Raph Koster's Blog, page 17

ExpoEVA 2013: El Mundo de Sistemas slides

Here are the slides for my talk at EVA ’13 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, last week. They are in Spanish, of course.

If I had to summarize the talk, I would say that it covered a lot of the same sort of ground I have touched on before in terms of the ways in which games teach systems thinking. I open with some discussion of the wide range of stuff that we call “games” — something that is also discussed in the GDCNext talk I am posting shortly. I talk about what a ludic structure looks like (something that folks who read the blog will probably find familiar), and the way in which ludic structures arise naturally in the world, and thereby are playable even though they are not designed games.

And then I move into anecdotes on exploits and loopholes and other ways in which we didn’t grasp everything about the systems we ourselves had designed, in games such as Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies. The talk ends on speculation on what we’re doing to the world, as we create systems that break outside of games. Are we the most qualified to do this? We might be.

It likely loses a lot without the actual speech, compared to most of my slideshows, but hopefully the video will go up at some point. In the meantime, the PDF is here.

 

Live Forum Q&A at MMORPG.com

This starts at the top of the hour:

Live Forum Q&A with Raph Koster, 10/16 – The Pub at MMORPG.COM – General Discussion Forums at MMORPG.com.

Feel free to start posting questions in that thread now, though!

On getting criticism

Lately I have been working on multiple new games. And whenever you are working on games, of course, you get people to try them, and a lot of them don’t like what they see.

I’ve gotten a lot of criticism over the years, and I haven’t always taken it the right way. These days, criticism comes from all directions, and work is often shared before it’s really done. It can be hard to know what to listen to and when to stick to your guns.

Ultima Online is a Hall of Fame game. It averaged 6/10 in reviews. Star Wars Galaxies got a famously mixed reception, and closed down a while back; I still get fan mail.

So here’s my takeaways from all those years of being told that my work sucks:

Everyone who dislikes your work is right.

This is the hardest pill to swallow. I’ve never gotten a piece of feedback that was wrong. You see, you can’t deny a player their unique experience. Whatever they felt, was true. For them. And something in your work triggered it.

It is useless, and worse, actually self-defeating, to attempt to deny the critique. Sure, there are sometimes reviews that seem spiteful, unfair, and the rest. But the vast majority of the time, people are giving their honest reaction.

And the bottom line is, you put the game out there in order to get reactions. If it were not for reactions, you could have just kept the game in your drawer and gotten everything you needed out of it.

The criticism that is useful is that which helps you do it better.

People make games for different reasons. Some do it just because it is fun. Some do it as a form of personal expression. Some have a message to get across, and some are out to make money to put food on the table.

Whatever your goal is, doing it better is held in common. That sense of craftsmanship is the common ground that unites us all. Do what you do better, serve the work better, and you get to do it again.

That means there are two aspects of your work that you want to hear about the most. What you did right, and what you did wrong.

Nothing’s perfect.

All our babies seem perfect until that first player touches them. We have to learn they are not. Nothing is. People who point out flaws are just pointing out reality. If you can’t see the flaws in your own work, you probably need to get some distance. You can’t do your best work if you cannot get that distance, because you will learn to gloss over problems. It is amazing how they will vanish into a blind spot.

In my case, I often have to leave stuff sit for a long time. A year, or more. The fastest way to short-circuit this process is to stand behind someone who tries to play my game, and shut up and say nothing. It’s awesome: suddenly everything in it sucks! Then I furiously take notes.

The fact is that to do creative work is to know that most of what you do is shit. And we feel that way because we know we can do better. Honestly, if you aren’t pushing the boundaries of what you can do, you’re probably not working hard enough. And working at the edge means a lot of screw-ups.

You often have to choose between your ideals and your message.

One of the commonest pieces of feedback I get is that I am choosing some philosophical ideal over the player’s experience. It might be getting wedded to an aesthetic or visual I love that is just confusing the issue. It might be sticking with PvP for too long in order to serve an ideal of virtual citizenship, not paying attention to how many players are being chased out of the game.

The irony here, of course, is that if I can’t make the player’s experience positive enough, my ideal is failing to reach them anyway. And what good is it then?

It doesn’t mean I have to give up on the philosophical ideal. But it does mean that there are many many ways to compromise, and not all of them leave you compromised. In fact, being uncompromising may be the least successful way to achieve your artistic goal.

You have to dig to get the gold.

Most feedback you get isn’t going to be from fellow practitioners. Even when it is, they are not going to know as much about the specific ways in which you did things, the tools you used, the practices you follow, to be able to pinpoint exactly what’s wrong without a pretty deep dive.

