GDC 2014 Dance Card

Are you in San Francisco next week? Here's some stuff you could do:

• Critical Proximity, a free mini-conference where game critics mingle and grouse... productively? There's a pretty diverse lineup of speakers here -- non-critics, critical bloggers, academics, developer-critics -- and, uh, Ian Bogost?
• Unwinnable Party, a bunch of games people invade High Tide, a (very) divey bar in the Tenderloin. As far as dive bars go, it's a pretty good dive bar, though.
• Agency Launch, basically an excuse to hangout with people (or play Netrunner?) while sipping somewhat pricey drinks in the "Death Star bar" (you'll understand) overlooking downtown San Francisco.
• The gay game industry group is hosting a night at The Stud bar, which is probably one of the more inclusive gay bars in the city. The first 100 drinks are on them.
• The annual Wild Rumpus party at Public Works, one of the few times when people actually dance. Good game curation too, and within a few blocks of burrito mecca down Mission St. (or hipster mecca on Valencia St.)
• Lost Levels is a free picnic unconference where anyone can give a talk or run a session. Bring a lunch and hangout!
• TIGSource regulars usually invade the local Denny's (on Thursday or Friday night?) for a mini art / work jam. I strongly recommend a "Moons Over My Hammy" sandwich or an Oreo milkshake.

"Game Educators Rant" at GDC 2014

At this year's GDC in San Francisco, I'm going to be delivering a rant as part of the "Game Educators Rant" session.

I'm still working out the script and details, but it's generally going to expand on what I've said before -- that game development has a sociopolitical dimension, and developers should actively recognize it and work in this dimension.

It should be an interesting session overall, considering that my esteemed colleague Sarah Schoemann will be delivering a rant opposite mine, arguing against the essentialism of learning code and technical development. Bring it on!

Post-partum: #lostlevels 2013

As 1/4 of the organizing force behind Lost Levels (the other 3/4 being: Harry Lee, Fernando Ramallo, and Ian Snyder), I'd like to talk briefly about it.

It went really well. Like really really well, much weller than I ever thought it could've went. At least 150-200 people showed up, and we had about 50-70 speakers in the end. Thanks everyone.

I'm sure all attendees and speakers have different takeaways from Lost Levels: on the power of organization, the ultimate uselessness of Powerpoint, why GDC must be destroyed, why GDC must exist, etc. At the very least, I'd like to think we succeeded, to some degree, to break down a sense of "exclusiveness" and unreachability among all game developers and players.

As a former modder, I occupy a strange space in the game developer ecosystem: my background is in AAA tools and techniques, but my politics and interests will often clash with AAA politics and interests. I can't identify completely with the more militant indies nor more militant AAAs. However, I do think militancy has a crucial purpose, and that purpose is to move the middle to a better place, and right now I think that place is toward those who have the gall to align themselves with the forces of human empathy.

Now, all throughout Lost Levels, I felt very conscious of this appearance that we're "against" GDC. Again, we are not against GDC; rather, we are against a pervasive system and mindset that prevents GDC from changing for the better. A giant corporate conference structure has strengths, but it also has very real gaping flaws -- its expense forms a prohibitive cost barrier that fundamentally limits the diversity of voices who supposedly represent all game developers, which enforces a monoculture of ideas and works. Monocultures kill games.

My main takeaway from Lost Levels: we all possess some degree of power. We must simply exercise it collectively, decisively, and tenderly.

Thanks for participating and see you next year!

(As a reminder: I am only 1 of 4 Lost Levels organizers and my opinions do not necessarily represent the rest of the organizers' opinions; it's okay if you disagree with me, you will still always be welcome at all Lost Levels existing and imaginary, whether I'm helping to organize it or not.)

#lostlevels is an indie unconference on March 28th 2013, 1 PM, downtown San Francisco.

Lost Levels is a hyper-inclusive "unconference" about games and play that is FREE to attend, open to all, and anyone can run a session. It takes place Thursday afternoon of GDC week, in San Francisco. I'm co-running it with Harry Lee, Ian Snyder, and Fernando Ramallo.

I don't know about the others, but the main motivation to organize this, for me, was about imagining an alternate world. Yes, GDC conference sessions are fun, but they're really just an excuse for us all to get together and hang out, and we need a giant conference to motivate us all to fly over and converge in one place.

