Balthazar Auger

The following is a refactored translation of the talk I gave at the EVA10 Expo in Buenos Aires, on 11/12/10. It does not mirror exactly what I said during the talk, but it should give you a general idea. I’ve divided it into three parts: Player limits and systemic constraints (this post), Cheap tricks and easy ways out and Best practices.

The designer tasked with creating a game experience using some flavor of motion control is always fighting a pitched battle against two cunning and deceitful enemies: the tech he’s using, and the player he’s designing for. Both will lay traps for him that might prove dangerous if he designs naively.

Having had some catastrophic encounters with those foes myself, I now attempt to pass on the knowledge I’ve taken from those experiences, hoping you will be able to avoid easy mistakes when designing for motion capture systems. (more…)

Unlike movies, game credits are often hard to find, or overlooked. Since most players don’t finish their games, developers try to place them in menus or make them interactive to have the players at least glance at them for a second.

In Raving Rabbids: Travel in Time, they’re hidden in a subscreen of one of the game’s “bonus images” menus. You’d have to know they’re there to find them!

Since I happen to have programmed the rolling credits, I saved the source text file for this occasion.

(more…)

Some weeks ago was my last day as an employee of Ubisoft’s Paris Studio.

Having stayed there for two years and four months, having shipped a game and completed another production, I’ve moved back to sweet Buenos Aires town, where I’ll be staying from now on.

I have much to say about that period, and sadly I fear I will bore you, since you probably don’t remember why you subscribed to this blog’s feed anyway, or got here by accident. But hey, It’s my site, so I can do whatever I well damn please.

I started there straight after my second-year student project passed the final teacher’s examination, as an intern on Rayman Raving Rabbids: TV Party. That kind of transition can be delicate; you go from believing you’re the most awesome dude in the world to being crushed by all these guys seniority, experiences and professionalism. Obviously the learning’s not over.

So I soldiered on, learning the ropes, and managed to get one or two mini-games on the disc I was pretty proud of. I also had one of my ideas kinda stolen (but hey, it became a cool minigame afterwards too, so no worries) and countless others aborted in various stages of completion, mostly due to my inexperience.

It’s amazing how much you learn on your very first professional production. Yes, both production exercises we had done while at school were terrific experiences, but nothing else can teach you what being a game designer actually means…

…for Ubisoft, at least.

The designer’s role in a big company is delicate: you’re stuck between 3 supervisors, you have no ownership but full responsibility; other professions view yours as one of goof-offs that runs on passion in stead of true skill and everyone thinks they can do better than you. When you do have carte blanche on something it’s usually too trivial to matter or treated as a “crazy” prototype with no chance of moving forward without an infinite string of review meetings. Or you might be asked to cripple something you lovingly designed and replace it with a plagiarism of what Nintendo did.

Integrity++ right?

But hey, even that sounds pretty nice when you’ve been doing it for only six months and all your best friends are working within a six-foot radius.

That is, obviously, until they get arbitrarily shifted from project to project and ultimately booted out. Like what happened to Atien, who was put on a really great and revolutionary project, then shuffled over what would become Just Dance when that other project was taken out back and shot in the head. He had worked on that for six months but hey, he took it in and was key in making that game the hit it was (and all in a new low record of time and budget). I mean, the guy did gameplay design AND interface programming, he always managed to keep it simple enough to make dancing so fun and is responsible for at least half the sales of that game, hands down.

A few months down the road and Atien gets “non-renouvelé”, technically fired in french labour law, and replaced with interns. The circle was complete.

Due to a folly of the fates, I was kept. While Atien had worked on four games and shipped two of them, I was still in the process of producing the second. While he was the only designer on his team, I was one of a team of five. Some bullshit about quotas and priorities. Go figure.

Ironically I was already planning on resigning, so that put a nice bow on my resolve of doing so. Because how big do you need to get to allow yourself the luxury of passing on great talent? Worse, how big do you need to get to allow yourself to NOT care about talent? Clearly if Atien was let go, then Ubisoft wouldn’t miss me; every year a fresh batch of younger, cheaper interns is ready to replace the crusty old OMG-2-years-experience game design veterans. The emotional bond was severed.

Nevertheless, “Raving Rabbids: Travel In Time” will be a great game. Play it in good company.

This might probably be considered as a flame.

On Awards

I will assume that you have either attended the conference, or at least kept up with what goes on there, and have attended or at least watched some of the Awards ceremony on video.

