This article is reprinted with permission from Capcom Unity.

Blanka is considered bottom tier in ST, but even in that game he has a lot of potential and a lot of things going for him. The throw range on his bite is enormous. His crossup (jumping short) is excellent and easy. After the crossup, you can go for a combo, a bite, a blocked hit into a bite, another crossup, or a blocked hit into another crossup. Also, Blanka’s roll attack does really good damage. HD Remix Blanka retains all those good features, and gets some boosts.

Horizontal Rolling Attack
In ST, most characters can hit back Blanka’s roll after blocking or even being hit by it. In HD Remix, it recovers faster, but it’s still not completely safe. Dhalsim and Balrog are still able to hit it back easily (with standing fierce and jab rushing punch, respectively).

Bison can still hit it back with a well-timed Psycho Crusher. But Honda no longer gets a free hit after the roll, and Ryu no longer gets a free red fireball. Blanka actually lands fast enough from his roll to jump over a fireball if Ryu throws one right away. That’s quite an upgrade from getting hit back and knocked down every time.

Diagonal Rolling Attack
The so-called Beast Roll or Rainbow Roll was not at all useful in ST. It has long startup time as Blanka jumps back before rolling and it has long recovery, allowing almost every character to hit Blanka back, even if he hits with this move. In HD Remix, the initial hop back part is greatly sped up, and the recovery is drastically improved. Blanka actually recovers before the enemy if they block this move, allowing him to keep up his pressure. At mid screen, it’s now a realistic way to go over fireballs, but the hop back part of the move still leaves Blanka vulnerable to a solid fireball trap.

Hop
The hop is a pretty good move, allowing Blanka to move around quickly and hop into position to throw. The old command is press all three kicks while holding either away or toward on the joystick. This motion still works, but now you can use either jab+short, strong+forward, or fierce+roundhouse instead of three kicks, if you like. This is a great benefit to players who use a gamepad, but even I prefer the jab+short command on a joystick. I find it easier to hit those two buttons quickly than any other two because my thumb and index finger rest on these buttons. If your mileage varies, you can always use the original command, though.

The hop back has the same invulnerability from the ST, but it generates much less super meter now. The hop forward has an additional nine frames of foot invulnerability which theoretically allows him to hop over sweeps somewhat, but in practice this has not proven all that effective so far.

Vertical Ball
The vertical ball is unchanged, but I just want to point out that it’s one of the only moves in the game that can hit on the very first frame. This makes it incredibly good air defense and it’s impossible to “safe jump” against Blanka because of this (see the video tutorials on Capcom Classics Collection 2). The move is also vulnerable on the first frame which means Blanka often trades, but the trade usually does damage in his favor and leaves the enemy knocked down, allowing Blanka to go for his tricky crossup short.

Note that we did fix a bug with this move. In ST, moves that can hit on the first frame have an unintended property that if the opponent tries to block them on the very first frame, there is a 50% chance the move will hit anyway. These 1-frame semi-unblockables are fixed in HD Remix (but left unfixed in HD Classic Arcade).

Electricity
The properties of this move are unchanged, but fewer mashes on the punch buttons are required to activate electricity.

Super
Blanka’s super is one of the worst in the game in ST, so it’s improved in HD Remix. The startup is faster and the recovery is faster so it doesn’t get hit back all the time on block like it did before. You can actually use it just for the sake of getting close and going for crossups, if you like. If the move hits, it will now always knock down.

Blanka’s rolling attacks are the main upgrades here, allowing him to roll more safely against some of his biggest enemies, such as Ryu, Sagat, and Honda. His Diagonal Roll gives him a new pressure option that also doubles as a way around fireballs. That said, fireball characters can still keep Blanka in check (back away and sweep the Diagonal Roll as it ends or just Dragon Punch it), but the matches should be a lot closer.

–Sirlin

It was hard to find any talk of games today at the Game Developer's Conference.

There was a promising session where venture capital firms let five or so startup companies present what they're doing. One of them was Dennis "Thresh" Fong, the Quake master who once won a Ferrari in a tournament. Afterwards I introduced myself, gave him my book, and asked if I could interview him in the future for my next book, which will contain compare several champions in various different games. He said yes and at least sounded excited.

Anyway, the session itself was dreary and strangely not relevant to the conference. It was a session that showed no games, talked about no games, and none of the featured companies were game companies. They were all VC-fundable, yes, but all strangely out of place at the same time.

By far the most notable speaker was the guy behind "I'm in like with you." He cursed like a foul-mouthed sailor and opened by telling us that internet completely sucks in the United States. He moved to Korea for a few years and got a 100mbit connection for 30 bucks. He says everyone plays games there--everyone. Popular, beautiful girls play games, it's the norm. Games are social. Games are all ostensibly free. Korea is moving completely away from the subscription model. Item buying is commonplace and his friends there often gave him items in games as gifts. He noted that he received about $10 per week in virtual items from his friends. Compare that to the 0 here. He also said 75% of item sales are gifts for friends in Korea.

We're so far behind here it's almost laughable. He told us how the CEO and (someone else high ranking) at Yahoo came to Korea and tried to buy every game company there and failed. He met with them and told them how gaming there is incredibly awesome and that Yahoo needs to get in on this way of doing business. The guys from Yahoo said they agreed completely and they'd already been working on this and that it will be out in one year. Then the speaker said that either Yahoo measures "year" differently than him, or that "they are complete fucking retards" because there's still nothing in sight years later.

Raph Koster
It was equally hard to find mention of any actual game at Raph Koster's session. I think highly of Raph and I know there is some small chance he will read this, so Raph, your lectures have so far *all* been entertaining, engaging, and thought-provoking, except for this one.

It was labeled as a "game design" lecture, yet it contained no game design at all. You might argue that your choices about the architecture of Metaplace imply certain game design results, and yeah they probably do, but I still maintain there was no discussion of game design at all. It was entirely about architecture, involving programmery stuff like telnetting, markup tags, cgi scripts, and client-server models. You should have labeled this a programming lecture. I was also disappointed to see no actual game anywhere in this (though yes I understand your platform gives other people the ability to create games). I also bet you'll be very successful.

Sherwood
This Sherwood game is pretty amazing. It's a free, web-based MMO in 3D...that was made by one person (company: Maid Marion). Yeah it feels clunky, untuned, and has terrible combat. But it's an MMO made by one person! And it's 3D in your browser. Not impressed yet? How about this, he has 1.8 million active players (700,000 in Poland for some reason). It's ad supported (an ad at the bottom horizontal strip of the game) and it seems like this guy makes bank.

He did the entire thing in Shockwave using Director and Maya only. He modeled everything (characters, weapons, enemies, buildings, etc). He animated everything. He programmed everything. He designed everything. It uses lots of procedural content and has procedurally generated quests. When you check it out, I know you'll complain about it being too low quality, but let me remind you that one guy made it, that it's free, and that it has 1.8 million players, and that it makes him bank.

It totally blows my mind that you could have a graph of World of Warcraft subscribers and this Sherwood game even shows up on the graph as anything but a dot. WoW.

That was about it. Although the sessions weren't so great today, I made up for it with some of the connections I made.

--Sirlin

Soren Johnson
I wanted to go to his talk, but I couldn't get up in time because I stayed up too late doing [can't talk about it for 2 years.]

Ray Kurzweil, Futurist
Oh my god. There is no possible way I can explain to you what he explained to us. A year or two ago, GDC had a "vision" track with a keynote speech from a scientist that worked on the mock-technology behind the movie Minority Report. Spielberg had him assemble a team of top scientists from different disciplines around the world to create a plan about how future technology like transportation, advertising, computer interfaces, etc, etc might feasibly work in the future. The goal was for all these super smart guys to figure out something reasonable in under a year about all this. At first, I wondered what this had to do with the game industry, and maybe this guy didn't belong here. By the end, he seemed like the smartest guy at the entire conference and *we* were the ones who didn't belong.

Ray Kurwzeil (the Futurist!) gave me that exact same feeling. He's like, on a level above another level that's above everyone else. I was trying to estimate how many times more data he used in his talk than the average, but the average is somewhere around zero so it's hard to compute. I think there were tens of thousands of pieces of data thrown at us, at minimum.