At its core, it's all about hanging out with people and enjoying each other. Everything else is just a fun ritual to facilitate that. But many people don't have GDC passes -- so what happens to them? The ritual isn't as fun if it prevents people from joining.

Our community will, inevitably, be incredibly diverse, chaotic, and messy. We should embrace the messiness and accept that diversity, and strive to lower barriers.

Please visit the site for more details and sign-up if you'd like to attend or give a talk or run a coloring session or dance it out to Tetris music or eat sandwiches. Thanks.

GDC tips

It's GDC season again... Daphny has a lot of helpful advice on having a good time at GDC, so make sure you read that. Here's some bits of my own:

• My write-up / thoughts / post-mortem of GDC 2012.
• Don't over-extend / over-promise / flake on people, don't promise to meetup somewhere but then realize that you're actually somewhere else, etc. I did this to people last GDC and felt pretty bad about it. GDC, in particular, is really exciting because there's so much going on, so it's tempting to try to do everything at once... don't do it. Pace yourself.
• That said: here's the official unofficial GDC 2013 party list curated by Brandon Boyer.
• If you must be network-y, then don't be network-y with people who aren't network-y. Use your personal judgment as to whether the person you're talking to (especially an indie or academic) will care about the business card ritual or if they're like Daphny, who uses the business card to mean, "please go away."
• Typical flow / activity of the week goes like this:
  

Radiator Blog: Three Year Anniversary

Wow, I've been blogging here for about 3 years now. This blog is now approaching the end of its toddler years. Much like last year, and the year before, here's a "greatest hits" compilation of this past year's posts:

(Oh, and feel free to have some cake. Forks and plates are over there, on the table.)

GAME ARCHITECTURE CRITICISM

• Why game architecture matters and the reality / unreality of de_dust. If digital life is real-life, then digital places are real places. QED.
• The shape of crime and escape. Notes from a BLDGBLOG panel / talk on heists and bank design, and me trying to apply it to game architecture. Sort of a sequel to last year's "On the first person military manshooter and the shape of modern warfare" which takes off from another BLDGBLOG talk on military infrastructure as war.
• Infinite Omaha. I went to the real-world Omaha Beach, then compared it to various video game portrayals of Omaha. 
• The shadow of the white cloud: architecture criticism at the 1893 World’s Fair and BioShock Infinite. These days, I'm more reluctant to credit the upcoming BioShock Infinite with intellectual subtlety -- it's a game where you shoot men while riding ziplines -- but still, "City Beautiful" is one of the most influential and distinctly traceable trends in architecture ever. It's also a forerunner to thought on Disneyland, theme parks, and "artificial" architecture.
• A short history of non-monoplanar first person movement. The biggest con of non-monoplanar movement is that it's hard to make giant impressive sweeping landscape levels: you're usually either stuck inside a padded room, or you're running outside on an asteroid, and neither offers a grand vista because you're either inside or outside but rarely just off to the side. The horizon is always shifting.
• What makes good writing on level design? I think writing is best when it's specific, and here I try to articulate what I like about certain writers' styles.
• On Joiner and the cult of greeble. If Sleep No More spams readables to show how much money went into it, then TF2 maps spam meticulous func_detail brushwork to imply the mastery and skill of the level designer. What happens when you automate the writing of readables, or automate the placement of detail? I think indie developers are more conscious of the cult of detail than AAA devs, mostly because detail is expensive to add.

COMMISSIONS

• Level With Me, a post-mortem. A Portal 2 mod I did for Rock Paper Shotgun. The level design is some of my better work, and I like the idea of game journalism in the form of games, but it seemed somewhat cooly received. I have to conclude that it must simply be not as good as I think it is... or that Portal 2 players are super lame.
• The Future of the FPS, written for PC Gamer UK in issue 240. A short essay and list of really cool indie FPS games and how they're changing the genre, kind of the basis for my later RPS series. Thanks Graham!
• A People's History of the FPS. A three-part essay series for Rock Paper Shotgun that argues mods are transcending their video game bodies, becoming genuine culture that is increasingly independent of the products that they're meant to be "modding" and adding value to.

