you

had to balance the two achievements

together to get the highest level of

achievement, which is right down the

middle. If you went too far to one side

or the other, you would actually get

stuck on a local maximum on either side.

So, this is basically the way I was

visualizing a certain region of the

possibility space within the Sims the

players would encounter. And we use that

as kind of a guideline for tuning the

game. uh after we actually were really

in deep tuning of the game and we had

thousands of players playing it, we in

fact were actually mapping the real

possibility space that they were going

through and we were actually looking at

how the players would fan out across

these dimensions. These are graphs here

of the way players were actually fanning

out. At first we saw them, you know, too

many on this side, not enough on that

side. We changed the parameters of the

game a little bit and actually kind of

evened out so that these were equally

attractive, you know, to a wide group of

players that whole space.

going a little bit deeper into you know

actually how do we build this how do we

think about it how do we engineer it uh

I need to define two things here the way

I think about them you know one is

structure what is something made of you

know what are its parts uh structure of

a tree it has a trunk it has branches it

has leaves uh then there are dynamics uh

and this is process this is what happens

over time in this case it's you know

what can happen to a tree how does it

Oh, what happens? Can you cut it down?

Can you turn it into firewood? What

happens over the seasons? So, those are

all the dynamics that can happen to a

tree which are very different than the

structure of a tree. From that, uh, I

started imagining the different things I

use as a designer to build these

systems. And structurally, I basically

think in terms of three types of

structure. One is what I call agents.

These are objects, you know, that can

move around, interact in a world

somehow. Next is networks. These are

things that are connected through some

type of relationship uh formally. And it

could be relationships, it could be

economic, it could be biological, it

could be anything. And the last one is

layers. Uh and this tends to be more

spatial. Something like Sim City, you

know, there's basically the pollution

layer. Uh there's the traffic layer.

These are things that are spatialized.

Um and everything in the game like Sim

City is one of these three things. It's

either an agent, a network, or layer.

The road basically is kind of a network

of you know intersections connecting

areas something like pollution crime are

layers uh cars moving around people

moving around even buildings are agents

you know sitting on the landscape with

some identity and some parameters now so

that's kind of the topologies or the

structure of games the way I think of

systems

Next when we get into dynamics you know

across any of these topologies

any one of these dynamics can occur

things like propagation how something

spread through that uh growth grouping

order allocation mapping specialization

all these are dynamics that occur within

these topologies in some sense these are

now the verbs the topologies These are

the nouns that we're building the game

out of. These dynamics are the verbs.

And lastly, how do we think about this?

You know, what is our underlying

metaphor for bringing these things

together? And that's what I call

paradigms. Initially, there were things

way back in the 40s called it

cybernetics, but really it was very

simple systems like a thermostat. And

originally, this was developed for

things like autopilots or very simple

machine control. Governors on steam

engines even are an example of a

cybernetic system. But in essence, it's

a very simple little system trying to

seek a behavior, seek some set point. It

might be a temperature, might be the

speed of an engine, whatever. Uh it was

only in the 50s when the very first

primitive computers started coming

around that the idea of system dynamics

came out. A guy name Jay Forester kind

of came up with this concept and it's

almost uh hydraological. It's it's

almost based upon like a chemical

refinery. And that in system dynamics,

you just basically have valves and flows

in containers. A container might be

population or it might be number of

cars. You know, a flow might be birth

rate or death rate. And you have little

algorithms that will adjust the flows,

you know, for the birth rate, death

rate. You can see what the population

does over time. and he would build these

very elaborate models of very

complicated systems. You know, things

like the world, you know, food

production or in fact he was the first

person to actually build a city model

using this kind of paradigm. The next

one I'm going to talk about is cellular

automa which really kind of came to its

own uh when PCs were really starting to

come out and people had access to

cheaper computers although in fact

cellular automter were predated system

dynamics. So automa are basically the

idea that there's a grid and cells and

these cells can have you know either be

on or off or have quantities in them but

basically all the dynamics within that

are based upon the neighbors and the

behavior of neighbors. The simplest

example of this is a game called life.

Uh John Conway mathematician came up

with this very simple system and it's a

grid. Actually I'm going to go to the

whiteboard uh just to explain this

because it's actually quite simple.

