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The Great Indian Game Design Workshop Tour

2010-03-27T00:00:00.008Z

Mumbai, Bangalore, and Chennai, India

Everyone in the entertainment business has, or should have, heard of Bollywood—the great Indian film industry located in and around Mumbai, or Bombay as it was formerly known. Bollywood turns out dozens of films for every one that Hollywood does—not blockbusters like Avatar to be sure, but movies made by Indians, for Indians. When Mr. Anirban Chatterjee of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) wrote inviting me to deliver a game design workshop at Bollywood's big annual Frames conference, I couldn't possibly refuse.

The only difficulty was that FICCI Frames, as it is universally known, takes place in Mumbai immediately after the Game Developers' Conference, which was in San Francisco—and my talk was on the last day of GDC. To get to India I would have to fly back to London and then directly on to Mumbai, or go on around the world and travel via someplace in the Far East. Nobody offers a flight directly from San Francisco to Mumbai, I discovered—maybe the planes don't have the range. I consulted flight timetables and found that if I left right after GDC, I would miss the first day of Frames but I could still get there in time to deliver a workshop.

Once I knew I was going to India, I wanted to take as much advantage as I could of being there. With a lot of back-and-forth E-mail, I was able to set up additional events at Dhruva Interactive in Bangalore and at the Image College of Arts, Animation, and Technology on their campuses in Bangalore and Chennai. This is the tale of the tour.

Sunday, March 14 – Tuesday, March 16

The day after the Game Developers' Conference ended, I flew overnight from San Francisco to London. My wife met me at Heathrow airport, and traded the suitcase full of cool-weather clothes for use in San Francisco for another suitcase of hot-weather clothes appropriate for India. She and I had lunch together, and then I got on another plane to Mumbai, also overnight. I arrived at about 9 in the morning on Tuesday the 16th, pretty wrecked after two back-to-back overnight flights.

The Renaissance Hotel in Powai plays host to the Frames conference. Powai isn't the real Mumbai—it's a large, seemingly affluent suburb to the north, centered around a large lake. Of course, a suburb in Mumbai is a major city anywhere else—something like 20 million people live in the Mumbai metropolitan area, more than than several European countries put together. When I got to the hotel, I went straight to bed and slept all the rest of the day and all that night as well. By Wednesday morning I was feeling at least partially human.

Wednesday, March 17: FICCI Frames

Frames is primarily a conference, not a trade show, and a conference for suits, mostly: suits from film, television, music, animation, visual effects, and games. They lump games in with visual effects and animation because the majority of India's work in these areas consists of providing outsource services to Western companies. Autodesk sponsored several of the events at the conference; they provide a lot of the tools that these industries use. As India begins to develop more games locally, I hope that the game industry will move out from under the shadow of animation.

Mr. Chatterjee asked me to sit on a panel on the afternoon of the 17th, called “Is Gaming the Third Pillar of Mass Entertainment?” I wasn't sure what the first two pillars were, but I agreed to do it. They're film and music, it turned out. It was the usual sort of rambling panel discussion, concentrating mostly on the market, and I suspect I gained more knowledge than I imparted. One of the things I learned is that Indian film studios don't bother to release films during the cricket season—nobody would go, because they're all glued to the TV or radio. Another useful fact is that India has an installed base of 8 million PCs (I would have guessed it was ten times that, in a country with over a billion people), only one million consoles, and over 400 million mobile phones—more mobile phones than the entire population of the USA. Many of them aren't yet smartphones, but that will change. I have said for a long time that I thought video games would come to India via mobiles; it's nice to see my prediction vindicated.

While I was sitting on the panel I made the acquaintance of Vishal Gondal, the CEO of Indiagames. I had already met one or two people from Indiagames at the NASSCOM Games Summit last November, but not the man himself. Indiagames is located in Mumbai, and on the spot we arranged for me to give a game design workshop to his employees on Friday the 19th. Vishal is a proper game developer—he may be a suit, but he doesn't look like one, and he turned up for than panel in a T-shirt and jeans. I'm beginning to learn that I don't have to wear a tie at Indian events. It's too hot and even a lot of Indian bigwigs don't wear them.

Dinner that night was a huge buffet on the lawn of the hotel, accompanied by fireworks and an awards ceremony, mostly for achievements in animation and visual effects, but also for games. Indiagames won one of them, though I can't remember which award it was, unfortunately.

Thursday, March 18: FICCI Frames Workshop

When I went to set up my workshop on Thursday morning, I was startled to discover that it was in a nightclub at the hotel—the “Velvet Lounge.” I think it's the only time I've given a workshop in a place with mirrored walls and a dance floor. Everything worked out just fine, though, and the workshop drew attendees from all over India—some had gotten up in the middle of the night to drive from Pune, and others had flown in from Hyderabad and Bangalore to be there. I was really pleased at the turnout. I think my event assembled the largest group of game designers ever gathered under one roof in India.

I normally randomize the teams when I do my workshops, to break up existing hierarchies and encourage people to get to know each other. I had initially been concerned that this might violate some subtle social code that I, as a westerner, was unaware of. In the end I need not have worried. Hindu, Muslim, Jain, Sikh, or Buddhist, we were all game developers and that was what mattered.

I tried a couple of new game ideas at this event. Knowing that Indian weddings—Hindu ones, at least—tend to be long, complex affairs, I decided to ask one team to design a wedding planning game. This isn't as outlandish as you might think (Ubisoft already has one), but the team sort of got the wrong idea and turned it into a minigame-driven dating sim, Japanese style, with the wedding as the end of the game. Generally, though, the workshop went off well and we took a lot of pictures to commemorate the event.

That evening there was another big buffet on the lawn, more fireworks, and more awards, this time including the glamorous stars of Bollywood—the press was out in force. I had no idea who any of them were. There was also a band, singing in what I guessed was Marathi, the local language.

Friday, March 19: Indiagames Workshop

Friday was my hastily-arranged workshop at Indiagames. I didn't go to their offices because they didn't have a suitable space, but they had managed to rent classrooms at a nearby training center. It was a pretty big crowd, about 40 people, and warm but tolerable. Even Vishal Gondal and his senior executives participated. One of the attendees was Purnima Iyer, who had paid her own way to the FICCI Frames workshop the previous day but enjoyed it sufficiently to attend a second time. I had already met her in November, when she gave a talk at the NASSCOM conference. Purnima has her own blog about game design in India, and is beginning to make a name for herself.

One thing I noticed at the Indian workshops was a tendency to think small. Many of their ideas consisted of Web-based or mobile phone games rather than the large console or PC games that participants in the West usually specify. It doesn't really matter one way or another—the workshop is technology-agnostic—but I suspect this reflects the kinds of games that the attendees grew up playing. It's probably good that Indian game designers do think small for the moment, since their own markets won't support large games yet, and there isn't the funding to develop them in any case. Students in the West often specify games that are impractically large. I don't discourage this in an introductory workshop, but sooner or later they do have to realize that game features have a price.

One of the game ideas I gave them to work on was “Secret Service Agent”—the goal is to protect the President. Most people design this as a 3D shooter, but not the Indiagames team. They defined it as a sort of reverse tower defense game, in which the presidential motorcade moves through a maze of streets and the player must set up snipers and other agents to defend the motorcade from attack by people in the crowd. It was a 2D game and would actually be quite easy to build.

Indians serve water everywhere, at all times. If you're lucky, it will be chilled. The tap water isn't always safe, so it's usually bottled water. Even the classroom chairs have special water-bottle holders, something I've never seen in an any Western classroom. What they did before plastic bottles I don't know—glass ones, I suppose—and it must create an absolute mountain of waste.

Saturday, March 20

I had originally planned to spend Saturday being a tourist in Mumbai—perhaps taking a boat to visit the famous caves on Elephanta Island, or doing something that might involve being indoors and cool, such as a museum. However, when the time came I was pretty tired, between the jet lag, the hot weather, and the two back-to-back workshops. I just stayed in my room and caught up on E-mail.

Sunday, March 21

Sunday I was off by plane to Bengaluru, or Bangalore—another first for me. Like many other airports in India, Bangalore's is brand new, very shiny and attractive. It's also a long, long way from the middle of town, and on the taxi ride I had a chance to look at a bit of the countryside. The state of Karnataka seems to be hot and dry – drier, at least, than Mumbai was, and the heat was less oppressive. Dhruva Interactive, my hosts, put me in a very nice service flat, which is kind of like a hotel with a kitchenette in every room, but no restaurant. The room was spotless, the air conditioning worked well, and best of all, there was a high speed Ethernet connection.

Many of the service flats in Bangalore advertise that they have emergency power generation, and on the day I checked out, I found out why. Bangalore's power isn't very reliable, and it cut out briefly twice in the space of half an hour. But the generator kicked in within 10 seconds each time.