ON GAME NARRATIVE

• The myth of psychological realism in narrative. Argues that thinking of fictional characters as "people" is meaningless for a writer. It is much more useful to write by thinking of a character as a vehicle for plot, and let the player fill-in character for themselves.
• Dishonored fails as an immersive sim in its first minute. The simulation should be "immersive" -- meaning, the scope of it should be consistent and everywhere. Scripting special cases goes against this genre dogma.
• Dishonored uses the Heart to lie to you. You'd expect the Heart to be an unreliable narrator of some sort, but it doesn't lie to you with narrative -- it lies to you through gameplay and psychological framing.
• "Stair K": architecture criticism, Thief, and a coffee maker. Situates Thief as dialog on social class and urban architecture. (e.g. stairs are invisible to rich people who take taxis, not subways, and frequent buildings with abundances of elevators) It argues that in Thief, stealing is framed as an ethical act because the rich deny the truth and infrastructure of cities.
• Thief 1's "Assassins" and its environmental storytelling. I really hate the type of analysis that just thinks of game narrative as a static text that you read -- game narrative is also a game design tool, a way to make the game better to play. Games tell stories, yes, but those stories tell games too.
• What do simulations simulate? Argues that a simulation gap is important for framing a narrative.
• The structure of Sleep No More (part 1, no spoilers) and (part 2, detailed and spoilery). You paid a lot to see this damn show everyone's raving about and now you're inside, on a timer. Are you going to spend your valuable time (a) reading faint scribbles on random pieces of paper under a dim flickering light-bulb or (b) follow the crazy naked people who have an interpretive dance orgy in a blood-smeared disco?
  
  I still think a lot of "game critics on Sleep No More" like the idea of it more than how people actually consume it -- unfortunately, reading is boring and performance is captivating. So I argue the readables function as set dressing to assure you of the production's expense, not to serve as barely coherent narrative in a familiar plot that's hundreds of years old. Of course, the dancing's fantastic, but I guess it's hard to argue for the value of dance to gamer culture.
• Rule Databases for Contextual Narrative. On modding Valve's dynamic self-branching conversation system and using it to author dynamic self-branching narrative, and how Emily Short's already doing something like that, naturally. I think it's one of the more promising directions toward a holy grail of procedural narrative.
• Balls and conversation: let's narrativize the sports genre. I really love baseball movies, but I'm really bored by the focus on statistics, which is probably why Moneyball sucked. There's a rich tradition of sports narratives in film and literature, but in video games it's conspicuously absent. Let's change that.
• "Do you think shooters take themselves too seriously?" We watch blockbusters in a special way, I think, but the gulf between action films and action games is this: the films are structured to be human and sympathetic, but games are sociopathic and mean. This is a game narrative writing problem.

ON GAME CULTURE

• Frog Fractions should really win something at the IGF.
• On appreciating the UV texture flat as fine art. Here, I propose three aesthetic modes for enjoying texture flats on their own merits and glorifying them as authentic game art, rather than the silly concept art we parade as game art. I later re-wrote this piece for Game Developer magazine, as "Loving the Bones."
• Desperate Gods and rules-forcing in games. Pretty recent, but I think it's a good summary of current thought on the issue -- if you can play a game of Starcraft in your head, and Starcraft exists fundamentally more as a mental construct than a product, then why can't we just argue the rules of Starcraft in the same way we interpret and amend the laws of board games.
• On grad school for games / what studying at Parsons was like. Imagine a cohort of game developers from all around the world, and 50% are women, and 10% aren't straight people. Parsons is like the rainforest: diverse, beautiful, and vital to the global ecosystem -- but it's also humid, with lots of insects everywhere, and it's constantly in danger of deforestation. It's not for some people, while others will really grow to love it.