So in Conway's life, you basically have

a little world. It's a grid. Uh within

this grid, every cell

can either have one of two states. It's

either alive and it's full or it's dead

and it's off. Now, the rules for life

basically say that, you know, if one

cell right here has exactly three

neighbors, and we're counting all the

neighbors like that. If there are

exactly three cells alive around it like

so, this empty cell now comes to life.

On the next turn, a new cell appears

here. Now, if a given cell is already

alive and it has

three or two neighbors, it stays there.

If it has less than two or more than

three, it dies. So, this one only has

one neighbor, so it dies. So basically

that's the whole rule set for Conway's

life. Now it sounds very simple you know

you're just counting whether it has two

or three rule you know neighbors and

whether it comes to life or dies. Turns

out that when you turn this on and you

put a few cells in there's an explosion

of complexity. All this stuff starts

happening really unpredictable uh

surprising stuff and people have studied

this thing for years. I spent months

studying you know in fact I taught

myself programming trying to program

life and make it faster and faster and

faster. So uh and you can take something

in as an example

if you put this shape into life at the

very beginning and just start it, it

will explode into this whole set of

hundreds of things that start moving

around and have behavior and it's always

exactly the same every time. It's

deterministic. Uh but it's all a result

of that two simple little rules. And

this is, you know, one of the best

examples of emergence that, uh, Conway,

who programmed this, discovered it. Uh,

there was no way he could have predicted

the elaborate behaviors that were going

to happen in this little world based

upon those two rules. Uh, it just

emerges as a result of that. And it's

emergent complexity. So, you have this

amazingly complex little world that's

emerging out of this incredibly simple

little rule set. Somebody asked me just

recently what my favorite game was, and

it's Go. And the reason Go is my

favorite game is because Go has very

much the same property. Go has two very

simple rules, one of which almost never

happens, but yet the strategy of Go is

incredibly complex relative to the rule

set. And for me, that's a wonderful

aesthetic for game design. What is the

simplest set of rules that you can

create that leads to the widest range of

complexity and the most interesting

world that you can explore with strategy

and behavior? Sell automa actually

became a key part of sim city and the

way it operates. Uh basically a lot of

the complexity of sim city comes from

this connected to a system dynamics

model like J forester had. Again, Jay

Forester's, you know, model was kind of

basically containers, you know, with

whatever, let's say, population and

then, you know, little valves that would

control, you know, this might be birth

rate,

this might be death rate, you know,

later on we might have uh another one

that we add for migration, whatever we

want to. Um now

Jay Forester came up with this model

system dynamics and people started

trying to model a lot of different

things with it. Uh back in the late 60s

early 70s there was a group that started

building what they called the world

dynamic model and they actually started

modeling the world economy food

production population growth all this

stuff to get some sense of where the

world was headed. uh in fact they

started a group called the club of Rome

and there was a very famous book

published called the limits to growth

and in that book they were basically

showing the results of their world

simulation they were running around 1970

and it was showing that the world you

know economy would collapse around 1985

to 1990 and food production people would

starve and it didn't happen uh what

turned out is they looked back at the

model and they found that they were off

on a few little factors they didn't

foresee the green revolution for

instance that you know the efficiency of

food production per land area was going

to go up a little bit more than they

thought. And what was surprising was

that that little bit that they were off

led to an incredibly different result

than what really happened. And that was

really our first inkling into what

became known as chaos theory. The idea

that, you know, sometimes the initial,

you know, starting position of something

can lead to a totally different outcome

if it's just a little bit displaced. You

know, a good kind of way to think about

chaos theory. We have basically what we

call chaotic systems and stable systems.

If I take a a bowl, for instance, like

that, and I drop a marble into it, you

know, it might land here, or I might

drop it there. Uh either way, it's going

to roll around a little bit. It's going

to pretty much end up at the bottom.