This means that usually, when someone tells you that something is wrong or broken, it’s going to be wrong. But wrong in the sense that it will be imprecise. You need to find out what the problem is underlying the problem. In other words, the symptoms described will almost always be right, and the diagnosis will often be wrong.

Don’t discard the feedback because of this. Look at it as a door you need to push on. Dig deeper and find out what the real issue is.

Good feedback is detailed.

Sometimes you get a piece of feedback that is highly specific. It offers alternate word choices. It tells you the basics like you’re an idiot. It offers suggestions that are likely things you considered and discarded. It rewrites the plot for you. It feels like a rug burn: condescending, a checklist of everything wrong. You walk away feeling like this is the worst feedback ever.

It isn’t, though. It’s the best.

Look past what may feel like condescension. This sort of detail is impossible for someone who has not engaged fully with your work. The sign of a critic who does not care is brevity, not detail. It’s dismissal.

Now, all the other caveats about whether or not this feedback is right still apply. It can be detailed and not right. But never dismiss serious thought.

People who tell you you’re awesome are useless. No, dangerous.

They are worse than useless because you want to believe them. They will defend you against critiques that are valid. They will seduce you into believing you are done learning, or into thinking that your work is better than it actually is. Especially watch out for the ones who tell you that nobody understands your genius.

Honestly, this is going to sound horrible, but self-doubt is one of your most powerful tools for craftsmanship. None of the designers you admire feel self-confident about their work in that way. None of them think that they are awesome. They all suffer from impostor complexes the size of the Titanic.

I am not saying that you need to lack confidence in yourself. (Heck, you’ll never put anything out if that’s the case! You need to have the arrogance to assume anyone will care in the first place). I am saying that nobody is ever done learning, and people who tell you you have arrived will give you a sense of complacency. You should never be complacent about your art.

Someone asked for feedback will always find something wrong.

This is super simple. When someone is asked to critique something, they will feel like they have failed if they don’t find something wrong. So everyone will always find something, even if there’s nothing major to fix.

That doesn’t mean that the thing they mention is wrong. If the only feedback you get from multiple people is the same minor thing, you should feel pretty good!

Good work may not have an audience.

This is a sad truth. There is no correlation between quality and popularity. You may make something that is sophisticated, subtle, expressive, brilliant, and lose out to what is shallow and facile and brash. Oh well. And that really is the right attitude to have about it, too: oh well. Getting bitter about it is pointless.

That said, don’t underestimate the skill required in being simple, polished, and accessible. Dense and rich is easy. Simple is hard. You denigrate “pop” at your peril.

Any feedback that comes with suggestions for improvement is awesome.

That’s because it means the person offering the criticism actually thought about your goals. So either you get avenues to explore that assist you in your artistic goal, or you get told that your goal is invisible to an audience! Both are highly valuable information.

If you agree with the criticism, say “thank you.” If you disagree, say “fair enough,” and “thank you.”

Complaining about a critique, or about a bad review, is utterly pointless. You can’t deny the subjective experience of the reviewer. You also have to be thankful that they paid enough attention to actually say anything at all. The fact is that indifference is the enemy, not engagement, even if that engagement doesn’t get the results you want.

You’re going to face way more indifference in your career than anything else. There are a lot of people out there working really hard, and they all want the audience attention that you do.  Always be grateful for the attention. Someone takes the time to let you know what they thought? That’s already one in a thousand. They cared.

You are not your work.

Above all, don’t forget this. Oh, be personally invested, of course. Your art will be poorer if you are not. But every little ship we launch is just our imperfect crafting of the moment. And we move on. We create again, and again. Each can only ever express a fragment, a tiny fraction of ourselves. And if you are trying to always improve in your craft and your art, then every old fragment, everything out there in the world already, that’s old news. You are on the next thing. Your next work, that’s who you are. Not the work that exists, but the work that does not yet.

So if someone savages it, who cares? That was yesterday. It’s not who you are now.

Hold on to that, because a lot of people can’t separate the work from the artist. Including a lot of artists.

That’s all I’ve got.

And really, this post is as much for myself as it is for anyone else. Because we all need reminding.

GDCNext: Playing with ‘game’

I’ll be speaking at GDCNext on this, in the future of gaming track.