GAME CONFERENCE / FESTIVAL NOTES

• Why Indiecade is the best games conference / festival I've ever been to. It might sound like hyperbole but it really isn't.
• I spoke at Games for Change this past year, on LGBTQ attitudes and developers in games. It went great. I began with "I'm Robert Yang, and I'm a practicing homosexual" -- and the entire auditorium erupted in applause and cheering. It was an amazing feeling.
• Notes on the Games for Change industry. Fun fact: I got into an argument with a G4C speaker in the comments. His stance -- yeah the games suck, but people want to put a lot of money into this, so just accept it. My stance -- art should be a free or reasonably available public good, not a product.
• How the worst part of the game industry uses PAX East to teabag your entire face with its cancerous scrotum. I encourage everyone to go to at least one big mass market game convention, because that's when you will know what "indie" really means and you'll realize how small, puny, and insignificant we "video game intelligentsia" really are. The sheer amount of money being thrown around in this industry is insane -- the money spent on a 20-foot tall Blops booth-complex, blaring out noise at a regular interval, is a huge contrast to the humility and humanity of indie game culture.
• What were the main trends of GDC 2012? A look-back on what happened and what stuck out as significant.

UNITY TUTORIALS / RESOURCES

• Shader-based worldspace UVs ("triplanar") in Unity. The worst thing about BioShock's environments is the cookie-cutter feel of the game architecture, the result of modular building in game engines today. The scale and proportions don't feel human or plausible. To me, one answer is to embrace old school BSP construction techniques with procedural UVs so that you can scale your primitives to arbitrary sizes without texture stretching.
• How to integrate Unity and Twine. Notes on Unity's web player JS hooks, and how that can feed into Twine's JS, or any webpage's JS, really.
• How to dig holes in Unity terrains. How to use depth mask meshes to selectively mask geometry, then disable the terrain collider temporarily.
• The best Unity tutorial writer in the world. He really is. I'd pay him to write a book, in fact, but unfortunately I'm poor.

GDC Europe diary

I heard a story about how a certain indie developer fled from an angry mob.

He and a friend wanted ice cream, so they went to a remote island famous for ice cream.

Unfortunately, he ended up punching a clown in the face for some reason.

It was implied that the clown was particularly beloved by the small remote town specializing in ice cream, so a large mob quickly formed to attack said indie designer.

His friend jumped on a nearby motorcycle and started speeding off.

The indie designer ran after the motorcycle, just barely jumping onto the back. They escaped, but they never got any ice cream.

BRB. GDC Europe.

Blog updates are on the backburner for this week... I'm currently in Cologne, partying the only way Europeans know how / crunching on the last touches on my slides. I recently ran through the whole thing and I came in at just under 50 minutes, so I'm pretty happy with how it's going.

If you'll be at GDC Europe, come see my talk on Tuesday at 5:30 in Congress Saal 2, 4th level. I don't know if I'm getting recorded, but if I am I'm sure it'll be in the GDC Vault or something.

Wish me luck!

Rule Databases for Contextual Narrative... and spelling bees.

Valve's Elan Ruskin gave a fantastic talk at GDC 2012 on using "Rule Databases for Contextual Dialog and Game Logic" -- basically, the implementation behind the dialogue response system in Source games, most recently used in Left 4 Dead 2 and DOTA 2. I'm surprised more people haven't picked up on it because I think it presents some really effective research on procedural narrative systems.

A lot of game logic / narrative resembles a flowchart, especially with the advent of visual scripting systems like Unreal's Kismet or Twine -- resulting in this deeply entrenched concept of branching structure. Authoring and changing these individual branches is usually very expensive.

"What were the main trends of GDC 2012?"

So I checked my spam folder and found out I'm signed up for this thing called Quora, which wanted me to answer the question, "What were the main trends of GDC 2012"... which I found compelling because lately I've been wondering, who writes game developer history? Who decides "what happened" and where? What goes in the Wikipedia entry?

Here's how I answered, with a heavy indie bias. I invite competing accounts in comments or on the Quora thing if you happen to have a Quora thing:

What were the main trends of GDC 2012? 
Like, what were people talking about? What was on their minds?

MirrorMoon, by Team Focaccia / Santa Ragione

Run, don't walk, to your nearest electro-computer-device and play MirrorMoon. It was a Global Game Jam 2012 project / recent contestant at this last GDC's Experimental Gameplay Workshop, and stupid ol' me had never heard of it before then.

The FPS controls are somewhat non-standard, but it's for an important reason, and the deviation is handled pretty gracefully. Otherwise, the sounds, the colors, the scope of the level design -- everything is perfect. So so so perfect; part of the GGJ team included the man behind first person runner Fotonica, and it shows in the bold visual design. It's a really solid first person experience that'll improve your day.