Okay, that's a stable system. uh a

chaotic system. If we take that ball and

we invert it like so and we drop a ball

and displace it a little bit, you know,

if it lands here, it might roll way off

over here. If it lands right there, it

might roll way off over there. So, this

is really a chaotic system where a very

small change in the initial position can

lead to a wildly different outcome. And

that's kind of what they discovered in

uh the world dynamic model and all of a

sudden chaos theory started putting real

limits on things that we could predict

with simulations. You know, it turns out

that things like weather uh and even

other things like economies tend to be

chaotic. So that uh even if we have a

very detailed simulation and we put a

lot of horsepower behind it, there's

still going to be a very deep level of

unpredictability to these kind of a

system. Another direction that these

paradigms have taken is what we call

network theory. And you know a network

is just anything kind of containing

nodes and links like that. Uh turns out

you can visualize so many things as a

network. You know you can visualize you

know biological systems, metabolic

systems, you know things within your

body, the way chemicals and proteins

flow through your body, economics,

uh social systems, all these things can

be visualized as a network and of course

you know including the internet. Now it

turns out that these networks have some

surprising properties things that are

just not obvious. One of those things is

that if you have a disconnected network

like this

and you start randomly

connecting these things like just

randomly

it turns out that all you need is the

average of about one connection per node

to have a fully connected network

basically for any size network. Uh so

over time if I just do like one

connection per node I almost always end

up with almost a fully connected

network. Another kind of surprising

result is that you know for any size

network above a very simple one like

this that the distance what they call

the graph width between any two points

in this network is almost never more

than six steps you know so from point

there to point there one two three four

and this is of course you know the six

degrees of Kevin Bacon thing that uh you

know even across the earth they've shown

that you know I can find any other

person on earth through you know six

steps of people that I know what this

person that person knows that person

that person knows that person I can

connect myself to almost any other

person on the planet uh so these are

very kind of non-intuitive things but

actually as a designer this is part of

your language that you can use within

your game to build these systems uh you

can represent you know any kind of

system in your game using multiple

paradigms you can kind of choose which

paradigm is best suited for my game when

I'm building a system and this occurs

you know both kind of at the conceptual

level but also at the engineering level

as well.

So these become a lot of things that I

think of as a designer of systems that I

use to build games. On top of this,

there are also certain properties that I

find interesting to think in terms of

dimensions within a system. One is local

to global. How much are local effects

versus global effects? And you know

where do they meet in sub city? you

know, something like uh traffic is very

local to that one spot on the road. Uh

the overall tax rate of the city is

global, you know, and there's some

things that are kind of in between. You

know, what's the police effectiveness

within the city? Uh order to disorder.

Uh things that are, you know, very very

ordered become, you know, very

predictable and sometimes you want that

in a game. Other things are totally

disordered, random, chaotic. And even

things like cooperation to competition,

you know, is a dimension within a game.

You know, you can have some games that

are very competitive, others that are

very cooperative, but there are also a

lot of spot spots in between those two

and sometimes the game can actually

shift where one moment you're playing

cooperatively, another time you're

playing competitively. One of my

favorite old games is Mule. And Mule had

that beautifully done where you're kind

of competing with the other players, but

at some sense if you don't cooperate

with them to some degree, the entire

colony collapses and so you all lose.

And so I love the fact that that game

actually had cooperation and competition

in the same game structure.

I tend to be a very visual person. Uh

you know in school I didn't think math

was that interesting at all until at

some point I started realizing that I

could basically turn almost all of math

into geometry and I could take almost

any branch of math and as soon as I can

imagine it as geometry I love it and it

makes sense and it's totally intuitive

to me. So that's just kind of the way I

think about things is I tend to try to

bring it into the visual realm in

essence. You know there's a certain part

of my mind that you know I think does

very good spatial uh

reasoning. Other people tend to do

better I think you know with audio

reasoning or something else. But uh as a

game designer you know I'm imagining

even as a game player when I come into a

game I'm trying to imagine you know what

are the things I could do in this game

you know how far can I go? Uh, how hard

is that? You know, in some sense, I'm

building a map, not a, you know, an

explicit overt map of the terrain, but a

map of, you know, my abilities, my

agency, my freedom. I always tend to

visualize that as some type of topology.

You know, if it's a gated experience,

you know, maybe with rooms, you know, I

see these as nodes with connectors, you

know, and that's just a way for me to

visualize the topology of that, you

know, structure. It might be more free

floating you know agents moving around

or it might be something you know very

rigid like a cube or layers but um even

the behavior the the what we call phase

space in mathematics you know can be

viewed as a topology. A lot of the

really cool work in chaos theory has

come by visualizing these systems you

know collapsing you know fairly complex

system down into something that you can

now look at as a picture. You take

something as simple as a pendulum, you

know, swinging back and forth. And in a

chaotic system, you know, basically it's

going from, you know, zero movement,

fast movement at the bottom back to zero

movement. One dimension is, let's say,

the kinetic energy, and the other one is

the potential energy. So the potential

energy is how high it is. Kinetic energy

is how fast it's going. If you imagine

these drawings of curved spaceime, you

know, you put a planet on spaceime and

it bends it down here. Okay? So you're

actually bending space there. Turns out

time bends exactly the same way. So if

something is going past that planet

through that bent spaceime, the timeline

for that is a lot longer than if the

planet weren't there. And that's a

really clear way of visualizing time

dilation and relativity. So I love the

fact that you can just take things like

that as soon as you make them visual.