So what does this guy actually *do*? He predicts the future. He's a very old man and he's done this for a very long time and he now has a team of 10 data analysts in various different fields who help him. I think he won us over immediately by saying how unfortunate  it is that the thing we make is called "games" and it's the "game industry." As if none of it matters, it's all just a game. Doesn't count! He does a lot of work in AI and said he's stuck with the same unfortunate naming there: "artificial intelligence." No, it's real intelligence. "Virtual worlds?" No, they are just worlds. In Second Life, $2 million changes hands every single day, but maybe it doesn't count, because it's a "virtual world."

The telephone, he said, is a virtual world that's been around for a while. It was really magic when it fist came out, allowing people to share a virtual auditory space across great distances. With deadpan delivery he joked, "But what about that agreement you made with me yesterday? Oh that wasn't a real agreement, it was on the telephone, so it doesn't count." Ha.

Seriously...*seriously* save your criticisms of any of that. Let it go. I have so far told you about 0.001% of what he said, so any trash talk you have will be ill-informed and picking on things like whether AI is "real intelligence." If I could tell you the rest, you'd see how fucking real he means it.

Kurzweil explained that predicting things like Google's stock price in 2020 is very hard, predicting how a possible merger between Microsoft and Yahoo might go is very hard. The fortunes and misfortunes of individual people. The waging of wars and results of wars (that might happen 100 years from now) are hard to predict. But that is not what he predicts. What he predicts, he can do with amazing accuracy. While he can't answer any of that, he can tell you the price of a 1 billion transistors in the year 2014. The capacity of efficiency of solar cells in the year 2040. The size and power of nanite technology in whatever year you name. And so on and so on.

He showed his track record in pretty great detail. One example was his published predictions of the expansion of ARPANET in like 1970 or something. He predicted a doubling every X time that would continue indefinitely, resulting in certain numbers of users in specific years, reaching a tipping point in 1990s at which point he said the entire world would basically be connected through a "world wide web," so to speak. At the time he said this, they were struggling with signing up 1,000 new scientists, so to many, this idea was ludicrous.

There are many, many more examples, but I'll have to skip them. Kurzweil explained that he is not some magician here, he just uses the same trick every time: it's all about exponential growth. Hopefully you're all aware of the whole phenomena about how humans are horrible at understanding exponential growth (it's not intuitive, we can only handle thinking about linear growth). He has a ridiculous amount of data about everything from punch card computers to cell phones, to the nanites about how every kind of technology follows the same exponential growth curve. (He had at least one zillion examples of this, all with tons of data). He says his predictions are only surprising to people who have not looked at where we are on a certain technology's exponential curve.

For example, solar power cells are expensive, hard to make, not terribly efficient, only contribute a very small amount of all the power we generate today, etc. If you aren't looking closely, you'd think they're going nowhere. But they increase in efficiency exponentially over time and we're currently in the period where they are only doubling small numbers to begin with. You might think that even if we gathered all the energy that the sun sends to Earth, that it's still not enough to power the Earth. Well, the actual research shows that we need only 1/10,000th of the energy the sun sends to Earth and solar power planners will be able to capture that amount by the year 2029 at which point fossil fuel will be irrelevant.

The human genome was only very recently mapped, but we can already reprogram the software life runs on, he says. We know the exact gene that causes your cells to store energy in the form of fat. This was useful to hunter-gatherers (hard work to find food, need to store it if you get it), but today it leads to heart disease, diabetes, etc. We've already tried turning off this gene in rats and they live longer, have all the health benefits of being slim, yet eat whatever they want. This is one of like a dozen health technologies he covered, trying to demonstrate that human life span is also going to change on a radical scale. Every year, the human life expectancy increases by some amount. In 20 years (or 30 at the worst), the increase per year will be *greater* than one year! Think about that for a minute!

By using his graphs for exponential shrinking of computer technology, you can see how easy it was to predict that by the year 2006, we'd be able to insert a pea-sized computer into someone's head that has Parkinson's disease to do whatever it is you need done if you have that disease. The computer interacts with your neurons just fine and performs the missing brain function for you. Now in 2008, we can even upload new software to these computers inside people's heads.

It's totally foreseeable when computers will be small enough that instead of a pea-size, they are the size of a human blood cell. I got a little confused at this point about whether this next part is really being tested now or it's a prediction of the near future or what, but he was talking about blood-cell-sized nanites that perform the function of your red blood cells at radically better efficiency. Replacing 20% of your blood cells with these nanites would, for example, allow you to run a marathon without being winded or sit at the bottom of your pool for four hours without needing more air.

He also talked about the implications of having nanites like this inside your body, and how they could be used. Things we call HUDs would be sent directly to your visual cortex (and he had a ridiculous amount of information about how we have now deconstructed the human visual cortex and are implementing  in robots exactly how it works in humans). Anyway, you could have these computers take over your sensory system and make you feel as if you're really in a virtual world instead, perhaps with some kind of "picture in picture" thing of the real world so you are still alert to dangers or whatever.

I have now captured maybe 5% of his talk, so you'll have to live with that. Imagining games in the future he describes is completely mind-blowing.

Clint Hocking
Clint thinks really hard about what he says and that puts him far ahead of a lot of speakers at GDC, ha. His lectures from last year and the year before were incredibly, though this year I wasn't quite as deeply affected. His topic was immersion and he explored the difference between sensory immersion and immersion in thinking deeply about something. For example, you can really be taken over for a moment by the tast of great chocolate, the sight of a beautiful painting, the music of Miles Davis, etc. Movie theaters themselves are a way to try to immerse our senses in a movie (filling up your field of vision, darkening the rest of the room, everyone is supposed to be quiet).

Clint says movies are really pro at this type of immersion, and while games need to care about this, they probably shouldn't try to attack Hollywood on their home turf by completely relying on this type. Games create this feedback loop between actions players make and changes in the game-world, so this leads to the possibility of a different type of immersion. Playing an intense game of chess or even moving Mario around his world is are interactive loops, and create their own kind of immersion.

He also talked a great deal about Guitar Hero and how it offers a pretty deep type of immersion to hardcore players who really try to improve their skills, but it provides a different (shallower, but still enjoyable) type to Grandma, who just wants to fee like she's playing a guitar and rocking out a little, without learning the intricacies of a timing system with hard dexterity challenges.

Experimental Gameplay Workshop
Always great stuff here. Several games involving playing with time that are dangerously close to something that, if only I could tell you.

A few games demonstrated the idea of "obfuscation." One was a simple platform game where everything is made of static (like on a tv screen with no signal). Any screenshot of the game looks like pure static, but in motion you can see patterns in the static that show you where the ground is. Another obfuscation game lets you play an invisible monster. No predator-like shimmering though, you are really completely invisible. It has platforming challenges, dodging bullets, and you even fight a boss that's another invisible monster. The remarkable things about this game are that you can actually play it at all, and that while you are very intensely concentrating on something like jumping around and avoiding stuff, spectators see absolutely nothing happening! ha!

One game, I don't know the name, was probably the weirdest game I've ever seen. The entire point of it is that the rules themselves are obfuscated. Even moving your guy around has mysterious consequences. There's some strange low-rez alien that screams at you for a long time, but he somehow disappears if you walk into him for long enough, and then a heart falls from the sky, and you can enter it and ride it to the next area. Then you have to walk to the right for a while, which scrolls some star background behind you but nothing else. Ok, so it's like this gibberish game of what-the-fuck-is-happening. But it really does raise interesting questions. When I see one single screen of Super Mario Brothers, I know like 100 things. I know about jumping, about landing on the enemy's head (not the side which can hurt me). I know about going into pipes, hitting question mark blocks that might give me a powerup or a coin, about jumping on turtles that make turtle shells that I can kick around, etc. But *this* crazy game? I have zero, zero clue what's going on, and you basically never have that feeling in a game. It was actually very interesting to have the feeling that I knew nothing at all about what even the basic rules are.