GDC 2012 Halftime Report + Notes on the Industry / Indie Divide

It's Thursday now, and I'm writing this in Moscone North on Thursday, the 4th day of the conference. There's some kind of podcast recording going on to my right ("One Life Left") and it looks important. People are eating $15 crepes behind me. The carpet is boring and inoffensive. People are making Blackberry Playbook jokes. So it goes.

The past few days, I went to some Indie Game Summit / Education Summit talks and I've been to a few Game Design track talks. I found a lot of it redundant because I already follow all these people and their ideas; they've been blogging and tweeting and talking about it for the past year. Like, if you're a Doug Wilson super fan, you're already familiar with a lot of his theories and his recent body of work. And even if there's a little bit of new information, you can just read a Gamasutra write-up and get all the salient points in a few minutes instead of sitting there for an hour.

It's making me reconsider how I'm "using" GDC. It makes me think I should only attend talks where I don't know the speaker or if I'm not familiar with the games already -- but that's risky too for obvious reasons. Some people here don't even go to the talks and they're just here to hang out, and I think that's probably the right way to approach things. I think next time I'm not going to shell out for the indie pass, and I'll just try to bum an expo pass off someone, or, if Buddha wills it, I'll have my own IGF passes to give out.

In general, the indie / industry divide is kind of jarring. I'm not sure whether that's good or bad.

The IGF Awards and the Game Developer Choice Awards are back-to-back, hour-long events. After the IGF was over, I swear, at least 200-300 people left; many of them I recognized as mainly indie people. Actions speak for themselves... we seem to see the GDC awards as a largely irrelevant exercise. Indies don't need the permission or acceptance of the industry, though the awards that went to J.S. Joust and Sworcery show that it's there.

This tension between indie and industry got played-out by the Mega64 skits that made light of indie uncertainty about corporate interests. It's okay to laugh, as long as we recognize why we're laughing -- the conflict is still very real. Corporate power can often help and empower indies, but often it belittles us with a reality show that implies the ultimate goal of being an indie is to join the industry, or it exploits us by signing a contract that robs the developer of their property, or maybe it even steals an idea wholesale and cross-markets it with their other cloned apps. Then you also hear success stories like Steam enabling Brendon Chung to sell 160,000 units of Atom Zombie Smasher, which is great, and that's a corporate industry-indie partnership.

As we left the Venus Patrol / Wild Rumpus / One Life Left indie game party at Public Works, we passed a group of industry game developers leaving as well: "It's okay, we'll just never understand their indie ways."

The party was pretty fun. Watching Bennett Foddy get trolled by his own game (Mega-GIRP) was entertaining. Eric Zimmerman tackling 10 people in a crazy J.S. Joust maneuver was awesome. Helping Anna Anthropy push the Oak-u-tron arcade cabinet onto the middle of the dance floor ("occupying the party") was pretty amazing.

I am a little confused, though, as to why the Killscreen party tonight is at the same venue featuring many of the same games: I feel like it's going to be the same party. I wonder what the differences will be, if any. It does beg the question as to how "scene-y" the indie scene really is, that all of these various indie organizations share so many of the same members with power and we all know each other and play each others games over and over. But isn't it the nature of a community to define itself and exclude others? Again, I'm not sure how to interpret Brandon Boyer's face being projected on the walls -- is this fun and great that we're celebrating him, or is this a weird perverse cult of personality we're perpetuating?

I honestly don't know. I'm still trying to figure it out.

But I do know what I heard as we passed that group of industry devs walking home from the indie party. The one with the glasses half-chuckled and then said: "At least one of them shook my hand."

Stuff I'm Working On, GDC 2012 Edition

Souvenir is a group MFA thesis project at Parsons about exploring your memories and holding onto the ones that mattered most. You start disoriented and overwhelmed, figuring out how to walk on walls and ceilings, but eventually you get the hang of it and start sorting stuff out. We started with Portal as our template, but eventually we came to dislike how everything felt so designed -- go here, go there, find the next step someone intended for you to find... For a more "organic" feel we started building areas around ideas instead: nature, school, and religion.