It's so instinctual and intuitive. Uh

which is actually kind of a good lesson

I think you know for your players if you

can take things in your game that seem

overly complex at first and make them

more visual. So the player can inter,

you know, interpret it with their

intuition rather than, you know, having

to do some more abstract reasoning. Uh

you can make something that's very

complex actually seem much more

approachable.

Just to recap, you know, basically we

have these things that we can build our

systems out of. Agents, networks,

layers. Layers tend to be more rigid.

Agents tend to be more flexible.

topologies that we can kind of structure

from these things. And these networks

also are not just within the systems of

our games. You know, the overall context

of what we're dealing with, the players,

the world, the way we distribute market

games can also be viewed as networks. We

have the technology networks of our

computers being connected to the

internet. We have, you know, platform

networks of different types of platforms

that our games might play on this or

that or iPad or PC. We have the formats,

you know, networks, the kind of games

that we're playing, brain networks that

we're dealing with in the player, and

the social networks that we're dealing

with in the communities of the players.

So all these things really these

topologies and systems aren't just

things that we're going to use to

construct our simulations and our games

but these are also things that we can

use to represent and understand the

overall world in which these games are

being played

A design leader on a team, you know, can

take a number of different roles. You

know, they can start the vision for

design. This is where I think we should

go. They can be the one initially

pitching the team members, you know,

hey, doesn't this sound cool? Don't you

want to come build this with me?

uh at some point you know I think if

things are running kind of nicely you

know that's when I start feeling like a

traffic cop like you know all the ideas

are pretty good and you know it's more

just me matter of saying you know let's

do that one now this one later let's see

if these two let's build a prototype for

that you know it's more a matter of that

sometimes you do have to get dictatorial

you know and you have to just kind of

put your foot down you know a lot of

times you'll get stuck in this kind of

standoff stalemate and you just have to

make a decision and that's where you

just have to go with your gut your

intuition your instinct and say Okay,

look, I'm just going to resolve this

now. Uh you try to avoid that if you

can, but um at the same time, you're

also you're not just uh leading the

design of your product, but you're

leading the process of your design team.

You know, you're telling your design

team, okay, look, this is how I want us

to resolve uh disputes or this is how I

want us to make creative decisions. And

so you basically establish a process on

etiquette uh some kind of rules of the

road for how these design decisions can

get made how you want them to work on

your team what you want the team's uh

basically philosophy to be for design

you know I've always wanted to have

design spread out through the entire

team if possible and so that's a

philosophy that you try to instill in

the team so I think that's probably one

of the more important roles the designer

plays that's kind of separate from the

actual

I've been talking about kind of like the

design team, you know, almost like it's

separate from the rest of the team,

which it's not. Um, and, you know, on a

lot of the larger games I've worked on,

you know, we had, you know, several

people that were purely designers, but

yet everybody on the team was

contributing to the design, you know,

all the way down, uh, at some level. you

know, any idea could bubble up from

anywhere, you know. So, really, ideally,

you want to start actually distributing

a lot of the design tasks to the entire

team because somebody working down here

on the sound system or that guy on the

graphic system might have some really

creative ideas and they probably know a

lot more about the way that thing

actually works and what you could do

with it than you as a designer might

know. uh as a designer you want to have

a rough idea of the way all these things

worked but you're not going to have

necessarily the specialized knowledge of

the way that particular you know cell

shader works or something like that.

Ideally, you want to find the design

talent within your team. Um, learn to

rely on it. You know, basically make it

visible to other members. So, it's not

just that person going around, you know,

somebody's back, but you know, you

really respect that person's idea. Uh,

you want to go with it. Um, a lot of

times people will enter a game team as a

programmer, an artist or whatever, but

their real aspiration is to be a

designer. You know, that's where they

really want to go. And so if you can

help nurture that and help them down

that path, uh, you know, one day you

might end up with a great designer

alongside of you. We're competing with

you.

