Transcript Dimensions: creative vs technical

Games: technical or creative?
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#1 Games are technical
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Technical support costs everyone money
Many games platforms have technical standards
Same development tools as everyone else
Development logistics inevitably gets technical
#2 Games are creative
• Duplicate an existing game, and you’ll sell 0 copies
• Like books/films/music, constant need to innovate
• Layout of a game forms an implicit language
The “Technical-Creative Hinterland”
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#3 Games are “technical-creative”
• Devise solutions to hard technical problems
• Consoles aren’t expandable, so have hard constraints
• …but games need to improve year on year!
• PC’s aren’t much better - a viciously competitive market
• So: a constant supply of technical innovations needed!
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#4 Games are “creative-technical”
• Technical constraints restrict creative expression
• memory, speed, tools all act as glass ceilings
• 3d modelling needs to work with existing tools
• These limitations do not kill us, they make us strong!
Observations:
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So, Creative and Technical are not either/or...
...but are separate interacting dimensions.
• Many other dimensions of expression, including:•
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Tactile/Input
Interactivity/Responsiveness
Story/Backstory
Milieu/Genre
Licence/Brand - using or originating
Financial
Publicity/Promotional
etc
Technical reuse vs Creative reuse #1
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Technical reuse = Design Pattern!
• Pros:• Excellent for team-working - teams are larger now
• Our previous project needed 5 core, now needs 10
• Best for new architecture - reengineering is painful
• Some Antipatterns you can’t fix, regardless of resources
• Cons:• Not a magic bullet!
• Needs collaborative framework & good communication
• Only a short-term fix: 0-5years, then will be orthodoxy
• Long-term complexity curve will kill us all & all our tools
• Engines need to be reinvented every few years
• Techniques have appropriate life-spans
• We should be sensitive to the time-scale of reuse
Technical reuse vs Creative reuse #2
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Creative reuse = quotation/cliché/plagiarism!
• Pros:• Developing an implicit visual language is a major issue!
• Visual expression help make games a rich experience
• Cons:• “Seen it / Done it” = biggest criticism of games
• #1 Antipattern!
• Using someone else’s visual language is plagiarism!
Technical reuse vs Creative reuse #3
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Conclusions:• Engineering and innovation interact
• ...often bringing conflicting interests to the table
• The two overlap in a technical/creative hinterland
• …where reuse is a very double-edged sword
• The two need managing in separate ways
• Different type of risks, different type of activities
• Where they overlap, what is your strategy?
• Prioritise? Integrate? Infight? Thrash?
“Tales from the Hinterland” #1
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Design Patterns: aggressively anti-innovation
• So are they applicable to content integration?
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Users know when media reuse content
• Films are often the worst offenders
• Music too has ultra-short-term bandwagons
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Games take longer than most CDs and films!
• Was 9 months, now is 18 months and rising
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Difficult to build in innovation over long period
• Long-term development, but short-term sales
• Development lengthening, shelf-life shortening
• Obviously there’s a bit of a paradox going on here
“Tales from the Hinterland” #2
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Similar structural problem with middleware
• (My company sells a middleware movie player)
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You pay licence fees for technical reuse
But this locks you into a particular process
So: you’re paying money not to innovate
High risk when innovation is part of your business!
Antipathy towards middleware is natural
• Design patterns are collaboration middleware
• …they just happen to be free (well: GoF = $49.95).
• Less development risk != less publishing risk
“Tales from the Hinterland” #3
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Innovation != ‘Perceived Innovation’
• Innovation can be promoted, regardless of size
• A small innovation is now as saleable as a large one
• Many end up as bullet-points on unsold boxes
• The illusion of novelty is the story of the ‘90s
• See 95% of Internet companies, for example
• Overlap of technical and promotional dimensions
• Spin is the new rock’n’roll, allegedly
• Games have become areas of dense spin
Development perspective...
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Games are becoming like movies
• Comparable budgets and time-scales
• Involving the work of many professions/talents
• Art/Music/Design/Animation... “Content”, for short
• Integrate well to get more than the sum of the parts
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Integration used to be the programmer’s work
• Back then, it was assembly rather than integration
• Integration is the same, but with more bugs
• Now we have specialist jobs devoted to integration
• Producers, Content Engineers, and Level Designers
• Content engineering is as risky as software engineering
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The rest of this is about Level Designers.
