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First there was “Mass Effect.” Next there was the Fox News’ report on the game’s alleged “Luke Skywalker Meets ‘Debbie Does Dallas’” themes. Then came the subsequent fallout.
So at Game Developers Conference last month I asked the founders of “Mass Effect” developer BioWare how they’ll handle love and sex in future games
Their response:
Here’s an excerpt for people who can’t watch the video:
Read more…
I’ve been excited about “Mirror’s Edge,” the upcoming console and PC first-person parkour game from EA’s DICE studio, since I read a cover feature about it in the magazine Edge. Just look at the screenshots!
Last month at GDC, EA hosted an event showcasing DICE’s work, which included a live demonstration of “Mirror’s Edge.” The sight of the game’s heroine running through a stark, gleaming city, leaping from rooftop to rooftop, taking enemies out with her hands, was impressive. Seeing it all in first-person was exciting. But, watching what it looks like when she tumbles forward into a roll and the game stays in first person was… disconcerting.
I wondered if presenting parkour in first-person might be asking for trouble. My head was spinning:
I had to talk to the developers. EA PR obliged, setting me up with two quick, on-the-spot chats. We talked about several key issues and I got some intriguing answers…
(Warning to EA marketing team — there’s a possible surprise in here for you…)
If I was making a list of top 10 answers I ever got in an interview, the following honest, open, emotional video from Silicon Knights president Denis Dyack would be included.
At GDC I asked him why, with more than a decade of development work done on “Too Human,” he didn’t at some point decide that this game just wasn’t meant to be. This is what he said:
“We have a powerful medium, and we can do more. We should do more, and we may be able to do more than only entertain.”
–Rusel DeMaria, Author/Analyst at GDC 2008
It’s not uncommon for GDC attendees to start scratching off end-of-day sessions after sitting in panels for hours on end. Unfortunately, anyone who decided to passed on DeMaria’s panel as day one of GDC closed missed out.
The ambitious panel asked whether games were capable of achieving more than sheer entertainment, and while everyone there had something interesting to say, it was Gas Powered Games‘ Chris Taylor and 2K Boston’s Ken Levine that found themselves at opposite ends of the spectrum, yet on surprisingly common ground in regard to what designers bring to their games.
Taylor kicked things off with an untold tidbit about his breakthrough RTS game, “Total Annihilation”: he purposely removed blood from its art direction. In his eyes, war wasn’t meant to be cool, and even though his passion was to develop war games, real war involved young soldiers dying and never coming back. He kept this part of the design a secret. “I don’t think anybody cared. I was on my own little thing,” he said.
Later in the panel, Levine would come to defend the use of blood in games from an artistic standpoint. “For the healthy mind, for the thinking mind, the advantage of blood, the advantage of gore, the advantage of keeping it on a level that makes it true is powerful. [In “BioShock”] if you didn’t have that level of pain and realism and nastiness, people wouldn’t think about it.”
Both designers are 41-years old. A key difference between the two, however, is that Taylor is the father of four boys. “As a father, there’s this genetic sort of trigger that [tells me] I have four boys, and when I make games and I come home every night, I want my boys to see my work. It would really suck if they couldn’t see what I did every day. That’s probably got more to do with [my beliefs] than I care to admit,” confessed Taylor.
One of Taylor’s favorite shows growing up was “The Brady Bunch,” but he found himself annoyed with the preachy tone of some episodes. As an adult, he understands why the writers took that route: they were “slipping medicine” to kids in an attempt to give back to society through their creative work. “Here I am, 41, I’m kind of slippin’ a little medicine into my games and I’m hoping that kids will play the stuff that I create and they become better kids.”
On the other hand, there’s Levine. “I’m not the guy you want to look towards for a teaching moment,” he said. Read on to find out why that is.
At the Game Developers Conference last month, we asked a few developers some of the most important questions about video games.
Like… “What’s your favorite video game dog?”
In our quest to find the Greatest Animal in the History of Video Games, this month we highlighted the best dogs and wolves for consideration.
First, we had Epic Games’ Cliff Bleszinski and Mark Rein weigh in with their picks. Then we had Lionhead Studios’ Peter Molyneux talk about his favorite virtual dog, which happens to be to his own four-legged furball from “Fable 2” (and our one and only canine nominee from a game that’s not yet released). See why he thinks his “Fable 2″ dog deserves top prize and which other dog inspired him to create it:
As video games become more sophisticated, game makers are finding themselves asked what they’re teaching players. How many gamers knew the name Ayn Rand before “BioShock”? Ken Levine might not have set out to teach, but he did.
On the other hand, “WolfQuest” is an online game designed to teach.
The last time I encountered “WolfQuest” was mocking it during a segment for The 1UP Show, but my actions were only somewhat in jest. “WolfQuest,” an online space where players live the life of a wolf, is a compelling idea. The program’s designer, David Schaller of eduweb, discussed this during a behind-the-scenes panel at GDC last month.
Ironically, Shcaller’s biggest obstacle came from the education community. Educators hoped to see children hovering around a computer monitor less often, while Schaller believed it better to communicate with kids using a device they’re already hooked on. For Schaller, that required a four-step process. Educators wanted it to happen in one step.
