Another workshop at FITA.

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.

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

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

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.

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!

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

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

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

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!

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.

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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!