I usually think when I hear the word

document, I think of something that you

you write down and then you print it out

and get ready to copy of it. Um, you

know what I think is typically much more

useful in game development is something

like a wiki. you know where it's

changing all the time to show you know

the current thinking because I think you

know even a game designer is going to be

changing you know if not daily at least

weekly you know aspects of your games

are going to always be changing and you

don't want to have everybody on your

team have to come back to you and say

what's the plan this week but as you're

making these incremental or iterative

changes you're updating it on the wiki

you know pretty consistently everybody

can always go back there and find out

okay what's the current plan for our

animation system or this or that uh and

we found that to be pretty uh effective

you know just in terms of time

management and all that. One thing I

noticed you know when I started doing

games I was doing almost everything. I

was writing the manual doing the art

sound and all that. Uh then I started

working in small teams you know four or

five people eventually it was like 10 20

people. When I was teams are around 10

or 20 people I found that we would spend

about three hours actually doing work

for every hour we spent in meetings

together. As I started working on larger

and larger teams up toward 80 people,

90, 100, uh it was the inverse. We were

spending actually three hours in

meetings for every 1 hour we spent at

our desk working, you know, and that is,

you know, obviously

topheavy and you know, you're wasting

way too much time on communication

there. But now we have more and more

tools coming online that allow us to

collaborate more effectively with a lot

less effort. We don't all have to sit in

a room at the same time for an hour

having a meeting about something all the

time, you know, we can actually

eliminate most of those meetings. So

these documents really I think it's more

a matter of uh group memory, you know,

and that's what a wiki for me kind of is

is like, you know, me and two other

designers decided we're going to do

this. We put on the wiki. If you know,

somebody wants to find out what we're

doing, they look at that or if they have

an issue with that and they look at it

and they come to us and say, "Hey,

there's a problem with what you

decided." You know, then we kind of

revisit it. But you kind of wait for

these things to happen and you basically

try to get everybody on the team to

respect that mode of communication.

Well, criticism uh actually depends a

lot kind of on your background. You

know, we find that you the artists on

our team are very familiar with the idea

of criticism because they go through art

critiques and art school and stuff like

that. You know, they're very comfortable

with that idea. Programmers are not.

programmers hate other people looking at

their code and criticizing it. Uh, you

know, designers tend to be uh somewhere

in between really, but um I'd much

rather feel like an idea was tested

against criticism and survived it than

feel like it sailed through, you know,

unchallenged. Uh, and if somebody comes

to me with a criticism of my design, you

know, at first I will try to, you know,

just kind of say, okay, well, I'm glad

that you're at least speaking up and I

might disagree and but I will, you know,

in the back of my head it might just sit

there for a while, sit there for a

while, you know, everybody's going to

have an initial kind of defensive

reaction, I think, to criticism. And if

you can just kind of take a deep breath,

get past that defensive reaction, even

to yourself, and you imagine, okay,

well, what if that is a good idea, you

know, let me just try to blank my mind,

live in a different world where that's a

great idea. um and imagine it that way.

If somebody comes to me with uh creative

criticism, you know, real constructive

criticism um and I really eventually do

think it's a good idea or they sell me

on it. And that's a big process. You a

big part of it is when somebody's

criticizing it, can they present an

alternative? You know, it's not okay to

just say that's bad. I don't like that.

But if they say, I think this would be

better than that. and they can really

sell me that this is better than that or

maybe even sell other members of the

team you know so maybe I don't agree but

maybe the other designers start thinking

hey I think that is maybe a better idea

uh and I'm trying to sell my idea

against that you know now it's in a

Darwinian process and I think that's you

know a place I would like it to be you

know I'd like you know you don't want an

idea that you know is getting through

nepotism or favoritism or you know will

set it so it has to be um but if you

feel like your idea went out there in

you know in the thunder drrome and

battled the other ideas and came out the

victor. Uh then I think that's that's a

nice way to approach it as long as you

just don't end up with a blood bath of

ideas fighting forever. You know, at

some point you do have to kind of make a

decision, move forward with some path,

but you want the whole team to feel good

about that path too. You don't want to

feel like everybody on the team thought

we should do this, but the designer said

that.