1. Children are already at the computer due to games
2. “WolfQuest” is a game, but meant to be a learning tool about wolves
3. Adventures in “WolfQuest” lead to an interest in wolves
4. Kids finally end up outside to learn about wolves in real-life
From the educator’s point of view, providing children with yet another reason to sink time into a computer is counterproductive. For “WolfQuest,” it’s a bit of a gamble. If “WolfQuest” proves too compelling of a video game, what is the incentive for the player to leave the virtual world? Ultimately, Schaller’s argument implied that if kids never left “WolfQuest” to learn about wolves at a zoo, at least they learned in “WolfQuest” itself.
Schaller pointed the audience to James Paul Gee’s book “What Video Games Have to Teach Us,” in which Gee introduces the same subjects Schaller is riffing on:
“In the end, then, video games represents a process, thanks to what Marx called the “creativity of capitalism,” that leads to better and better designs for good learning and, indeed, good learning of hard and challenging things. … How are good video games designed to enhance getting themselves learned — learned well and quickly so people can play and enjoy them even when they are long and hard? What we are really looking for here is this: the theory of human learning built into good video games.”
You can download a free copy of “WolfQuest” for PC and Mac at the official website. Oddly enough, now I kind of want to check it out. Who wants to be in my wolf pack (learning not guaranteed)?
Why would Tomonobu Itagaki implement a YouTube-like capture-and-share video system in the upcoming Xbox 360 “Ninja Gaiden II“? I didn’t know last week. So I asked him, backstage after the Microsoft keynote at GDC.His answer — and a classic Itagaki moment of turning the tables on the interviewer — are above.
An excerpt from the above clip:
Itagaki: Well, we had a lot of feedback that the first “Ninja Gaiden” was a little bit too difficult. And we’re taking a lot of steps for the sequel to help alleviate that. But one thing that we thought is if we give people an example, a reference, say this is how you get past this certain encounter this is the moves you can use in order to play the game better, if you give some advice in the way of a video that would help increase their proficiency in the game.”
A new “Tecmo Bowl” game is still coming. That’s what I learned at GDC as I wrapped up a quick interview with Tomonobu Itagaki.
He and I mostly talked about the Xbox 360’s “Ninja Gaiden 2” (and gambling). But here’s my exchange with him about the famous football series, which took place right after Microsoft’s GDC keynote:
Multiplayer: People back in my office would be upset with me if I didn’t ask you for an update about “Tecmo Bowl.” About a year ago, there was an announcement that a new game was underway for an unspecified system. What can you update people about about that beloved franchise?
***
That’s all I could get about “Tecmo Bowl,” but I will have more from my chat with the Itagaki shortly. Stay tuned.
Will Wright’s modus operandi for “Spore” has always been about empowering the user to have a personalized experience from start to finish.
Such ambitions extend to even the game’s music. Electronic Arts Audio Director Kent Jolly and Composer Aaron McLeran, who temporarily came in to work on “Spore’”s musical implementations, discussed the execution of their hard work at last week’s GDC.
“Spore” uses what’s called procedural music. The sounds generated are executed through processes designed by a composer. In this case, the composer is musician Brian Eno and the processes hidden in the various editors (creature, ship, etc.) found in “Spore.”
Jolly’s team has incorporated most of the user-influenced music into the game’s creation editors (some bits show up elsewhere, such as the civilization building era), but it wasn’t until Eno arrived that the team became really jazzed about the prospects.
“[Eno] was a very inspiring person,” recalled Jolly. “He came and really just got everybody pretty excited about the idea of doing procedural music and I think that’s one of the things that’s just amazing about him as a person.”
When McLeran came on board, he worked with Jolly on tools for Eno’s procedural ambitions to be realized in “Spore.” When the player is using one of the creature editors, building a UFO or alien or what have you, the ambient music alters based on the player’s editing work. Moving the mouse over different icons produces small, but noticeable, alterations to the music, while placing a piece on a ship causes a much more substantial change.
Music is best understood heard. Click the player below for a quick example. Here, McLeran is building a ship in the same editor pictured above.
“Hopefully, the average user might not even notice that it’s procedural music. In fact, if they don’t notice, then I think aesthetically — and they still like the music — we’ve achieved something that’s pretty awesome,” concluded McLeran.
I have no musical talent, but “Spore” seems to take the hard part of creativity and make it an organic process without the user aware it’s happening. There’s something very compelling — maybe even unnerving — about that.
There was a time when PC gaming was in “disarray,” or at least that’s what I had been told back at DICE. And those comments is what has gotten many people riled up here and at Penny Arcade. But Cliff Bleszinski, the man who told me that just earlier this month, sat down with fellow Epic Games power player Mark Rein to tell me at GDC what the situation with PC gaming really is.
Specifically, they told me what the point of this whole PC Gaming Alliance is.
Rein: “Right now, if you have a laptop with integrated graphics and try to play our game, it doesn’t play. Or if you’re trying to play some games aren’t capable of integrated graphics, they play terribly. So you just lose your interest in that. We don’t want that. We want all these people buying laptops and reasonably priced PCs, to at least be able to be exposed to gaming. They can go out later and upgrade to something better, but let’s at least give them a baseline experience.”
Multiplayer: “Cliff, you buy it? PC gaming is back?”
Bleszinski: “Abso-frigging-lutely. The thing is, I think everybody coming together in that kind of way will essentially kind of help re-glue things back together and kind of help fix the market. I have a big PC gaming heritage and I love playing games with a keyboard and a mouse, as well as a console, and I’d just love to see it.”
