Extenuating Circumstances

Work-wise, three big things are still Nokia, Nike and Secret Agency Project, but around that, last week I was at the Develop conference. First time I’ve been to a proper games conference, too. I put my typing skills to good use and published a collection of notes.

I’m still absolutely stunned as to how relatively siloed the various entertainment and media industries are, at least, in their older, more traditional incarnations. Everything is smushing together whether anyone likes it or not.

Friday, once I was back in the office, was full of meetings during which awesome things happened. It was also the day my work iPad arrived.

Outside(ish) of work saw Wednesday at the Wonderlab event at the ICA organised by newly crowned Director of Development Margaret Robertson. There’s a brief page here and I’m sure there are videos somewhere but I can’t find them at the moment.

Thursday was Penn & Teller at the Hammersmith Apollo, and Margaret’s also done a great job writing that up, too.

Friday was Inception with a surprise appearance by the Internet’s Dave Green. I’m not that sure about Inception. There were parts that made me snigger because of how hokey and earnest I thought the dialogue and delivery were. But then again, after talking about it more with Lee on Saturday, I’m convinced it wasn’t a completely cheesy B-Movie. It also made me want to watch eXistenZ again.

Saturday was the first Conspiracy for Good event and was spent running (well, walking) around with a phone pointing it at things, watching videos and being shouted at in various capacities.

Sunday was a day of rest.

I’ve updated my Collection of Five Things, too.

• Discovery Channel's The Colony
  Campfire's social media narrative for Discovery. A bigger, better World Without Oil?
  (tags: campfire thecolony socialmedia narrative storytelling discovery)

• Why Old Spice matters « Snarkmarket
  Yes. *waves at Robin Sloan*. Would love to talk more about this to Robin. Invoking Internet ego-surf attractor.
  (tags: robinsloan snarkmarket oldspice theatre performance thenewstorytelling)
• power to the pixel Presentations
  2010's Power to the Pixel Pixel Lab slides/presentations
  (tags: crossmedia powertothepixel pttp pixellab funding presentations slideshare)
• Ed Vaizey: Games industry hasn't made case for tax breaks – Telegraph
  I still don't like politicians. Especially ones who can't lie well.
  (tags: edvaizey gamesindustry uk lobbying taxbreaks gaming business)
• BAE Taranis – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Mainly for the military research codename projects
  (tags: bae uav taranis wikipedia)
• UAV Demonstrators – BAE Systems
  BAE page on Taranis. "Fully autonomous" means EDI, from Stealth?
  (tags: bae uav taranis uk military airforce mod)
• Britain's Ministry of Defence unveils unmanned Taranis combat aircraft — Engadget
  OK, fine it's military industrial complex stuff, and yeah, its budget probably hasn't been cut, but a) DOESN'T IT LOOK AWESOME and b) OMG new UK military hardware
  (tags: taranis bae uav uk rand research development)
• Lookspring » Too much of a good thing
  What Margaret's been up to
  (tags: margaretrobertson design games wonderlab hideandseek)

Quite a lot of action on the laptop sticker front.

Also, no one’s told me off yet. So that’s good.

First off, Kars sent me some Hubbub stickers a while back. They’ve only just arrived. Here they are:

Then, Rowan threatened to send me some Twilight stickers. Which he did.

Rowan is allowed to send me Twilight stickers because he is a very old friend and I know where he lives.

Finally, I got a sad Keanu from @culturalelite and @nationstudio.

So. What does the laptop look like now?

It’s annotated on Flickr if you’re into that kind of thing.

Send me more! But obviously smaller ones. It’s getting a bit crowded.

Fable 3: Story, Game and Simulation
Peter Molyneux

(Side note: Fable scripted in Lua)

Right, yes. Because of traffic, i Was a bit late and relied upon my sat nav a little bit too mucha nd went a little bit mad for a second but there you go.

I’m going to be talking no real surprises here about Fable 3. I’m going to take 15 mintues to talk about design challenges, and then dive into a demo, and then through questions, just demonstrate what the game is while we talk about questions.

Here’s a big difference. Who in this room was in this industry back in the early 90s. Show of hands? We don’t have colostomy bags yet, but they’re coming soon. In the early 90s, this weird thing – doing sequels was doing this most evil thing you could do. It was exploitative, people thought you were being lazy. Now, 20 years further on. Now we all love sequels, we all love taking our franchise, improving it, and that is a different design challenge than doing an original title. And at Lionhead we’re doing 2 things at the moment, Fable 3 and a project called Milo – which I believe at an award ceremony last night some comedian had something to say – good thing I wasn’t there. Ha. Ha. Ha. Otherwise I probably would’ve cried.

When we came to Fable 3, the dream, kind of – oh, we need to switch this to my presentation. I’ll switch it.

There. No? There. Yes! No, that’s the other laptop. There” No.

The Dream

IS – to create a world that both core and casual gamers can play in, which of course means a bigger audience. We need to challenge some of the preconceptions of design. What this dream means – is we want to sell lots more units. This means more money for Microsoft, we love success. But as a designer, more and more, it matters that more people play your game. And I think that when we came to Fable 1 and 2, we said – what did we do right and wrong. In Fable 2, it was an RPG, it focussed on you being a hero, it had some terribly messy things about it. Part of that, being honest, was we rushed as we always do in development, at the end, and you have this terrible phase which we all know – the world looks this beautiful with these features, and slowly transitions into less beautiful and less features, because you have so many bugs. In Fable 2, at one point, we had more than 67k bugs. We had the Microsoft Test Team – they rated us as super black. No one had been black before. They’d been red or orange. We were super black. It was utterly impossible for anything to come out with super black. We had to reduce down what we had. There were also huge design flaws, to be honest with you. One of them was, not really concentrating on the USPs, having a lot of game features in Fable 2 that people didn’t use or only used once. A great example of that was getting married. You could get married, btu it didn’t mean anything, it didn’t add anything. It was just an excuse to have sex – how much there was, whether it was going to be another hot coffee. That was it. That was a huge problem.

There was a piece of research that came out. That research came out – more than 50% of the people who played, understood or used 60% of its game features. We had constructed 40-50% of the content, people never really used. You know, it’s like designing a car with 300 buttons on the dashboard and you only need a steering wheel. That’s one of the things that we did with Fable 3. What were the things people used, that they liked, that we should focus on. We wanted to get more people to play, we wanted to take small steps to a revolution, a rebel, taking you on a clear story which we’ll talk about in a second, we wanted ot make sure people used all of our gamemechanics. When we come to the demo, I’ll be demoing big things.

The first thing- the big features – the drama. For me, for Fable 2, we’ll use our examples. I don’t think we’ve taken drama seriously enough. For me, that means: when we did Black and White, we – for those people who remember – all the voices were actually done by one person. By one single person, he had 300 different accents that he put on. Is that the best way of getting dramatic story? Probably not. In Fable 1 and 2, although we took the writing reasonably seriously, we’d actually not thought about it as a real story, a drama with beats, that has places where you really want people to get the story, understand what they’re doing now and next. What we did on Fable 3 was firstly go and create a great cast. It was incredibly hard to do. It doesn’t seem hard. But going out, having the idea – why don’t we get John Cleese to do our butler in Fable 3- the process of going from there to getting him in the recording studio is incredibly arduous and difficult, he’s enver done a computer game before, not really interested – doing it with the whole cast is really interesting. John Cleese, Zoe WAnnamaker, Stephen Fry, Bernard Hill.

The other thing is accessibility, especially in the RPG genre. This tends to be for people who love RPGs. Personally, I love them. I love levelling up, collecting things, exploring, gathering things, wealth, experience. I love all that stuf. A lot of the times, especially in games that we’ve done, most of the games we’ve done – the RPG happened not in the game, but in the 2D GUI, in the pause menu. You collected stuff in the game, but used it in the 2D menu. When you think about it in design terms, is that right to say to people – you can spend 1-2-3 hours collecting experience, but when you level up, it’s done in a really basic tedious almost DOS-like way. The other thing in Fable 3 was Co-Op. A lot of people in Fable 2 whilst I think it was an achievement to get it in the game, they said – we hate the idea of having one single camera – so detaching that, so to do things more in Fable than just fight. Fable allows you to do lots of stuff. Talking to people, getting married, having kids. Why can’t you regard co-op as someone to do that with. All the game features – pretty much all – you can do the same with a co-op partner as you can with the NPCs. Uniquely, you can marry, befriend, chat-up your co-op player. Whilst us gamers – two blokes – don’t want to get married, have sex, have children. There are other people who have to say to their wife or darling, I’m going to go off and play my game now, well now you can get married to your partner in real life – why don’t we have an intimate moment while we play Fable 3- obviously it’s not quite asa realistc, but a lot less messy. Perhaps. And being able to do that and to have kids, that’s a nice thing, isn’t it – why don’t we have a child – not in real life, in a game. At least you can offset that time when you have children by at least mont. I love that, and I love the idea of sharing, sharing what you’re able to do, the idea of I am grinding for gold, you are grinding for experience, I love the idea that one co-op person can buy a house and another person can earn money to customise it. That sounds great.

the other thing that’s itneresting is the actual story threat. In Fable 2, the interesting thing – i was talking to the press back at E3 – every interview I asked what the story was. None of them could remember anything. They couldn’t even remember the meta, the big plot point. The Spire being built, this evil guy doing it. That seemed wrong to me. Without having a clear structure. One of the things we wanted to do was to have something very clear about the story. The story in Fable 3 is this simple. You are going to be a revolutionary who is going to overthrow this tyranical king who is doing horrible stuff in Albion, gather forces, storm the castle, take him out and then become king yourself. People are much more likely to remember that, to anticipate it, to clearly understand it. Very often especially with the Fable series, the big story point, what you’re doing it and why is often lost in the noise of a lot of characters. Something very clear and simple is very key.

But that’s not enough. We have to get people to care. So what we found was we really needed to reinforce this rebel point. About a year ago, we started off, we have this evil king, Logan, he’s not a nice guy. In fact, he was genuinely unpleasant. That was a word. They didn’t get it, he wasn’t terrible enough. We kept on layering more and more awful things for him to do. Now by the time you play the game, within the first 15 minutes, he’s done an unforgiveable thing. Every 10 minutes, we remind the player by what they see, not by voice necessarily, the consequences of his tyrannical rule. It’s so easy to forget why I’m here – that’s why we do that. Especially with a game like Fable. In Fable 2, people got hugely distracted with earning gold, houses, and even though we had something like the breadcrumb trail, you still needed to remind people this is why you’re here. That’s that awful thing – av oice saying, why don’t you go to Bower lake and find the… that was repeated every 2 minutes. Instead we try and do it more subtly this time.

Again, letting people be who they are – that’s not only who they are physically and how they interact with things in the world, but who they become when they are king. I love this idea, even though I know very few people will be tyranical like king, I love the idea that you have the opportunity to have your kingdom be even worse. You may be that sort of bastard. Constantly reflecting what the player does. That’s why we have John Cleese – he reflects that, as well as people in the world.

One of the other things – humour. Humour is making people laugh in Fable is absolutely essential. We’ve got a brilliant writer, Mark Hill, fantastic, humorous dialogue – John Cleese, Stephen Fry, then they are naturally funny people so I would say, abotu 20% of the lines you will hear are actually from their mouths and minds rather than from us. It’s important we give them the freedom to do that.

Now let’s talk abotu the GUI. I can talk about it here. That’s the GUI. This for me in Fable 3 is the biggest feature. This is our GUI that we had in Fable 2. It was based on these lists. We asked the player to scroll up and down the lists, these lists had sub-menus. They meant that you, the player, had to keep an eye on the left and right hand side, which is in complete opposite to what we did in the main game, we asked you to look at the top and bottom. Again, it seems like bad design. These submenus often had submenus, those submenus could have up to 300 items to scroll through. That’s just not good enough for today’s world. You can’t get people excited about scrolling down some menu. A picture of a sword is not going to do it for people. The first thing we did was, the crazy way that I work. Right, Fable 3 – no single list in the whole entire game. Everything you do is in the world. To be honest with you, that was a crazy thing to say, but I set the problem for people. They’ve done a fantastic job. We’re going to take a look today. We’ve measured how fast it was to do things in here vs how fast it is to do them in a 3D world. The main portion I wanted to replace was the map in Fable 2 which was boring, tedious, no one even knew it was a map, the second was how you level up. Levelling up is such a wonderful thing to do but atrociously iplemented. When we look at it I’ll show you.

On combat, I think – Josh Oatkins has done an amazing job – all his work. So an amazing job to take one button combat we had in Fable 2 and make it really, really work. Now the stuff you can do is really amazing, very tough to balance freedom and balance and accessibility to balance it with the difficulty curve that core gamers require versus casual gamers.

So I could go through these slides, but let’s just switch to the demo.

We’ll switch to the demo now, while we’re doing it, we’ll take some questions.

This is oldschool. Me doing a demo and a talk at the same time. This is the build as it is at the moment. Firstly, we can look at anything. I’m not policed anymore. Secondly, there are a lot of bugs. A tonne of bugs.

What I’m going to show you is very near the start of the game – EscapeCave. This is within the first 25 minutes of the game. I’m going to show you how we’re introducing game features. THis is a another huge mistake we – I – made, throwing features on a player. Going to give you al lthis and chuck it on the player. This time we’re going to be a lot more paced. One of the things we do – 2 things – we give you the game features slowly, but secondly, you choose the game features.

That voice there is someone called walter. He’s your mentor character. Where we are in teh story is that we’re just escaping the castle. We’re escaping my brother, the tyranical king. There’ sjust 3 of us. This is our first unveil that you’re going to be the hero. ONe of the things you can do is import your saved game from Fable 2 and that allows us to theme part of the world around the Fable 2 game. There’s some small things that are happening. Basically, in this tomb here is the hero of Fable 2. You are playing his son or daughter. This is just the point where you discover that you are a hero. For those people who are fan of deep mythology. It’s always the second son or daughter. My mentor is going to help me through the whole game. This is King Theoden from LotR. Bernard Hill, thank you! Absolutely fantastic character. Something nasty happens to him, I won’t spoil what it is. I pick up the guild seal, I pick up the seal… This is when you first become really powerful. Why has it gone black? This is when you get first powerful. I’m going introduce you now to this. This is the equivalent to our experience screen. Those bars when you get 16 to 17. This is our visual equivalent. This woman here you can’t hear – the volume’s low – she’s Teresa, she’s explaining this to me. Each of these gates is a level just like level 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 6. As we travel through them, we unlock them by playing the game, we’re getting nearer and closer to becoming king. I love that visual metaphor, the journey to rule, the road to power. It also introduce our one and only currency for the player to think about. It’s guild seals / followers. You get it for doing everything you do in the game. In Fable 2, you only got 4 different types of experience – thrown all that away, replaced it with this. You get stuff for getting married, chatting people up, doing anything in the world you can get this currency. You spend it on – I’ve just gone up a level by opening a gate. You spend this experience on – I’m going to fly you somewhere. You spend it opening gates and this stuff. These chests are essentially – these are your different abilities that you can choose to spend your seals on. You can buy houses – this chest here. You may want a big bastard sword. So in this chest, you can get big bastard swords. You can choose your game features as you journey. Hopefully I haven’t messed things up. Teresa has explained this to me – open this chest up. That’s the global way of levelling up. There’s another levelling up mechanic that I love. That is that you can level up this. It looks phallic at the moment – this is your fist of power – (laughter) – what it is, all weapons, every single one, the gauntlet that you wear, the sword that you hold, the hammer, the gun, the rifle, those will level up. The actual physical thing will level up. They will all morph to reflect what sort of fighter you are, how good you are. That allows me as a player, as a gamer to craft by use some really cool unique weapons which I can trade, or gift, to my friends or enemies. Let’s go back to the game now. I do that by going through here.

OK – I’m going to walk on. Any questions about this stuff so far?

Q: (inaudible)
A: Absoultely, it’s crucial to let us take that choice – as a woman, you start the game as a princess, you have a boyfriend – my mind was going somewhere with that – the good thing is, a bad thing about Fable 2. All our women did look like russian shopkeepers, in Fable 3 I’m glad to say that they have curves and soft bits. All morphing of course.

So we’ve reintroduced this one simple thing. We get this animation here, I don’t like it at all. This is this one fireball spell. Now probably of our 3 combat systems what’s changed the most is the spell system. Just go down into this – the escape cave. This was built by my father, the hero of Fable 2, he knew this was going on, this is like the batcave, you can think of my butler as Alfred from Batman. Here we have the cave. One of the tcool things about Fable – this is not a vista. This is all navigable. We’re going to be wandering down here later on. Looks like a vista. I love that most of our tech – our levels are 4x bigger, if you can see it, generally speaking, you’re probably going to be navigating it. Incidentaly, this – down here, these four icons, this whistle, getting rid of it. We hate this thing now. If we don’t have that, then you just have this beautiful clear view. This is what we want it to look like. No bars, stats, numbers, we don’t need them. They’re inside the world. We’re travelling along here, these two guys, they’ll comment on things I do, they’re companions, you spend a lot of Fable 3 time travelling through – it’s hard to do this and talk. Oh, we’ve got some bats. I’m going to show you some magic – you can tap the btuton, and push with joypad, I fire at range. Or you can hold and you build up and charge the spell. We don’t ever cap these holds. If you really want to, I’ve done this years ago, if you want to go to bed and rest a coffee button on your b button and wake up 12 hours later, then absolutely, you can do that. You can see some of that. How it enhances. I love that feeling of power, of why should we cap these things. What we do change is that you level up the gauntlet. So it unlocks special moves. The other thing is that we change the chargeup time. I’m going to go forward to another level and take another question. I really want to show you the GUI.

Let’s do that now. Not working. Ah, OK. I have 15 minutes. Geez, I haven’t even started the demo. Any questions? In the middle.

Q: What you were saying about keeping the player focussed on the objective. What happens when you become king? By the sound of it, it becomes a dead end. You achieve everything, how do you intend to keep the player focussed after that?
A: The temptation to keep the player focussed – I want to talk about that actually. Either have this voice saying – you should go over there, over there, or even more lazily, have a bar saying you should go over there. I don’t think that’s – what we’re trying to do here is to keep you engaged but allow you freedom. The breadcrumb trail had its critics from Fable. They really don’t know I’m showing this off. They’ll be so angry.

Fable 2 had that version of telling people. Now, setting up in the player’s mind this mentor character. If you’ve got walter or Jasper later on there are other characters, then that’s a great way of helping you with that reminding system. Not pushing, but making that character sensitive to what you’re doing. If you’re hcatting up a girl, they’re not going to come up to you and say go to the lake, go to the lake. With Walter, if he sees you doing something, he’s going to say – I’;m going to wait in tihs pub, when you’re finished, come and get me. The breadcrumb trail will update from going to the lake to going to Walter. We fade it up and down depending on what you’re doing. If you’re in the midle of buying a a house, we’re not going to have this throbbing glowing thing. In the balance thing – we’re balancing this thing – the breadcrumb trail. If I took this and for a few minutes, it drastically changes peoples experiences. That’s what’s so lovely about designing a game around it, it replaces the map. If I fade it out to almost nothing and you’re standing still, I fade it up, I can pull you along. You do’t feel like you have this voice in your head.

This is only about 15 minutes further on. [wolves]. You can see that I – again, very simple combat, I can build up a massive spell. Now here’ sthe thing I love. This button here, when you pressed it in Fable 2, it bought up the 2d gui. Now it bring sup into this place, the sanctuary. In this place, this is where your butler lives. We’ve only just discovered it. The sanctuary is part of the story. And so he is unveiling, unlocking, these different rooms which are coincidentally, our game features. This is my dressing room. To change my clothes, I walk up to something and press A, that’s it. I’ve changed my clothes. Not wading through hundreds of options. I can use the stick to alter parts of my body, we know few people will do that. I can scroll through this. You get more manequins. Also we unlock more stuff in this room – you can learn about dying, the road to rule, some people never dye stuff. Any time, I can press the start button, back in the game. That’s how quick it is to swap between it. The thumb stick usage is less than going through a 2d menu. I love that, I love it’s in the world. This – the living map. We call it al iving map. It allows you to scroll round. Albion is still alive in this map, it helps in your journey to rule. This is where I am at the moment. Earlier on if I’d gone into it, you’d see the wolves there. It makes you feel you’re still in the world. Any questions about what you’ve seen there?

Q: I wondered if you’d done anything – you’ve almost touched on it – to address loading.
A: I know, I hate loading. I really hate it. I knew everyone. Now I know journalists are going to slag us off about it. This level here is a pretty vast level. I’ll fly around it a bit. You can see it’s vast. We want to try and keep you in it for as long as we can, everything navigable. We’ve got a big problem – a lot of our world is persistent. We can’t afford the memory footprint of keeping it in memory. We experimented with stream loading. Let me just cheat.

Q: I only just got an XBOX 360 a couple weeks ago. I haven’t played Fable 2 yet. I played Fable 1. I bought it as a late game. What I wanted to ask – you had companions – those two henchmen are like your companions. Do they beat the shit out of you when you do bad things – stop that, stop that, he doesn’t deserve it, blah blah blah.
A: The question was – do your companions beat you up. Certainly, they – John Cleese – he’s not a physically strong person. He doesn’t beat you up. He does chastise you verbally. And some of that will make you laugh. People will love that idea, you can do ridiculous things, when you’re crowned king, you can put on a chicken costume. He’ll comment on that. For Walter, when you become a rebel, he’ll turn round and say – that’s not right what you just did. He doesn’t stab you in the heart, he does comment on what’s right and wrong. Making you feel not guilty – not a good emotion – making you feel the consequenes are important. I don’t think they’re with you the whole time. Jasper is there for a lot of it, he’s in the sanctuary.

Q: In Fable 2 your actions never seemed like they had much consequence. You could piss them off, and 30 seconds they’d love you again.
A: Yeah, they didn’t have an effect on the meta story. What we have now – we have promises. On your journey to rule, we are – (Brightwall Village) forcing you to take promises. They’ll say I will support you on your journey to become ruler if you promise to do this. This might be a huge thing. It might be reinstating lands. It might be promising to turn a factory into a school. In this case, we’re going to Brightwall, this was a university town, the Librarian says I’ll follow you if you’ll give us the money to reinstate. You are completely free to totally ignore and rub their noses in the promise and do awful things or to keep the promise Everything changes around the world. Promises will change the entirety of the makeup, some will change individuals. We’ve just turned up.

This is me going off quest now, the breadcrumb trail is fading in again, I’ve decided I don’t want to do that, I want to walk up this person, take them by the hand and go for a drink. Why? Because I’m make him my friend, he’ll like me and he’ll follow me. Anyway, Fable 3…

Q: Can you build up armies that way?
A: Yes, armies, very good question. We give you – you have got an army. Do you enter into a battle with 100k of your troops.

Q: You friended him, can you do that to a bunch.
A: They will follow you around the world, they will comment on you. Is that a core game feature, no it’s not. If I want to I can play the entirety of the game, holding this guy’s hand. But why you’d want to do that, if I start doing things, I wonder if I can odo this. Belching. ONly got 2 expressions at the moment. Do that again. Going to try to take hand again. No. I need to do a bit more work on him. If he gets scared, you’ll end up dragging him along, on the ground.

• Swan dive! Into interactive TV commercials. | MetaFilter
  Metafilter, not alone, struggles with the nature of advertising and entertainment
  (tags: oldspice metafilter mefi w+k discussion advertising entertainment twitter youtube portland)

How to get great drama and performances in video games
Georg Backer – Lionhead Studios

Welcome – thanks for taking the time. First a few things about me. Audio producer at Lionhead Studios – look after voiceover and audio production. Complete audio coverage in our games. But also because we’ve got the drama properly sorted out in games. I’ve been working there for 10 years, all the titles I’ve been involved with in one way or another. Fable 2 I took over video and continued that for Fable 3.

The first thing I want to talk about is non-interactive versus interactive drama, especially now with both industries trying to cross over. Films trying to be like games and vice versa. Although there’s a big difference between two categories.

On the left – the passive, non-interactive. On the right the interactive department. The non-interactive drama, you can call it traditional storytelling. You tell it there’s no active audience involvement, you listen, you read, you watch, the whole experience is pre-canned and process on your own, you have no way of interacting with it. With the interactive department, you have experiencing – you don’t get told it, you get to experience it. The storytelling comes afterwards when you talk to your friends about the game , what happened. Passive – over time, established languages to convey emotions and motivations.

When you talk to films, tv and books – writers – who think that it’s quite amazing videogames having all that freedom. It’s quite an irony. For films, tv, books, you have full control of everything. Protagonist, antagonist, tell it how you want, structure. That’s great if you want to do videogames, but you can’t control the protagonist, you’re not really allowed to tell them what to do. You can say it’s about a space marine who goes into space and that’s about it – you can set it up, but what you have to do is define an environment, get the player to progres sthrough a story without them thinking that they’re being hand-held here. That’s a key difference. Interactive is very young compared to books and films, no real established language yet.

Films, music, books – they have an emotional delivery language that’s established. We all know films, we may not know the rules, camera angles, editing, sound design, we may not know the techincal names, but we know when something works and doesn’t work. We all know it. You know when there’s a horror film when something’s going to go wrong, when something’s going to be cheesy. You know, camera cuts and angles, you don’t get confused as an audience when things go back and forth. That’s something you’ve subconciously learned over the years watching films. The same for books and storytelling. In the games industry, we’re young in that edge, we’re trying to, we’re getting there, we’re borrowing a lot from other industries, and we’re trying to take it over rather than adapt it.

The other interesting thing is that when you watch a movie, the way it evokes emotions is through a third person – a hero journey, you’re feeling for him, but you don’t feel – you don’t invoke the same as if you’re directly involved. So in what – passive emotions versus active emotions. That lets videogames evoke different sets of emotions – remorse, regret, guilt, everything is direct, it’s not through a third person, it’s geared toward you. It’s at least a concept. In films, it’s often the case – the best riend gets hurt, to die – that’s the point where you are, in videogames, that is as well, if ther’es another person ivnolved who’s not the player, then you share the same set of emotions, the passive set.

The immersion on non-interactive title is non-participation level. You don’t have to, the main thing, the protagonist, he has to believe his surroundings in a movie. You might not like the environment there, btu you can accept that this is something the author has conceived and wants to execute. In videogames, it’s key, it keeps you in the world, that keeps that makes sure you want to progress, go through the story, the game, the game mechanics. Immersion is a different take in both medias. The ROI on games versus movies or books is that you’ve got a finite amount of time in those media, 90 minutes in a movie, 42 minutes in a tv series, you can plan when you have to get the first results to keep the audience hooked so they don’t go off, but at the same time you’ve got 40 minutes. You know that the ROI will be pretty soon. It’s harder in a game, you have to explain setup, mechanics, let the player do it, feel immersed without being handheld, it’s very different, more active, but probably more interestingly rewarding in a different way.

The other thing, drama in traditional media is breaking rules and patterns – if everything is fine there’s no story. Videogames are based on rules and patterns. If you strip down a game, you end up excel sheet and balance data. Those are the differences between the two medias.

Another interesting comparison is linear and finite in a traditional storytelling way. 1 to 2 to 3 to 4 to 5 to 6. High points and low points to make it dramatic and engaging. Videogames may look like this – [squiggle] – the key elements are there, but in between are an infinite amount of time only based by how many quests or how big your game is. The blue dots are optional quests or things not part of the core experience. So it can go a bit more manic. The problem there is if you have af inite amount of time, in al inear story, you can plan the dramatic exposure. You can plan how you hit the audience, the lighting, the cuts, the right amount of drama is in the right moment. In the experiencing, in the interactive games, it can be much more difficult. If the player doesn’t do anything, then there’s nothing happening.

Creative interactive immersive drmatic experiences. I found this thing on the internet. Take a look of the things here. It’s Guitar Hero 5. It loks great, you’ve got music, sounds, it’s participation, it’s full immersive experience. Now imagine what would happen if it had been developed in 1981. Text adventure. The ruleset is the same. The fun’s gone (Press red button / you see a blue circle / press blue button) etc.

How can you best approach the whole thing of creating – there’s three categories. The right approach, the right people, the right process.

The approach is, from drama to gameplay to drama to gameplay to drama etc. That’s the traditional approach. It’s compartment and separated. Luckily the game industry does the right steps to get away from that, where you combine eveything and combine everything. SEverything sort of happens like seamlessly.

The way we did it Lionhead is we first wanted to understand the languages together. We worked with people from the film industry, the sound industry, musicians, artists. Just to understand how they work and what the language of their preferred media is. It’s quite itneresting if you talk to a film editor all the tricks and treats you get. Also I got to talk to someone who told me that Porsche has a sound designer, they want to make sure that their door sounds like a door. There’s a lot of, so the language of the media slips over into the world of into the real world of the sound designs. Or also starts to reel into the video games world. I also had a discussion with a sound designer, they used to be more realism in the games, real guns, and go to real um fighters, and t then what we did is we talked to people who do the sounds for films and they told us a different story and they don’t record real guns, they want to make a sound meatier, bigger, and explosions in film it’s big and meaty and not in real life.

The other interesting thing I found about the different talking to the different people is the they had a lot of time to establish language. Films, music have been there for ever. We are a young industry, we’re trying to catch up now.

We understood and deconstructed traditional drama. We got a swordmaster in, and got him to teach us how film fights work, how they look cool. You guys don’t care, make us look cool. And it was quite interesting the different things he showed us, things that looked cool on screen. Same for film and directors. And then we took all of that and started to apply it to certain types of the game – the combat system, externally of the game, camera cuts, sound effects, so that and the game mechanic so it feels complete so you’re not thrown out. TSo the camera cuts aren’t confusing you. And we sort of like then we readapated it and put it into the game.

The interesting thing about story experiencing is that it doesn’t only happen one level, it happens on all the levels. You take all the elements. The obvious thing is story and character and writing. Setting, art, animation, audio, levels/environmetns and game mechanic. A good one is coherent. One of the ones I love is Bioshock. The art style, the setting, the audio. Even the game mechanics are part of the core story. Adam, the powers, is not just plugged in as a meta thing, it’s part of the story. I thought it was just brilliant.

Portal is one of my favourite games, the story – it’s a strategy game, it doesn’t need a story experience, it would work without it, it makes it better with it. They had one voice and clever level design. It’s sometimes misunderstood and just facilitates mechanics but not immersion and experience. Bioshock did that well. You’d walk through a level and you’d walk in a living room, there’s a fridge, a tv, a family on a couch, and the floor would be a poison pills and on the table there’d be food. You can make up your own mind what the hell happened there. Another scene where you walk into a toilet and you see a dead woman and a guy who shot himself and I’m Sorry on the wall. This makes for huge experience dramatic.

The other thing is imagine if you can tune game mechanics to your favour. The way a weapon works – you shoot it, you hit a enemy, you deduct a hit point, if the hit points if health hits zero enemy dies. Consistent rule. Bullets. Bullets run out. So but now what if you could create an environment, a big one. Five minutes, middle of the fight. All big super guns gone. You know that’s thing gone. Got more health than you can do with. And then you in desperation you charge toward it and shoot shoot shoot and with last bullet enemy falls down. That relief feeling, I love in games. As a game designer, we can cheat our rules, we can say – the last round of ammunition does 10x more power or damage.

So the other interesting thing about creating immersive drama also often not fully explored is character design. 2 examples, one from Fable 2. Banshee. I love the banshee because we took coders, animators, AI designers, a lot of writing. What it would do, it would comment on what you’d done in the game. It would try to aggravate you. [clip].

The game would check what you’d done so far and depending on that, the banshee would say different things. ‘Could you do nothing to save your sister? Rose would’ve done anything to protect you. She even gave her life. And what have you done about it? Nothing. Nothing at all. Your poor son cried out for you in that dark cave. Wondering when you’d come. His last thought as he died was this. Was it because I wasn’t a good boy? All those people you killed. Just to get your family back. Don’t you think they had families too. And are you sure it was your family that was brought back?’

They were unprocessed files. What you heard was depending on how you played the game, different set of stories. Lots of involvement to get that character right. Then you get another character. This is the Companion Cube – a box with a heart on it. By only using 4-5 lines. He doesn’t even speak. It’s by GlaDOS. When you first see “This weighted companion cube will accompany you through the test chamber. Please take care of it.”

[And then the cube dialogue as you have to burn it]

There are other cubes, they don’t have the heart. Suddenly you feel really attached. Portal is really evil. You have to do it. You have to incinerate it.

‘You neutralised your companion cube more quickly than any other test subject on record. Congratulations’

Then: ‘I invited your best friend the companion cube. Of course he couldn’t come because you murdered him.’

Awesome!

There are clips of people of how to save the cube. An exapmle of different character design.

So the next thing is the right approach. Game mechanics, and in Fable 3. Apart from story and quests and game mechanic and combat, we also have great AI systems. Our AI is the biggest chunk of our dialogue. 30-35k lines are purely for AI. We have AI, the gossip lines, where the AI talks to each other and you about stuff that happens in the game. You might hear villagers talking to each other. You hear that in passing, but it gives you an idea of what you can do. It does common and regular things. The whole AI was designed to marry the idea of the core quests and the game simulation together, to create a coherent simulation.

Even for marriage lines, we have over 1.5k marriage lines. Variation. We don’t want a different sentence 3-4 times in a row. AI types speaking. Different styles. Behaviours etc. Always movement and not just idle. The interesting thing is the core story is dark, the optionals are funny, so they try to marry them.

The other thing is the GUI room. Has been shown at E3. And the reason why I picked it is it’s not just a system we slapped on, we carefully planned and chose and integrated into core story. For that, I have a clip. The first time you meet the guru.

You enter with Sir Walter, your guide and teacher, Jasper, the butler.

Tried to get rid of 2D GUi and pull it into the game. This sanctuary. Change clothes, Jasper’s there, etc. You can change weapons. You can pop in instantly. We wanted to make sure it’s introduced properly.

So the right the next – the right people:

Designer, writer, art, animation, audio, production, VOI production partner, VO director, spcialised sound designer, music, consulting and outsourcing.

So Kate Saxon, our director. Met her through voice partner. She’s a theatre director, lots of experience, mocap direction. Has a lot of theatre plays that have done well in reviews. It was amazing. Worked with us, we got stunning performances, completey understood what we’re trying to do. Without – with understanding with action, carrying out someone else’s vision. She never went in there to take it away from us. Also understood limitations. Mark Hill and Rich Bryant – writers – completely understands. Rich Bryant is from TV world, wrote for Spin City, but huge gamer. Fully understands difference. Carrying out someone else’s vision. Then the other person is Josh Atkins, lead designer. He also understands immersive experiences. 4 people most involved when audio, VO and music production.

And there’s this other guy, Peter Molyneux, who controls, big inspirator. He gives us the freedom and direction we need.

Another type of process is staging. Using all the elements in a videogame, art, game mechanics, visuals, audio, etc. Creating a coherent immersive experieence that evokes emotional and motivational connection and fuels his desire to progress through the game. E.g. getting amulet from the forest. We want to make sure you’re creeped out. We take the music down. Pull the sound effects up. Then go on and pop up in background, stuff that – glowing eyes, etc. Not attacking you. Then go on and footsteps. Turn round, no footsteps there. Go further on and get to this place, you get someone running, screaming desperately for help, desperately for help. She runs away, is gone. Go into this place, graveyard, and you go lightning strike, and you see this huge creature, then it’s not there. Then alleyway, then a tomb, then you’re creeped out by then. And then only do we start with game mechanic elements and spawn monsters. Even then we’d use the right ones. You’re staging the scene.

The most painful thing is the painful process of iteration. Imagine ahead and iterate forward, not to the left or right. You have to be able to see that all the time without startint go change things around. Play your quest, game mechanic works but the dialogue is wrong. It doesn’t do anything to you. Or you think – the text is wrong? It still doesn’t work. Redesign the quest. Rather than iterating to the right and left, iterating forward.

One thing we also do – a staging workshop. In order to figure out, what we do is we had the director, Peter, the lead writer, animator, into stage, let them work on scenes. That’s for non-interactive and interactive elements. We let them play out those scenesz. then we’ll do freestyle. One of the actors plays the hero. He can break the scene. We’ll deduce what live assets, etc. Little clip.

Directing, not motion capturing, but have got game there as well.

The last chapter I want to go into is casting and recording. Fable 3 dialogue: over 80 actors. Fable 2 was 50ish. IT’s a great cast. John Cleese, Stephen Fry, Zoe Wanamaker, real experienced people. 460k+ recorded words, 47 hours final speech. Dedciated combat and vocal foley for most characters. About 64 episodes of the West Wing in one game. Three writers. Lots of meetings with director. Little clip from scene in game.

You’ve got the actor, the writing, lead animator, designer, constant collaboration.

Casting and recording. Casting is interesting. Once we’ve done staging workshop. Casting committee. We lok at tings that we fill that role.
Work with casting, etc. 5 suggestions for main characters. Then we meet with Peter and we hope that – we’re clear that we like the 5, whatever Peter picks we don’t have a problem with. And then we start putting packages together. That’s 6/70. That’s where we give all the information about the game to the production partner, Kate’s worked with us for a while, she’llhave input for casting. Hopefully their timing with our schedule, our VO partner, we can get them to record. The recording run – many months – ther are certain things we do. We prep, artwork in studio, game design documents, where possible a build in the studio. Kate always preps everything beforehand. She knows scenes inside out, game mechancis, so she can trust. No more than 4 peopl ein a recording studio. Writer, director, actor, engineer, me.

Content divided up. Funny, core, simulation. We allow time. Lines we’ve recorded we can feed back as soon as they walk into a door.

Most important thing is trust.

A director isn’t just someone who gets performance, but also someone who also understands how to talk to them, an individual basis.

User Research: Turning Design Vision into Player Reality
Jerome Hagen, Microsoft Game Studios

So thanks for coming – I work at MGS, we have a games user research group there that’s been in existence for the past 12 years, and I’ve been there for as long in various roles and we have around 40 total people either working in the user research group or supporting it, around 20-25 user researchers who focus on individual games.

What I’m going to talk about today is about how we use user research but what the principles are about what we do with the research and what’s important to think about when you get user research on your own products.

At its most basic level, the definition of user research is to improve the gameplay experience before release, by understanding how players will interact with and react to the game.

To give you a little sense of what this like first hand, I have a short video for you – an old video – a classic – by the huge CRT monitor and the player using a ‘joystick’ to control a game, which I don’t know if anyone’s done for the past ten years, but the game we were doing a study on was Midtown Madness, a PC racing game at the time, a game where you race through the city and take any route to get to a destination. This was the first itme they’d played this kind of game.

[Show video]

This guy is in a race for three minutes, his interpretation of what he’s supposed to do is follow all the traffic rules, ‘this is a cool tree’. ‘It’ll be more like a TV, like real – man, I was going to run that light…’ ‘this is just cool! I mean I’m driving, I’m goinna see if I can follow this car!’

‘The arrow is yellow, now it’s green again… Well, if the arrow was indicative of what I should do, it means I should run up the grass which means no sense whatsoever…’

So this is a situation with novice gamers new to a new kind of game. You’ll be amazed at how many things people have problems with even if they’re experienced with the genre and the games themselves.

So, I’m going to talk a bit about extended metaphor here. One thing about user research is that it’s an important partnership with design. Designer is Amelia Earheart here – designers are like the early days of aviation – you have little information, have to do lots of things yourself, have to rely on instinct to get to your destination. It’s difficult because you don’t have realtime feedback about how your game is received in the outside world. So with user research, being a designer can be a little bit more like this [glass cockpit] – tonnes of information in realtime in terms of how the outside world looks and what you need to know to react to it. Of course, it’s an amazingly overwhelming amount of information so one of the key factors about user research is that it’s a prioritisation and filter system so you know what to pay attention to.

So one of the the important things that I think is cool about user research is that it’s a data service feeding into creative endeavour and having that data and having that feedback allows designers to be much more creative and it allows creatives to take more risks and get feedback about what’s working and not working and to get to destinations that would not have been possible otherwise.

We’ve had user research in the past which is a lot of information that requires a lot more of combining your own data and we’re really getting to the bpoint where we can summarise things more clearly.

As I mentioned, I work at MGS, Games User Research Group. We interact directly with development partners in MGS, internal studios like Lionhead and Rare and external like Epic and Bungie. But clearly we’re a development service. We’re not a final check. It’s working together with them throughout development.

So this is a brief look at some of our labs. These here are usability labs, similar to the guy playing Midtown Madness. On the top level, there’s a living room lab and a smaller one for PC and single player play, ont he bottom is some of our observation sides that allow us both to record information and to have designers and other team members in the lab with us so we can discuss realtime and dig deeper.

This is one of our playtest labs, where we’re not getitng as much realtime feedback, but it’s really important as we’re getting in to balancing and large group feedback about what’s going on.

So with user research there are a bunch of different tools available and going into them will take several hours. MGS is not the only people doing games user research. There’s lots of other companies out there, there are different terms, Im not going to go into too much detail on them, but as we talk about specific examples, I’ll talk about some of the techniques we use and the information we gather.

So: getting into the principles behind user research.

1. More than anything else, it’s important for you to get designers on the teams to watch people playing first hand.

That’s the single biggest thing to understand what it’ll be like for players in the real world. This is one of the Halo designers watching a gamer play through the level he designed, which can be extremely illuminating and disappointing at times. As a designer, you don’t come in the box with the game.

Understanding how players will interact with and react with the game.

There’s lots of different kinds of players out there. It’s a bigger discussion what your primary, secondary audience is, but it’s important to think about who you expect to play your game and those people who you reach out to that you get those people represented and that you see what the experience is like for them.

There’s a big distribution of players out there. The main sources of feedback without additional research – the forums are the most vocal people, and not necessarily most representative, they can be a tiny distribution of the people you have.

The next part – understanding how players interact with and react to the game.

Interacting with – what they do and why they’re doing it. So verbal feedback as they’re doing it. There’s mayn different methods for understanding what players are doing and understanding the reasons why is the only thing that’s going to help you address the issues. You need to undrestand what trips people up and what blocks them. In general those are the big ones.

Example from Halo 3. I was talking about what people play and what people do and why they do it. In Halo we have instrumentation which is direct recording of player behaviour as they go through, that helps with understanding of what people do. This is a map of the very first level in Halo 3. Up in the top here is dots that reprsent a snapshot of where players were – this is the first encounter near the beginning of the game. The design intent is that players get throug, follow the pathway through and get to the end of the level. We take several snapshots of where players are at various points. We see further on, there’s still people further on, some people are moving further, a lot of people went back to the start area, and then here, is where – further on – lots of people get much further, but lots of people are staying or backtracking to the start. The question we had at the time – we knew what was going on, we knew where they were going, but not why they were doing so. Were they stuck or lost, exploring, trying different things? So in addition to just this direct recording of play data, we also had a questionnaire – a subjective one that pops up every 3 minutes – too easy / not sure what to do / not sure where to go / too hard / I would quit.

The dots represent when people gave that response on the map. These responses are for the whole leve. If we zoom in up here to the start area, we see that people were giving those responses – brown dots, some green dots, one blue. So the green dots, not sure what to do. We have brown response – most extreme response – I would quit. So we saw that players weren’t havin this experience that they wanted to. As I mentinoed each of those points on the map were in places where people had gotten to certain encounters and then backtracked all the way to the beginning. The ultimate solution was funnelling people through the level and where they were backtracking unintentionally, dropoffs that could not be climbed back up were introduced.

The last most frequent thing that was in responses there was not so much how players reacted to the game. What’s important is the kind of experience players have and where the major problems are.

Here’s an example from Crackdown, a game that had some different kinds of gameplay that people had not experienced. A superpowered agent fighting through a city to defeat gangs. You can jump higher over time and you have several different skills you develop and improve over time.

As I mentioned there’s several skills. The first one is agility, then explosives, then firearms, driving, then hand to hand combat.

Going back to design intent – it was that players would discover and try out all the skills and they would use whatever skill they most enjoyed to get through the game. There’s 21 gang bosses you have to defeat, none require the use of a specific skill, so players can essentially build up the skills they care about. And actually, fairly far out from release. we had a game where we removed brick walls and hurdles. And we could let them run free.

They explored skills they were most familiar with from other games – shooting and driving, which left out a lot of what was fun about the game and the different techinques that players have. The feedback at the time was that they’d seen shooting and driving was, they didn’t see what the big deal was, they didn’t know what this game brought. The skills develop over time. So players both use them over time to defeat enemies and in some cases get rewards for other things.

So there were two big changes that went in. 1 it was made clear the differences between skills and giving them experience of them, and making them advance much faster.

This is what we saw when people played through again. Instead of ‘I just ran and drove and shot, that was boring’ it was really clear that advancing the skills was coming up more strongly, and particularly with agility. ‘I like leveing up the most’. We asked peopel what they thought of the game every 20 minutes. We would see fun over time. At 20 and 40 minutes, epoeple were starting to get into the game. 60 minutes was where they sarted advancing the skills. Particularly with agility. We used those stats so that everyone would hit within the first 30 minutes in the demo and able to see the experience in a different situation. Helping people see what was unique about Crackdown.

One other short exapmle was from Shadowrun. MGS worked on this. Largely multiplayer game. It was one of where toward the end of development, there was a lot of feedback that they felt the weapons weren’t strong enough. Based on balancing the game. We could design a study with 3 different conditions. 1. As it was, 2. another where we added a shield where people showed when they got hit and a 3. where we added visual and audio feedback.

So, talked a lot about some heavy duty user research that used a lot of data. You might be wondering if this is somethign I should bother with. I would definitely say that it’s really important to get player feedback early. There are a few key things I talked about, if you do nothing else, then you must do these things.

1. Get designers, team members, watching people play the game.
2. Get players who are representative of the playing audience
3. Focus on the things that block people and trip them up.

I’m not just saying this as a thing that if you don’t have the resources we have, we use this principles all the time – I recently did an important study – we used an empty conference with a laptop and a webcam. We got things out early in development. It’s working with our develpoment partners – I encourage them even if not formal research to get new players playing the game. It helps the designers and helps me as a user resesarcher so we can deal with the really sticky stuff.

That’s not to diminish the amazing things that user researchers are doing. One of the biggest thing is paying attention to the player experience throughout development. Everyone on the team should be thinking about that, but having that feedback of seeing what players do, what they’ve done on that game, and as I mentioned, it’s really – you’re going to get a lot, an experienced researcher can really help out with prioritising and filtering that.

http://mgsuserresearch.com/

Creative Game Development – How We Do It At BioWare
Dr. Greg Zeschuk, General Manager, BioWare Austin and Co-Founder, BioWare

There were supposed to be two of us, Ray and I present together. I’m not sure wh there’s a picture of Willie Nelson behind him, but he’s playing poker right now at the WSOP and he’s just made it to day 5. We were assuming that if he would lose then he would come talk. Wishing his best, he’s sending his regrets. He’s happy his game’s going well.

I’ve always wanted to write this: making games is hard.

What this talk is about is ways to make games easier. The other thing was I saw Louis talk, he was talking about the environment for making games, it’s harder, but there’s lots of opportunities. How do you take advantage of that situation. What we’ve done at BioWare, we go back to the people, the teams, they’re the solution. This talk is about culture, good development culture, positive company culture, decisions consistent with your culture. It’s our secret and how we’re successful.

Culture, from wikipedia:
Shared attitudes, values, goals and practices that characterise an institution, organisation or group. It’s how you operate, function, culture drives your organisational group. It’s illusive, fragile, difficult to manage. When you do something wrong it can really devastate and damage it.

So I’ll talk about BioWAre, I’ll whip through that, talk about how we did it over the years, we’ve been in business technically 15 years, but operating 17 years, things we’ve learned, some of the decisions, the things we’ve learned along our life as a company, the testing we did aggainst our culture, some thoughts on the future. We’re at a brave new world right now and somet of the things we might consider going forward, the next big thing, the whole triple A console development business.

So, who are we? We started in Edmonton, Canada. INteresting about tax breaks. I know CAnada gets paitned with that, in Alberta, there aren’t any, there never were any, they just care about oil and cattle. It’s a regional thing in Canada. There are tax breaks across most of Canada now, it’s been interesting for us, we’ve watched from afar, the disturbing thoughts – why don’t we get anything, we do have a nice tax regime, but it doesn’t apply to us directly like breaks or credits. We’ve sold about 25m games since our inception in 1995, we’ve sold around the same number across most of our titles, that’s one Modern Warfare 2, but that’s scary and the reality of our business. We’ve launched successful franchises like Baldur’s Gsate, Neverwinter Nights, and later Mass Effect and Dragon Age.

So yesterday, Louis joked they sold three times. We’ve only done it twice. Ray’s SVP at EA, I’m running BioWare Austin. We’ve got 4 locations, there is one in Montreal, Austin, DC – we joined up with Mythic – and in Galway, Ireland a new studio. We still make products people are excitd and passionate baout.

This is a quick headcount ramp. I won’t go into too much detail. It goes linear. From 95 to 2007, the approximate timing of our titles, it’s flattened out now, but across all studios about 800 people across 4 locations. This mystery one turned into Dragon Age 2.

This is the metacritic slide, we pay a lot of attention, some say we’re obsessed with review scores, Mass Effect 2 is our highest game ever, 14th overall, we’ve got about 6 games in top 1%, everything in top 10%. We had to deliver quality. That’s one way to compete. From a personal perspective, all of us, we strive for that continually, we’ll see how that fits into values and culture later. We’re on a never ending mission for quality. So latest large-scale projects DA:O and Mass Effect 2, SWTOR, and BioWare Mythic has three ongoing online games – Ultima Online, DAC and WAR. They manage those on a worldwide basis. That’s reflective of a transition – online service oriented business rather than boxed product, so they educate the overall group.

So, secret to success. It’s not super complicated. This part is always interesting, it’s always very common-sense oriented. You get people together, you get something they feel is a worthy project, support them in collective goals – one of the things I joke about is we generate no revenue, I don’t do anything, I suck moeny out of the system, it turns a lot of orientation of management – management is a support role. The other one is don’t compromise the long term for short term gain. This is difficult, ahrd to manage. If you’re going out of business next month, you’ve got to do things you’ve got to do. Today’s business, that’s more poignant. I’ll talk about how we did that over the years.

We never started out thinking about how to build our culture, these steps ultimately formed our culture. We did it, didn’t worry about how or why, but then we started documenting it and talking about it with our employees. We used to talk about GDC a lot, we’d talk 10 years ago, we’d talk about structure, this isn’t really a secret. The challenge is living your values. SO really if you develop a strong culture, people and grow with it, you can be successful. There’s no best culture, you can have a whole bunch of different ones, but you have to find people who fit into it, who believe in it and support it. Develpoing a strong culture isn’t easy, there’s some simple steps that I’ll try and touch on.

So one thing we did which was interesting was because we were actively growing, we’d do a company orientation. Right now, it’s a slide deck and a talk. I went back to it over the course of this, you can see how it evolved. We started doing this in 99, then 04/05 we had this set deck, it was a blueprint, core values, practices, but it was interesting that it was a dialogue trying to explain to new people coming in largely drove how we define ourselves. Another thing was that we would talk about it openly. We’re like a broken record player, Ray and I, that started permeating, it made it happen. They actually did start hearing and sinking in.

In 2004, here’s a presentation that we would give our companies about how culture worked and how we could all affect it.

Some slides:

Goals, Values, Systems, Structures, People, Culture
We always debated goals and values. We debated what you’re striving for. Are you making money, making the best games, how do you do it, do you do it by being honest, working hard. We debated which came first. It’s immaterial, the key thing is knowing what they are.

So the triangle is the other aspects that you have to design. Structures are how you organise your teams – silo, matrix. People – who’s in the company, who makes up the essence. Systems are policies, rules. And finally, all those things create a sense of culture.

All these things have to exist in an environment. We really – we’re in this world where the business and development environment is changing, it will change all those other things. So how do you change it?

An example: we were largely matrix based and say we wanted to go to silos. Say let’s go entirely along Mass Effect and then Dragon Age. The company would suddenly change, things would be different. Structurally, that would start sending reverberations. And then boom your culture’s different. Any structural change you make changes your culture. So now it’s a yellow colour.

When you change culture, people change. You hear that people at companies are there because they like what they do, they’re passionate, they’re engaged, they leave when the company is incongruent. We saw this over time. We got to 60 people, it was hunky dory, we got to 100, there were a whole set of people, founders, original people, too big, too complicated, they all left. It wasn’t a bad thing, they weren’t consistent with the culture we were developing, and we’re both better off without each other, it didn’t make sense of being the company the way we were develpoing it.

And finally systems. As we grew, we’d have one-off processes for holiday time, project credits, we’d do it each time. Eventually you get to the place around 150 people you systematise and you write them down. THis was a – structurally – doing things differently.

When everything’s changed, you have to think about goals and values. You re-evaluate, is it the same company.

Just a general thought. This last slide. You think of it as a game designer. Openly discuss it with people, discuss what you want to be, create the exact structures.

So how we’ve done this is our core values. We would repeat these over and over again. It was pretty early, we wanted a good place to work and to create good games. We started putting language around that. In retrospect, that was the smartest thing we did. The how, but the what was clear. This was 10 years ago. They’ve evolved over time. I’ll talk about how we made changes, new people coming in, environmental changes. Something we focus on as a key tool.

Quality in our workplace
Quality in our products
Entrepeneurship
All in a context of humility and integrity

Sometimes you see big pages of stuff. We went for simpler stuff. You can look at these and have a good idea.

Quality in our workplace. All the aspects you imagine. Work/life balance, growing and learning, people in the games business want to be exposed to new things, one of the dangerous things you can do as a business is to pigeonhole people, people want to be engaged. We imagined the concept of waking up on monday morning and you run to work or do you haul yourself out and you’re unhappy? Another thing was team-oriented talent, rather than individuals. Especially as games got larger. teams got more important. The primary benefit – this is for the employees.

Quality in our products – delivering the best story-driven games int he world. Event products, community and a trusted brand. We wanted to do the best, not rest on our laurels. Mass Effect 1 to 2 is a huge evolution, people knew we could’ve just done it with the same feature set, but we thought we could improve it. Back in the Elevation days, we’d talk abotu event products, community is something we’ve always done, it entails product and brand. The benefit is the fans.

Entrepreneurship – We didn’t have this for the first 10 years. Intuitively when we were small, we had this naturally. Did what you could do for every dollar, every success. A new senior guy came from the business software side, he was flabbergasted we didn’t have a way of expressing this. So we turned it into being part of a bigger studio. Achieving and exceeding metrics, financial success and profitability, being the best investment in our industry. This is the thing as part of EA you put a dollar in you get more than one out. So the primary benefit is our investors. So we made it a value. The key differentiator in our case is that at the time we were independent, all the employees held stock, it was to their benefit to be smart. The right financial decisions every day.

All in a context of humility and integrity – not a core value but an underpinning. The funny thing about it – integrity is pretty obvious, honesty, reasonableness. BUt we had this debate about what humility is. Some people think it’s a position of weakeness, it’s not that at all. It’s the realisation that you’re only as good as your next game. You always have to be striving, open, take feedback. We’ve made our games simply by press, fan feedback. They give you a blueprint, you have to weave through it, you can not get indignant about people criticising you and you can improve what you build. There are people within the company that have problems with us who have that. That’s something we believe really strongly.

Cultural consistency: one way to do this, it’s funny in retrospect. We designed the company using values as a guide. This one is the traditional quality, resources, time for project managers. The idea of scope was a problem. It wans’t quality and scope weren’t the same thing. So it was the QS=RT quality and scope = resource and time. If you ever felt it was out of balance with our products, then you have to raise your hand. If we’re trying to do the impossible, which largely happens in the games business, then we’ll try and deal with it. We try to teach people this is always making sense.

So Employees at top focussed on resource and time, customers foussed on quality and scope, investors focussed on everything. Then there’s a sweet spot where everyone’s happy. Arguably this should be a venn diagram where veerything’s small but you can’t fit all the text in there. This should be rational. If you’re really being reasonable, then you get to a place where everyone knows the score and it makes a lot of sense as a business.

Another one – the matrix. We are organised by matrix. Project and department. AProject director, exec producer. Lead in each discipline. We organise that against core values as well. Project core value is quality of product. Run by project director. Departmentally, it’s run by a department director, functional excellence, not by projcet work but overall scope, and quality in the workplace and taking others into consideration.

Everything affects culture. We moved to scrum in the last few years. Everything changes culture.

Interesting learnings – potentially culture changing events. Joining EA was interesting. EA is a large company, we’re a good sized developer, we’re quite mature, almost 15 years of tinking, when confronted with the giant behemoth of EA, we knew where to keep the interface points and how to keep BioWare culture and deal with EA culture and manage it. Over time we learn how the company works and how you interact with EA. Now we’re in the third year and we’ve got it kind of figured out. It’s any relationship, you put time and effort into it. `There’s times where we’re incongruent. If you’d ask me 10 years ago, I’d say no, impossible, but not we do seriously see ourselves as part of EA.

Next was greenfields. Austin was a studio we created about 3.5 years ago, and it was one of those situations – greenfielda nd you build something there. We created the studio from the ground up in the image we built up, an the right local partners. So culturally we had this new concept of this distant studio, we used this the next time, they’d say – hey, you’re giving out Edmonton T-Shirts, where are our t-shirts? It’s important for Austin to feel like they’re part of the company too. It’s fine having a different culture, thy’re in Texas vs Alberta, all these things are unique.

That’s where it became interesting with Mythic. We had to be very cogniscant to integrate them and work with the teams there, very relationship based. Bringing groups together, personal relationships in place and driving the success of getting together.

So, how do you do it?
Five steps on how to evaluate and change your culture.

1. Take an inventory of your culture, understand what you are, and be honest. Take an honest inventory. Be honest. It’s valuable.

2. Decide what kind of culture you want. There are a lot of options. You can start changing the structure. You can be flower children, sports team, military squad or American Office.

3. Think abotu your structures and proceses, are they consistent with your cultural goals? Do you want sharing teams, do you want policies in place to be open? A whole spectrum of things you can do – open book accounting through to super secretive. Decide where you are and express it.

4. Start adjusting processes, policies and structures so they align with your cultural goals. Be aware that you may need different people. When you get to 300+ people it’s hard for everyone to know everyone.

5. Be vigilant, re-check, ask the people – do something crazy. We’d sit down with a bunch of people sliced across the year they started, they’d have different perspectives. They needed different support. So ask people, talk to them.

Why bother?

Happy and engaged game developers make the best games. if the team’s hapy, they do better work, there isn’t a best culture, it’s all about fit, good developers are mobile and will select for teams that fit their disposition and this is one reason why consistency is important. People will pick one culture and stick with it.

Some specifics. Balanced needs of individuals and the group. You can get bigger and lose the individual, we’ve tried to not do that. Individuals are important in the games business, Long-term view raher than short term and never compromising. In the first few years, we were weeks away from no salary, we’d take risks. You have to stick with principles and make difficult decisions. as much as possible, taking risks and pushing hard. Being consistent, they don’t like you flipping things around and changing rapidly, we did it on a gradual basis, but also individual responsibility and autonomy. They got it, they learned the culture. True teamwork, scrum is interesting is that when teams got big, responsibility and autonomy fell away, doing standups, showing your work, wht you’re doing gave group responsibility and stronger bonds in the team. Shifting around leadership and ownership, giving people – changing hats of who’s in charge.

Decision making – using core values to drive out decision. Assing people based on project preference, picking projects based on team preference and passion and performance management with compassion and striving to always be the best investment. The team picked Star Wars, but they were involved in the process. Performance management with compassion – generally when we bring someone in, we do so for the right reasons and if they’re not succeeding it’s not just because they’re a bad person, we’d take flack for second chances, third chances, well documented and firm, but 50/50 half the time people would fail or would become the most valuable, we helped them out of a rough pathc. Always striving to be the best investment. Always doing big magnum opus games, but trying to do the best with it.

Doing the right thing – triple A console is now bad. The current development climate is simultaneously dangerous and full of opportunity. We build these gigantic games. The triple A market is changing and it’s a goal-setting exercise, if you can get the money, people, contracts, then it’s pretty good. But otherwise it’s a pretty bad goal. Striving to do AAA console development right now is the wrong goal for most developers. The opportuntiies there are narrower and narrower, it’s turning into Hollywood blockbuster, at some level, innovation and risk taking is disappearing on the publishing side. There are exceptions, but they cost a lot of money.

This si the interesting thing – the hit driven thing. The middle’s dropped out, the bottom’s dropped out. The top 10 are the only ones who’re making money. Count right at that top. There’s a huge opportunity there. ONe of the things I’ve enjoyed seeing is the elder developers retrenching into smaller teams to things they’re more passionate about, micro groups that are good and self-sustaining and quite successful.

So what’s working? Going direct to consumers rather than retail. Retail still works but it’s going – it’s always down every year, you can’t just blame the economy. Really it’s about online. Yeah, we do Star Wars, all over the space. Teams and different talents. Figure out what you can build. Ask them what they want to build, what they’re passionate about. Online games of all shapes and sizes. I used to be Group Creative Officer and all this stuff was amazing. Browser based games, flash games. Not with hundred person teams, but there’s money there.

What have we done? We’ve done some FaceBook stuff, we did an iPhone game, it wasn’t the best one, you ahve to iterate. The team did some games that were never released that were way better. You never have success with first or second, but your fourth? Yeah. Large-scale MMO, small scale MMO, that’s the future. Triple A console will be continued, but we’re going to explore. That’s passed. The future is new businesses that are starting up.

Different teams, different cultures. Intimate teams have a stronger team passion. Very scaleable. If you want to team up with other groups you can do that. It’s still competitive. These smaller teams can be more fun. It’s a stronger group. That’s what we’re trying to do inside BioWare. even inside our giant teams. Stuff you’ll see in the next yrear that shows what we’re doing there.

That’s it. It’s been a whirlwind. Culture’s important. Goals, values, it’s an open thing. Make sure it doesn’t evolve by itself. Once you’ve got something you like, protect it.

Gamification * 3
David Helgason, CEO Unity Technologies

One of the founders of Unity Technologies. Got asked here in the Spring to talk about Gamification. The problem is that in the programme for this conference, the subject is this : games are leading the charge on mobile, web, TV and invading social network platforms (in the conference programme). So I have a bit of a solution for this. It won’t be the core subject matter, so sorry about that.

I’m going to talk about Gamification for a bit, then something’s brewing – a perfect storm – and I’ll try to get back to the topic. This is my time from a year ago, we’re 50% larger now.

So, Unity. It’s a game engine that’s pretty boring by itself, there’s a lot of them, they’re pretty good, there’s open source ones, cheap ones, there’s more to it though. We spent a lot of effort making it easy, tools, workflows, documentation, making it layered. The initial thing you see is a high level drag and drop game creator, but layers below that, you can go deeper, and build large, streaming MMOs, complex experiences, FPSes. We have a profiler, we’re about to release a debugger finally, and a lot more stuff. We’ve created – democratic licensing – a free version, low-priced, and that’s almost it. 200k developers using it, 20x more than a year ago, 5x more than the previous year. Explosion in developers using it, thousands of companies, high end customers, but hundreds of schools, multiple industries. This all spins out to forums, communities, sharing, etc. Over 30m people have played Unity games in the browser, 2.5m installed per month. Every single browser, over a decade’s worth of hardware. That’s really important when youre targeting the web, which is a broken piece of hardware. Also we’ll go to the newer stuff. That’s too much detail already – we support the iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch – 20% of the games on the appstore are made with Unity. Just about to launch Android support, in pre-sale now in our store, and have had for a while and releasing support for consoles. Also, since we’ve grown so fast, we have resources, so we’re pumping up the quality and a new version, Unity 3, licensing client middleware, umbra, etc. a very valuable package with cool new features. There’s more to it, I’m not going to bore you with that, which I could do.

We’re at a good vantage point. We are in a unique, unusual position to see trends, hear things early on. So that’s what led me to get excited about gamification.

I heard about it last November from a journalist. Christian at Playfish used it at Develop last year. Definitely not new. Summed up lots of concepts. The power of a concept or an idea is in organising your thoughts, understanding the world. My brain lit up like a star field. It uses game design outside of games, e.g. in product or user experience, and use of game technology in other fields. Its first meaning has been covered much more – foursquare, wii fit, mint, swoopo, etc. Lots of coverage this year. Foursquare, I’m addicted to it – to getting the points. Then mint.com, a personal finance site where you can track your expenses, a very neat product, but they’ve been using game design to hit your budget, your scores, it’s quite neat. It’s not really game, there’s something there. And the whole Fit thing. Fitbit. EA Active, all that stuff. And then the dark side is Swoopo, it’s a site that turns shopping into gambling. If you look at it superficially, the only way to win is not to play. If you get into it, you can spend hundreds of dollars buying an iPod, that should cost a lot less. It uses game mechanics to drag people into this experience.

Lots of coverage, Jesse Schell’s talk at DICE, but it got paraphrased into our lives as an RPG. You should watch it. There’s upcoming books about it, there’s companies being created that will take game design to other fields, and Scott Dodson’s talk will be on GDC Online. With that, I will cop out of saying anything, Scott’s slides are thorough, they analyse Gamification and give a historical overview and all of that.

Now, the second meaning – gamification of technology. It’s affecting us directly. This didn’t need a word to start happening. Militray training and simulation for over a decade, when we were starting out in 2003 with this stuff, some of our friends in architecture were using game engines to visualise, complex data and visualisation, then medical visualisation, social spaces and interactions – social worlds, that have got a bad name, but large groups it can be really useful – and then long tail art, VJing, experimental media, and every week we see a new thing. Those are different trends. Gamification maybe sums them up.

We see something big brewing, a real change. Something exciting is happening. This is the perfect storm. The first enabler is programmers. 8-16m programmers in the world, depending on how you define and count. Really good odds that 70-80% will be to make games. Most of them won’t make games. But it creates a baseline of interest in the technology. The second is education. Game development education has been fastest growing curriculum in the last several years. We’re educating disturbing numbers of game developers out of universities, high schools, primary schools, they’re learning interesting skills but they won’t all be making iPhone games and making a living from it. Large groups of people with interesting skills, they’ll find a way to use them. Third, content creation. There’s probably some Maya/Max users in the room. Content creation is changing these days, Maya 2009, 2008, etc. Might be drawing blanks. But outside the professional space, Google Sketchup, and animation, companies like xtranormal, etc. animated characters, etc. that have been very hard normally, specialisation, tools, takes several days to do a little cycle, but they’re not getting the same quality, but decent quality out of an hour of work. Not often where we see more than an order of magnitude increase in productivity. This is not going to put professionals out of work, but 10-20x more people will create that content than today. Finally, technology and community. What we think happens there is that a standardised platform that people can use to do highend games, small games, outside the game industry and those people to work together, a critical mass of knowledge creation. Once a piece of tutorial has been created, it can be dissemninated widely in forums, wikis, scripts, addons. People build businesses around this. This is so new that we’re in the shock of it, in the last 9 months our userbase went from 9k – crazy ball of energy that has to be released somehow. We feel, we’re sure this is going to affect a lot of industries.

That’s where I intended to stop. But I felt bad about the other topic. I’l ltouch on that at the end.

So, Gamification 3. 2 fairly fundamental things happened, depending on who you are may or may not have been overlooked. Facebook got games and games exploded there. It had the rocket fuel to become the largst social network in the world. Games powered – created – this deeper interaction, virality, the social games companies made so much money, it was an engine of revenue for Facebook and it grew really fast. They had this amazing thing happen there. And at the same time, the iPhone app store opened up and the device became a gaming device and was propelled much further by that. There’s something about games that is very powerful engine. And sort of, based on that, a lot of stuff is happenign. All the other social networks are focussing on games – just a couple of days ago, Google invested $100m in Zynga to get them to build them a gaming platform, and what we see is not reported yet, but inside our offices, all the phone companies, tv manufacturers, STB manufacturers are rushing to get a games strategy, to be really successful, they need strong games content. We’re seeing beyond that, media players, applicances, radios, etc. Manufacturers coming to us and begging for a games strategy. If this is gamification, this is it as an economic driver that pushes our ecosystems out there. With that, that gives us a third meaning: a process where games are a primary ecnomic driver for new platforms and ecosystems. What sums up these ideas is that we have this in the room, this is where it gets creative. We can be proud of this industry that creates value for everyone else. It drives so much stuff. I wanted to end with congratulations.

So, questions:

Q: Will all games get dumbed down? A: No. Good games will be good games.

Q: Do developers need to specialise? You work with architects etc. A: I have a hard time thinking a company will do all those things well. I haven’t seen a company yet, really. I know companies that specialise in other peoples projects, who get hired to do those non-game projects and do them well and those clients pay well. There’s an opportunity there. If you’re a games company, will you get your best people poached?

Q: What’s the most outlandish company approaching you for gaming technology? A: Not a company we’ve talked to directly, but we’ve talked to people who do digital radios. Then microwaves?

Q: What’re they looking for? A: Mainly visuals.

Q: Do you think iPhone games built on middleware are crappy? A: Well… He also said consumers would decide. I think he doesn’t understand the economics of game development, fundamentally. It’s reasonable to use native UI framework for information driven application, but for games. No one seriously does that. Not when it’s smaller productions for phones.

Q: People are using Flash in browser space. Do you think Unity is going to get to that position where it’s ubiquitous? A: I don’t want to brag too much, but on our browser strategy, ecosystems are changing, this will be less of a problem. Unity games for the browser are 50-70% success rate conversion for installing the plugin. If retention better, then it’s OK, harder for lightweight social games. We’re doing a few initiatives that will change this. A lot of organic growth of plugin installation. 30m is low over the entire world, you get hotspots. 60% of users on their site had Unity on some media company. So get hotspots, organic growth. We’re working with Google on Chrome native client. It lets Unity and other stuff run natively on the browser. Every single Chrome browser will natively run Unity. And then in a few weeks, a new plugin installation method. It’s taken success from 60-70 to 90%. Combine with organic growth, success goes into 90s, so 95-98 does that matter? For a lot of games it won’t. We know it’s a problem and a political one.

Q: Additional plugins that we make that run in the browser, to extend Unity? A: No plans for it right now. We can discuss it later.