Monday, March 22 – Tuesday, March 23: Dhruva Interactive

Dhruva is the Indian name for the North Star. Dhruva Interactive is the oldest game company in India, providing services to Western companies as well as creating original titles of their own. Their work has appeared in titles such as Asterix at the Olympic Games, Forza 2 Motorsport, and Battlefield 2: Modern Combat. The company is located in a residential district—dotted with businesses here and there—located right off Hundred Foot Road, an upmarket shopping district full of designer boutiques.

I can't really talk about my work for Dhruva; suffice to say that it consisted of a mixture of game design training and some consulting on forthcoming titles. The CEO, Rajesh Rao, had also invited a few others to visit, including the irrepressible Anand Ramachandran, a journalist I had met at NASSCOM, who has enough energy and opinions for any three other people. He actually lives in Mumbai, and flew down to take part.

Each night we went out to dinner, and of course it was all wonderful. There's a chain called Barbecue Nation where they put a box of hot coals into a recess on your table, and waiters keep coming around bringing different things on skewers for you to cook for yourself. They only stop when you put up a little flag to indicate that you've had enough.

Dhruva made me particularly welcome, and I owe special thanks to Raju Patil, the Director of Operations, who took care of all the local arrangements.

Wednesday, March 24: ICAT Bangalore

On Wednesday morning I checked out of my flat and went to give a half-day workshop at the Bangalore campus of the Image College of Art, Animation, and Technology. Like many Indian technical schools, ICAT is affiliated with a company, Image Infotainment Ltd., which uses the school as a way to spot and train new talent—at their expense rather than its own. ICAT is unique in that it awards full degrees, not just certificates, through an arrangement with the University of Wales in the UK.

I met Mrs. Varsha Shelar, the academic head, and several other faculty before starting the workshop for about 70 students and other visitors from nearby companies. I was curious to see what Indian game students would be like, since their educational system is pretty different from the West's. A local acquaintance described it as “Victorian,” and said that it concentrated on rote learning, which is not satisfactory in a creative field.

The only real difference that I could see, however, is that they're a bit quieter—less inclined to stand out. The sex ratio was actually a little better than it usually is in Europe, maybe 80% male rather than 95% male. It was a pretty good workshop. One team got a little lost, but I think if we had had more time and fewer people, I could have prevented that. A four-hour workshop for 70 people means that I'm spread pretty thin.

While I was there they brought me a treat: a whole coconut, carved open with a straw stuck inside to drink the milk. Once you've done that you're supposed to cut it open the rest of the way and eat the meat, too, but I didn't have time.

After the workshop I hurried off to the airport for my flight to Chennai (the former Madras). I got in quite late.

Wednesday, March 25: ICAT Chennai

Chennai is hot and humid—everybody warned me that when they found out I was going there. They weren't kidding. It's on the east coast of India at about the same latitude as Bangalore, but very different. Unfortunately, I didn't see much of it. I arrived late at night, slept in the next morning, and gave my workshop in the afternoon. The ICAT Chennai campus turned out to be about 50 yards from my service flat, so I didn't get any time to look around.

The Chennai workshop produced some of the best results I got in India. The room was long and narrow, not ideal for lecturing in, but the students were very energetic and imaginative. One of the game ideas I handed out was “to be a real cowboy (not a gunslinger).” The team chose to interpret this role as an Indian cowherd and not a cowboy in the Western sense at all. Indians keep cows for milk but not meat, and they treat them rather better than we do, so it was a very different take on the idea.

I also made a change to the workshop, which I think improved it considerably. Many participants start to present the game they've been designing by telling a long, rambling back story about their main character, and describe the game itself as a sequence of events rather than an opportunity for the player to do interesting things. In the course of the workshop they have worked out the gameplay, an internal economy, and a user interface for their game, but it's easier and more familiar to tell a story, so that's what they do. This time I explicitly forbade them to tell the story and required them to concentrate on gameplay. As a result we got much more interesting presentations and I think they did better work overall, too.

That evening Mr. Natrajan, the Chief Academic Officer of ICAT, took me to dinner at a fancy tandoori restaurant on a rooftop terrace—a popular thing in India; several of my dinners there were on rooftop terraces. We were ten stories up and could see all the lights of Chennai. The city also boasts a very long beach and a lighthouse on the Bay of Bengal, but I couldn't see much of them in the dark. Two ladies from the college administration came along, and in the course of chatting with them I learned how you put on a sari. (It takes a while.)

Thursday, March 26

I had to fly from Chennai to Mumbai in order to catch my flight home, and unfortunately this meant getting up at four in the morning. Everything went smoothly, although it was a bumpy ride to the airport, and there was more traffic than you would expect at that hour of the morning. The British Airways cabin crew went on strike the very next day, but fortunately it didn't affect me and I got home on time and luggage intact.

All in all it was a great trip. The only thing I would do differently is to come at a cooler time of the year. I had several requests to come back, and I probably will do next winter if there's still enough interest.

GDC 2010!

2010-03-16T00:00:00.005Z

San Francisco, California, USA

This was my 21st Game Developers' Conference. I started going in 1990, and I've been to every one since.

It was a bit of a blur this year, combining social, networking, attending, and presenting into one big busy furball of activity. The first order of business, on Tuesday, was to get to the Serious Games Summit and see my friend Tim Laning of Grendel Games present his amazing new laparoscopic surgery training game. The game doesn't simulate laparoscopic surgery itself -- there are loads of trainers for that and the surgeons are bored stiff with them. Instead, it offers an action-puzzle game that the player has to play by performing laparoscopy movements using a pair of specially modified Wii controllers. It teaches the same hand-eye coordination skills, and uses the same restricted lighting conditions, as real surgery, but the game itself is about managing a bunch of destructive little robots. It was a hit with the audience and will soon be demonstrated at the new Games for Health conference in May.

The Wii surgery input device. They had some trouble getting it through Customs.
I snitched this picture from Jason Della Rocca's Reality Panic blog.

I also ran into Judy Perry of Norco College again, and stopped into the orientation meeting for new IGDA board members. The main point I made there was to keep their internal board squabbles internal, lest their disagreements hurt the organization as a whole.

That evening I took my Dutch friends, who have been incredibly hospitable whenever I have visited them in Leeuwarden, out for dinner. We started with a trip across the Golden Gate Bridge to see San Francisco from Battery Spencer on the Marin headlands, a longtime favorite of mine. After that we went to Greens Restaurant in the Fort Mason center for some of the best vegetarian food anywhere, and then over to the Marina Safeway (famous to fans of Tales of the City) for It's-Its. The It's-Its were not as good as I had remembered and something of a comedown after the food at Greens, but I explained that this was a San Francisco Thing which they Must Not Miss.


Nadia Columbo, Jonathan van Woudenberg, me, Gerdien Dijkstra and Tim Laning at Battery Spencer.

I spent most of the next day locked in my hotel room working on my lecture, which wasn't yet finished. In the evening, Dorothy Phoenix, a very promising student I met a couple of years back when I was doing a recruiting gig at DeVry University in Arlington, took me out for Korean barbecue. She's now with IBM and will be someone to watch if she ever goes into games. I'm so fond of the bridge view that I took her there too, and we also did Lombard Street and Telegraph Hill in the evening. We were planning to go to the Women in Games International party afterwards, but by that time it was so late that we missed it, unfortunately.

Thursday was the first day of the main conference, which, after more work on my lecture, began with the IGDA VIP lunch. I had no idea the IGDA had so many VIPs. I was expecting a couple of dozen and there were well over a hundred. We got a look at Joshua Caulfield, the new executive director now that Jason Della Rocca has stepped down, and awarded plaques to various IGDA overachievers. I was especially pleased to see Wendy Despain get one -- she has been instrumental in getting books published with the IGDA logo on them (thanks to the Writers' SIG), which helps to raise the organization's profile.

I can't even remember what I did Thursday afternoon or evening. Friday morning I had to run to Palo Alto on some personal business, but I was back in time to meet Linda Breitlauch of the Mediadesign Hochschule in Dusseldorf and learn about their program. I also sat and talked over some free-to-play game design issues with the sage and insightful Martha Sapeta, formerly of Zynga and now of Playdom, which I worked into my lecture. That night was both the IGDA party and the Level 99 speakers' party. The IGDA party was so full that I, the founder, was not allowed in. I ended up sitting at a table inside the Metreon and learning all about Pokemon from Eve Eschenbacher, who is one of their translators from Japanese into English. Then off to the Level 99 party, at which, for the Nth year in a row, the music was too loud to talk to anybody. They never, ever, seem to learn. I gave it an hour and then ducked out -- I needed to save my voice for my lecture on Saturday afternoon.