Awards ceremonies are always a very exciting glimpse of how the industry thinks of itself. In that sense, games continue to feverishly idolize their older brother, Cinema : red carpet, VIP sectors, big screens, loud noises, funny hosts reading from a teleprompter and live broadcast. This, judging from the audience reaction, works beautifully.

The awards ceremony are a very easy way to communicate to a broader audience what games are about, using the most powerful channel of communication: winners. People love to win, and people love winners. It gives the industry a new standard to emulate, and it gives consumers a clear guide for investing their money, i.e. “This game is obviously more beautiful  than that one because this one won the Visual Arts award”, or “This game is the BEST GAME of the year, period.”

Of course, the choice of the best of the best in all the different categories that matter is not left to chance. Both award shows have clear rules and transparent processes, polling nominees and awards from a voting process involving many “game industry professionals” (quotation marks are because I was included in that group, a claim that still needs to be backed by myself). Accordingly, what most people will choose is deductible from a game’s Metacritic rating. Sadly, this makes the GDCA and the IGF’s global cultural significance equal to ZERO (with one little exception).

Their judging approach is an attempt to reach an objective absolute result based on an aggregate of subjective impressions. The thing is, the games industry’s goal is NOT to produce reliable software, we are producers of (at least) entertainment, and such it is impossible to give an accurate measure of the level of entertainment a game provides. The best we can do is voice our opinions about it.

I’m most uncomfortable with the fact that the whole process makes it hard to disagree with it’s outcome. There is no opinion to argue against. Everyone hides behind that impersonal polling system to avoid giving their informed and well-voiced opinion of why a game is more better than the next.

And this goes for both awards, with just one notable exception: the Nuovo Award. In terms of process, it is completely different from the rest: the only ones to be involved in the final decision is a limited panel of judges and we know who they are.

Check this out. This is what I mean: get people who are relevant to the prize together in a room and have them reach a consensus through informed discussion. Then, have them output a professional opinion of who should get the prize and why.

Don’t hide behind numbers, educate your audience.

I really think this should be the dominant method of prize assignment for both award shows. Mass-polling asphyxiates all possible following argumentation, stifles intelligent discussion and kills innovation. If we want the awards to be more than just loud noise and bright lights, we should make a method switch as soon as possible. Make all awards function as the Nuovo award!

This is the part where I justify the title

Artistic currents have always defined themselves by agreeing or dissenting with other ideas, philosophies or political currents. The most dynamic times in artistic and philosophical thought coincide with historical periods where the balance of power is multipolar: during the Renaissance, the Industrial age or the 20th century, cultural evolution was driven by a continuous back-and-forth of competing opinions, theories or schools of thought. Hollywood cinematography wouldn’t be what it is now were it not for George Méliès, the German Expressionism, Italian Neorealism, the French Nouvelle Vague…

WHY do we allow a single North American, corporate-run event to act as the face for most game creators in the world?

The main reason we should work for better visibility of personal opinions at the GDC and IGF is to foster dissension of those same opinions by people, or groups of people. We SHOULD NOT all agree, that would be aberrant and incestuous. We SHOULD all pursue completely different directions to prove each other wrong.

We should become POLITICAL about what we do. We should talk about our work, and argue why it was made the way it was made, and people should be able to disagree on WHY, not on HOW it was made.

Imagine the mighty Tower of Babel, the place where everyone talked the same language and everyone understood each other. Now, imagine how FUCKING BORING it must have been…

Today was the big lauch of the actual conference, and with it the opening of the GDC expo floor and the arrival of the big-name studios and high profile, high money guys. Actually, I kinda miss the Summits.

Conferences have gotten longer, more polished and with almost no time for Q&A in several of them… just like AAA games now that I think of it.

(more…)

Hello, and welcome to the first day of GDC feedback extravaganza!

The morning was kicked off very indie-ly as I attended the opening of the IGS where Ron Carmel explained a little further what the Indie Fund was about and how it came to be. The talk in itself was interesting, although it remains to see if the experiment in funding works out (it would be awesome that it did, so fingers crossed). What was nice is that the presentation was illustrated by Braid’s artist, so as nice to hear as it was to watch.

The follow-up was a rather quirky presentation by Cactus, regarding the techniques by which one could punish and disorient the player. Actually I think he got short on time because the talk never really seemed to take off: we were treated to a list of his favorite David Lynch movies, some fellow game-tortionists’s work and ended with a short list of techniques he used. You’ll have to come back later for actual content, if you’re lucky. Was this actually a very clever exercise in disorienting and punishing the conference attendees disguised as a talk about punishing players instead? We’ll probably never know.

I then managed to catch Soren Johnson’s very inspiring keynote at the Serious Games Summit, about the relationships between themes and mechanics. For me, the keynote nailed one of the biggest problems facing the serious games movement/market actually, which is over-reliance on theme to carry a message. Of course, the mechanics are the message, not the theme. You can read more about it here.

Lunch.

I kicked off post-lunch with a quiet talk at the IGDA education summit. The title was “Happy together” and the talk delved into ways educators and people in the industry could better collaborate to bnenefit both. Amongst the speakers was Prof. Stephane Natkin, director of ENJMIN, who revealed to us his plan to take over the world. Also, a sort of brainstorm session was organised and teams were tasked in finding new ways in which they could collaborate together in order to boost the student’s education.

Then followed by a short reminder (I refuse to call it a lesson) of good marketing tactics for indie studios on behalf of Wolfire Studios, makers of Overgrowth.

After that, I walked in into what was probably the weirdest talk at GDC ever, at the Serious Game Summit. Basically it was some guy talking about this idea to teach kids not to go along with sexual predators. The WTF moment was wen you followed the dates he gave us, you realised the game had spend 20+ years in development, even more than DNF. The kicker? It’s a FLASH game. FLASH. Also, the guy got totally paranoid in the 90′s that someone would “steal his idea”, so he got a lawyer he ended up marrying in the 00′s. Bonus stage: all of the voices in the game were provided by said guy and said lawyer wife. This presentation was probably indiest than any other IGS feature, COMBINED. The guy was so indie that before working on his game, he was a friggin sailor. Yes, the kind that goes on boats. Again, Indieness. But seriously WTF.

The conference day closed with a rather interesting IGS keynote about Immediacy and Depth. The talk was actually more interesting by what it told about the Indie movement than for it’s actual content. Basically this came through as “hey, mainstream does this pretty well, so we should steal their methods”. The key here is that this shows that now, there are more people who have always been indie than people who were working for The Man and quit (this was the norm some years ago). Visibly lots of students are attracted to indie games nowadays, which is wowsome. Global domination is just at the turn of the road. (In itself the talk was pretty basic stuff, so I won’t go into it).

And that’s it! More tomorrow if the beers allow it.

I am currently in San Francisco, resting my weary feet in my hostel dorm. I collected my pass for the 2010 GDC today and then dedicated the day to some serious sightseeing. Weather was erratic, but very nice overall, and provided some very nice photo opportunities. I am becoming mildly obsessed with the bay bridge.

Tomorrow the real conferencing begins, so I shall attempt to post my impressions of the talks I attend. Don’t expect nothing fancy, but if something really gets me going, you’ll find my rant here.

My very good friend and colleague Etienne Bégué has refreshed his site, now located at www.atien.net

He is always plugging away at some kind of cool project. Lately he’s made a port of Elite: Frontier for the PSP, designed on Ubisoft’s Rayman Raving Rabbids: TV Party and Just Dance and regularly builds some neat flash demos or games.

You should really follow his work!

Hey there.

I’m currently on the last stages of judging the IGF finalists… I have a lot to tell you about that, just not now… you’ll probably have to wait until I’m done. So…

Everything else is just dandy fine, just very busy. More on that when appropriate too. Damn NDAs.

I received this mail today, if you’re an IGDA member you should have too:

Dear Members,

Recently an email went out that appeared to have originated from IGDA. The return address of this email appeared as: “Concerned_Members_of_the_IGDA@IGDA.org.”
That email address was spoofed and the communication was not an official IGDA communication. We are currently reviewing the methods by which it was sent to see if this was sent out by people ignorant of proper use of the IGDA website or if there was malicious actions involved. We are also reviewing the method by which your email addresses were obtained and if that was done ethically or not. It is my hope that this was done by someone simply overzealous about their cause and not for destructive reasons.

Please be aware IGDA was not responsible for this email and does not have anything to do with the content or the links provided. You should read and use such links at your own risk.

We will investigate this issue and provide you with information on our findings as they are confirmed.

Thank you,

Joshua Caulfield
Executive Director
IGDA

This is a follow-up to an email from an address coming from @IGDA.org pointing to a simple online survey asking if the member agreed on asking for an extraordinary meeting to force Tim Langdell out which, strangely enough, asked for your membership number along with your name and a simple yes/no radio button.

Is this really an act of vigilantism to remove Langdell from the association or were we just victims of a phishing hack? Time will tell…

The full text of the original e-mail is reproduced below.

(more…)