Zobeide, meanwhile, is a collaboration with sound designers Robin Arnott and Eduardo Ortiz. It's my super secret Proteus-killer. (... Well, not really.) In it, you build cities on top of other players' cities, chase naked women through moonlit alleys, and listen to the music that results. It is also an experiment with combining first person interfaces with hypertext, as a literary ode to Borges' Calvino's "Invisible Cities."

CondomCorps XL did pretty well at Jaime Woo's queer games show in Toronto. Apparently it's going to be on a Canadian TV news program too, or something? I'm going to do some more interface tweaks, add a silly campaign mode / narrative, and then call it done. I'm aiming to mirror the final feature scope of "Fear is Vigilance"... well, maybe half of that.

Radiator 1-3 might get dusted off. When I talked about it a few months ago at SVA, it reminded me how much I liked working on it sometimes. Maybe the San Francisco air will do me some good.

If you want to see any of these at GDC (or at the associated parties) come say hey at me, especially if you're a big important games person. Also, if you'd like to give me a job when I graduate, that'd be nice! My portfolio is here.

Operation: Get a Job at GDC (Part 2)

This is part 2 of my adventures in job-hunting at GDC 2010. Last time, I was disappointed by the small number of actual studios in the GDC "Career Zone." I had some okay encounters and some pretty embarrassing cringe-inducing encounters.

And then I went to see Valve.

They weren't in the dimly lit, half-abandoned "Career Zone" ghetto with all the other booths. They were a 4 minute walk to the complete opposite side of the show floor in the quiet, austere, and intimidatingly ambiguously named "Business Area." (What kind of business?!)

This part of the floor was profoundly deserted and I felt like some sort of trespasser, but then I checked for my balls (yeah, still there) and decided that someone would yell at me if I wasn't supposed to be there. Then I saw it -- in the center of the maze was the "Steam-plex," complete with interview rooms and a lounge and a reception and food table and whoaaaa. It was more than a booth -- it was a mobile office, an outpost, a citadel. I wish I thought to take a picture.

I didn't expect to get anywhere, given my dismal results talking with Crytek and Bethesda. I prepared myself for blank, vacant stares followed by me hastily leaving a CV on the desk, apologetically bowing for wasting their time, and then promptly running out to the front of the nearest speeding bus to kill myself.

I walk in.

The man at the front ("Charlie Brown" -- the bestest name ever, though I'm sure he gets that a lot) seems surprised to see me. He hands me a form. I fill it out and hand it back to him. That's when he says, "Oh, there's Robin. Looks like he's finishing up right about now... you can go with him."

Wait, I think to myself. Did he just say --

And then I'm sitting at a table with the lead designer of Team Fortress 2.

Operation: Get a Job at GDC (part 1)

I went to GDC on Saturday with the intent to talk to some developers, show my portfolio, and get a general sense of what I need for a level design position. Here's what went down and what I thought of it:

A student pass is $75 USD and gets you onto the main expo floor. It's kind of a rip-off. I mean, if your goal is to wait in line for 20 minutes to play the newest Call of Honor or Medal of Duty or whatever, it's great...

But for me, I wanted to talk to developers at the "Career Center," a shadowy set of booths relegated to the side of the show floor... and there were maybe 5-10 studios there, at most, who were interested and willing to talk to students. The rest of it was a bunch of schools, both the reputable (Art Institute, Digipen, Guildhall) and the less reputable diploma mills (Digital Academy of Arts or whatever they call themselves). These "career enhancers" took up 60-70% of the floor. It was some lame and misleading advertising on the GDC's part to say that "40 companies" or something were gonna be there.

But still, shit went down. I visited some booths. Here's how a typical exchange goes:

Me: Hi, my name is _______.
Them: Hey, I'm ________.
Me: Are you hiring for any level design positions? [Shows CV.]
Them: Well... not entry-level. [Hands back CV.]
Me: Oh.
Them: But here, take my card, and watch our website for openings.
Me: Alright... Thanks for your time.

... Which is fine. I expected that. With all these developers closing down, good talent getting fired, competition is only going to get worse for people trying to break-in like me. "It's a buyer's market" as they say. But I had a few interesting moments... here's how they went: