JoinGame 3.0 Conference
Drammen, Norway
JoinGame is a new resource network for Norwegian academics and companies involved with video gaming. They've been holding a series of small conferences, and they invited me to come to their third one, thanks to the lobbying of my friend, client, and fan Tinka Town of Ravn Studio. When I got there I was surprised to discover that I was the guest of honor. There was a crowd of about fifty people from all over Norway, plus Simon McCallum (late of the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand and now working in Norway) and me. Most of the talks were in Norwegian, so Simon and I sat in the back and chatted (quietly) about this and that.
I talked about the future of computer entertainment, and a bit about designing educational software for use in the classroom. Several people said my talks were inspiring, which is always nice to hear. Simon's talk and mine overlapped a surprising amount; we both discussed the changing value chain as software distribution switches from bricks-and-mortar retail stores to electronic means. Simon's company, ESP Gruppen AS, seeks to create gaming portals that benefit telcos, developers, and gamers alike. One of the things they can do is provide useful demographic data back to the developer about who is playing the developer's games online: age, sex, length of time played, frequency of play, and so on. This is data that those of us who are more used to the bricks-and-mortar world seldom get access to.
After the event there was a nice dinner for the whole crowd, and I got to talk to Tinka and her business partner, Stine Waern, whom I had never met, about goings-on at Ravn Studio. If all goes to plan I'll get to do a bit more design consulting for them, which I really enjoyed the last time I had the chance.
DeVry Austin, old friends and new ones
Austin, Texas
I went off to Austin, Texas this weekend to do a lecture for the existing students and a recruiting event for the prospective ones. My hosts were as hospitable as ever, putting me up in a nice hotel and making sure I had everything I needed for my workshop. It all went very well and the participants came up with some fun stuff. The big news, though, was that I got to meet Bruce Naylor, who made important contributions to the development of BSP (binary space partition) trees, which are data structures used to perform efficient rendering of 3D scenes. Naylor was a longtime, but largely uncredited, advisor to id Software on the early
Doom games, which may have been the first game to use BSP trees. Anyway, Bruce now teaches programming at DeVry Austin, and we had dinner together along with Shane Sokoll, the dean of the center, Shane's wife, and a couple of students. I feel privileged to have had the chance.
As Austin is such a major center of game development, I have a number of friends here, and I took the opportunity to catch up with a couple of them: Tess Snider, who was very helpful while I was working on my books (she knows tons about MUDs, MUSHes, MOOs, and so on) and Sheri Graner Ray, current head of Women in Games International (I'm on the advisory board). Sheri and I and her husband got to chat about WIGI's prospects and plans. Like all volunteer organizations, it struggles with fundraising and to have enough warm bodies to do all the work required, but things are looking good at the moment and the mixers they give around the country are as popular as ever.
I'd like to attend the Austin Game Developers' Conference one of these days, but the opportunity hasn't yet arisen. Maybe next year.
Workshop and Consulting at Crytek
Frankfurt, Germany
Sten Hübler is one of the key designers at Crytek, which is acclaimed for its graphically spectacular first-person shooters. Several months ago he attended a game design workshop I gave with Martine Parry in London. He decided that it would be worthwhile for several of Crytek's designers to have the same experience, so he invited me to come to Frankfurt for a day. We did some back and forth to find a mutually convenient time, and I finally made it on Monday. I gave my Fundamental Principles of Game Design lecture to anybody in the company who wanted to come -- there was an audience of about 50. After that, 18 of their creative personnel did the three-hour version of the Fundamentals workshop. I deliberately chose some of the harder games to design, knowing that this was a group of experienced professionals -- and as I expected, they knocked some of them out of the park. Several teams took approaches that I had never seen before, and interestingly (for a company that designs monster 3D shooters) often chose to imagine their designs as small, web-based casual games rather than large AAA titles.
From there we went on to interactive storytelling. I gave them an introductory lecture just to establish a common vocabulary, and we spent the rest of the day discussing different design issues, seminar-style. The folks at Crytek are hoping to improve the stories in their shooter games, to make them richer and more emotionally meaningful. That's not always easy when your primary way of interacting with the world is at gunpoint. We spent a lot of time talking about the merits of predefined characters (e.g. Lara Croft), versus player-defined ones (e.g. MMOG avatars), versus completely neutral ones (e.g. Gordon Freeman), and which ones best manage to combine player freedom with emotional engagement. Someone made the interesting observation that the real hero of Half-Life 2 isn't Gordon Freeman, but Alex, the player's supposed sidekick. Because Gordon himself has no personality, the player identifies more with Alex and her goals than his own.
After the work day was over, we went out for a splendid dinner and a lot more shop talk. I had a great time and got a good insight into the way they work. I hope I get a chance to go back one of these days.
Game Design Workshop at Trinity College, Dublin
Dublin, Ireland
Trinity College, Dublin, is the most prestigious institution of higher learning in Ireland. It was founded by Queen Elizabeth I, back when England ruled the Emerald Isle, and is, for complicated reasons, the only college of the University of Dublin. Dr. Mads Haahr is a Dane who teaches computer science there. We met at GDC 2007, and this year he invited me to come give a game design workshop for his computing and multimedia students. They were a mixed group with a lot of artists among them, which I find always improves the results -- as indeed it did.
Before the workshop itself Mads gave me a brief tour of the campus. Although it's nowhere near as old as Oxford or Cambridge, Trinity manages, with its architecture, to convey a sense of gravity that American institutions can never quite match. Even the most prosaic buildings, such as the student dining hall, are lent a certain dignity by the august personages looking down on the students.
We also had coffee in the Senior Common Room -- a place forbidden to students, and a room that is everything that it should be: lots of dark wood, leather sofas, a massive fireplace, and still more oil paintings of college dignitaries from days gone by. I felt as if I didn't really belong there (I should have been wearing a gown and mortarboard), but it was wonderful to visit. It's upstairs in the smaller building on the right in the image below.
Mads also showed me around his departmental lab, where they're working on a lot of fascinating stuff -- tiny Linux machines that fit into the handle of a tennis raquet; beds that detect the movement of the person in them (very useful for hospitals); and a variety of other motion-based devices. Great fun.
Groundbreaking design work at Develop 2007
Brighton, England
This year the folks at the Develop Conference asked me to assemble a group of game designers and other folks who were working on the cutting edge of video gaming, or even beyond it, and create a conference session around them. I was hoping to achieve something like the annual Experimental Gameplay Workshop at the Game Developers' Conference, although I didn't get as many people as I would have liked - several that I invited were too busy to participate. However, I ended up with four interesting and inspiring speakers:
Philip Bourke, an ICT Specialist from Tipperary Institute, showed off Xbox Brainbox, a toolkit that allows teachers to easily develop and share educational content, without having to learn a complex user interface. Students and others can then download the material to a variety of types of machine, including the Xbox and Zune. Xbox Brainbox even includes a facility for subtitling lectures, so as to allow localization of the material to other languages. A pilot version of the project is expected to go into Irish schools in a few months. Bear in mind that the whole thing was done by undergraduates!
Mark Eyles, Principal Lecturer in the Advanced Games Research Group at the University of Portsmouth, spoke to us about his concept for Ambient Gaming. Ambient games are games that you can either play or ignore, a concept borrowed from Brian Eno's seminal 1976 album
Music for Airports. Just as you can engage with ambient music at any level you choose, from listening closely to ignoring it entirely, so you can engage with the game at any level during your daily activities. In one version of his game, data from a pedometer that the player wears becomes an input that affects play. Mark went through his slides at a very high rate of speed and unfortunately dwelt more on introductory issues than was strictly necessary, so we didn't get the full benefit of his work. However,
he has now put his slides online, in
PDF (3 MB) and
PowerPoint (9MB) formats.
Kate Pullinger, a successful novelist whose work has been reviewed in such places as the
Times Literary Supplement and
Cosmopolitan, gave us a demonstration of
Inanimate Alice, an online interactive novel she's developing with digital artist
Chris Joseph. The work has gotten a great deal of attention from the mainstream press, and it features a gradually increasing level of interactivity so it's not off-putting to gaming neophytes. Best of all, it's a serious story, not escapist fantasy stuff. In the first chapter a little girl and her mother are driving through an empty dark landscape in search of her father, becoming more and more worried, and Pullinger builds the tension with a sure hand... a far cry from the usual "your father has been kidnapped by trolls, you must go kill them" scenarios of the game industry. Kate does all kinds of things in both print and digital media, and I look forward to seeing more of her work.
Jolyon Webb of
TruSim, a little-known division of Blitz Games, rounded off the session. He began with a compelling argument for better facial and body animations in games, procedural animations that can correctly display the subtle differences between such states as "unrestrained joy" and "restrained joy." Jolyon also showed us some examples of their own work, using the most complicated facial animation rig I've ever seen. He then gave us a disturbingly realistic demo of their work on simulating the bodily reactions to serious injuries. In the demo we watched a (simulated!) man bleed to death, seeing his breathing and heart rate increase as they try to move blood around that isn't there. The work isn't intended for conventional entertainment but for specialized purposes such as training paramedics to do triage after a major disaster. This was some of the most advanced bodily simulation I've ever seen, but it's not ivory-tower stuff; it's eminently practical. This was a slightly revised version of the talk I saw at BECTA earlier in the year.
I had a good time at Develop, made a few connections and met up with a lot of old friends. As last year, it was a useful, well-run event in a convenient location -- convenient to me, at least, since Brighton is only 90 minutes away by train.
Interactive Storytelling in Lisbon
Lisbon, Portugal
I've added a new country to the list of places I've taught. This is my first-ever visit to Portugal, a place where not only do I not speak the language, I can't tell from looking at it how it should be pronounced. For example, I'm teaching at Universidade Lusófona, which I would expect to pronounce LU-so-FONE-A, but which is more correctly pronounced lu-ZOF-na. I think. Portuguese looks vaguely like Spanish with the tildes in the wrong places, but it sounds more like Russian -- there are a lot of strange gutteral vowels. And Lusófona, or Lusophone as we would put it in English, means "Portuguese-speaking." It's a private university with campuses all over the Portuguese-speaking world -- Portugal and Brazil of course, but also Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde and other former colonies. I hadn't realized that Portugal's one-time empire had stretched so far.
Like the University of Skövde in Sweden (another place I teach, rather frequently), Universidade Lusófona is housed in rather unprepossessing old military barracks. Fortunately the interiors have been completely rebuilt and are not nearly as depressing as that sounds. This campus is particularly dedicated to film, animation, and multimedia, so there are several studios, a motion-capture suite, a design workshop, and of course loads of computers.
I'm here to teach a four-day workshop on interactive storytelling to a group of students, with a couple of staff and professors thrown in. I'm giving the first of a series of modules, the most open-ended and theoretical one. After I'm done, the participants will be going on to do 3D modeling and animation with other instructors, building characters and locations from the games that they started designing in my workshop.
My only complaint -- as usual -- is that I'm not getting to see much of this new city. Everyone is hard at it all day, and I need to be there with them. But we're all going out to dinner tonight in the old town, so I'll get to see a little more of it, and perhaps some tomorrow afternoon. There's a fabulous castle here, according to the tourism websites...
A quick trip to University Campus Suffolk
Ipswich, England
Ipswich is on the southeastern coast of England, about three hours by train from where I live. It's home to what used to be Suffolk College, and is now University Campus Suffolk. There's a game design program there, and I went to critique the students' projects and give a lecture. I was really pleased to see that the students had all been asked to work on something educational. Several groups just grafted questions onto simple action games, and clearly were more interested in the action part than the education part, but one or two had tried to create an experience in which education was really part of the adventure.
My kind hosts also took me to an excellent pub, the Lord Nelson, in which the great admiral himself was reputed to drink from time to time. True or false, it's everything an English pub ought to be!
Flying through Innovation Week '07
Belfast, Northern Ireland
Invest Northern Ireland is a government organization that tries to promote (surprise) investment in Northern Ireland. A good many of the province's historical troubles have been due to underemployment and a poor economic climate, and they're hoping to change that. Every year they run a show in Belfast called
Innovation Week, and this year I was invited to address the crowd on the subject of video games. I was pretty busy at the time, so I couldn't stay the whole week; I had to fly in and fly out the same day. But they laid on a car for me and made all the other arrangements, and it went very smoothly. I gave them my lecture about the future of computer entertainment, looking out to about 2050 or so.
The show itself consisted of a number of rooms, each devoted to a different aspect of starting a business in Northern Ireland. If I had any reason to, I would certainly consider it as a place to set up. They offer tons of help on all kinds of subjects -- finding employees, looking for investors, doing the government paperwork, and so on. Labor costs are comparatively low and land prices aren't too bad -- not nearly as high as they are in Dublin, for example. Anyway, it was a fun and informative, albeit short, trip.
Accessibility Contest Featured on KQED TV
When I was at the Game Developers' Conference earlier this year, I took part in Accessibility Idol, a competition to design a game for a quadriplegic player. During the competition, San Francisco public TV station KQED was filming for a segment of their
Quest series, which would address accessible games. The segment has now aired, and you can see it here. I only appear in it for a few seconds -- the majority of the time is given to Reid Kimball, a hearing-impaired developer who explains the issues very eloquently. I think it's an excellent piece.
University of Ulster Game Design Goes National!
University of Ulster Magee, Derry, Northern Ireland
Dare to be Digital is an annual game design contest for students from throughout the UK. During my last trip to the University of Ulster Magee as a visting professor, I took an hour or so to pass on some advice to a team that was entering the competition. I'm really pleased to report that they've made it through the first round of qualifications, and will now be representing all of Northern Ireland in the national competition.
The game is called Bathroom Buccaneers, and the premise is based on tiny pirate ships fighting one another in a bathtub. In addition to their own battles, they have to look out for storms (caused by someone bathing), fog banks in the form of soap bubbles, and of course the dreaded Rubber Duck.
The final awards for Dare 2007 will be handed out on August 16th at the University of Abertay Dundee in Scotland (another place I've visited a few times), and I hope they make it!
Big fun at DeVry University!
Arlington, Virginia, USA
This weekend I flew to the USA to give a couple of workshops at the Arlington, Virginia campus of DeVry University. DeVry is a nationwide career-oriented university with campuses all over the country, and they were using my visit to promote their new Games and Simulation Programming degree. They had a reception and dinner for me among the current students on Friday night, and then the workshops were held on Saturday in conjunction with a whole lot of other fun events to encourage prospective students to apply. I got a chance to sit down with the faculty and look over their curriculum. It looks good. I'm normally a bit suspicious of schools that are heavy on the training, but their degree includes some psychology, literature, and other humanities courses to help turn out a more well-rounded graduate.
The workshops went well, and the prospective students showed promise. I had them work on some new, never-before-tried game ideas, including "Confront the Whaling Ships." One team created a simple action game for mobile phones called Moby's Revenge. The player controls a whale that head-butts the ships. Pieces fall off and you can collect them up to make armor, which enables you to bash larger and larger ships as the history of whaling progresses from the 19th century to the present day.
The biggest fun, though, was at the reception the night before. I seldom encounter such a friendly, engaged, bright bunch of students. It helped that they were self-selected, of course, so the only ones who turned up were the ones who really wanted to be there in the first place; but even so, it was an outstanding group of people. The other thing that really struck me was their camaraderie and positive attitude. You often run into game development students, especially young males, who are just too cool for words, or aggressively competitive. Not this crowd -- they seemed really supportive of each other and excited about learning. There were only three women out of probably sixty people there, but a little observation showed that they weren't being shunted aside or given minor roles on their development teams (as happens all too often).
Anyway, the whole thing was a lot of fun and I'm looking forward to going back, even with the jet lag.
Two lectures to BECTA
Birmingham, UK
The
British Educational Communications and Technology Agency is responsible for figuring out how to use technology in schools and higher education, and where the money should go. This involves bringing together an awful lot of people -- local education authorities, teachers, software developers, and other governmental agencies. They invited me to come to a day-long seminar called "Enhancing Learning: Virtual worlds, Simulations and Games Based Learning." I gave them two lectures, one called "Reality, Simulation, and Play," and the other one, "The Future of Computer Entertainment."
I went expecting that my audience wouldn't know much about computer games... which is often the case at these kinds of events. In this case I was wrong, and had to revise my slides pretty quickly when I got there. There's some fascinating work going on. Sion Lenton from TrueSim (a serious-games division of Blitz Games, which has hitherto been known mostly for kids' titles [
Barbie Horse Adventures]) gave a talk about some of their work on facial animation for trauma-care training software. It was pretty amazing stuff. We could see the various stages a person's face goes through as he slips into unconsciousness and dies; creepy but brilliant, assuming they have the details right (I'm not in a position to know).
The day ended with a really inspiring talk by a Scottish guy named
Derek Robertson, of Learning and Teaching Scotland. He and his colleagues find all sorts of innovative ways to use commercial off-the-shelf (known as COTS) games in the classroom. They got totally unmotivated kids to substantially improve their math skills simply by giving them the arithmetic drill in
Brain Age for the Nintendo DS. The kids loved the instant feedback and the ability to watch their own progress as the days went by. The classroom was miraculously quiet. He also talked about how somebody (I'm afraid I didn't catch who) is using
Guitar Hero in the classroom... yep,
Guitar Hero. The kids form bands and go on virtual tours. They use math to do the accounting to keep track of how much "money" the band makes. They learn art skills to make posters for the band. They use English skills to write newspaper reviews of each others' bands. And of course they learn about music (sort of) by playing the game. Completely brilliant. Mr. Robertson seems to have boundless energy and imagination. He's somebody to watch. After his lecture, a member of the audience said, "Can I send my kids to school in Scotland?"
My thanks to BECTA for inviting me to a very entertaining and informative day.
Back to ENJMIN for a day
Angouleme and Paris, France
One of the students at this French video game school where I'd had such fun a few months ago asked if I were planning to be there to see them present their final projects. I said, "Well, nobody's asked me, but my wife might like a quick trip to France." A few hours later I was invited, with my expenses paid -- all we had to do was buy her train ticket. We took the Eurostar via the Channel Tunnel, then the TGV from Paris to Angouleme. She spent a day exploring the town, and I went off to the school to hear the students present their projects and give feedback to the instructors.
They had done some pretty interesting work, although the quality was variable. By far the best, and also the most complete, was a retro -style game called Nippon Salary Racing Championship, about racing around an office building in desk chairs. (The "box cover" mockup is visible at left.) Although it used a 3D engine, most of the objects in the game were made up of tiny cubes, giving the world a distinctly pixelated look. Another game, Psychedelia, was about a purple-skinned Rasta-looking god working to defeat the forces of squareness with flower power. The squares were, indeed, squares -- hostile cubes with teeth. Fun stuff.
After the day was over my wife and I went off to Paris, and had two full days just to be tourists. We took in the Asian Art Museum, the Musée d'Orsay (always a favorite, although we didn't have long enough there), a walk under the Eiffel Tower and down the Champs de Mars, Les Invalides and Napoleon's tomb. There are
rooms full of plate mail, swords, and other late-medieval arms at the French Army Museum, far more than at any other museum I've seen. We also wandered along the Seine looking at the bookstalls, but it was pretty cold for riverside walks. And of course we ate fantastic meals every day; French cuisine deserves its reputation. The only downside is that there's no such thing as a quick restaurant meal; once you're seated, you're expected to want to sit there for a couple of hours.
Gotta go back, sooner rather than later. I'd love to have a full week in Paris sometime.
GDC 2007!
San Francisco, California
I can't believe how much stuff I signed up to do this year... and at the end of the trip I was sick into the bargain, with some sort of nasty bug that went around the conference. You shake a thousand hands at GDC, and if one of them's got a virus on it, chances are you'll get it too.
First up, I went to the day-long Academic Summit for the International Case Blast session organized by Dan Hodgson from Northumbria University. The Case Blasts consisted of 5-minute presentations from instructors about their curricula and approach. Dan asked me to step in and talk about my
game design workshops.
Following that I blitzed off to the big
Women in Games International event being held at the Electronic Arts campus in Redwood City. I haven't been back there in about six years and had no idea the place had grown so much -- when I left it had three buildings; now there are six or seven. Anyway, the event was really well-organized, with a number of top industry women present among the speakers and about 400 attendees all told. I sat on a panel about designing games for women, and was also privileged to deliver the closing keynote, "Developing Backwards and in High Heels," which I've given before to other women's groups with considerable success. The picture at left is me addressing the crowd... wearing a black hat, standing in front of a black curtain and behind a black podium. It would be nice to think that "EA" stood for "Ernest Adams" but...
On Thursday was the Accessibility Idol competition, a game design challenge. Four other designers and I were required to design a game for a quadriplegic player that enabled him or her to compete head-to-head against able-bodied players. The list of competitors read like a Who's Who of industry old-timers: Brenda Brathwaite, the longest-serving woman in the business; Ellen Guon Beeman, formerly of Origin, EA, and Monolith, and now a program manager at Microsoft; Noah Falstein, another consultant like myself but with an even longer track record; and Sheri Graner Ray, who's the head of Women in Games International and another design powerhouse. My design was an alternate-reality 3D combat flight simulator for... zeppelins! I called it
Dreadnoughts of the Skies, and tried to create a game that combined mouse-based input (which quadriplegics can usually control via a head-mounted pointing device) and voice commands. Alas, I came in second. Sheri beat me by one vote with a very interesting design about training dragons using a pitch pipe. Still, it was a fun exercise, my only complaint being that it was badly under-attended. They're planning to repeat it next year, and let's hope it generates more interest.