Level Design Patterns #1
• (and about time too)
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3d Level Design is halfway between:• software development (GoF territory); and
• architecture (Christopher Alexander territory)
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…so (like me) you’d think it would benefit from
Design Patterns. I have three words for this:• Wrong…
• Dead wrong!
Level Design Patterns #2
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Most Design Patterns we identified were:• 1. Deep storytelling patterns (AKA Hero’s Journey)
• Allegedly deriving from myths and legends
• Joseph Campbell “The Hero With A Thousand Faces”
• 2. Overused pre-existent motifs (AKA cliches)
• 3. Pre-existent structural problems (AKA gotchas)
• 4. Ways to get it really wrong (AKA bad design)
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The Hero’s Journey is as close to a Design
Pattern as we got.
• All the others are basically Antipatterns.
1. Storytelling Design Patterns #1
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Some well-known examples:• Hero / Shadow / Threshold Guardian
• Functions played by people/elements within the story
• Roles can be duplicated, overlapped, or shared
• Character Arcs
• The idea that each participant should develop
• Should be comprehensible from each point of view
• Call to Adventure / Return With The Prize
• Functions for the overall arc of the story
• Again, lots of overlap possible
1. Storytelling Design Patterns #2
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The “Hero With A Thousand Faces” set of
ideas has now virtually taken over Hollywood
• Many similarities with Design Patterns
• Disney were (supposedly) first to use this
• cf Christopher Vogler’s “The Writer’s Journey”
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However:• Screenplays are now utterly formalised
• …a lot like 3-Act 120-page haiku
• Just as many bad films coming out as ever!
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Many analogies to spread of Design Patterns!
2. Overused motifs...
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An example: “Crate Puzzles”
• You need to give the player an item...
• A self-timed goo bomb, or whatever
• …but you don’t want to make it too obvious...
• Sitting around on the floor is a bit cheesy
• ie, that’s what we were doing two years ago
• …so you stick it in a crate for them to blow up
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This ‘puzzle’ has been done to death
• Games will still use crate puzzles in 200 years time
• …because all the alternatives are time-consuming
• We used a few! (not too many, though)
3. Structural problems:
An example: “Kill The Scientist”
• The game “Half-Life” is where this came up in
• …which has many similarities to our current game
• If a character dies who shouldn’t, what to do?
• “how to reconcile narrative continuity with free movement”
• Half-Life solution: stop the game and fade out
• irritating, but there’s no easy fix for the problem
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Usually a manifestation of a deeper problem
• Here, the problem is really “how to build top-down
narrative with bottom-up design tools?”
4. Ways to get it really wrong:
An example: “Crazy Quilt”
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AKA “Texture Diarrhoea”
Too many different textures in close proximity
“Quake” is full of this! (IMHO)
It’s not a victimless crime - my eyes hurt!
Too many other perpetrators to name
Underlying problem: no clear stylistic lead
• Similar to when programmers design levels
• Often happens with programmers’ websites
• Many portals exhibit the same symptoms
• “It’s not brashness, it’s just bad design.”
Level Design Patterns Conclusions...
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Level design is:• an expression of ideas via a novel visual language
• a frozen moment of time in the evolution of games
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In level design (and in creative projects):• If you can identify design patterns really early...
• …you’re probably doing something wrong.
• Design patterns should be your target...
• ...not the starting point!
• The lifetime of a set of creative design patterns
should be exactly 10 minutes!
• …the 10 minutes after you complete it, before it becomes
a set of cliches for other people to avoid
Deep structure:
Structure of Patterns
• Design Pattern= a pattern that works
• Antipattern
= a pattern to avoid
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Structure of Ideas
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Cliché
Anti-cliché
Ironic cliché
Novelty
= Last year’s idea
= Cliché, with a fresh coat of paint
= Two year-old idea, freshened up
= Today’s idea (next year’s cliché)
• (Similar to patterns, but with a time dimension)
Summary (I’ll be brief)...
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Did we identify Level Design Patterns?
• Not really - but we gained a lot from looking.
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The underlying story is that projects - of all
types - are getting larger and more complex.
• So: the future is increasingly one of collaboration.
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IMHO, design patterns are simply one way of
coordinating effort and language to improve
teamworking on such large projects
• Many other technologies and ideas will emerge
• Using patterns as a target helps team coherency
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Absence of patterns != lack of communication!