In any type of collaborative

uh endeavor, you want somebody who is

not going to be too dogmatic, but at the

same time uh is going to have a very

clear strong voice for what they

believe. And it's going to be pretty

they need to be pretty clear about what

they believe. You know, not just they

say everything is great or I love all

that or that, you know, if they really

don't like something, they just get

quiet and don't say anything. I would

rather them, even if I think they're

wrong, I would much rather them speak up

and clearly say what they think. That's

the thing that I think is missing kind

of the most on the teams I built is

enough constructive criticism. Uh you

don't want people just saying, "Okay,

we'll do whatever you say and go do it."

You know, I'd love to have people push

back on me and do things like that. Um

and not just on the design, you know,

also just on the team dynamics and

everything. My art director I worked

with for many years, Ocean Quigley, uh

he became what we call the canary. And

that, you know, we would have these big

team meetings all the time and at some

point, you know, the meeting would just

kind of drag on and on and there'd

always be some point in the meeting at

which Ocean would put up saying, "Can I

leave now? Can I leave now?" And that

basically we knew that the meeting had

hit the mission returns at that point.

Whenever Ocean left, it was like the

canary died in the coal mine. And so,

uh, but actually it turned out to be a

very valuable dynamic. As soon as Ocean

left the meeting, everybody, oh, Ocean

left, all right, let's we're we're

wasting our time here. And we usually

stop the meeting. And it ended up being

very valuable actually.

I think recently we've seen games evolve

in an area that was kind of unexpected,

let's say, 15 years ago when we had the

rise of the app market and tablets and

smartphones. We're seeing a lot of what

I would call interstitial gaming now.

These are very short consumable game

experiences on a small screen that I can

do in a few minutes on my smartphone.

I've seen some of the most creative

games I've ever seen appearing on

tablets. Uh, you know, it's actually a

really nice format for gaming wherever

you want to be. And, uh, it's, you know,

something that's not doesn't have the

stigma of I'm carrying around a game

machine everywhere because they're using

tablets for everything now. So, I think

those have allowed games to reach a much

wider audience. Um but uh and it's also

allowed diversification and exploration

of kind of indie games and new

experimental gameplay that uh probably

would not have been economically viable

on the older platforms.

Going into the future, I think uh you

know we have VR starting to become more

and more accessible. You know, I've

played a lot of the VR games, which I

enjoy, and it's interesting. As

immersive as VR is, though, it's not the

type of thing where I'm going to be up

all night like I was playing Doom in a

dark room for 5 hours, you know. Uh

there seems to be for almost everybody a

limited time that you can kind of be in

that box, in that world, uh and you

know, without starting to feel really

uncomfortable. You know, I think part of

it is the fact that you're totally

blocked off from the world around you.

And there's something, you know, kind of

inherently disconcerting about that. Uh,

and for that reason and a few others, I

really think that um there's a much

bigger potential, you know, for gaming

and augmented reality games that now are

I'm consuming, you know, without closing

off the world around me and in fact are

occurring placed in the world around me

that have maybe some context even to

where I am and what I'm doing. I think

that the technology there that I've seen

is still several years off, but that

stuff is coming at us so rapidly. You

know, I wouldn't be surprised if I was

seeing some really cool creative stuff

in about 5 years from now, you know, as

the headsets get lighter, more

transparent, less uh kind of social

stigma with Google glasses and whatnot.

