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Okay So Far by Peter Rasmussen

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The game industry is right now in a very special time. Anything can happen. It reminds me of the words called out by a man as he fell past a tenth story window. “Okay so far”.

The game industry won’t be this way forever. But there may be ways of getting the best out of this part of the journey while we’re here.

It’s hard to be objective about a time while it’s happening but perhaps we can anticipate some possible future pitfalls.

A disproportionate amount of an entrepreneur’s creative energy is burnt up in just getting the opportunity to do the work. At business conferences you never get anyone’s full attention. They’ve got that nervous twitch with restless eyeballs hunting, always looking over your shoulder to network with the next person and the next and the next.

At game conferences there is some of this but for the most part people are still actually excited about the work.

Maintaining and expanding a profile in any industry becomes such an art that there is a sense of reward that comes from being good at that alone. This contributes to a kind of decadents. It can become more about working the room and less about doing the work.

I saw a fascinating parallel to this intense miss-direction of energy at the Olympic games in the weight lifting. One of the contenders put so much effort into psyching himself up to get into the zone, before he realised it the hooter sounded and his turn was over. He forgot to lift. A lot of people get so caught up with selling an idea they forget to lift.

Big expensive stars often do guest spots in games but it’s not the key attraction. The star of a first person shooter is the person who went to the shop and bort a copy of the game.

With games at the moment the starring attraction is not so much who’s in it but what’s in it. Or sometimes most excitingly even what is it?

There are still fundamental technological and conceptual breakthroughs being made in interactive entertainment.

These are breakthroughs that won’t just improve the quality of the game experience but potentially open up whole new kinds of games and whole new ways of playing them.

So the elements that will green light a game are changing from moment to moment. Working the room is important but it’s not the only game in town.

One of the most recent and promising breakthroughs is The Nintendo “Wii”. That cool new hunk of plastic you waggle around in front of the screen to manipulate the game in three real world dimensions. It will clearly be refined in speed and accuracy as time goes by. But more importantly I hope and expect the anarchistic fringe of the gaming community will take the “Wii” places and make it do things the makers never imagined.

Voice recognition is a steadily growing technology. Once it reaches the threshold where it becomes easier and more reliable than touch-typing I expect an avalanche of games exploiting it.

Artificial intelligence has a ways to go before a game character can pass the Turing Test and give a coherent answer even when a user is pulling his/her chain, but good progress is being made.

And serious work is going into putting more realistic and refined emotion into synthetic speech. All this will lead to the permanent extinction of conversation trees and give the gamer a powerful sense of immediacy in these fantastic worlds.

Speaking and getting a coherent answer is something humans like to do. It’s so natural. So far this can only be done between humans.

There are voice recognition systems on phone menus that offer lists of yes no options but this is not conversation.

There is a strong push to get this working between humans and computers in many industries out side of gaming. So much effort and money is being poured into this because the companies know that once a real conversation can be had between a human and a computer we’ll have a level of immediacy that makes the keyboard tapping we do now look like Morse code.

Audio communication between online human gamers is already available in some shooters. It hasn’t really taken off. Too much yakking is a bit uncool. And people like to have a different identity online. Steps are being taken to address this with audio manipulation software. Not only can you appear as an exotic character in a costume of your own devising; you could sound exotic whether it be beefcake or elvan. Software already exists to lip-sync to audio in real time. This has the potential to be a subtle but a very real way you could impact the collective online experience of the game. Then all you’ll need is a dialogue coach.

Technology is being developed to enable a car’s computer to assess the drivers emotional state, alert, tired, angry etc. The system is able to do this by using a camera to look at the changing shape of the driver’s face. Could this be used in a game? So much of human communication is in body language and facial expression. If the technology becomes widely used in cars it will make it very cheap and easy to acquire.

So what’s a possible scenario? A hacker mods a popular game and distributes the mod with and optional enhancement. All you need is one of those cheap little computer cameras you use for video conferenceing. The face recognition software is in the mod. You set it up. You forget about it. You get engrossed in the game. Now it feels like the game knows what you’re thinking. Spooky! Games are incredibly immersive now. What will they be like with that level of intimacy?

Sony has taken out a patent on an idea for transmitting data directly into the brain, in the aim of allowing a person to experience the smell, taste and maybe even touch of a video game. It’s only a theory at this stage. The idea is for it to be completely non-invasive. It would not require any probes or hard wiring or nasty surgery. The patent describes a device that would fire pulses of ultrasound at the head to modify the firing patterns of neurons in specific parts of the brain. This is at the moment still science fiction but the will and the backing of a global corporation is there.