Saturday itself was jammed -- meetings with Albert Sikkema of Gameship in the Netherlands, Sheryl Flynn who works on games for rehabilitation at the Blue Marble Game Company, lunch with an old friend from college, and then the Developers' Rant session. Jason Della Rocca had invited me to give a two-minute cameo rant, and I gave an excerpted version of a longer rant that appeared in my lecture, which I rather sneakily used as an opportunity to plug the lecture.

Finally, the last session on the last day, it was time for my own talk, "Single-Player, Multiplayer, MMOG: Design Psychologies for Different Social Contexts." I don't have it on the web in any form yet, but I'm working on it. In the meantime, someone named Ben Zeigler has posted a surprisingly complete and accurate summary (barring some minor quibbles) on his blog, and you can read it here. The essence of the talk was that game design, as a discipline, is fragmenting. The craft is really very different between player-versus-environment, player-versus-player, massively-multiplayer, and the new "free to play" games. Towards the end I condemned "social" games that make money by creating incentives to tribalism and hatred, and that promote emotional instability, as just plain evil. I got a lot of laughs during my extensive quotations from an important lecture by Zhan Ye -- he actually talked about how profitable it was to sell people tools for humiliating others. One of my key points: there's no such thing as artificial hatred. All hate is real.

After the talk I answered questions for a while, then hurried off to the GDC bookstore, where I had set up a book signing. Unfortunately, they had already sold out of all my books! I'll arrange it better next year.

And that was the end of GDC. The next day I flew back to London, then immediately caught another plane to India, which is where I am now.

Faculty Training at Norco College

2010-03-05T00:00:00.007Z

Norco, California, USA

A few months ago I got a message from Judy Perry, who's head of the new game program at the Norco campus of Riverside Community College in southern California. RCC was about to set up a game development program, grant funding pending, and would I come and help to train the faculty? Of course I would. In order to save them the airfare from Britain, we scheduled it for right before the Game Developers' Conference this year.

I’ve had the opportunity to teach university faculty on a number of occasions, and it’s always fun and different from teaching students. They don’t come in with as many preconceived notions, for one thing. Students tend to feel that they already know everything there is to know about games, based on what they’ve seen in the shops. (I quickly disabuse them of this idea.) Faculty usually aren’t hardcore gamers, so they’re more open to new ideas. They sometimes come up with very unusual ideas. Unfortunately, their lack of experience also means that they occasionally reinvent the wheel, but I can usually nip that in the bud before it wastes too much time.

A few weeks back Judy wrote to me with the good news that their grant had come through, and in addition their college now had its own identity – not merely the Norco campus of Riverside Community College, but Norco College, an independent entity. We planned an intensive three day visit, with events scheduled throughout the day and in the evenings as well.

Judy met me at the Ontario, California airport and took me to dinner at the Mission Inn in Riverside – a lovely historic hotel that the college very kindly put me up in. The next day the fun began. It was a relatively small group, which made it possible to have a lot of discussion. We started with my fundamentals workshop in the morning, and moved on to interactive storytelling in the afternoon. That evening I went and hung out with a bunch of students for a while, telling scurrilous stories about industry luminaries and giving ad hoc design and career advice.

Judy Perry (top left) and team at work on their game idea.

The next day we were hard at work again. I began with an unscripted discussion of how the industry works as a business, and the careers available within it. In the afternoon we did my character design workshop. The faculty was a bit of a mixed bag, and included both former game industry professionals and complete newcomers – professors of computer science who had never even played a game. They had some fun designing the look and animation move set for Emily Vista, field zoologist, and Aristides Mykonos, sponge diver, among others.

In the evening there was a gala dinner at the Eagle Glen Golf Club, with over 100 people. It included faculty, university administrators, a few students, and some parents. Every single person who turned up got one of my books as a gift -- generously provided by the college -- and I signed them all. The dinner was lovely, and I gave my lecture “The Future of Interactive Entertainment to 2050,” which was pretty well-received although my laptop was a long way from the podium and I could barely see my slides. Afterward Judy Perry told me she was surprised that I was able to make the subject of procedural content generation both accessible and funny to non-technical people, which I take as high praise.

After all the excitement the previous night, we took it a bit easy on the last day. I gave a lecture on mechanics design, and then gave the participants a challenge to find the flaws in a game and make suggestions how to fix it. Mechanics design is always the hardest thing to teach, because it’s rather dry. I didn’t want them working with spreadsheets, so I invented an asymmetric card game for two players and had them play through it a few times to find out what was wrong with it. I’ve only done this once before and I wasn’t sure how it would be received, but people seemed to get into it and there were a lot of good suggestions. It was particularly interesting to see how different players adopted different styles of play – the strategists spent a long time figuring out how to lay out their cards, while the more casual players dived right in (and actually seemed to enjoy themselves more).

A room full of people trying to fix the flaws in my castle siege card game.

After it was all over Judy and I enjoyed a quiet chat before I headed off to my hotel. It was a long and busy three days, with almost every moment taken up with activities of one kind and another. I even got to play a student-built survival horror board game during one of the lunch breaks (five players, one of whom is the mad killer, but only he knows it). I was impressed with the students and faculty, and I hope the opportunity arises to go back some day. Special thanks to Judy above all, and to Annebelle Nery, the Grant Director; Dr. Diane Dieckmeyer, the Dean of Instruction; and Dr. Brenda Davis, President, who all supported my visit and worked hard to make it happen.

My First Trip to India

2009-11-15T00:00:00.001Z

Hyderabad, India

At the Game Developers' conference earlier this year, I was passing through my hotel lobby on my way to the Dutch game developers' party with some friends (unlimited free Heineken!), when I was stopped by a handsome young Indian fellow. "Hello," he said. "I'm Rajesh Rao, the CEO of Dhruva Interactive. I've been hoping I would run into you. We want to ask you to come to India and speak at a conference."

I don't know whether he had actually tracked me to my hotel, or it was a chance meeting, but I was delighted. I have wanted to visit India for years, and I've written about how I think game developers should make more use of its culture and heritage in video games. I felt obliged to stay with my Dutch friends, so I expressed strong interest to Rajesh and hurried off, hoping that he wasn't offended that I left so quickly.

I needn't have worried. Later in the summer Rajesh got back in touch and we started to make arrangements. I was to deliver a keynote address on the second day of the NASSCOM Animation and Gaming Summit. This event started off a few years ago as a pure animation event, and in fact my colleague Chris Bateman had already given a keynote there before, but this would be the first time they had ever devoted a whole day just to games. We talked on the phone about the content of the keynote, and now that I have delivered it, it's available online for you to read.

Because this was our big chance to see India, my wife and I decided to go together and to visit some more of the country after the conference was over, but that's a separate story. We flew from London to Hyderabad via Munich, arrived very late at night, and were met by a car from our hotel. Fortunately it's November, and so not too hot in India -- neither of us likes the heat much. We went from Hyderabad's brand-new glittering airport to its brand-new glittering convention center in Hitec city, and put up in the fancy Novotel hotel, which is certainly the equal of any in the West.

We actually arrived two days early because of flight scheduling issues, but I had been in touch with another Indian developer, Prakash Ahuja, the CEO of Gameshastra. They're primarily a service company doing outsource work for the West, but recently they have started to develop their own games, and Prakash asked me to visit on one of my free days before the conference. I had expected this to be a simple meet-and-greet, but they sent a car and one of their senior people to pick us both up and take us to their offices in Banjara Hills, a prosperous district of Hyderabad. Upon our arrival we lit an oil lamp with several wicks -- a traditional gesture of welcome and greeting -- and were each give enormous garlands of fragrant flowers.

We took a good look at Gameshastra's new games, including a number that are specific to the region -- Kabaddi, bullock-cart racing, one about a mythical Indian hero whose name I have, alas, forgotten, and a casual Wii game of village cricket. Indians are mad for cricket; it's even more popular than soccer, which surprises me as it requires more equipment. There was also a meeting with the design teams and a tour of the facilities. It looked like any Western company's offices but for a few things. India has so much wonderful stone that the floors in the stairwell were all of dark-green marble. I don't have any pictures of Gameshastra, unfortunately -- they took a lot of pictures of me, but not I of them.

The next day Gameshastra loaned us one of their employees, Jayadev Yalavarti, their VP of IT services, as a tour guide while we went to visit one of the local sights, Golconda Fort. It's not just a fort, but a huge walled city, now ruinous. We only saw a fraction of it all. Golconda was once the capital of the local Qutb kingdom, constructed to defend against the Mughal empire to the north. Golconda was also the source of so many precious stones -- diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and so on, found in nearby rivers -- that the name itself was synonymous with wealth for several centuries. Jayadev was very knowledgeable and graciously tolerated several hundred questions about Indian history and Hinduism. We bought him lunch by way of thanks.

The next day was the first day of the conference, and while Mary Ellen went into Hyderabad to shop for clothing, I stayed and learned about the Indian animation industry. That evening there was a big buffet dinner for all the attendees -- Indian food, mostly, but a few dishes suited to the Western palate as well. I'm very fond of Indian food as long as it's not too hot, and I think they must have toned it down for our sakes.

My keynote was the following morning, and it seemed to be very well-received. Rajesh had asked me to keep it practical, so my theme was making the transition from outsource work, which many Indian companies do, to developing intellectual property for themselves. Afterwards large numbers of people wanted to talk to me, and I collected up about fifty business cards.

India's game industry is small but has huge potential. As I noted in my talk, the richest 25% of 1.2 billion people -- the population of India -- is equivalent to the entire population of the United States. Nobody in the West is making games for the Indian market, so it's clear they're going to have to make them for themselves... as indeed they should. Their biggest problem is not money but attitudes. Indians are a very studious people, anxious to better themselves, and video games are seen by many as a frivolous waste of time.

We left well before dawn the next morning, on the next leg of a journey that took us to the great Mughal palaces and fortifications of Udaipur, Jaipur, and Agra, and ended with (of course) the fabulous Taj Mahal itself, all pearly-grey in the morning mist.

I'm more grateful than I can express to Rajesh Rao of Dhruva Interactive, and the good folks at NASSCOM who organized the conference, especially Shruti Verma who handled our travel arrangements; and to Prakash Ahuja, Sonia Nair, Rama Krishna Raju, and Jayadev Yalavarti of Gameshastra for their wonderful hospitality and the gift of so much time and help on our first couple of days in India.

Fall Colors and Unusual Art Styles on Gotland

2009-10-11T15:41:00.001+01:00

Visby, Sweden

This was my first official time teaching in my new post as a part-time professor at the University of Gotland. The university put me up in a very convenient apartment right off the town square, with a supermarket and lots of restaurants close by.

On Monday I gave the first-year students an introduction to the game industry and then the first homework assignment I've ever given: to find an artist or art style, and a musical style, to go with a genre. On Friday they showed PowerPoint presentations of their results. These are fairly young students, but many of them did a very good job of researching the project, building the presentation, and arguing for their choices. There were some nice and distinctly unexpected combinations -- a Fauvist take on the survival horror genre, for example; and a lot of arctic photography accompanied by Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings. Unfortunately there were over 50 of them, so we couldn't see them all.

I had an extra day on Gotland, so I borrowed the University's minivan and went for a drive around the island. It would be wonderful for cyclists -- no steep hills and very little traffic, at least at this time of year. The landscape consists mostly of pine forests intermingled with fields, but there were a lot of aspen trees as well, all turning glorious shades of yellow and red at the moment. I had a picnic by the shores of a long inlet of the Baltic at the north of the island, Kappelshamn, and then went on to find an outdoor museum of traditional Swedish buildings at Bunge, not far from the ferry port at Farösund. Unfortunately it was closed, but I got some pictures from the outside, which I'll upload to Flickr in due course.

I'll be back in November. Visby will soon become a second home at this rate.

The Second G-Ameland Festival!

2009-09-25T00:00:00.002+01:00

Ameland, The Netherlands

This year I again attended the G-Ameland Festival, a student game design jam held on the island of Ameland, off the north coast of Holland. It's organized by the Northern College of Leeuwarden, where I teach frequently, and they asked me to come back and serve as president of the jury.

Last year's was loads of fun and this one was even better -- not least because the organizers brought along some students from a cooking school, so the food was much improved. There were about 85 students present, all working for about three days to build games on the theme of sustainability. The Dutch government is naturally concerned that these isolated islands be able to sustain themselves as much as possible, particularly if bad weather cuts them off from the mainland. Most of the students interpreted "sustainability" to mean "recycling," but that's OK. The winning game was called "Once Upon a Time in the Waste," and was a puzzle-solving game that combined features of Tetris with its own unique gameplay. You had to pick up tetromino-shaped blocks of garbage and pile them up to build a bridge -- but if you put heavy things on top of light things, the bridge would collapse. Not bad for three days' work! You can see screen shots from the games, and play the winning game, here.

Ameland has a lot of seals. One of the students drew this picture of me in the course of the week. They like me, but I'm not sure they respect me!

I didn't have time to take many pictures -- I think I gave five lectures while I was there, plus helping the teams -- but there are several YouTube videos that give a feel for what it was like to be there:

News Video (in Dutch)

Fundamentals of Game Design 2nd Edition is on the presses!

2009-08-12T17:55:00.003+01:00

Yesterday I finished work on the next edition of my game design textbook, Fundamentals of Game Design, Second Edition. It has been a long march, but I got it done in time for a September 15th publication date -- which means that at least some professors will be able to use it in the fall semester.

The first edition was published in 2006. Since then a lot has happened in the game industry -- especially the colossal impact of the Nintendo Wii. Apple raised the bar for mobile gaming with the iPhone, and the casual market is bigger than ever. I wrote Fundamentals of Game Design, Second Edition to take these changes into account. The writing is tighter, and I removed outdated material to make room for a lot of new content.

Andrew Rollings is no longer involved, but I was very fortunate to have the assistance of Chris Weaver as my technical editor. Chris is the founder of Bethesda Softworks as well as being a professor at MIT, so he understands both commercial game development and game design education perfectly. Chris made many helpful suggestions about the new edition.

I've got a web page dedicated to it now, and there you can read about all the new material I added.

I won a contest at Develop!

2009-07-17T00:00:00.003+01:00

Brighton, UK

So about two weeks before Develop, Susan Marshall, the organizer, wrote and asked me if I would come and speak, because one of her speakers had cancelled on her. I wasn't planning on going because I'm so busy revising Fundamentals of Game Design at the moment, but I said I'd do it and off I went. It gave me a chance to meet some old friends and make some new ones.

The first day I went to Games:Edu, the special event for the higher and further education community who teach about games. I arrived late and apparently missed a controversial talk, but I'm not really into the politics of games education funding, so I probably wouldn't have understood it anyway. I got to hear Kim Blake talk about the work that Blitz Games does in reaching out to students, though, and that's very cool. They hold frequent open days for students, but the students have to apply to be accepted and only the good ones get in. Several of the best have ended up employees of Blitz, so it clearly works for them, although it's expensive and a lot of work. I can't think of any other development company of their size that does so much to get in touch with students.

The second day I should have been out schmoozing, but I spent the whole day locked in my hotel room working furiously on the book. I didn't have any scheduled events that day and I felt the book had to take priority. That evening I went and had a great fish dinner (alone, alas) at the Regency Restaurant on the waterfront.

On the 16th I went and listened to a couple of different things -- I think my favorite was Masaya Matsuura's lecture on musical games, which preceded mine. He made the point that musical games don't just have to be about rhythm, as most of them are now. We can make games about harmony and singing together and all sorts of things. I have a great quote from Matsuura-san on my Quotes for Designers web page, some of the best advice for creative people that I've ever heard: "Do weird and difficult things."

My own lecture was reasonably well-attended, even though it was the end of the day and the room was hot. Because I was asked on short notice I didn't have time to write a new one, so I delivered "Rethinking Challenges in Games and Stories," my 2007 GDC lecture. (You can hear an audio version of the GDC lecture here.) After the lecture Develop held an event called the Opinion Jam, in which people got up and gave short rants on different topics, and then there was an audience vote to see whose was best-liked. There were about ten. I only remember two or three: a Conference Associate (volunteer) got up and ranted that he didn't like his yellow CA T-shirt; someone said, "Don't do any more sex in games until we can get good at it"; another person said, "Don't do stupid preachy moral decision-making in games any more." I wasn't going to say anything -- I had just come along for the free beer anyway -- but they were looking for one final ranter, so I got up. I said (as I've said before in lectures): "Writers are paid garbage anyway, so for God's sake hire good ones! And good actors too! Nothing destroys my immersion quicker than having a character deliver a stupid clunky line." I think I won over the crowd with the observation that Britain has excellent actors (this is why the US imports them) and so there's no excuse for bad acting in a British-made video game.

At the end there was a vote, and to my considerable surprise, my rant won. It came down to a runoff between the anti-moral-decision guy and me, but the crowd cheered just a little louder for me. I don't normally win things, so I'm obscurely pleased about this.

After that I went to the bar, did a lot more schmoozing, and went home.

A Visit with Michael Stenmark

2009-01-24T00:00:00.003Z

Enhörna, Sweden

Michael Stenmark was one of my very first clients when I started consulting, and brought me up to Stockholm to visit his company, Hidden Dinosaur. A lot has changed for both of us since then, but we're still in touch. He's one of the most creative people I've ever met.

After I got done on Gotland I had a day free, so I went to spend the night at his amazing house in the country. I don't know if Michael is a big hit with women or not, but he ought to be: this is his guest bedroom, a wildly romantic confection of an antique Indian bedstead, cloth-of-gold pillows, draperies galore, and a big fuzzy tiger. The house is full of plants and candles everywhere, and he leaves the latter burning when he goes out for dinner, which suggests that he either has nerves of steel or just doesn't think about burning the whole place down.

We went out for a great Greek meal in the middle of nowhere, Sweden (!) and talked about all kinds of computerized creative stuff. Michael is the creative director of a funky persistent world called Spineworld. It's isometric, looking a little like Habbo Hotel, only way more weird. It's also very low-bandwidth.

On the way back from dinner I slipped on some black ice and banged the back of my head very hard on the pavement. We put ice on it right away, and although it developed a goodly bump, I don't think I suffered any permanent damage.

The next morning I was off to my next gig, a week teaching at the University of Skövde. Many thanks, Michael!

A quick trip to the University of Gotland

2009-01-23T00:00:00.001Z

Visby, Sweden

Last summer I went to Visby to serve as a juror at the Gotland Game Awards, hosted by the University of Gotland. We've been talking about setting up a more permanent arrangement, in which I'll formally become part of the faculty. Because I was in Sweden anyway to visit another of my favorite universities, I flew out to Gotland for a couple of days. I gave the students my Fundamentals of Game Design workshop and another lecture, and had some meetings with folks to discuss plans for the future.

When there are too many teams in my workshop to do a detailed presentation, I have each team make a sales poster instead, and show it to the group along with a short pitch. Here one of the teams is working on a game about saving whales. The approach they took was to let the player be a mermaid -- more of a siren, really -- who lures the whaling ships to their doom. I had in mind something more like Greenpeace and their zodiacs, but you can never tell what novice game designers are going to do.

Back to the NHL (not the National Hockey League!) again.

2008-12-10T00:00:00.003Z

Leeuwarden, Netherlands

I went back to the Noordelijke Hogeschool Leeuwarden for more meetings with the students there and to talk about how I can help the program. Along the way I learned something I didn't know about the Dutch trains. The one I was riding in split into two, and one half went to Leeuwarden, and the other half went to Groningen -- which isn't even in the same province. Guess which one I was in.

I guess I was getting a little cocky about my ability to get around in countries where I don't speak the language. The announcements on the train were in Dutch, of course, and when they said which part of the train goes where, I never noticed. Oh, well, I'm forewarned for next time. Fortunately there was one more train going from Groningen to Leeuwarden that night, and I managed to catch it.

In addition to the work at the NHL, I also got some time to visit with my old friend, colleague, and competitor Noah Falstein. Noah is one of the few other people in the game industry who does what I do, working as a freelance design consultant. He'll be doing some work for the NHL as well, on different projects from mine. We went to dinner with some of the NHL faculty and Noah's wife, who was along for the visit. After dinner we went to see the new offices of the guy who recruited us both for the NHL... in a jail! Tim Laning of Grendel Games was instrumental in bringing us to work for NHL, and his company has just moved its offices into a former jail in the middle of Leeuwarden. It's a big old Victorian monstrosity from the 1880s, complete with judas holes in the cell doors. The building is being converted into offices and shops, but it will still retain some of its prison character. At the moment the conversion is just starting, so it's still pretty grim inside.

Don't know why I look so pleased. Photo: Noah Falstein

Another workshop at FITA.

2008-12-04T00:00:00.006Z

Angoulême, France

I went back again this year to the International Forum on Animation Technologies, which in French has the acronym FITA. It was their tenth year, so they were justifiably proud of all that they have accomplished. I don't have a single picture, unfortunately -- like last year, I only stayed one day, and spent almost all the time giving my own workshop on interactive storytelling.

Keynote at Swansea Animation Days... again.

2008-11-25T00:00:00.002Z

Swansea, Wales

For the second time, I had the privilege of delivering the opening keynote at the Swansea ANimation Days festival -- at least, the Game Days part of it, which comes first. The last time I was there was in 2006, and the festival just seems to keep getting bigger and better. In addition there was dinner at the house of the Lord Mayor of Swansea, complete with the Lord Mayor himself, and his wife, in attendance, wearing their gold chains of office.

Gold chains of office are something we don't do much in the United States. Just as the Queen is a constitutional monarch, so the Lord Mayor is a constitutional mayor -- the job only lasts for a year and I think his duties are strictly ceremonial. Still, he gets to live in a pretty nice house with some amazing silver dishes. I didn't ask what he thought about having a bunch of animation geeks and game developers to dinner, but he seemed gracious about it.

The talk I gave was "A New Vision for Interactive Stories," my GDC lecture from 2006. There was a good crowd, despite my being first thing in the morning and a number of them rather sleepy. I was rather sleepy myself, if the truth were told. The next night there was another, less formal and more intimate dinner for the speakers. Unfortunately, I can't remember who all is who in this picture, except that the guy on the left is the wonderful Ed Hooks, who teaches acting to animators all over the world. Like me, he divides his time between consulting and doing workshops. The lady at the back next to me is Felicity Blastland, who organizes SAND every year and makes sure we all have a good time. We did!

Workshops at Dublin Institute of Technology

2008-11-22T00:00:00.003Z

Dublin, Ireland

For the third year in a row I went to Dublin, twice, to give game design workshops at the Dublin Institute of Technology. They invite high school students in and give them a pitch about the benefits of studying game development at DIT, and then we design a bunch of crazy games. These are some of the biggest workshops I've ever done -- once there were a hundred participants -- and they always sell out.

Here's the poster:

A week teaching at Instituto Superior Técnico

2008-11-15T00:00:00.004Z

Porto Salvo, Portugal

A couple of years back I met a cool professor named Katherine Isbister, who was studying social interfaces at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. At some point, Katherine got a chance to go teach at in Portugal for a week at the prestigious Instituto Superior Técnico which is sort of the MIT of Portugal. When they were looking around for another guest lecturer, she kindly recommended me. After some discussions with Rui Prada, the guy in charge, we fixed a date and off I went. Rui works on human interactions with autonomous virtual characters -- definitely a useful research subject for video games.

I've only been to Portugal once before, when I went to Lisbon to teach for Universidade Lusófona. I had a good time and went to Lisbon castle, which is extremely cool, but I didn't get to move around much. This time I rented a car. The IST campus where I was teaching was in Porto Salvo, outside Lisbon, but I stayed in a seaside resort town called Estoril. As you can see, it's gorgeous:

I didn't do anything very touristy, just cruised around in the car, but I noticed how much the landscape reminds me of California -- warm, dry and rather dusty, but with the ocean nearby

I did a variety of events with the students, including giving them my character design workshop.

The faculty were all great and one evening I went and played a German board game about colonizing the West Indies with them. Interesting game -- there was very little element of chance, but enough different kinds of strategies that you couldn't easily predict what was going to happen. Unfortunately, I've forgotten its name.

The Solomon's Judgment machine.

2008-11-07T00:00:00.006Z

Leeuwarden, Netherlands

Last May I went to the Exposure '08 event in Leeuwarden in the northern Netherlands, and then I went to GAmeland in September. Both were courtesy of the Northern College of Leeuwarden. Now I've started work for the NHL, as it's known, on a regular basis. For the next little while, I'll be consulting for the college and working with the students on quite a number of projects.

One of the projects I'll be involved with concerns an extraordinary machine built in the early 1900s. Beginning in the Renaissance, German clockmakers began creating wonderful mechanical devices that acted out stories from the Bible using puppets. In the early 1900s, a young Dutchman named Jan Elzinga decided to build one himself -- all by himself. And he did. It's called "Solomon's Judgment," and it tells the Biblical story, in mime, of how Solomon was required to decide which of two women was the true mother of a child. (You can find the story in 1 Kings 3:16-28, if you don't know it.)

Elzinga was a mechanical genius, but he was poor. He lived alone with his mother, had no job, and had to scrounge parts wherever he could find them -- mostly from the blacksmith's forge and the bicycle shop. He shut himself in his room, and for three years, he worked on his amazing invention. When it was done, it was one of the wonders of the Netherlands, and it was put on display all over the country. Originally it had to be cranked by hand, and it ran for 35 minutes continuously. To reset it, it has to be cranked backwards for 35 minutes!

Sometime in the 1930s, though, the machine was damaged in shipment, and was not repaired. Jan Elzinga died in 1947, and when he went, the secret of the machine went with him. He never made any plans -- they were all in his own head. Two mechanical engineers tried to restore the machine in the 1970s, mostly during their spare time. They made a lot of notes, but even they never fully understood it.

This is where I get involved. The Solomon's Judgment machine now sits, broken, in the Martena Museum in the the town of Franeker. The museum doesn't want to try to repair it, but they have some money to make a virtual 3D model of the machine, and a video game that incorporates the machine as one element. The game design students at NHL are designing the game, and the 3D students are doing the modeling. As you can see from the pictures, it's a huge task. The model will enable us to make an animation of the machine in operation -- the first time that anyone has seen it (or rather, its virtual equivalent) working in over 30 years. My job is to advise the students on the game. When we're done, it will run on a kiosk in the museum, and perhaps on the museum's web site also.

I find this incredibly exciting. I love old technology, especially mechanical things, and you don't often get a chance to work on something like this. Although it's thousands of years younger and its purpose is known, it sort of reminds me of the Antikythera Mechanism -- a mysterious machine whose workings are not well understood.

Workshops and Siege Engines in Norway!

2008-10-18T00:00:00.004+01:00

Rena, Norway

Wow, did I have fun at Hedmark University College in Norway. I met the nice folks there when I went to the JoinGame conference a few months ago, and they seemed really interested in a visit. This week I got the opportunity. I flew to Oslo and then took the train to Rena.

The college has three campuses, and this one is in a small but very pretty town in eastern Norway. The province of Østerdalen is a mountainous area used by the military for special forces training -- lots of lakes and rivers. All the leaves were turning color and there was a decided chill in the air.

The college has an ordinary modern building, but I gave my workshops in a separate place -- a old wooden building made of logs that smelled wonderful. There was a church in the town built in the same style, but unfortunately I didn't get a chance to look inside.

The students all seemed to be very interested in the work and I think they enjoyed themselves. In addition to learning game programming they're also designing a board game, and the best one may be published. I'm always pleased when I find game design students working on a non-computerized game -- I think it's important for them to realize that games are games regardless of what medium they're in. Obviously the computer allows us to do things we can't do otherwise, but the heart of the experience is still the same: gameplay.

The night I arrived I had a surprisingly good Chinese meal (Rena has only 7000 people but two Chinese restaurants) with Sule Yildirim, the head of the computer science department there. On the second night, after the workshop, all the students and faculty headed out to an Italian place that served gyro (doner) kebab pizza, which was new to me.

One of the highlights of the visit for me was getting to see, and indeed release, a small home-made trebuchet. If you're not a fan of medieval siege engines this probably won't mean much to you, but in my experience a lot of computer people love them. This one was built in a single day by one of the faculty, Simon McCallum, a kiwi whom I met four years ago at the Fuse conference in Dunedin, New Zealand.

The Romans had a kind of catapult (known in the Middle Ages as a mangonel) that worked with a spring made of tightly twisted rope, but as Simon explained to me, they were dangerous. If something went wrong, all that pent-up energy had to go somewhere, and the thing could literally fly to pieces, killing the crew. I knew how mangonels worked, but it never occurred to me what would happen if the frame gave way.

The trebuchet is a later and safer invention. It's essentially a sling, extended by a long pole. You pull down on one end of the pole, and the other rises up and slings the projectile. The later and more famous version of the trebuchet used very heavy (many tons) weights to throw stones weighing hundreds of pounds. Simon's is an earlier design, the traction trebuchet. The crew simply pull down on ropes to sling the arm. The advantage of this approach is that all the energy is in the human beings -- the device is completely safe to its users provided that the sling is adjusted properly. For maximum distance, the projectile should leave the sling heading upwards at a 45 degree angle.

In the pictures you can see Simon showing off one of the stones it throws (it weighed about five pounds), then getting ready to put it in the sling, and finally, at the moment of release as everybody pulls down on the ropes. I got to sit where Simon did and throw a rock of my own.

Now consider this: This device took one day to build, cost almost nothing, and could throw a heavy stone well over a hundred yards. When you imagine a determined army armed with a dozen or so of these devices on a far larger scale, it's no wonder that castles had walls 12 feet thick. A steady rain of heavy rocks would unnerve anyone.

On the second day I gave a lecture about character design and a short workshop on serious games. That evening I had the pleasure of attending a concert of various Norwegian pop and folk songs put on by the townsfolk. One of the faculty, Tone Vold, was the stage manager and got me the ticket. Even though I didn't understand a word, it was a lot of fun. I had forgotten how enjoyable live performances are.

Unfortunately the computer science program at Hedmark is under threat -- the administration says there aren't enough students. It would be a shame to lose it... I'd really like to visit again some time.

Quick lecture at Futures 2008

2008-10-14T00:00:00.001+01:00

London, UK

Back at Games:EDU this summer, I met Chris Linford, who's Head of Digital Media at the London College of Communication. (The LCC is part of the University of the Arts London.) He invited me to come along to a conference, and so I did. Futures 2008 is an event that the LCC puts on specifically for their own students. A lot of them have never been to a professional event before, and the LCC wants to give them a little experience with it before they dive headfirst into something gigantic like the Games Convention.

Anyway, I went up to London for the afternoon. They had a nice lunch at an Indian restaurant for us speakers, and then I addressed the students on the future of computer entertainment. Interesting crowd. A surprising number of them had foreign accents -- in fact, just about all the ones who asked questions -- so maybe the program is particularly attractive to visiting students. I didn't get to stay long, though, because I had to pack for a trip to Norway the next day.

First annual GAmeland Festival

2008-09-20T00:00:00.008+01:00

Ameland, the Netherlands

The Northern College of Leeuwarden, in conjunction with the province of Friesland and several other funding agencies, decided to put on a festival -- actually more of a game jam -- for game development students in the region. I was invited along as an instructor, coach, and juror. It all took place on an island named Ameland off the north coast of the Netherlands -- hence, Gameland and the joystick/lighthouse logo, which I think is very clever. The whole thing lasted five days, and it was a ton of fun.

We had sixteen teams of students from various institutions, along with their instructors. Each team consisted of from four to six people, and the organizers tried to be sure that there was one programmer and one artist on each team, and a sound designer who was shared between two teams. It was wonderful to have all the sound and music people -- most game jams never have enough sound people, and the quality suffers as a result.

Each team had to create a quasi-educational game in Flash and ActionScript, suitable for potential installation in the island's nature museum. On Monday we all headed to the island by ferry from the mainland, moved into our bungalows, and heard a lecture about the island's natural history.

Tuesday morning I gave my Fundamental Principles of Game Design lecture and handed out the worksheets I use in my workshop. I wasn't running a real workshop but I thought they would find them handy. My lecture was followed by one from an art director from NCSoft, Daniel Dociu (pronounced DOE-shu, he's Romanian by birth). After that the students got to work, while the organizers took us instructors on a seal-watching trip -- seals come to the island periodically. It was great to see them in their natural habitat.

Tuesday evening each team presented its initial concept to the whole group, and we instructors commented on them.

Wednesday morning there were more lectures by other folks, and more work in the afternoon. Each of us among the instructors and organizers had been given two teams to "coach" and I visited mine two or three times a day to see how they were getting on and offer advice. I also talked to anybody else who wanted my assistance -- we weren't supposed to be partisan about "our" teams.

Most of the other guest speakers were art people rather than game designers -- in fact, I think I was the only game designer, which meant that I got a lot of questions. My old friend and fellow freelance designer Noah Falstein was supposed to come, but couldn't make it work with his schedule, unfortunately. I hope to see him there next year.

There was some very high-level talent among the artists. Their lectures often consisted of showing how to do things in Maya or ZBrush, although for the purposes of the contest the students were only supposed to make a 2D game.

By Thursday everyone was deep down in it. I gave another lecture in the morning, Emerging Issues in Game Design, which was very well received... probably because among other things I talked about sex in games!

There was quite a variety among the games. Many were simple action games involving racing seals or feeding birds against the clock. They all had an educational theme, so in one of the bird games, you had to make sure the bird that you chose to control ate the correct kind of food for its species, or it would lose energy and fall out of the sky. Others were economic simulations, involving balancing the issues of tourism, pollution, and wildlife on the island. (Wildlife brings tourists; tourists cause pollution; pollution drives the wildlife away.)

Meals were taken in a big central hall, where all the students got a chance to mingle and relax for a bit. Thursday night there was a barbecue for the instructors. Large quantities of beer, mostly Heineken and Grolsch, were consumed at all times of the day and night. Everybody was very well-behaved, though -- the students took the task quite seriously and really put their backs into it.

Friday morning all the teams turned in their work on USB memory sticks and then we judges had to rate them. There was no formal plan for choosing a winner, and we were in a hurry (we had to catch the boat off the island at 2:30). I proposed that each juror just each rate every game from 1 to 10 and we add up the numbers to see who got the most points. This met with everyone's approval and we got to work. It's tough looking at 16 games quickly, but I think we gave each one a fair shot, and the jury was 7 people. Every game but one included a playable demo in Flash, and many included PowerPoint presentations or design documents to explain the game as well.

In the end there was one clear winner that stood head and shoulders above the rest. "Little Sand Ameland" was a game about protecting the island from the sea, which tends to wash it away. As the player you have to defend a sand castle for a period of time by pushing sand in front of it -- but the sand's behavior is a bit peculiar and requires care to figure out. The graphics were charming, the sounds ideal, and the whole thing was very nearly a finished game. The team that built it was a combination of men and women, and included the only black participants in the contest -- it might almost have been chosen for PR reasons, but they won fair and square and everyone recognized their quality of their work immediately.

I was selected to announce the winners aboard the boat home. The Dutch being mild-mannered and low-key, I think they wanted the loud American for the job. Anyway, there was a good deal of cheering, and each of the jurors got a chance to say something about the winner.

The winning team took away 1000 Euro each, so they were pretty pleased. We heard them talking about what they were going to do with the money -- new laptops, school books, audio gear...

After that the boat docked and we all went our separate ways. I rode back to Amsterdam with Alessandra van Otterlo, one of the organisers, and two other speakers -- Daniel and Horia Dociu from NCSoft, who had come over from Seattle to take part.

Many thanks to Tim Laning, the father of the idea, who did a lot of the fundraising and pre-production; Gerdien Dijkstra, who was the primary organizer and queen bee of the whole event; Alessandra van Otterlo, Marjoleine Timmer and Ivo Fokke of the NLGD Festival of Games, who did a lot of the work on the ground; and to Guido Swildens, Jeroen Nauta, and Wessel van der Es of the Northern College of Leeuwarden who provided beer, Internet service, and excellent company throughout. Special thanks and a hug to Alessandra, who picked me up, drove me around, and generally looked after me throughout.

I'm looking forward to next year!

Ten Commandments at Games:EDU 2008

2008-07-29T00:00:00.005+01:00

Brighton, UK

I wangled myself a speaking invitation to Games:EDU this year, which takes place the day before the Develop Conference begins. I wasn't speaking at Develop and I had a bunch of other stuff to do, so I only went to the educators' day. I saw a bunch of old friends and gave my opening keynote from the 2008 GDC Academic Summit, Ten Commandments for Game Development Education. I had to cut it down to 30 minutes to fit into my time slot, and then for logistical reasons I actually ended up with only 14 minutes to give it in; but that was OK. I just talked really, really fast.

In addition to all the schmoozing and reunions, I got to hear a couple of excellent lectures. One was by Jolyon Webb of Blitz Games and Heather Williams of De Montfort University, talking very honestly about how industry/academy collaboration works and how it doesn't. One of industry's bigger problems is convincing those who don't have what it takes not to apply... we need the most talented people we can get. Jolyon and Heather's slides included some funny pictures of very low-quality artwork submitted by job candidates. Jolyon promises to make his text available (minus the offending art) Real Soon Now.

Heather and Jolyon. All pictures courtesy of PixelLab.
The other highlight of the day, for me at least, was Jonathan Blow's brilliant lecture on the conflict between what he calls "dynamic meaning," i.e. meaning that arises from the core mechanics of a game, and traditional storytelling. To those who follow indie game development and experimental gameplay stuff, Jonathan needs no introduction. He's the author of Braid, which is winning rave reviews in spite of its total weirdness, and the longtime organizer of the Experimental Gameplay Workshop at GDC, where all the most avante-garde ideas in (and out of) the biz are displayed.

Jonathan Blow, blowing minds.
What excited me so much about his talk was that it was exactly on the subjects that interest me most--successfully interweaving gameplay and storytelling. I disagreed with certain parts of it, but that just made it all the more enjoyable.

You can download Jonathan's slides and an MP3 of his lecture itself here, but beware, as it's 35 MB.

Finally, here's a picture of me doing the very thing I said in my lecture that instructors should not tolerate: waving my hands!

The Gotland Game Awards!

2008-06-08T00:00:00.016+01:00

Visby, Sweden

I'm starting to wonder if I might be a very boring person. I was a juror at the Gotland Game Awards in Visby, Sweden, and when I came back I read some of the other jurors' blog posts about it. It seems their experience of the event was rather different from mine. They spent a lot of time drinking at parties until 4 AM, and took about a million pictures. I only have a few pictures, and most of these are snagged from other people's blogs. I didn't spend a lot of time drinking at parties; in fact, there were parties going on that I never even knew about.

The problem is partly that drinking doesn't do much for me. I like the taste of certain drinks, but saying that is like saying that you like driving a Ferrari because it has a great paint job. There's something about my metabolism that prevents me from getting any kind of buzz or pleasurable feeling from drinking a lot. Or maybe I'm just too tightly wrapped, and have such iron control over my behavior that I don't allow myself to enjoy it. Anyway, I just get sleepy and don't walk steadily. Since I don't feel a lot of motivation to be sleepy and none at all to walk unsteadily,

Photo by Ulf Benjaminsson

I don't usually drink much at parties. Then there comes a time -- usually around 11 or midnight -- when I discover that everyone else there is drunker than I am, and their conversation has become inane and repetitive. They're having a marvelous time; I'm just bored. And boring, presumably, for wanting to leave. And afterwards I wonder if something wonderfully fun and exciting would have happened if I had stayed. But whatever it was, it probably wouldn't have happened to me in any case.

Photo by Tobias Lundmark

But I digress from the real point. The Gotland Game Awards are an annual event honoring the best student projects in the Game Design and Graphics program at the University of Gotland in Visby. The awards cover both short films or animations and video games, and there's an invitational category for certain guests as well. I was invited to be a juror and to present an award at the ceremony. I got to be the last presenter and to give out the biggest award of all, the "pwnage award" as they called it -- in effect, best of show. Here's a picture of me at the podium, with my own image displayed hugely behind me on a screen. Very self-referential and postmodern. The effect would have been more striking if the image on the screen had not been delayed by a good half-second behind the sound. Maybe that was a playfully ironic comment of some kind -- postmodernists are into that. I got a big round of applause when I got up, though. That was gratifying.

The pwnage award went to a game called Vertigo -- a classic fast-paced side-scrolling race game, very 2D retro. A lot of games were too ambitious and so didn't really get finished; Vertigo did exactly what it set out to do and did it well. It also had a nice graphic style that emphasized the impression of speed.

There were tons of fascinating games. The first-year students are required to make an arcade-style game (though some of them put games into cabinets that clearly don't belong there). There was a wheelchair racing game with real wheelchairs, a bicycling game with real bicycles, and a lot of other fun stuff. My favorite from an art standpoint was Deep Ocean, a Myst-like exploration game that combined 3D models with hand-drawn images (although the dialog was much too wordy, a common beginner mistake).

There was a big difference between the first- and second-year students; the later games were larger and more polished. My favorite of the second-year games, from a conceptual standpoint, was called In Other Words and was set in the world of a book. The opening level was set in Don Quixote. The game had a few design flaws -- it needed more interesting things to do -- but I love the idea and think somebody could take it a long way. The Red Cross also gave awards to two games, one a Neverwinter Nights mod about non-violence called Monks of the Sangreal, and one a sim game called Mission Africa. It's set in an African village and you have to try to provide housing, water, and other amenities in the face of guerilla attacks and various disasters. Very cool and it had a fun advisor character in the form of a giraffe wearing a pith helmet.

The animation students also had videos to show, and there were a couple of standout winners -- a very stylish "advertisement" for Wacom graphics tablets (not that Wacom would ever make a TV ad), and a strange little movie called Perfekt which questions the beauty myth.

These folks are playing a game called Dark Room. It's not one of the students' games; it was made at the Nordic Game Jam over the space of about a day and a half. The theme of the Jam was taboos, so this is a sex game. It has no graphics (hence a dark room), and is played with Nintendo Wii controllers. Each player has to wave his or her controller in rhythm alternately with the other player, and the speakers produce a moan if the rhythm is right. Get out of sync and you get a squawk -- "Ow!" or "What?" or "Not there!" The real trick is that you have to get faster and faster in order to get an orgasm, and it's difficult to both maintain the correct rhythm and speed up at the same time. I tried and was terrible at it.

I've written about Visby before, but this was the first time I'd ever seen the place in the summer. It's just plain gorgeous. I brought my wife Mary Ellen along to see it too, because we both love all things medieval and European, and Visby can't get much more of both. She spent the time wandering around while I was in watching students' presentations, and then she came to the open house the next day and checked out the games. We will definitely be going back and spending some more time just to be tourists on this lovely island.

Many thanks to Steven Bachelder and Don Geyer of the University of Gotland for making it all possible, and congratulations to the winners!

Exposure '08 and Some Very Cool Ceramics

2008-05-30T00:00:00.005+01:00

Leeuwarden, Netherlands

Exposure is an annual student showcase sponsored by the Northern College of Leeuwarden (which is pronounced "LAY-var-den," approximately). This school has one of the most interesting game programs I've ever heard of. All the assignments are actually work projects with real game development studios. The companies approach the school looking for student labor; the school helps to match them up appropriately; and the students learn on the job. It isn't always full-time work, because the students also take classes in the usual way. Exposure is the great matchmaking event of the year, where the students show off projects of their own, and employers wander around and look at the exhibits. They also have a number of invited guest speakers, and I was asked to give a lecture by Tim Laning of Grendel Games, who's also a part-time instructor at the college. I also had some very interesting talks with Albert Sikkema, who heads up the program. We're trying to see if there's a way I can be more involved.

Leeuwarden is an ancient and extremely pretty town in Friesland, the northernmost province of Holland. Like many Dutch cities, it's full of canals that once brought trade from all over the world. I snapped a picture of the original weighing-house, at which merchants had to stop and prove that they were providing honest measure before they could take their goods farther on up the canal to the market.

I had some time on my hands after my talk, so Tim dropped me off at the Princessehof Ceramics Museum, whose building, as luck would have it, is also the birthplace of the artist M.C. Escher, beloved of programmers, mathematicians, and nerds generally. The museum has an extensive collection of works from Holland's history, as well as a number of other Islamic and Asian pieces, including some Ming dynasty vases from China. (Looking at them, I couldn't see what the big deal is about Ming vases, but I'm probably just a philistine, or perhaps the ones I saw aren't necessarily the best examples.) My favorite collection was the large group of Art Nouveau plates and vases, of which this is one example. But the museum isn't limited to historical works; it also contains a number of modern items such as this dramatic statue of Eve as a dominatrix, holding two male demon-figures in chains and crushing the serpent under her foot. (The full title is E.V.E. 1: Erotics Versus Evil. This is one of the things I like about Europe -- precious few American art museums would dare have something like this in their garden.)

I also like these geometric works by the artist Wim Borst, most of which don't have any pretensions to functionality.

After my talk the organizers of Exposure gave me a present -- some tasty spiced cookies rather reminiscent of Italian biscotti, and a bottle of something called Meekma -- a 60-proof liqueur which seems related to gin or the Dutch genever (from which gin derives). Both are characteristic of Friesland, apparently. I'm looking forward to my next visit.

More Workshops at DeVry Arlington

2008-05-19T00:00:00.003+01:00

Arlington, VA

May 13

Having completed my visit to RIT in Rochester, New York, I headed to Arlington, Virginia for three days of events at DeVry. I had been there before and enjoyed it a lot -- some of the best students I ever encountered. Although the events went well, the trip started badly when I got to my hotel and found that my booking had mysteriously disappeared. Someone, somewhere, had cancelled it and there were no other hotel rooms to be found in or near Arlington. I ran up a $140 cab fare driving around trying to find one. Even American Express Global Assist was unable to help me. They came to my rescue when I lost my wallet in Zurich, on the way to Santiago, Chile; but in this case they were distinctly disappointing. They found me one hotel room which turned out to be in Richmond, close to a hundred miles away, and when I called back to ask for something else, they found me another one in Arlington, Texas. After that I gave up and slept on the floor of Washington National Airport, as one place where I knew I could stay and be safe, and find transportation in the morning. It was a frustrating and thoroughly uncomfortable time, especially as the airport played loud music all night, presumably to discourage people like me from sleeping there.

May 14

At about 7:30 AM I called Hilton's national reservations number and discovered that, mirabile dictu, my original hotel had rooms available for the next four nights. I caught their shuttle and went blearily back to the place I had started 10 hours before, where the desk staff were kind enough to hurry up the cleaning process and get me a room by 9:30 AM. Check-in time is normally 3 PM, so this was a lucky break. I was supposed to have the 14th free to be a tourist, but in the event I spent the whole day sleeping.

May 15

My first day at the DeVry campus; I went over in the early afternoon and had a chat with the professors, then gave a lecture on job-hunting to the current students while they ate pizza. That evening I went back to my hotel room and cooked up an impromptu lecture on the history of computer programming.

May 16

In the morning I gave the students a game design workshop, then delivered my lecture on programming. I had been asked to address in a class on "why we do object-oriented programming," and I thought it would be fun to start with Ada, Lady Lovelace's program for the Analytical Engine and then work my way forward through FORTRAN, BASIC, Pascal, and finally C++, with examples of code and pictures of some of the old gear that I used to program on -- a keypunch, a teletype, and a DEC VT-100 terminal. Along the way I explained how the features of the languages changed. I was also able to find a facsimile of Edsgar Dijkstra's famous "GOTO Considered Harmful" letter to the Communications of the ACM. I have no idea whether the students enjoyed it or not, but I did.

That evening I had dinner with one of DeVry's brightest stars. Dorothy Phoenix already has a degree from MIT (!) but she didn't learn as much as she wanted there about games, so she decided to get a second degree in the Games and Simulation Programming program at DeVry. We've exchanged E-mail several times on the subject of female players and women in games, so it was nice to get a chance to really talk to her for a couple of hours. Remember that name, folks; Dorothy Phoenix is someone we'll be seeing more of.

May 17

Saturday was the big recruiting event, when DeVry has an open house for prospective students and their parents. I gave an off-the-cuff talk on the game industry and its future in the morning, had a brief interview with a visiting urban radio station, and then gave a game design workshop in the afternoon. It was very well attended and I was pleased that I managed to persuade several of the parents to take part as well. One of the game ideas I handed out was a favorite -- help slaves escape along the Underground Railroad -- and the team did a particularly good job of combining the associated challenge with a storyline.

May 18

My flight didn't leave until evening, so I had most of the day free. I decided to spend it at the Udvar-Hazy Center, a branch of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum not far from Dulles Airport. I took in an IMAX film, Fighter Pilot: Operation Red Flag, which included breathtaking footage of the Red Flag training exercises in the Nevada desert, and then just wandered around looking at all the aircraft. They had an SR-71 Blackbird, the fastest plane that ever flew; the prototype for the Boeing 707, a plane I practically grew up in; MiGs from the Korean War; and then of course there's this:

The Enterprise was named following a long letter-writing campaign from Star Trek fans, well before the TV series was revived in the 1980s. Technically, it isn't a space shuttle at all. It did fly, but it never went into space. The rocket nozzles are mockups and the heat-shield tiles are fakes. Enterprise is a test vehicle to determine the aerodynamic characteristics of the shuttle design. They would take it up on the back of a 747, then turn it loose and see how it flew. ("Like a brick" is the general consensus.) The Enterprise was supposed to be refitted into a fully-spacegoing vehicle, but changes to the design made that too costly. Anyway it was great to see it up close.

May 19

And so home. On the way I got to try out United's new lie-flat business class seats. Definitely an improvement on the old ones, although if you're not really sleepy, you still aren't going to get much sleep on a six-hour flight. But they're a lot more comfortable and they have a real 110v power outlet!

A Welcome Return to RIT

2008-05-13T00:00:00.005+01:00

Rochester, NY

I first met Andy Phelps at one of the early conferences at Algoma University College in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. He was a young professor at RIT in Rochester, New York, and later he was one of the first people to hire me to give a game design workshop -- to the faculty! Andy wanted to try to convey to the non-gamer professors at in the RIT Department of Information Technology just what this "interactive entertainment" thing was all about.

Our paths have crossed several times since then, and about a year ago he asked me to sit on the advisory board for RIT's game program. This spring I was supposed to go to a meeting of the advisory board, had the tickets all booked and everything, when it was suddenly canceled. It turned out not enough people could make it. Since the air tickets were non-refundable, I persuaded Andy to have me come along anyway and deliver a lecture to his students; that way they wouldn't throw the money away. That was good fun, and Andy and his colleague Erick Vick treated me royally -- a nice hotel and several good meals.

It turns out that Rochester has a lot more to it than Eastman Kodak. Andy told me it was one of last American stops on the Underground Railroad; from here, escaped slaves were smuggled on to Canada. Frederick Douglass is buried here, as is Susan B. Anthony, and the next time I get there, I want to visit their graves. I also plan to visit the Eastman House, which is Kodak's own museum.

I had some time before my flight on Tuesday, so Andy suggested I have a look at the Strong National Museum of Play. Margaret Strong was an avid collector, amassing thousands and thousands of dolls, toys, and games. Her collection was the basis for the museum, which also houses the National Toy Hall of Fame. I thought I would only want to spend an hour or so there, but once I got inside I realized just how much there was to see. A lot of it really took me back to my childhood. There was also a lot of interesting social and historical commentary; the collection of toys on the theme of atomic power and nuclear war, reflecting the concerns of the Cold War, really caught my attention. It's one thing to see one or two of these objects, but to have them all together in one place is something else again. We were really fascinated by nuclear war; as a cultural trope it resonates much more strongly than anything I can identify today. Even global warming, which potentially represents a greater disaster than nuclear war, doesn't get turned into toys.