Alongside of augmented reality, I think

that uh AI in fact really is going to

make the biggest impact by far. I think

that um and when I mean say AI, I don't

mean, you know, intelligent opponents,

but I mean an intelligent game system

that is understanding the player, you

know, that is watching what the player

is doing and understanding what

motivates the player, what they enjoy,

what they don't like, topics they find

interesting, things that it can pull in,

other people they might want to meet or

interact with on certain topics. I think

that uh AI as a moderating either as a

game master or even as a game designer

uh can fundamentally alter the landscape

you know of game design. If you can

imagine an AI that could actually craft

a game uniquely for you. You know it

might be that we all start with the same

kind of generic game as we start playing

it starts learning more about us. Uh

there's a great book by Neil Stevenson,

Diamond Age, and he describes this, you

know, magical book, which is in fact a

supercomput that understands this little

girl, understands the world she lives

in, the context of her uh day-to-day

life, and starts teaching her very

effectively the things that she needs to

know to survive. She's like actually a

homeless girl on the streets, but I can

imagine a gaming system very much like

that that sits there and starts

customizing itself to you. This is

extreme personalization. Basically, if

you had a master game designer sitting

over your shoulder very quickly and

rapidly uh iterating, reprogramming the

game around you to make it more

interesting to you. If an AI could

understand you to that degree, it could

also find other people that are that

similar to you and put you in a shared

experience, you know. So it could be

that it finds, you know, what other

people have had their game world evolve

to fit them in exactly the same way that

you've had your game world evolve to fit

you and, you know, all a sudden put you

in this, you know, together in the same

world. Uh there might also be, you know,

collaborative experiences based upon

this kind of an idea where the AI is

trying to moderate, you know, based

upon, you know, different people their

shared vision or which parts they share,

which parts they don't. And it might be

this would be a very interesting way to

kind of figure out which parts of the

vision we share, which ones we don't.

And maybe the parts we don't become ripe

for gameplay, you know. So there are a

lot of different things this could lead

to. Uh but step one is can we build an

AI that really is starting to understand

the player at a deeply fundamental level

the same way a game designer tries to.

In some sense it scares me. I mean it

almost sounds dangerous that you know

something like that could be so

addictive you know if it was effective.

I almost um wonder you know if we should

somehow avoid it but I know we won't. I

know that you know if it's possible we

will build it but I think that more than

anything else that is going to be um the

most interesting uh disruptive

fundamentally uh gamechanging thing

that's probably going to happen in our

field and I think that could happen

within 15 years or less.

The most fundamental aspect of the

future of game design is it like almost

everything else it's becoming more and

more unpredictable.

You know if you went back a 100 years

ago and asked people what's the world

going to be like in 50 years I think

they would have given you a pretty

reasonable description of the world you

know in 50 years later. If you, you

know, went back, let's say, to 1950s and

said, "What's the world going to be like

in 2000?" I think they would have been

quite a bit farther off. It's still in

the ballpark. You go to 2000 and ask

what's the world be like in 2050? I

don't think we have a clue, you know, or

maybe we have a little bit of a clue,

but basically the future is increasingly

becoming less and less predictable. Uh,

and this ties into this kind of basic

idea known as the singularity that all

in almost any dimension we measure

humans. you know it could be energy

consumption it could be population it

could be intelligence whatever it is you

know technology it's uh accelerating to

this asmtopic curve and so there these

transformative technologies approaching

us and it might be biotechnology

nanotechnology AI any one of these

things could radically alter the world

around us pretty rapidly over a few

decades um and that's an indication that

our future is becoming less and less

predictable

Games design is one of these fields

where you know you're basically

committing yourself to lifelong learning

you know because it's not only so

rapidly advancing but also you have such

a wide pallet of things you can do

within that field. Uh I think that you

know don't get too dogmatic about any

approach any platform any philosophy.

Uh, it's really about being adaptable

and flexible and open-minded and looking

ahead, you know, not too far, but far

enough ahead to get some sense of, okay,

I think in three years we're going to be

going there or there. And assume that

you're standing on shaky ground. You

know, you're not standing. We used to

live in this world where every four or

five years predictably there would be

another platform coming out on the

console side and then we would know that

five years later would be another one

and it was like very predictable almost

deterministic world that we lived in as

game designers. Uh that's not so

anymore. You know now you know five

years from now there could be some

platform we're not even aware of right

now that's the big fad. You know things

are moving that fast. So that's probably

the best advice I can give to up

andcoming game designers right now.

Well, thank you for going through this

entire course. And I hope that from this

point on, you'll go out into your field,

whatever that is, and use these new

tools in your toolbox to do something

maybe a little bit more outside your own

box and create things that even surprise

yourself. Really, more than anything

else, I'm looking forward to seeing the

games that you'll create. The generation

that's creating games now has so many

opportunities and the things I'm seeing

come out right now are amazing. And I

really want to sit back, have

comfortable retirement, and play these

cool games that I only right now can

imagine, but I know that one day you

will make as designers.

The possibility space for your next game

is huge. So find something you're

passionate about and start exploring.

Remember, look around you. Your next

idea might be lurking somewhere nearby.

Go out and catch it.

I'll be here anxiously waiting, ready to

play.