Friday was my main lecture, which this year was called "Rethinking Challenges in Games and Stories." It went quite well and was voted one of the top five lectures at GDC, which is saying something considering how many dozens there were. I've now put a
printer-friendly version (with pictures) online on the
Lectures page of my website.
To top off the conference, I went off to the
Video Games Live concert on Friday night, which I've missed on both of the last two opportunities. It was amazing, despite the fact that by that time my cold was getting pretty bad. Not only did the orchestra play famous game tunes from
Pong to the present day, they even played some of them correctly as a player played the game in real time! I can imagine a single pianist managing to do this, but an entire orchestra? And many of the great game composers were there in person: Koji Kondo, of
Super Mario Brothers and
Zelda fame, actually played his own pieces live on the piano, which had the audience on their feet roaring. The whole thing was a marvelous celebration, and I'm really glad I finally got to see it. If it ever comes to town near you, go!
A quick trip to the Waterford Institute of Technology
Waterford, Ireland
Karl Sandison at the Waterford Institute of Technology got in touch about a workshop and some consulting, and fortunately I was able to squeeze in a one-day visit between Animex and going off to Skövde, Sweden to teach for a week. It was my first visit to Waterford since I went as a tourist back in 1999. There wasn't time to be a tourist this time around, because I only had a single day there and went back to England the same evening, but I did give a lecture, a short game design workshop, and did a little consulting with the faculty about their curriculum. I got a chance to chat with some of the students about their game development projects, and I was quite impressed with the thoroughness and professionalism of their work. I'm hoping I'll get a chance to come back someday.
Animex again -- plus the Darlington Railway Museum!
Middlesbrough, England
How could you not love a conference that puts you up in an incredibly posh hotel and gives you a driver to go wherever you want? I gave the opening keynote at Animex Game, the first two days of the week-long Animex Festival. My lecture was "A New Vision for Interactive Stories," which went over well. I also gave a half-day game design workshop to a very well-prepared and attentive crowd of students. Evenings were spent having dinner with various game developers, and I was delighted to make the acquaintance of Thomas Arundel of Introversion Software (
Defcon and
Darwinia), and Philip Co from Valve, who was mobbed by students everywhere he went. My thanks, as ever, go to Gabby Kent for inviting me. Animex is a huge amount of work for her every year, and she takes great care of all the speakers.
I also had an extra day there, which I used to visit the
railroad museum at nearby Darlington. This area of Britain is rich in railroad history, as the first-ever passenger-carrying train operated here in 1825. I looked around the museum for a while and got to stand in the cabs of a couple of locomotives. One of them was ordinarily closed to the public, but once the staff knew I was genuinely interested, they were happy to let me go behind the scenes. After that I wandered over to the workshop where a brand-new steam locomotive, the Tornado, is
being built to an old design. People were welding and machining and hoisting and generally doing all sorts of cool stuff with machinery that I wish I knew how to do. I was completely free to wander around, ask questions of the engineers, and take all the pictures I wanted. In the shot below you can see one of the engineers installing a shaft into the frame of the locomotive. The boiler, which is not yet installed, is visible behind him at the left edge of the frame.
Why build a steam locomotive in 2007? If you have to ask, you're not going to get it.
A week at the University of Ulster Magee
Derry, Northern Ireland
This was my first trip as a visiting professor to the University of Ulster, Magee campus -- although I came here last year for one day. It was outside of term-time, so attendance at my workshops was voluntary, but I got a pretty good crowd on most days. Almost all of the students were first-years, with one or two second-years as well. I gave my Fundamentals and Character Design workshops, as well as a new one that I created just for them, an introduction to game balancing. As with most of my workshops, it didn't need a computer. I created a deliberately unbalanced card game for two people, then let them play it and propose new rules to correct it.
I also got a chance to be a tourist for a bit. Derry, or Londonderry, is a fascinating city. The official name is Londonderry because the current city was built by London companies in the 1600s on lands confiscated from local Irish landowners, but the original name of the region was Derry, and Irish nationalists prefer the older term. The city walls are still intact -- the only complete city wall remaining in Europe, they say -- and I took an hour or so to walk all the way around them, even though it was chilly and raining a little. They've even got the original cannon (although on new carriages). Derry's nickname is "The Maiden City" because it outlasted at least two great sieges and was never taken.
Derry is also famous for less happy reasons -- the Troubles of Northern Ireland. For a couple of centuries the region outside the city walls was known as the Bogside, a depressed area inhabited by poor and disenfranchised Catholics. In 1969 this was the scene of a huge multi-day riot called the Battle of the Bogside,
and for almost three years the Bogside was a self-policing, autonomous region known as "Free Derry." The Bogside has since been redeveloped, and a number of monuments and murals commemorate those events. It's now a place of pilgrimage for civil rights activists and many others. The mural in this photo shows a young boy in a gas mask and holding a Molotov cocktail. Some of the newer murals now celebrate peace rather than confrontation.
New interactive storytelling masterclass at FITA '06.
