Sunday, November 15, 2009

My First Trip to India

Hyderabad, India

NASSCOM logoAt 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 citadel of Golconda fort.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.

Sunday, October 11, 2009

Fall Colors and Unusual Art Styles on Gotland

University of Gotland logoVisby, 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.

Friday, September 25, 2009

The Second G-Ameland Festival!

Ameland, The Netherlands

2009 G-Ameland logoThis 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.

Ernest Adams as a sealAmeland 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:

G-Ameland Day 1

G-Ameland Day 2

G-Ameland Day 3

G-Ameland Day 4

News Video (in Dutch)

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

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

The cover of Fundamentals of Game Design, Second EditionYesterday 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.

Friday, July 17, 2009

I won a contest at Develop!

Brighton, UK

2009 Develop badgeSo 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.

Saturday, January 24, 2009

A Visit with Michael Stenmark

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.

Photo of Michael Stenmark's guest bedroom.

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!

Friday, January 23, 2009

A quick trip to the University of Gotland

Visby, Sweden

University of Gotland logoLast 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.

Photo of students at workshopWhen 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.

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

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

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.


Photo of Ernest Adams inside Leeuwarden jail. Don't know why I look so pleased. Photo: Noah Falstein

Thursday, December 04, 2008

Another workshop at FITA.

Angoulême, France

FITA 08 logoI 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.

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Keynote at Swansea Animation Days... again.

Swansea, Wales

SAND 2008 logoFor 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.

Lord Mayor of Swansea 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!

Speakers' dinner at SAND 2008.