Recently a new kind of treadmill has been developed for use with 3D environments. It’s a hollow ball made of a strong mesh. You climb in through a porthole and run inside it. The whole thing rolls on a cradle of industrial grade shopping trolley wheels. It’s used with wireless 3D headgear. You can step sideways; crawl and even take a tumble if that’s what’s called for.

At the moment it still only being used by the military, but the design is very mass producible. The creators are hoping to make it cheap enough for enthusiastic gamers to afford. Out goes the pool table. It could fit into a room in an average house but hosting a LAN party might be a bit more challenging. BYO Rolla-ball.

All electronic media are going through a revolution as creating and distributing content becomes cheaper and easier. This is especially true of games. With games its clear there is still undiscovered territory for us to stumble into. This productive stumbling is so often done by small groups of individuals working independently for the joy of it, as they have done with game mods and low budget on line experiments.

The sense of humour that goes along with this experimentation is vitally important. Humour and playfulness seems to open doorways to creative parts of the brain that can not be accessed any other way.

The satisfaction of creation is very conducive to persisting with experimentation even when confronted with technical obstacles. Having created something new we have a compulsion to share it with like minds. Even if the mind belongs to someone in a different country who is only known to you by their enigmatic tag and cool avatar and wicked accuracy with a rail gun.

A second important role for humour lies here, in that anything that contains an element of humour is very much easier and more pleasing to share.

At this experimental stage there is a tag team effect that drives an essentially non-verbal conversation of micro-innovation. Of course words are spoken but the important conversation exists in the adaptations and modifications each team member makes to the software. This is a kind of pure research

Companies faced with a brick wall dead line can’t afford the luxury of this kind of experimentation. They start out with a final result in mind and have to work toward that goal until it’s achieved. When you have the freedom to truly experiment you are much more likely to discover something genuinely original.

The first Apple computer prototype was constructed out of off the shelf components just to show off to other computer geeks. Once it existed it was clear that this compact personal computer was something people would be willing to pay money for. Now Apple lead the field in personal music players with the iPod.

These days with games a lot of software tools are shareware or free. The code of the games themselves can sometimes be open enough that an industrious hacker can tease it apart and make it do something it was never intended to. Just for laughs.

A great example of this comes from the Half-life mod community. Someone came up with a new kind of “gun”. You point it at a spot high in the map you can’t get to. It fires a grappling hook, latches on and reels you up there. Now you have a vantage in the game the designers never intended. It was a big hit with the Half-life gamers. It was such a big hit with the Half-life developers they put it in the game. With a few changes this device was added to the weapon menu of one of the Half-Life mission packs.

On a larger scale this is the way a whole new game like the wildly popular Counter Strike comes into existence. You can tinker a project to a state where you at least have a demo to at least get someone else excited enough to give you a hand to make it better. It’s the power of creation.

Hustling to get money for a project is like being in a cassino. You can spend a lot of valuable time and energy just to end up on the street pleading with the bouncer. It becomes all about the money. Maybe the next turn of the wheel will be better. Or maybe the dice would be a better bet. And there are distractions, alcohol, people in seductive evening ware. You can see the cold hard cash there in front of you. Forget about what I want it for. “Show me the money”.

Whereas when you actually make something you get hundreds of tiny challenges and victories every day. To make it work you have to learn about new things you would never have imagined deep within the realms of computer code and the nuances of graphics and 3D modelling. This is a world in and of itself. Time here is plastic. You can be so absorbed that what seems fleeting here can be hours in the corporeal world. One thing leads to another. Each new element won’t let you go until you’ve got it working just right. When you’re the maker there are no rules. “I am the law”.

And every day you have more. You have something that didn’t exist before. That you can show. And you have the skills of navigating this new terrain. You get to keep that too.

I’ve just finished production on an independent feature length animation - Stolen Life.

Stolen Life was made using Machinima. Machinima is a great example of game engine software being re-purposed to do something it was never made to. In the days of Quake II most first person shooters had the ability to make a record of a game as it was played. After a great game people would post the “Demo” online so other people could see it. This is not digital video. It’s a record of every move and keystroke made during the recording. All you need is a copy of the game on your machine and like a piano roll it will manipulate all the elements of the game to playback the action. Gamers soon realised interesting new things could be made in this way.

The Machinima community grew largely from gamers charging in with little or no specialized training. This is what gives Machinima its raw freshness.

Many years ago in my deep dark past I worked with a theatre group. We had a base in the city but sometimes did projects in country towns. One of these projects was an adaptation of a book “The Little Prince”. There was something about this production that really clicked. Everything worked so well. It was truly captivating. And the cast was just the kids in this small town. No training, no experience, just pure enthusiasm.

We excitedly came back to the city to mount the production with the experienced kids. Everyone worked hard to put on the show but the result was strangely flat. There was no magic.