Angouleme, FranceFITA stands for the International Forum for Animation Technologies (the acronym is French), and it's held annually in the same cool place that the Ateleiers Jeux Video (Video Game Workshops) are that I attended last April: the National Center for Comics and the Image in Angouleme, France. Although the conference is primarily about computer-generated animation, they held a number of breakout sessions, and I was invited to present a one-day masterclass on interactive storytelling and emotion. I didn't have one prepared, so I had to put one together, bearing in mind that the attendees didn't necessarily know much about video games.
I took the Eurostar over the preceding day, arriving just in time for a nice dinner with several of the speakers, including Ken Perlin, whom I know fairly well, and someone new: Gitanjali Rao, a Bombay-based animator who creates films using hand-drawn animation, though on the computer.
The next day was my class, and it turned out that almost the entire group were not animators, but students from the video game school there, ENJMIN! So in fact they already knew quite a lot about games and game design. Nevertheless, we worked through all the material and I got a chance to fine-tune my content a little.
The day ended with one of those long winy dinners that the French enjoy so much, at no less a venue than the Chateau de la Rochefoucauld, a glorious castle that could easily have served as Disney's inspiration. A couple of hundred of us had dinner in the very room where the treaty that ended the Hundred Years' War was signed. All the game students gravitated by my table, so while I didn't learn much about animation technology, we had a good time chatting about games over dinner. The most dramatic moment, however, was when the Duchesse de la Rochefoucauld herself -- a striking lady in her mid-70s, with a manner both charming and imperious -- took about twenty of us on a tour of the castle. We saw the libraries, the map room, and a number of other rooms all filled with furniture and art from a variety of periods, and heard tales of the family as we went. Apparently the Rochefoucaulds were instrumental in helping the Americans defeat the British in the American Revolution, although La Fayette gets most of the credit.
The following day I headed back to the UK again, very much enjoying the speed and amenities provided by first-class travel on France's TGV trains and the Eurostar.
Lecture to the visiting Danvik students
LondonOne of my clients, Tinka Town from
Ravn Studio in Norway, also teaches at the
Danvik Folkhøgskole in Drammen. It's a media arts school, and the students take annual visits to London and Los Angeles. Tinka asked me to drop by and give them a lecture while they were in London, and as it's only half an hour away, I was happy to oblige. It was the last day of their stay, so they were a bit tired, but still a fun group. I gave them "The Future of Computer Entertainment, 2005-2050," which is suitably general and doesn't assume too much familiarity with video games. Afterwards I kept bumping into them on railroad platforms as we scattered around the city. You wouldn't think one group of Norwegians would stand out so much...
I spent the rest of the day working with Tinka on some ideas for a new game that Ravn Studio wants to do.
Keynote at Swansea Animation Days conference.
Swansea, Wales
Swansea Animation Days, also called SAND, is a conference put on by the University of Wales to discuss computer-generated animation. It's not a festival (they do show films but they don't give awards), nor does it deal with hand-drawn animation -- the real emphasis is on CG animation. One day this year was artificial intelligence, and they asked me to come give a lecture the day after the JISC CETIS conference. I took the train down from Manchester at night, slept late, and showed up just in time. Although it's a fairly old lecture by now, I gave them "Putting the Ghost in the Machine," which turned out to be very well-received. (It's hard to go wrong when you start your lecture by reciting "Old Ironsides".) Later there was a fabulous Chinese dinner at which I got to sit next to Ruth Aylett from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, who's doing some interesting AI work for games.
The next morning I sat on a panel chaired by Ed Hooks of "Acting for Animators" fame, to discuss story in games. I'm afraid Ruth and I rather dominated the discussion, as we're both pretty passionate about the subject, and the other panelists were comparatively quiet by comparison. As soon as the panel was over I had to charge off to catch a train to Cardiff Airport for a flight to Finland...
Keynote at the invitation-only JISC CETIS conference.
The Lowry Arts Centre, Manchester, UK
JISC is the Joint Information Systems Committee -- a large government-funded organization whose purpose is to assist higher and further education (the latter would be called "adult education in the USA) to make the best possible use of information and computer technology. CETIS is one of their many projects, and they have an annual invitation-only conference for academics and other educators. This year one of their topics was the subject of games in education, and I was invited to come along and give a talk about games generally. I gave them one of my favorite lectures,
"The Philosophical Roots of Computer Game Design." It went over pretty well -- one of the audience came up and said it was the best talk he'd heard in the last fifteen years!
The Lowry, by the way, is one of Britain's millennium projects, a really cool art museum/theater/meeting space in the Salford Quays, a formerly dying industrial region of Manchester (like the London Docklands area, it was heavily bombed during WWII and the postwar reconstruction was not particularly felicitous). Inside it's all funny lines and angles -- I don't think there's a 90 degree angle in the whole place, except maybe where the walls meet the floors. Lots of ramps, oddly-shaped rooms and so on.
Many thanks to Paul Hollins for inviting me.
A visit to Bletchley Park, an early home of computing
Bletchley Park, England
In the bland concrete buildings shown below, on the grounds of an English country mansion, a part of World War II was won, and a part of computing was born. This is Bletchley Park, the place where the German codes were broken. I went for a visit with the family.
The device on the left is an Enigma machine, the most famous German encryption machine. Enigma machines are actually a class of device; they're not all alike. They work on a fairly simple principle. A set of rotors, visible at the upper left, convert an input keystroke into an output letter. When you press a key, one of the letters above the keyboard lights up. The rotors advance in position, and if you press the same key again, a different letter will light up. The key to the code produced is in the original position of the rotors. This is a four-rotor machine, which, at 26 positions per rotor, has 456,976 possible keys. To add even more, a series of plugs and wires (visible at the bottom) can be inserted to further mix up the letters.
