Articles

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