The city kids were trying but putting on a show was not as big a deal for them. And for us that had run the show in the country the element of discovery was missing. All the “Eureka moments” were in the past.

Naivety is the key. It’s like a fountain of youth. It’s what keeps you open to pursue something out of pure curiosity to find the magic in something new.

As strange as it may sound I don’t believe naivety is exclusively the domain of the uninitiated. In the same way that any skill can be cultivated I believe that this way of looking at the work can be enhanced. I believe it’s at the hart of creativity and invention. But it’s a fragile business. It requires a willingness to go where the work is leading you, even if it looks like precarious territory.

When Oliver Sacks talks about creativity in science he describes an exchange between the conscious and the subconscious. He describes an initial stage of conscious thought to explore a problem or idea that gives way to a crucial point where conscious thought must be abandoned in order to let the subconscious do its part. For true originality this would seem to be the most important part.

He spoke of the scientist who devised the table of elements. He had worked on it for days and finally gave up deciding to give himself a brief holiday. The moment his foot touched the threshold of his front door to leave the vital concept he needed to make the table work came into his head.

On a smaller scale it’s that thing that happens when you search and search for something. You put it down and now you don’t know where it is. When you finally give up and open your mouth to ask some one “Have you seen…?” and then you remember exactly where it is.

Oliver Sacks suggests that it may be quite important that we never have direct access to the subconscious for this process to work. It’s this exchange I believe can be cultivated. But This delicate balance of playful conscious thought let go at the right time to let the subconscious do it’s magic requires as much practice and dedication as a musical instrument. The more you practice the better your luck gets.

We need an industry that is profitable enough to support all the people and infrastructure that make for a healthy and dynamic environment while still leaving some freedom of movement for all the out of the box experimentation.

Beta versions are used to work out the bugs. These are mostly concerned with things that will make the software lock up or crash. There is also the opportunity for creative and critical feedback from players on the aesthetics and style of the game. It’s important to listen to all of this provided it’s not taken too literally. There might be a chorus of disapproval of a particular scene or event in the game. But the remedy might simply be to change the context that leads up to that moment. When you tell a story you know inside out it’s easy to forget that not everyone else knows it as well as you do.

I use “story” here to mean any set or sequence of ideas that create an experience over time. Even in a driving game there is a set up, a development and a pay-off.

At the same time as it’s important for the player to “get” what’s going on its also important to remember that one of the things that compels you to tell the story is the sense of discovery you had when the story came into your head the first time. If you over explain everything there’s nothing left for the player to discover. The most important part of storytelling happens in the audience’s head when they put two things from the experience together, when the connection is made. This is how comedy works. You set up two ideas “in plain sight” and collide them at the point of the punch line. “A horse walks into a bar. The barman says why the long face?” So unfolding the experience of a game to a player requires a delicate balance.

There is a great deal of continental drift in games at the moment. For a while story driven point and click adventure games were going strong. They have been overwhelmed by the competition from action games. But like any successful genre action games are in danger of starting to all look the same.

When you find yourself in a faceless crowd it’s the perfect time to do something fresh and original to stand out in bold contrast to everything else.

There was one really strong innovation I saw quite a while ago. It was in a game called Outcast. It was a shooter with quite a good story. The graphics were a bit jaggy, which might have contributed to why it didn’t take off. They avoided the usual long, verbose cut-scenes where one character explains the plot to another character. They found a way of communicating the information that was more natural and intuitive. The character you play is a stranger in a strange land. This land is populated by locals working fields etc. All the inhabitants know about the local goings on. They know where stuff is and how to get there and who to bribe etc. If you speak to any of them you are offered a list of questions. When they answer a short scene is played out. The dialogue for each answer is always the same but the coverage is done real time, where ever you happen to be, whether it’s on a staircase or hillside etc. If you ask them where another character is they turn and point like a compass and say “I haven’t seem him for a while” if he’s on the other side of the island or “he just passed by” if he’s close. I’m surprised more use has not been made of clever approaches like this.

With the first Half-life game there was already a sense of humour. With Half-life 2 they have reached back to the adventure games and put much more emphasis on story. It has believable dialogue and an engaging plot. It’s still a shooter but it’s a start. Keeping the action going and unfolding a well-constructed story at the same time is no mean feat with a user running around loose in there.

Where does this leave us?

The game terrain is a “Wild West” full of peril and dead ends but it’s a ride into new territory. The rocket scientists like to say that when something is in orbit that in terms of physics it’s “falling” around the Earth. Will that be the kind of falling the game industry will do in the future or will we be calling Houston with bad news?

Peter Rasmussen
http://www.Nanoflix.net