Space Giraffe (XBLA) was another demonstration of obfuscation. It's a Tempest-style game, sort of, but the entire point is that it goes to more and more and more lengths to completely cover up everything with ridiculous special effects. It reaches the point where a spectator cannot even tell anything about what's going on. It looks like some kind of malfunctioning psychedelic explosion that can't possibly have any meaningful information in it, yet you as a player can actually play it. As you play each level, some mysterious part of your brain really can sort out the gameplay part from the crazy light show part, and that's kind of interesting.

There were more interesting experimental games, but I kind of forget the rest right now.

Positive Impact in Games Panel
This session had a simple message, and it was powerfully delivered. It was very similar to Jonathon Blow's message from the day before, but somehow delivered in a "good guy" way rather than Blow's "bad guy way." (No knock on you Mr Blow, I love your stuff!).

Anyway, the point of Molyneux, Chris Taylor, Louis Castle, and the rest was that our medium gives us incredible power over people's lives and it's totally irresponsible for us to shrug our shoulders at what messages we're sending. They were all very clear that they want to create commercially successful games (rather than games intended entirely to convey a certain message, regardless of profits). They want to make AAA games, but they want them to have some positive impact on the world, rather than negative.

I think their stance is totally reasonable, and they each gave several examples of how they are at least trying to do this. Molyneux said his favorite angle is to let the player do whatever they want (but with consequences) and then hope that the player will learn something about himself or herself through that. Others talked about how realistic World War 2 games gave their kids a better idea of what the Normandy Invasion was really like, how hard the odds were. They were all for Saving Private Ryan approaches that show people how horrible war is and remind people that 18 year old kids died on that beach.

Another panelist explained a game he designed about the French Resistance period of history, which he researched a lot and worked with a historian on. The theme of the game was that you cannot trust anyone, and yet you need to trust people to survive. As he said, this is an interesting facet of the human condition and exploring that is meaningful and worthwhile and does not preclude making a fun game, in fact it brings a new depth to the game that could be a great success. He also explained how he made the save/load screen into a calendar with pics and text about major events in the war. If you click on them, you get to read historical papers about those events. Of course, you can completely ignore this and it has no bearing on your progression of the game, but because it's on that save/load screen you see a lot, you might eventually get curious enough to actually learn something.

Other panelists had examples that were more mass market than that, but the general theme was that if you really want to make something that has *some* redeeming value, then can. There are many ways and opportunities to do so, rather than make a game that says how great and fun war is, for example. Note that they are at the level of Lead Designer or Creative Director or whatever, so they're assuming you're in charge of your project. Also note that in a proposal for a simple flying shooter about World War 2, I tried to show through an extremely short story sequence on each side of the battle, and through missions that were basically mirror images of each other where you got to play both sides, that war starts to feel futile. I could explain this in more detail so it doesn't sound stupid, but you get the idea. The publisher said "let's just take all that out." You see, they don't want to say anything because if you ever say anything about anything you might offend someone, and game publishers are generally very against that.

Will Wright
I won the lottery (literally) to go to Will Wright's talk. Will is just as much of a super genius today as he ever was, but I've seen him speak like 20 times now so I feel like I could almost give a Will Wright lecture at this point, or at least a parody of one.

He talked about fantasy worlds/franchises/IPs that are really successful (from tv shows to Godzilla to Disney to Starwars to Carebears). The bottom line from his talk is that he thinks the best stories/worlds have characters/settings/verbs that are the most easily deconstructable and separable because then you can play with them and recombine them in new ways in your head. And the flip side is that the best games, he says, comes from giving the player pieces they can put together in many ways, or at least give the player a way to generate their own stories based on what they do.

As an example to make more concrete, Darth Vader in Star Wars is very iconic and extreme and it's easy to separate him from everything else and just think about him. You could imagine him appearing in some other world or setting, and you can imagine what would happen. Spiderman has this great verb of swinging around and Harry Potter has great verbs about casting magic spells. You can deconstruct all those things into their components and imagine combining them in new ways. Properties that lend themselves to that lend themselves to "franchise" ubuquity. If something is going to be a movie, console game, phone game, lunch box, card game, t-shirt, etc, it's going to have a better shot if you can deconstruct and recombine the various parts easily.

That's it for today.

--Sirlin

Even though the Game Developer's Conference technically starts on Monday, I always call Wednesday the first day of the main conference. A lot of people ask me why I go to this conference at all. Other people at the conference ask me why I go to the actual sessions. All I can say is that it's a huge melting pot of semi-conflicting ideas. There's nothing else like it.

Player Generated Content
Daniel James (Puzzle Pirates), Brian Goble (Hipsoft), and a guy from IMVU talked about their experiences with player-generated content. Bottom line is that it's awesome, that it takes some system to manage it, but that it's really worth it. Goble explained that his word game that's been out four years now has had 2.9 million player-submitted phrases (kind of like Wheel of Fortune phrases). Only 19,000 of those are approved, but this is way more than the development team could have ever created (there are several requirements for what makes a phrase good for the game).

IMVU has a great business model. Players can create models/textures for avatars (in maya/photoshop) and upload them for sale. Users buy credits from IMVU. They spend the credits buying cool avatar stuff and 50% goes to IMVU, 50% to the content creator. The content creators do NOT sell those points back to the company to cash out, though. Some users use the points they earn to simply buy other people's cool avatar stuff. Creators that make more credits sell them back to customers on a secondary market (the price has stabilized to somewhere around 60 cents on the dollar). There's even a, uh, tertiary market of companies that buy points from creators, then do all the marketing and web transaction stuff needed to efficiently sell those points back to users. These companies take about 10% for their services. Bottom line is that money flows into IMVU and doesn't flow out. They make bank.

Microsoft
To give you an idea how much the Microsoft guy said "democratizing," he even had a joke about how he said democratizing too much. But you know what? Microsoft really *is* democratizing games if their new XBLA service works how they said it did in this lecture.

Step 1, join the Xbox Live Creator's Club. Use XNA Game Studio to make a game. When you're done, submit the game and fill out some forms about how much violence your game has or whatever.

Next, other members of the Creator's Club can play your game and rate it. They don't even rate if it's good or not, just if you were honest about the level of violence or strong language or whatever that you claimed you have. Once you pass this part (remember, you can't get vetoed for having a weird game or a bad one), then your game is fully available to ALL XBLA customers. Yes, all. Not just people in the Creator's Club. WOW! I've been waiting for that forever, awesome job Microsoft. I wonder about all those TCRs though, like the million requirements about naming the menus right, having help text right, when to use the B button for back and so on. Hmm.

Also, I happen to be in a super-fortunate position where I can get something approved on the full XBLA service in the first place without going the Creator's Club route (if only I had an actual team...please join me), but this Microsoft news is truly awesome for the industry.

Blizzard
When Rob Pardo talks,  people should listen. He spoke about multiplayer design. He first stressed that you must design multiplayer FIRST, or at least that's how Blizzard does it. Multiplayer games have more constraints and restrictions, so it's important to figure that out first, then do single player. If you did it the other way around you'd have to rip out a bunch of single-player stuff you came up with that won't work in multiplayer. As an example, Warcraft 3 had about 4 years of development time, but the entire single-player campaign was done in the last 9 months.

He spoke a lot about "skill differentiation." That means giving players lots of ways for them to show their skills. He warned against recent games going in the other direction, such as more auto-aim stuff in first-person shooters. "Twitch" gameplay is a very deliberate feature of Stacraft, he says, because it gives players that much more to master (in addition to managing their economy, multitasking, knowing the capabilities of each race/unit, and knowing the maps).

As one example, he talked about how in Starcraft you can only select 12 units at a time. On Starcraft 2 they argued a lot about whether you should be able to select unlimited, or keep it at 12. Keeping it at 12 gives the player one more thing to master because it's much easier to manage a large group of units if you can select them all at once. In the end, they decided to allow unlimited selection even though it goes against the "support skill differentiation" rule-of-thumb because players thought the restriction was arbitrary and felt like broken Ui.

I'm personally surprised they would even consider keeping the 12 unit selection limit because it tests a skill I find irrelevant. Fighting with the UI shouldn't be valued skill. And, in my opinion, neither should a whole lot of other twitch things. There's plenty in the realm of strategy, timing, and knowledge that differentiates players without needing arbitrary walls like 12 unit selection limits or 8 frame windows for recognizing Dragon Punches. While I'm interested in eliminating a lot of pointless skill tests, Pardo seemed in favor of providing a whole lot of these. He *did* make Starcraft, Warcraft, and World of Warcraft though, so what do I know?

Pardo said a lot of great stuff I totally agree with, also. He let out one of my secrets that game balancing has little to do with math. It can *start* at math, but there's no way around being a real *player* of the game. "You have to know the nuances," he said, "not just watch replays." He said things like how much this or that unit suffers from the pathfinding in Starcraft isn't in the spreadsheet math. And knowing that 1 zealot beats 2 zerglings, or whatever, is nice, but it doesn't matter to the level of detail some designers think it does. It matters if Protoss beat Zerg, but that's a much higher level, complicated question. Also, using just math to balance can lead you to very "boring, but fair" answers. Moves ideally *feel* extremely powerful, he says, even though they are fair. He advised against "super weapons" though. That means a weapon or move so powerful that you feel like there is nothing you could possibly have done. The nuclear launch in Starcraft is his example of how to do this right: it feels like a super-weapon sort of, but has LOTS of ways to counter it. (They neeed a cloaked ghost nearby, a laser sight, there's a red dot and a timer, etc, etc.)

Use your betas well, Pardo says, because you never get as long as you'd like. If there is a move or strategy you wonder about, start the beta with that move or strategy set to "too powerful" levels. Then people will try it. Then nerf it a bit. Then a bit more if you need to. If you start with it too weak, then no one will try it at all. When you make it more powerful, even if you really made it TOO powerful, no might notice in the beta because they have been trained to consider it pointless already.

I nodded in agreement as he explained that while you need to patch to fix balance stuff, you should NOT do this too frequently. If something appears too powerful, it doesn't mean it is (I've been saying that forever!). It's very possible that players will find counters and eventually the "overpowered" thing will seem pretty fair in comparison. If you fix every little thing that appears overpowered, players learn to not even try to counter anything. They just wait for you to solve all their problems. Let the metagame develop a bit before balance patching.

Don't have tons of special effects. Artists have a tendency to turn up the effects, he says, but it gets in the way of gameplay. Don't let them. He said Warcraft 3 has too many effects and sometimes you can't even tell what's happening.

Pardo also stressed having the right amount of complexity in your game. I have said for a long time that 30 moves is some kind of magic number that's about right. Pardo's magic number is 15 units in an rts. You want enough that players can be expressive and learn nuances, but if you have TOO many then it's a huge mess and no one even knows what's what. Amen to that. Incidentally, that's why Guild Wars is confusing. In Magic: The Gathering, there's a million cards, but it's a turn-based game where you can read each card. In Guild Wars, it's real-time and even though one character can have only 8 moves, it's 8 from a huge pool. It ends up with that "who even knows what's-what" syndrome (except for expert players).

I would love to make a "wow-battlegrounds" like game that has clearly defined classes/abilities. Not a million. Think about 15 units in Starcraft, 30 moves in Street Fighter, and 9 classes in Team Fortress 2. Manageable stuff that a player can wrap his/her head around.

Another amen to Pardo saying bigger maps are not better. More maps are also not better. You want as few maps as you can get away with and as small maps as you can get away with. I wish the media would figure this out. He said Warcraft 3 has about 8 maps per map-type because if it's too many, people don't really learn the nuances of the maps and it divides up the players too much anyway. If the maps are too big, they become less and less fun because travel time takes too long. Small maps are faster and just more fun.

I was amused to hear that Pardo keeps some stats secret on purpose because he's forced into this political game with the players. If players THINK a certain race/class whatever is imbalanced, then a snowball effect happens where more and more players jump onto it, fewer and fewer try counters of another race/class, and things generally get pretty unhappy. This snowball can startup even when players see stats that are like 51%/49% on something, so Blizzard never publishes stats what the win rate is between Orc and Undead, for example.

Pardo said a lot of stuff beyond all this, even. Good stuff, but that's enough for now.

Jonathon Blow
Jonathon Blow is outside of the box. I thought he had trouble expressing some of his ideas, but hardly anyone else is even attempting to express the ideas he brings up in conference after conference, so I'll cut him some slack. A lot of slack, actually, he deserves it.
He started with a quote from the New York Times review of Halo 3 saying something close to "As cinema evolved, it developed the ability to transform as well as to entertain." For some period of time, there mostly notable films had some kind of technical achievement, but only after a certain year (which I forget) do we now say films started to really have the power to "transform," meaning to make a real impact on people's lives. That New York Times Review said that games poised to make this transition from only entertaining to really transforming, and that Halo 3 is NOT a step toward that. Ha.

Mr. Blow's point is that he thinks we're not even as poised to make that transition as the NYT reviewer said. We're pretty far off, he said, and we're not doing great yet. Blow says he's matured over the years, but games mostly haven't and offer the same-old same-old without making much of a real impact on anyone.

To give some perspective, he talked about one way to make design decisions. In the consumer-goods view of a game, you make the game to make money. There's always design tradeoffs, so when you make your decisions about what to do and what not to, your guide is to choose the things that will make the game sell more. If adding only the minimum number of features to your yearly release is how you maximize money, then that's what you do.

Another way to approach design is to have some kind of "goodness" scale. Do X and the game is more fun (to you maybe, but also to your focus group of players, and your guess at the wide-world of players). You make your decisions in order to maximize the fun or enjoyment of the game. He pointed out how really stupid this all sounds, but he wants us to at least acknowledge that these are two different ways of doing things, and yeah, they are.

Then he really cut into the game industry. He said that we've gone way too far in making only games that are a certain type of "fun." They give the players fake challenges, then shower them with external rewards (rather than the real internal rewards). We make them feel awesome for doing the most routine things, and the whole sharade is empty and inauthentic. His example of one end of the spectrum was God of War (a power fantasy where you easily kill a zillion enemies who exist only for you to easily kill them) and on the other end, Peggle(sp?), a casual game that showers you with fireworks and sound effects when you solve the most easily solvable puzzles. (Disclaimer: I know the people made God of War and I happen to like it!)

Blow says much of the problem comes from games having trouble with the concepts of difficulty and challenge. If you want to tell a story, for example, then you need good pacing. If you want good story inside a first-person-shooter, then you just committed to some type of challenge-based gameplay. If it's too hard, then it ruins the pacing of the story. If it's too easy, why even having this aiming/shooting thing at all? So far the answer is to create these fake challenges that aren't that hard but kind of seem like you are cool for completing them, then occasionally tossing in a real challenge to help with the overall illusion.

Blow says we should be thinking of completely different kinds of challenge. Action/Skill challenge is one we do all the time, as well as problem solving. He asks what about challenges like curiosity, social challenge (trying to fit into an awkward social situation), perceptual challenges (like in Space Giraffe), ethical challenges, aesthetic challenges, or parasympathetic challenges (like in Wild Divine) to name just a few.

He also talked about how backwards it is to say "I'm going to make an fps, and I want it to have great story." He advocates we instead think of some genuine idea or emotional/intellectual territory to explore, and then ask "what kind of game can best explore this." He fully admits that this will not make as much money as a game that panders to the lowest common denominator, but that's ok. There are films like Transformers that are designed to make as much cash as possible. There are other films that are content with being seen merely by a reasonable number of people (rather than the highest possible number) and which have a real, deep impact on people, transforming the way they think and feel. The film industry has both and we need both.

Apologies to Jonathon for my poor summary of this. I could do a better job on this if I weren't trying to cram it in at 1am the night before Day 2.

Chris Hecker
I've only seen Chris Hecker a couple times and both times he seemed like he was using some sort of illegal stimulant. Apparently, he is just always like this. I took Chris's lecture as some sort of comedy experience or "ride." After 20 minutes of highly abstract stuff he said "From here on out, it's going to get a lot more abstract." He said this with a straight face and I literally laughed out loud. He also said such lines as "I don't know what this has to do with my lecture, or with games at all, but it seemed related (that was about Amazon's Mechanical Turk service). He also said "If you can invent something better than the triangle, then unlimited money awaits you." One of the questions at the end was actually "What was your lecture about?" and I'm not even making that up.

What his lecture was about is that there are few really hard problems we've solved in games that we solved really well. There is a similar character to these solutions. I won't go into the details, but let's just say they are awesome solutions. He talked a fair amount about "the triangle" being the biggest one, meaning a triangular polygon with a texture map. People tried all sorts of competing things like NURBS and other ways to describe meshes and surfaces, but the triangle apparently is the current king.

What he points out about this is that there's a bunch of STRUCTURE to a triangle...the xyz coordinates, the uv coordinates, the way it connects to other triangles, and that it can have a texture map. Then there's also the idea of the STYLE you can put on a triangle, namely the cool looking texture map. So programming people can play with all that first stuff because the computer understands the STRUCTURE of these triangles. Art people who know nothing about programming can play with the STYLE and create awesome 3D worlds and characters. Great solution!

He even said the triangle solution has had the biggest impact of any technoloyg in the history of games. But what SHOULD have had the biggest impact is AI. Too bad it hasn't.

Chris says that AI needs a STRUCTURE/STYLE solution. There needs to be some way that we can define a structure of how behaviors in AI work, then let non-programmers define the style of creating behaviors for particular characters. He means something deeper than just messing with stats on a spreadsheet, but not something that involves writing real code. Do you NEED code to describe AI? He says his first answer was yet, but now he thinks maybe not.

To sum it up in a catch phrase, he wants "The Photoshop of AI." A program that non-programers could use to create AI. He thinks we are no where near doing this now, but that it is possible. He said we're far enough away that we're better off not even trying explicitly for this yet, but on just generally understanding AI better first, and once we do, it will become more clear how to create that "Photoshop of AI."

Yes I know that if you know enough about AI to appreciate this, then my quick summary feels far too lacking. Sorry! You're better off talking to super genius Chris Hecker than me about this anyway. ;)

That's it for Day 1.

--Sirlin

Listen to my interview about MMOs over at Revolution G. It's in two parts, so go here, then click on "Download Episode 4" and "Download Episode 5."

I'm actually pretty complimentary of Blizzard. Even if I don't like the philosophy behind their terms of service, they are still one of the very best game companies in the world. That said, I probably manage to say some things that you fiercely disagree with or that will make you say, "Yes!!! Finally someone said what I wanted to say!"

I cover group vs. solo, time vs. skill, and squishy rules from a terms of service versus hardcoded rules. I talk about what applicability "playing to win" has in an MMO. I cover the kinds of changes I'd like to see to the terms of service in future MMOs, and I even try to quote some academic papers.

Check it out and make sure to visit revolutiong.com, too. Those guys really want the genre to take a step past where it is now and they seem to like me, so that makes them ok in my book. ;)

--Sirlin

News that Checkers (aka "Draughts") has been solved by brute force computer analysis. I have a feeling that we're coming to the end of the era of long-lasting games that are based on complete, perfect information with no randomness. (Meaning that maybe games need to have incomplete, hidden information and/or randomness to avoid being completely solved.)

That said, maybe Chess is still safe for a while. I heard somewhere (lost the source, sorry) that if every particle in the universe could somehow be used to compute one operation per second and that all the particles in the universe were used in a massively parallel computer that analyzed all possible positions in Chess, it would take longer than the current estimated age of the universe to finish. So yeah, pretty long.

--Sirlin

Here's a list of over thirty books that helped shape my thinking. It's also a glimpse into some of my future articles.

My list starts by highlighting the similarities between Sun Tzu's writing, Machiavelli's, and my own. The next two sets of books (from Alexander, Dawkins, and Blackmore) came from reading recommendations that Will Wright gave me about six years ago. At the time, he showed me a prototype that would eventually be called Spore, and I asked him what research lead him to create it, and he gave me a list of books. I discovered an interconnected web of ideas in these books, a web that's daunting to try to explain succinctly, but I'll give it a try at some point.

The books about writing I naturally encountered myself, and they each have their uses. Next up, Tufte and Feynman are quite a pair: each has strong sensibilities in his own field and they even knew each other, apparently. Tufte tells you how to display information honestly while Feynman tells you how to think honestly.

Finally, there's Collins's great work about building great companies.

There's a lot of great ideas here, and hopefully I'll give you small doses of some in the future. If you have the time, read some of these books for yourself. If you do, you can tip me a few cents by using the amazon links here when you buy.

Enjoy,
--Sirlin

Check out my interview about game balance on the Critical Hit show, along with Izzy from Guild Wars. Pretty good stuff! Here's the official summary:

"So to give a very brief overview of what I'm talking about here, we're talking podcast. Critical Hit is a panelist show, where we get 2 to 3 professionals from the gaming industry into a Skype conference and essentially let them loose on eachother. The point here is that old-school interviews saturate the media scene, and it's time for something more constructive. We bring developers, marketing specialists, media personalities, and the like together to put the important issues on the table.

Our fourth episode, about game balance, was recorded last night, and hot damn is it epic! We were fortunate enough to be joined by three excellent panelists.

Our first two panelists are somewhat of a 'dynamic duo'. Isaiah "Izzy" Cartwright and Ryan "Morello" Scott are both employees at ArenaNet, working on GuildWars. Izzy is the official skill balancer, among other responsibilities, in charge of making sure that the PvP experience in GuildWars is as enjoyable as possible. Morello, who used to work side-by-side with Izzy on skill balance, is now working on GW PvE, and is a FPS fanboy at heart.

Next, we had David Sirlin. Sirlin is a producer and developer, currently with Backbone Entertainment, who has, frankly, a gross amount of experience in the fighting game scene. He is one of the original founders of the Evolution Fighting Series, author of the book Playing to Win, and is currently working on projects such as Puzzle Fighter HD, and Street Fighter Super Turbo HD. For more information on Sirlin and what he does, check out his website, www.sirlin.net

You can download this episode of Critical Hit by clicking on this link: DOWNLOAD EPISODE 4 NOW (website coming soon!)"

--Sirlin

The short version

• I got 2nd in the Street Fighter Alpha 2 tournament (part of Midwest Championships, not Evolution), somehow losing to Justin Wong
• I go 2nd in ST (Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo), losing twice to Jason Cole.
• I did not qualify in Guilty Gear, though I did beat entire teams with just my Chipp.

Street Fighter Alpha 2
Even though I haven't played this game in many years, it was still my tournament to win. I know more about the game than anyone else there, have more experience in it than anyone there, and I was pretty solidly one of the 3 best US players back in the day. Both Jeron and Flash G are solid though, somehow knowing how to play A2 (though I wonder how they know, ha). Each of them remind me about a concept I don't really have a name for--maybe "tournament intensity." They are both serious competitors who make good decisions during tournament play. Even when they are out of their element in a game I know they don't know 100%, they still make good decisions and eke out every advantage they can.

Justin Wong has that same tournament intensity, and he's even more intense. I saw Justin play Ken, Rose, and some 3rd character (I think) during the tournament. He seemed to know just enough to get by. I figured he would play Rose against me and he did (maybe he even picked first, I forget). I picked Zangief to counter. Maybe it was my years of zero practice, or maybe it was Justin's "tournament intensity," but he destroyed me in that match. He demonstrated that he knew to counter jump-ins, which is really the main problem for Rose in that match. It was absolutely a testament to "time does not equal skill." Justin has probably played Alpha 2 about 1% as much as me, considering I played it for at least 3 years about every other day and he played it, well, almost never. And yet armed with only meager knowledge about a few important counters, he kept his head about him, turned up his tournament intensity, and was able to beat me.

Oh yeah, after game 1, I abandoned Zangief and went for Rose vs. Rose. I demonstrated that my secret low strong tactics can usually hit other people's low strongs. Rose vs. Rose is a game of doing only a few moves most of the time, with a couple random occasional things thrown in. I had the lead in games, but Justin was able to come back, mostly because he knew a little better when to do nothing and when to do the occasional strange thing.

Incidentally, my other loss in A2 was to NKI. He knows almost nothing about A2 either, but he fakes it very well. He played Rolento using A3 tactics (or CvS2?) in order to fake general proficiency. That's cute and all, but not nearly enough to win. He won by dancing around long enough to land Rolento's deadly custom-combo. Every time he activated it, he hit me with it. I think he learned this from A-Groove in CvS2, but he certainly didn't learn it by playing A2. Again, time spent playing A2 is most definitely not the major factor in whether a player can win.

If anyone is curious, I hardly played Rose at all during this tournament. I played Ryu almost the whole way through.

Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo

There were a number of good players at the event, including Jessie Howard, Wes Truelson(sp?), NKI, Jason Cole, Flash G, Jeron, and Darkside Phil (DSP) to name a few. Again, Flash G and Jeron showed their "tournament intensity" and gave me hard matches. They are able to "keep their heads about them" under pressure, but I was able to beat them, possibly more through super knowledge of ST nuances, though maybe I do have some impromptu ability of my own, shrug.

Facing NKI was a somewhat daunting because he beat me at Evolution two years ago (maybe I lost to him last year too, I don't know). I remember when NKI didn't know the first thing about ST and I could beat him without even trying. He devoted himself to the game, lived in Japan for a while, practicing often, and finally came of age when he beat me in a tournament two years ago. You can't really think about stuff like when you step up to play, and I managed not to. I used Vega (claw) to beat his Chun Li. His Chun Li is very solid, but cheapy wall-dive proved superior that day.

I lost only to Jason Cole and then again to Cole in the grand finals. I got noogied about 100 times by his Dhalsim. The finals score was 2-3 in his favor, so it was close, but his noogies proved greater than my wall-dives. Incidentally, Cole--who used to have quite a temper--has a different type of tournament demeanor altogether compared to Justin Wong and his crew. Cole doesn't seem that intense. Maybe "relaxed" is the better word. He seems to just let the right choice flow through him. Usually patient, and aggressive when he has to be. Cole likes to talk a lot about 'clutch' (the ability to really seal the deal under the final moment under the highest pressure) and he certainly has it in spades.

Guilty Gear Slash

I got jerked around by a few possible teams I could join, then decided to ahead with my original plan of playing alone. That means I'd have to beat 3 people in a row without losing one game to advance each time. Literally 10 seconds before my first match, RashReflection asked if he could join my team, and I said ok. I was--well--the main force on the team though. I defeated a couple teams all by myself. Against one team, I beat their first two members myself, then faced a potemkin player as the third (I was Chipp! Ouch!). After grinding this guy down with like 100 hits, I got him down to 2 pixels, and got hit by a low counter-hit low fierce. GG, Chipp dies. I was a pixels away from eliminating that entire team with Chipp...and they went on to get 3rd I think. Ugh, ugh.

Yeah, I hate the Curse of Chipp. I practiced Potemkin and Faust against random people ahead of time, and realized how many holes I have with them compared to Chipp. My practice matches with Chipp were like 10% me losing in one hit and 90% me completely owning, so I decided to go with him for the tournament after all. Maybe I should learn Millia in GG Accent Core. She always seemed like a non-sucky Chipp to me, but I could never get the hang of her at all. Anyway, I did not qualify in GGXX. Hopefully I'll have a real team for Evo West.

--Sirlin

I missed Evo South due to the Game Developer's Conference. I missed Evo East due to my consulting in Montreal. But I won't miss Evo North, which is this weekend near Chicago. Click here for more info on the event.

I only play two of the games in our lineup these days: Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo and Guilty Gear XX (Slash, and now Accent Core). And I hardly even play ST because it would cut into my valuable GGXX time, ha. Unfortunately, GGXX is a team tournament format this year, a "fun" format that waters down the serious competition in a 1 vs. 1 game. I have no team, so I can either scrounge to find teammates at the last moment (lovely) or play at a huge disadvantage on my own team. Perhaps I'll do that. I have Chipp, Faust, and Potemkin to choose from. In an normal good tournament, I'd switch between these characters as needed, but in this bad format we're stuck with, I'm stuck with choosing only one character for the entire event.

The Curse of Chipp has kept me better at him than other characters no matter how much I try to abandon him. My Faust is fairly good, but I just don't know what to do in a few matches. My Potemkin is good, but potemkin is all about "critical points" in a match: waiting and waiting for that split second where you can actually do something. In the pressure of a real tournament, I find it hard to rely on making these miracle moments happen. At least potemkin has enough hit points to weather the storm. And then there's Chipp. I can rush a lot of people down before they even know what happened, but one mistake can mean 90% of your life, and I'm not exaggerating. If I have to beat entire teams of 3 players by myself without losing one game, perhaps I'm forced to choose potemkin so the high high points reduce the chance of randomly losing off one hit. sigh.

This will also be the first time I see Capcom Classics Collection 2 used in a real tournament in front of my own eyes. (For SSF2T.)

We'll see how much I'm affected by practicing, lol.

--Sirlin

I leave tomorrow for Montreal, Canada. I'll be there about four weeks, providing some game design services. I probably can't say more due to NDAs.

If any Guilty Gear Slash or Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo players happen to be near Montreal, perhaps we can play.

--Sirlin

Some academics showed off what they considered to be the top 10 findings from game research this year. One of them involved the "playing to win" type player, and how even that type of player seeks to even the playfield by self handicapping or teaching the opponent. Another involved a bunch of data showing that a huge percentage of players spend a huge percentage of time playing World of Warcraft alone. It even used the phrase "together alone" as opposed to the phrase "alone together" that I used in my infamous article. A third finding had to do with ethical and moral exploration in games being a big, fertile, and unexplored area in games.

So, uh, I guess game researchers tend to talk a hell of a lot about what I write.

A panel moderated by David Edery (Microsoft) which included Raph Koster, someone from The Sims, and someone else from Neverwinter Nights talked about facilitating user generated content. Raph, always amusing, challenged the title of the panel "sharing control" saying that the users have almost all the control anyway, and that we're mostly along for the ride. The Neverwinter Nights guy agreed saying that maybe the players will share some control with us game developers. There were really interesting examples of players using content in crazy ways that were never remotely considered by the developers. As one example, Raph talked about how little development time was spent putting in dancing animations in Star Wars Galaxies, yet players made endless dancing videos on youtube and even orchestrated 150 person synchronized dancing scenes. He pondered "why didn't we just put in more dancing stuff and ship that? It would have been cheaper and we would have been on MTV." ha.

The creator of Castlevania talked about the advantages and disadvantages of 2D games. He said that 2D games are really good at capturing: 1) distance, 2) timing, 3) position, and 4) direction. In 2D, distance between objects and their facing directions are very, very clear. It's also pretty easy for the player to understand where a good position is in a 2D game and how to get into it. Finally, because those other things are easy, 2D games are able to focus on timing, rather than fumbling around in 3D space.

He also talked about how 2D, in some ways, is a great help to the team making the game. One person can be in charge of all the background in a level, such as "foggy village." In a 3D game, you'd have one person doing textures, one modelling just one room of that village, another fog programmer, and so on and so on. The fragmentation of the 3D team means each person feels like a cog in a machine, while the team member on a 2D project is responsible for a big chunk and feels more ownership, so he tries harder. 2D teams are also generally able to be smaller, which helps greatly with management and communication in the team. On the flipside, so much emphasis is put on 3D games that some team members feel they have no career advancement opportunities if they work on 2D games.

He also offered the interesting opinion that because of all the advantages of 2D listed above, that it's easier to create a 2D game that has the features you want and delivers the experience you want to the player. BUT, it's much easier to create a 3D game that has a presentation that impresses the player and gets him excited, as opposed to a 2D game where that is very hard. He thinks 2D games are unfortunately mostly for hardcore players who can appreciate the advantages, but that 3D games are inherently better at presentation because of camera movement, so they will remain the dominant form of game. That said, he also thinks 2D games will never die and that nintendo DS, Virtual Console, XBLA, cell phone games, etc all show many opportunities for 2D.

Chaim from Maxis gave an excellent presentation on the design of the editors in the upcoming game Spore. He talked about the difference between tools that let professionals create content and tools that seem to magically create awesome stuff when you hardly do anything. Photoshop can create great stuff is you know exactly what you're doing, but even a child can create interesting stuff with finger paints. Photoshop requires all sorts of technical knowledge to use to even a medium extent, but if you just put your hand in a paint bucket, then drag your hand over some paper, you get all sorts of interesting forms and shapes.

Spore wants to be more like finger paints. They want it to give you disproportionately great creatures/items/whatever for how much effort you put in. This way, your grandmother and other non-gamers can see what it's like to CREATE something, and once they do that with some success, they will be excited to try a little more complicated tools.

Imagine a large circle representing the set of all possible things a tool could make. The 3D program Maya, for example, has an enormous circle of possible things to make, as it could make any object/character/environment in any currently existing video game. Now imagine a much, much smaller circle representing all the "good" things one could make in 3D. Pretty much all of those are inside the first circle, meaning pretty much all the good stuff you could ever want to make, could be made in Maya. Too bad that the "good stuff" circle is damn tiny compared to all the really bad stuff you could possibly make in Maya. Even worse, imagine a third circle representing the content that an average users is *likely* to make. Unfortunately, there is zero overlap between what a new Maya user is likely to make with the set of "good" things that could be made. You are about 100% likely to make crap.

Spore wants align these three conceptual circles. They want the set of all likely things you'll make to be smack in the middle of all possible awesome stuff that you might want to make. Furthermore, they want as much of the awesome stuff you can think of to be inside the "possible to make" circle. At any given stage of their progress, they could look at the catalog of all the items made by various average people who get to play with Spore and see how "awesome" the resulting content is. It took a lot of iteration on the tools to get where they want to be.

One of the examples shown was the character creator tool. It was a hard problem because if you give the user the ability to make, say, *any* body for the creature, then players will tend to make very terrible bodies because the space of all possible bodies is so large. Furthermore, if the players could somehow assemble a bunch of polygons into some type of creature body, the animation system would have no clue what to do with it. So this very open system would be confusing to both players and the animation system.

Chaim (the prototyping master) asked one of the artists for help. This artist had a lot of drawings of creatures that Maxis hoped could be made in Spore (so they represent that circle of "good" things that we hope are all possible to create and even likely to create). Anyway, the prototyper knew that the artist had some kind of pattern he followed that let him always make good creature body shapes, but he didn't know what the secret was. The artist explained that all his bodies start out as a bean shape, and are then modified in only three different ways of extruding or bending or whatever.

The next creature editor prototype gave the player a 3D "bean" and a few controls to modify it in exactly the way the artist described. This structure, though very limiting relative to all the things you could make in Maya, turns out to pretty much always make good stuff. It is also very clear to the player what to do, and it's clear to the animation system how to animate anything that comes out of this structured system.

He also gave many other examples along these same lines. Quick notes are like, if you want to add legs to the creature, then allowing the set of all possible ways to put legs on would be difficult (how to place them in 3D space using a 2D screen and 2D mouse), it would lead to mostly bad placement of legs (the set of all bad places to put legs is way bigger than the set of all reasonable places) and furthermore the animation system would have too much trouble dealing with these wacky legs. So, what really happens is that all legs have feet that touch the floor. If you try to add a leg, the editor automatically puts the foot on the floor, and you move the leg around on that plane, which is very easy with a 2D mouse. It's fortunate that this gets rid of tons of bad places to put legs by not even bothering you with them, and the animation system is very happy too. They applied this same principle to many, many aspects of the editor.

I heard some people muse that creating doesn't mean anything if every choice is "right," but I think the overall approach is very good. It really will lead to empowering people like grandmothers who don't know they can create things at all, and will lure them into the experience. If they want more power, there are a couple levels of extra layers in Spore with more advanced features. If they want TONS of power, they can use Maya.

Next up, Ernest Adams talked about how he sucks at games and he wants more games for him and other people who suck but have money and want to play anyway. He talked about how a goal-oriented game can still allow diversions and sandbox stuff that is fun. Yeah we all know that but he's saying designers can take the sandbox activities more seriously and embrace the idea that it's perfectly valid to play around without a particular goal and not treat the notion as a second-class citizen.

Adams talked about FarCry takes place on this beautiful island with sandy beaches and blue water with fish and how he'd like to explore the game. But FarCry is, he said, allows you to explore that island if-and-only-if you want to be in a world entirely based on quickly shooting people before they shoot you. Of course, FarCry is simply not the game for him, but his point is that apparently MOST games aren't for him, which is a narrow state of affairs.

A game that offers a series of moral choices was an example of giving the player meaningful choice, but not requiring "skill" or challenge obstacles. I happen to be very interested in this exact type of game, but I guess that's for another time.

Oh, Ernest had a good line when he talked about how first person shooters have some of the most beautiful environments in the game industry, so "we have awesome nouns...and yet we have hardly any verbs." Rather than just shoot, he wants to ride a horse, climb a mountain, scuba dive, explore caves, go fishing, and other various activities involving tourism and exploring. He's saying that this style of play--that is play without gameplay--is way too uncommon. The reason, he says, is obviously because game developers are obsessed with games having to be hard challenges, which is less and less true as the market expands.

Everyone I've mentioned said a lot more than what was noted here, but I think I'll call it a day and get some rest. Game Developer's Conference 2007 is now over.

--Sirlin

When I wrote that opinion piece for gamasutra about World of Warcraft, I listed that "time = skill" was one of the "wrong" lessons of the game (or any rpg, even). I can understand someone debating whether that lesson is really taught or not, but it never even occurred to me that hundreds and hundreds of people on many messege boards would say, "time really is skill, because you need to spend a lot of time on anything to get good at it."

Oh my. I'm telling you otherwise, and so is Scientific American:
The Expert Mind article

It's possible to spend a very long time at something and still not be good at it. It's also possible to spend a short time on something and be extremely good at it. This is especially true in a competitive game (where you can bring the lessons of other competitive games with you into the new one) and it's double-triple true in an MMO, where mastery of pvp has little-to-no connection to the 400 hour grind to level 60. The 400 hours of leveling up doesn't convert your time into skill; it's simply a way to gate your progress so rpg's take a long time. Replacing actual skill with your character's simulated increase in "fake-skill" makes rpg's accessible to anyone (anyone with lots of time, that is).

Philip Ross's Scientific American article also explores the idea that "effortful study" is what really makes you improve at something. That's why people who practice something a few years (such as chess, but I think it's true of many skills) can overtake someone who has been "grinding" away at it for 10 or 20 years.

Ericsson argues that what matters is not experience per se but "effortful study," which entails continually tackling challenges that lie just beyond one's competence. That is why it is possible for enthusiasts to spend tens of thousands of hours playing chess or golf or a musical instrument without ever advancing beyond the amateur level and why a properly trained student can overtake them in a relatively short time. It is interesting to note that time spent playing chess, even in tournaments, appears to contribute less than such study to a player's progress; the main training value of such games is to point up weaknesses for future study.

Measuring actual merit, rather than purely time invested, is a nice thing to do in the real world and in games. The trouble is, developing mastery in something is hard and not for everyone, so simply rewarding time allows a game to offer "easy fun" and be enjoyed a wider audience. I wonder, though, if we could devise some new rpg mechanics that better reflected what learning things is actually like in the real world without restricting our audience to hardcore gamers. Spending time would count for nothing, but actually accomplishing things would. The closest thing I can think of to this is the Zelda series of games. These games are somewhat like RPGs in that they have a story, lots of characters to talk to, etc. And yet you have no XP bar or level, you don't grind monsters, and you only get things when you actually complete a quest or defeat a boss in a dungeon or whatever. A game like Zelda could be adjusted to have a stronger emphasis on story (imagine the rich and varied storyweaving in Oblivion) without resorting to leveling-up mechanics.

Anyone else have any ideas for how to do a story based rpg that is accessible to a wide range of people, does not use grinding or leveling at all, and is still actually fun? Getting rid of the addiction cycle of "kill monster, get +2 sword, kill better monster, get better item" is a tough one, becuase it's such a powerful system. But it would be nice if we had a story based game that *wasn't* based on increasing the "fake-skill" of your character by attacking the same monster 1,000 times. (Again, see the Scientific American article for how people actually increase their skill in things.)