Here's what an Enigma rotor looks like on the inside, disassembled:
And below is the machine, or rather a mockup of the real one, that broke the Enigma code, saved countless lives, and shortened the war by as much as two years. For some obscure reason it was named after the Italian word for an ice cream sundae, "Bombe," and for one of its inventors, the British mathematician Alan Turing. This is the Turing Bombe. Given an encrypted message intercepted by a listening post and a possible phrase that might be in the message (such as "Heil Hitler," which appeared often in German messages), it searched by brute force for possible rotor combinations of the Enigma machine that would turn the encrypted message into the original one. In effect, it consisted of 36 automated Enigma machines, all running backwards. It wasn't a computer in the modern sense, but an electromechanical search engine.
Lecture at Games Convention Developer Conference
Leipzig, Germany
Even before the implosion of E3, the Games Convention in Leipzig was the biggest game trade show in the world -- and yet surprisingly few American developers know about it. 130,000 people come from all over Europe to see the latest games. At the same time, there's a conference for developers. I was invited, and gave them a version of my lecture from this year's Game Developers' Conference in San Jose, "A New Vision for Interactive Stories." I could only stay one day, unfortunately, but I met up with some old friends and made a number of new contacts too.
Leipzig is in the old East Germany, but you wouldn't know it to look at the town. 17 years after the wall came down the city bustles with life. Modern hotels and the colossal convention center, Leipziger Messe, give it the look of any prosperous German city. I'll definitely go back for longer next year if they want me.
Ernest Adams joins advisory board of Women in Games International
I'm proud to announce that I have been asked to serve on the advisory board of Women in Games International, a group founded to improve conditions for women in the game industry and encourage new women to join. I have long been supportive of this aim, and was delighted to accept. Something like this was tried in the mid-90s, but didn't work out. WIGI was set up in 2005 and has already given several conferences around the USA and in the UK -- the amount of interest is enormous. I look forward to serving and lending what assistance I can to their efforts. The industry has long suffered from a dearth of female talent, and WIGI should help to remedy that.
A Visit to Norway
Drammen, Norway
I hadn't been to Norway in years and years, so when I got the chance to go I couldn't possibly turn it down. One of my clients, Ravn Studios, flew me there for a few days of consulting on their current project. This is a picture of the team. Black T-shirts and heterogeneous hairstyles -- can you tell these are game developers? The woman in front is their lead designer and boss. Afterwards I took half a day to be a tourist, and went to see some of the polar exploration ships in Oslo. Most impressive was the Fram, a wooden three-masted ship intentionally designed to be frozen into the ice -- it's incredibly strong. The picture below is of the Gjøa, the tiny little vessel that first discovered the Northwest Passage between the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific, via the Arctic Ocean north of Canada. The Oslo harbor is in the background.
Vacation!
Sierra Nevada Mountains and San Francisco Bay Area, CaliforniaI went on vacation... the first one in a couple of years. Here are a few
pictures...
A winter visit to the top of the world... and a great game.
Oulu, Finland
I went back to Finland again, as part of my ongoing consulting work for the Environment for Lucrative Virtual Interaction project at the University of Oulu. This was the first time I had been there in the dead of winter. I was expecting it to be bitterly, bitterly cold just 100 miles or so from the Arctic Circle, but it was pretty nice. The snow was deep, of course, and I actually saw some people using skis as their ordinary mode of foot transport. (OK, I know this is normal in places like Vail and Gstaad, but we sure don't see it in Britain. Not even in
Scotland.)
The fun thing about working for ELVI is that I get to hear a lot of new game ideas from dev teams coming to their business incubator for advice. They're more than student projects; many of them are serious games that may have something important to contribute. There's one for children with speech disabilities; one for people with neurological problems; one about surviving in cold weather (what a surprise).
This time around, though, I got an extra bonus -- one of the teams (whose own game I can't discuss, unfortunately) was very inspired by a game I hadn't heard of,
King of Dragon Pass. It's an indie game published by a small group called A-Sharp, and it won the Best Visual Arts award at the second Independent Games Festival in 2000. While the art is very nice, what really intrigued me was the storytelling design. King of Dragon Pass manages to create what seems to be a branching storyline without the usual combinatoral explosion of possibilities. They do this by having a very large number of situations that can occur during the game, and to some extent it's up to the player to decide which of several people will try to handle each one as it arises. The outcome depends on the player' choice, in effect it depends on how good a judge of character the player is. To put it in programming terms, situations are functions and the characters are parameters (inputs) to the function. With different characters you get different results. Events can change people and even kill them, so it's quite replayable. Fascinating stuff.
Opening Keynote at Animex Game Day
University of Teesside, Middlesbrough
This was just a quick trip, up one day, lecture in the morning, and back the next. I was given the honor of being the opening keynote at Animex Game Day, and the lecture I gave was "Emerging Issues in Game Design," which I had already given at FuturePlay a little earlier. The best part of the day, though, was hearing Kaye Elling's talk. Kaye is from Blitz Games and was head of the art team that did
Bratz: Rock Angelz. She gives a wonderful lecture on developing for women and girls. I had heard part of it before at the Women in Games conference, and so was anxious to catch the whole thing. She talked about the five C's that she feels are particularly important: Characterization (the avatar has to be someone that a female character can feel some empathy with), Context (the game has to take place in an environment she would want to visit), Control (one-size-fits-all designs and punitive systems that take power away from the player won't cut it), Customizability (women like to rearrange things to suit their own tastes) and Creativity (user-created content is going to rule the world).