Playing with ‘Game’
Raph Koster  |  Designer, Independent
Location: Room 515 B
Date: Tuesday, November 05
Time: 11:15am-12:15pm
Track:Future of Gaming
Discipline:Programming & Architecture

Never mind the future – the present of games is quickly carrying us well beyond the classic understandings of what a game is. We’ve got gamified restaurants, psychological self-help tools, immersive narrative experiences, quasi-gambling experiences, political statements and more. Along the way, we’re seeing conflicts between subcultures in our audience, and within our development community as well. Players get mad when a title isn’t what they expected. Developers watch the encroachment of business practices they dislike. Designers try to apply the tools of one genre to another, and find they don’t always work. Is “game” even a thing? And if it is, in what ways do these varied approaches relate to one another? In this lecture, we’ll take a look at a craft-centric approach to the question: what do we make, who do we make it for, and how can we best make what we want?

Takeaway

Attendees will learn about a framework for thinking about varied types of interactive experiences and the four types of problems that make for compelling play. They will also take away practical design checklists and techniques for these different approaches: top five tips for narrative experiences, ludic experiences, coercive experiences and so on.

This isn’t the same thing as the blog post of the same name — though some of that material will be the first few minutes. Instead, it’s an attempt to synthesize understandings coming from different quarters about what games can be and what they can mean, and how they can be and mean. I am sure that there will likely be some stuff in there to annoy people from every faction!

Most importantly, though, I want to focus back in on craft. Craft seems like it is often the forgotten root of all these approaches. Whether you are trying to make games that are personal, pure experience, narratively centered, systemically driven, emergent, linear, abstract, or Dadaist, there is always the how underlying it all. And “how” is interesting, because there’s what works for you the creator, and what works for a given audience, and in a very real sense, as creators we don’t get to quarrel with what the audience likes or accepts. It is always up to them whether to listen to what we have to say.

So this talk is going to be about how as much as I can make it… about the raw tools that might help a designer in their goal of making either a polished AAA experience or a raw emotional outpouring.

Hope to see you there!

Upcoming AMA on MMORPG.com

This is an early heads-up that I will be doing an Ask-Me-Anything over at MMORPG.com on the 16th at 7PM Eastern / 4pm Pacific. What about? Honestly, just about whatever people want. I can’t break NDA’s, of course, but I expect there will be hefty doses of nostalgia, a lot of discussion of worldy MMOs given the audience, and who knows, maybe I will talk a little about the games I’ve been working on lately.

I’ll post again to remind everyone once we’re closer, of course.

This should be fun; I haven’t been out there talking with players very much lately, and I miss it.

Pre-order Theory of Fun 10th Anniversary Revised Edition!

Yup, it’s up on Amazon for pre-order!

For those who don’t know, here’s what is different:

Full color throughout.
Revisions on virtually every page.
Revised punchlines for a lot of the cartoons.
Substantial revisions to the chapter on cognitive styles.
Expansion of the sections on non-fun reasons to play games.
Some additional discussion of narrative.
All the science brought up to date.
A huge amount of new endnotes, including expanding on many of the existing ones.
A new afterword.
A new vertical layout so it fits on your shelf better!

Looks like they currently have it set to come out on November 22nd. The book is still in layout as we try to get everything to fit perfectly, and we have to fill in my current bio. But all in all, it looks awfully close!

Pre-order Theory of Fun 2nd Edition here.

 

Keynoting EVA 2013 in Argentina

I am off to Argentina this November, to speak at EVA 2013, put on by ADVA, the Argentine Game Developers Association. I fly back just in time to get to GDCNext immediately after — won’t even stop at home. It should be an exhausting week of travel.

This is the talk I’ll be giving:

El mundo de sistemas

La definición clásica de “juego” siempre ha involucrado la noción de un “sistema” – un sistema mecánico, de retos y oponentes y matemática. Hoy en día vemos más y más juegos que son informados por nociones muy diferentes: la poesía del narrativo, el “duende” de la experiencia. Esto sucede a la misma vez que el mundo nos está revelando sistemas de todas clases, y las grandes corporaciones nos están metiendo en más sistemas diseñadas para mantenernos clientes. Es un mundo informado por los juegos – así que nos toca a nosotros, los diseñadores de juegos, entender el rol de nuestra obra, cuando a decir verdad tenemos poco entendimiento de los sistemas que nosotros mismos hemos creado. En esta charla hablaré de mis experiencias creando sistemas de juegos los cuales yo mismo no entendía, las responsabilidades que solamente los juegos pueden tomar, y del futuro en el cual fuimos nosotros los jugadores y diseñadores de juegos quienes educaron a la niñez.