Another sad note for me, apparently the game industry isn't about just putting in time, either. I've been at it a lot longer than a) the combat designers on God of War, b) Jenova Chen, who made the game Flow and now has a 3 game deal with Sony, c) a friend who's now an executive at Capcom, and d) another friend who's now a manager at Xbox Live Arcade. All of those people are doing great things and deserve every bit of their success. It seems that I made a wrong series of decisions or a wrong turn somewhere along the way though, as I still have little to show for all my grinding.

--Sirlin

I wrote this editorial for gamasutra.com about software patents. I'll put it up as a feature article here after a while, but I think gamasutra likes to have an "exclusive" for a while. ;)

--Sirlin

Steve Job's essay on music and DRM
Game design is a great topic, and I know I've spent a fair amount of time talking about other things lately. The battle to get rid of DRM is, I think, an important one because it affects the free exchange of information and the archiving of information for future generations. Music is in the DRM spotlight these days (though movies and even Microsoft Office documents are also hot topics). The issues surrounding DRM are bigger than just music or entertainment though. I hope we can sort this stuff out before it leaks into more important aspects of virtual goods.

Anyway, Steve Jobs essay is exactly what I wanted to hear from Apple. Steve used a technique I personally love: he put the truth on the table and let people know who they should really be upset at: the music companies who still insist on DRM.

My one question to Steve would be, why does he not sell DRM-free songs on iTunes *today* from smaller labels or artists who do not wish to protect (aka cripple) their works?

Incidentally, I used Macs until I graduated from MIT 9 years ago. 9 years of Windows hasn't been too bad, but Vista has finally gone over the line for me. I don't see why Hollywood studios should be able to decide when and if to disable parts of my computer, ever. I'm about to switch back to Mac.

Great essay Steve, now just take the next step to removing the DRM on iTunes songs from sources other than the big 4 music companies.

--Sirlin

The Nintendo Wii is great and we all love it and so many things about it fit into Nintendo's overall plan, and so on and so forth. I'm sure you can find a 1,000 other websites that tell you how great it is, and I agree, but I thought I'd share some things I found strange.

In Wii Sports, player 2's selection icon (the red hand) doesn't seem to do anything in any of the menus. It would have been better to allow both players to select items, even if that means "fighting" over game options. It's weird that one player can't even start a game.

In Wii Tennis, it looks like Player 1 always serves. Shouldn't it flip a coin or something to see who serves, especially in a 1-game match?

If you leave the system alone for a while, the "wiimote" shuts down (good, saves batteries) but the Wii displays a message that says

"Comminications with the Wii Remote have been interrupted. Press the A Button without touching the Control Stick to reconnect the Wii Remote."

My Xbox 360 never gave me any semi-scary messages like that. If I were an averge user, I might not know that message came up simply becaues the remote is trying to save batteries. It sounds an awful lot like something went wrong.

The A button is used to select things and the B button is used for cancel or back. In Zelda, if you press the minus button, you can then assign various items to the d-pad or buttons. On *this* screen, B assigns an item and *A* is used for back. Yes, I see why it's like that (so you can assign things to B) but it's just a bit wonky that A becomes back for that screen only.

In Zelda, pressing C activates free-look the default is inverted y-axis. That is a minor annoyance to me, but it's not my actual complaint. When I press up, I want to look up (not down!), but I accept some people want the y-axis inverted, so ok. I would have made non-inverted the default, but whatever. Here is my actual complaint: when you go to change this setting, the game labels the scheme where up looks down "normal" and the scheme where down looks up "inverted." I think their entire view of y-axes is inverted.

I've only played an hour or so of Zelda and while it has the feeling of a great game, it also has the feeling of a game I've played before. Rolling into to trees, storing milk in bottles, gliding while holding a chicken over my head, it's just all so familiar. (Yes, I really just typed that.) Perhaps this was meant to be an expansion pack for Majora's Mask? heh.

If I could remove one area from any video game ever, I would remove the vast emptiness of Hyrule Field from Ocarina of Time. It was huge for no reason, contained zero enemeis during the day, and a measly three skeletons at night. That field is the boring "quit the game" field as far as I'm concerned. So it was with great excitement that I got to ride a horse basically immediately in this new Zelda. Maybe that meams pointless travel times will be minimized. Cheers to that.

And despite all these minor complaints, cheers to the Wii and to Nintendo.

--Sirlin

Today (November 14th) is the release of both Capcom Classics Collection 2 (ps2/xbox) and Sega Genesis Collection (PSP...the PS2 version came out last week). Check them out and let me know what you think.

I hope you enjoy all the developer interviews from Japan on SGC. We also went the extra mile to include a way that you can input the original secret codes that worked on the Genesis games. This was kind of tricky considering we replaced all the button mappings with PSP and PS2 buttons (which can remap to whatever you want), yet the Genesis codes require you to know which Genesis buttons you're pushing. It's a big confusing problem that I think we solved in a reasonable way.

As I've mentioned before, the new Capcom Collection features 30 minutes of video tutorial produced by me as well as a version of Quiz & Dragons with new questions, a great many of which I wrote. It also features cheats (one for each game) which you earn by playing the Quiz & Dragons with the new questions. The unlock for Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo is an "easy special move" mode that I personally find really fun to mess around with. And it also marks the first time ever that you can play the arcade version of SSF2T *and* have training and versus modes.

Oh yeah, and both SGC and CCC2 allow you to save your game at any time. That alone is a major improvement from our previous versions.

Vote with your dollar that you do value all the extra stuff we put into these collections. We have some new projects on the table that are extremely exciting and I want Capcom to know that the more care and enhancements we put into these games, the better they will sell.

Thank you for playing,

--Sirlin

I'd just like to announce my victory and acceptence of the 2006 Robbie award for

Most interesting Video Game Industry Personality Robbie: David Sirlin.

If you haven't heard of this award, it's because it's "A fictional non-award from a person with no pull in any industry whatsoever," according to award-giver Rob Howard. Howard goes on to say:

In an industry that is still more about "team" than "stars," Sirlin is becoming the first real divisive figure. His articles in Gamasutra.com and other places usual stir up tremendous discussion in the industry (a good thing). Obviously, Mr. Sirlin is quite the self congratulatory fellow, and his bravado (honed while dominating Street Fighter II tournaments before he became a game designer) will lead him in either one of two directions: The Will Wright direction: Gamers become so enamored for his design skills, they will literally allow him to release pong with SNES graphics and call it great. The John Romero direction: Folks will eventually tire of his ego, and wait for their first opportunity to pounce. His career will then be nothing like it was.

(Author's note: As of now, Sirlin is much more of a theoritician than a real designer at the moment, as he works for a studio that mainly seems to do small titles and arcade compilations. We'll see what he actually produces as his career grows.)
Award Winning Moment: His article dissing World of Warcraft (and social gaming in general), launching an excrement storm throughout the game development community.

I'm seriously trying to do something that will qualify me as a "real designer" for next year's Robbies. If only I could speak about what I've done so far at work that no one has seen or ever will see. Sigh. Seeing my fate decided by the whims of others is getting old. If I make a digital version of my awesome card game, will that qualify me as "real designer?" Or would contributing 0.5% to Starcraft 2 count for more?

--Sirlin

I'm only 4 years late to the party on this, but it's still worth reading. When it comes to explaining why "violence in video games" is much ado about nothing, I can't say it better than my former MIT advisor Henry Jenkins can.

Here's the article.

Jenkins was setup on the Donahue show, and although he says he wasn't quick enough on his feet to respond, this article he wrote after the fact more than makes up for it.

--Sirlin

I replaced the old spam-filled forums with new VBulletin forums. I have no idea how to customize it or use it, but it has lots of cool features so have at it. Give me tips if you want.

I also updated the sidebar of sirlin.net so that the search bar is higher up, the "recently commented" bar shows more info and more posts (it's pretty useful) and category links are actually hooked up to categories now.

--Sirlin