Simulation and Entertainment Symposium at Ars Electronica
Linz, Austria
Ars Electronica is this staggeringly cool museum and art festival in Linz, Austria that I've talked about before. This year Austria is taking over the presidency of the EU (countries, not individuals, serve as president) and to celebrate they're holding a whole series of events. One of them was a whole series of symposia on different aspects of simulation, and I was invited to come and talk to the one on Simulation and Entertainment. I was only there for a single day, so I didn't get to see much, unfortunately, but I got to chat with some friends.
Ken Perlin and I had met in Strasbourg just three months before, and here we were in Linz. I think our lives are starting to run on parallel rails.
The lecture I gave, targeted to my audience -- who weren't game developers for the most part -- was called "Reality, Simulation, and Play." I'll update this entry once I get around to putting it on my website.
You've heard of the beautiful blue Danube? Well, this is it, made particularly blue by Linz' new Modern Art Museum, reflecting on the water. Stunning. Unfortunately digital cameras don't work so well at night...
December was quiet... until the end.
This is just a placeholder entry so the page won't be blank. The Virtual Storytelling Conference actually slopped over into December, but to find out about it you'll have to go back to November, when it began.
Other than that, my wife and I went to Cornwall for Christmas, for the third year in a row. Alas, near the end of it news came that my wife's father had died and we had to rush back to the United States for the funeral. A sad time, but he lived a good life.
The picture below is of me 'n' my homeboyz atop our Christmas cake. I'm the one on the left.
Keynote at the Virtual Storytelling '05 Conference
Strasbourg, FranceThis was a great trip. I haven't been to France in several years, and have never been professionally, so I was delighted to get the opportunity. Even better was sharing the program with such luminaries as Janet Murray of Hamlet on the Holodeck fame, and Ken Perlin, a researcher at New York University who has done some fascinating work on better ways to teach programming to girls.
So I was an invited guest speaker at the Virtual Storytelling conference. My hosts had bought me first class train tickets from London to Strasbourg, via the Channel Tunnel. It was the first time I had ever been through it, and it was distinctly no big deal -- 20 minutes in the dark; it just seemed like a very long tunnel. There was no sense of being down especially deep. But the Eurostar train itself was great: airline-style meal service, very comfortable seats, and power points for laptops. They even had both British and European style outlets.
The Eurostar ends in Paris, where I walked from the Gare du Nord (North Station) to the Gare de l'Est (East Station), a matter of a quarter mile or so, although it could be better signed. The Gare de l'Est had a sculpture on top and the word Strasbourg engraved beneath it, so I guess it was built specifically for that destination. It was fun being back in France. Most of the time I'm going to places where everyone speaks excellent English, but in France I got to use my schoolboy French and it served me in pretty good stead. Nobody snubbed me or ignored me; in fact I got a warm welcome wherever I went.
The train on to Strasbourg was almost as nice as the Eurostar and similarly fast. I've never been to Strasbourg before, but I highly recommend it. It's in Alsace, which is culturally part-German, part-French (the Alsatian language is a dialect of German), and was a part of Germany between 1870 and 1918. The annual Christmas market was going on as it has for several centuries, drawing people from all over the region. The shops were brightly lit and full of beautiful things and the smell of hot spiced wine was everywhere. Vendors sold roasted chestnuts and soft pretzels from street stalls; bratwurst and beignets on the same stand. The center of the city is one big pedestrianized shopping zone; the only vehicles are the spiffy high-tech trams that glide, almost silently, through the streets. The streets are narrow, and still have medieval names: Street of the Halbardiers, Square of the Old Wine Market, Street of the Jews. They're lined with half-timbered buildings that somehow survived two world wars. The cathedral, vast, deeply-carved red stone, towers over all.
The next morning I headed off to the conference, being held in the Munsterhof, a building where Mozart and Haydn had given concerts... I was distinctly aware of walking in their footsteps. I tried to imagine the room filled with ladies in magnificent Baroque dresses and men in breeches and powdered wigs. By comparison, the 100 or so academics gathered there seemed a bit frumpy.
On the other hand, they had fascinating things to say. "Virtual" was very broadly construed for this conference, so it wasn't just about head-mounted displays and gloves. There were talks on all kinds of interesting uses of input and output technology: museum exhibits, interactive music displays, research on children using dolls that record the children's movements, and many other things. "Storytelling," too, was pretty broadly interpreted. I think I was the only person there from the conventional game industry; the only person who was actually an entertainer by trade.
I missed Janet's talk, unfortunately, but at least it's in the Proceedings. Ken's was fascinating. He's clearly one of those multitalented people who juggles about six different, incredibly imaginative projects at once. Janet made a crack about how he makes everything look easy... provided that you're Ken Perlin.
My own talk was called "Letting the Audience Onto the Stage: The Potential of VR Drama." It rambled around a lot, but my key point was that the chief benefit of VR technology was not in presenting worlds that seem real (we're already pretty good at that) but in letting people present themselves as other than they are. The mask has been a tool of drama that goes back to the ancient Greeks. VR technology could let you really act, act like an actor, in a virtual world. Anyway, the PowerPoint slides are online in PDF format, so you can read it if you're interested.
Thanks to Gerard Subsol and the organizers of Virtual Storytelling '05 for their hospitality and excellent program. I hope they invite me again sometime.