The systemic world

The classic definition of “game” has always involved the notion of “a system” — a mechanical system, of challenges and opponents and math. These days we see more and more games that are informed by very different concepts: the poetry of narrative, the “duende” of experiences. This is happening just as the world is revealing to us all sorts of systems, and the big corporations are embedding us in more systems designed to keep us consumers of their products. It is a world shaped by games — and so it falls to us, the game designers, to understand the role our work plays, when we honestly don’t have a good grasp of the systems we ourselves have created. In this lecture I’ll talk about my experiences creating game systems that I myself didn’t understand, the responsibilities that only games can shoulder, and of the coming future in which it was we, the players and game designers, who educated the world’s children.

And yes, I am going to do it in Spanish… I need the practice.

I have never been to Argentina, so it will be nice to add another country to the map. I (perhaps naively) expect grass-fed parrillada for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

ToyTalk and The Winston Show

For the last few months I have been advising a company called ToyTalk, founded by a bunch of super-smart Pixar vets. Right now I am in an interesting and lucky place, where I can pick and choose what to engage with, and what caught my eye about ToyTalk was what they were trying to do.

In short, they are trying to use voice as a primary means of interaction. With toys, games, entertainment in general. It’s very forward looking — think “what if your plushie had Siri!” It’s also very hard.

Well, their first product has come to fruition and is on the App Store now, and FastCompany just wrote this article “Pixar Vets Unveil A Genre-Busting iPad Talk Show That Talks Back.”

This is The Winston Show, and it’s a vaguely muppety kids app featuring goofy characters that talk, branching stories, photo booths, quizzes, etc — and it’s designed for your six year old to yell at it. Seriously. Winston and crew will understand what the kid says (well, some amount of it anyway!) and answer in ways that are contextualized.

The humor is sharp and fun, and if you have young ones, or just are young at heart, or want to see how using voice might work as a controller, you should check it out. Here’s a little trailer:

You can find it on the App Store here.

A little card game prototype

I have been working on four or five game projects at once for the last few months, and they are all at various stages of completion. I had been waiting to do an announcement once I had things like, oh, a company name… but this just arrived in the mail today and I couldn’t wait to share it. Shame on me for blowing the “proper” social media marketing plan, but oh well…

This here is a nicely printed copy of a prototype I have been working on. Given the photo, I can’t keep the name secret, so… it’s currently named Rainbow, obviously.

What are my plans for it? I have no idea! I have never done anything professional with tabletop games! All advice is welcome. If it turns out to be fun enough, I might make a digital version of it as well as the card game. As it is, it’s made it past the handmade card stage, and the printed-at-Kinko’s stage.

This version was done at The Game Crafter, a print-on-demand service for game designers. I am pretty happy with the result, though it’s not perfect. As you can see from the close-up, there’s a bit of a registration issue and the top edge of the cards is cut with a little bit of an arc. They do warn that registration is always a problem with POD, and to be very cautious about using borders for that reason. I threw caution to the wind.

The cards feel nicely coated, and deal and shuffle pretty well. Much better than the Kinko’s run, which I did on the punch-out cards available from PlainCards. Those aren’t bad, but they’re just thick enough that I can’t run them through my home printer, and the micro-perforated edges just don’t come out cleanly, leaving cruft on the card edges. I used about half my supply on the the previous prototype, and may end up getting more if I do a card game again as they are handy for interim steps — but printing the full deck at Kinko’s would cost a dollar a card! And no box. In contrast, The Game Crafter version is around $10 for the 71 card deck and box.

They do the tuck box too; it’s the same quality card stock as the cards themselves. I used the 72 card tuck box, and the 71 cards I have are kinda rattling around in there — so it sure feels like the 72 card box holds more like 90. The boxes come shrink-wrapped, too.

I am not going to write anything about the game here right now, because it’s very much in an alpha play testing stage, so you can pretty much assume the rules are going to change. But basically, it’s a very easy to learn set packing game, and you can play it in groups of up to 8, or solitaire. I’ve got rules for both a simple and a trickier version. I also worked up a Blitz mode that I haven’t playtested yet. My wife Kristen can destroy me at the standard game, shaking her head at my boneheaded choices, so that may indicate that there is some strategy to it! We’ll see.

 

The Ready Player One MMO was Metaplace

MMORPG.com has an article about a hypothetical Ready Player One MMO.

For those who haven’t read it, Ready Player One is a novel by Ernest Cline that describes a network of virtual spaces running on a common operating system, called OASIS. The story is a fun romp, not too deep, about a kid who is looking for the secret prize hidden in an insane scavenger hunt scenario by the network’s creator.

The book is full of geek references. The skillful playing of Joust is a key point; so is the ability to recite Ferris Bueller’s Day Off from memory. But of course, part of what captivates a gamer is the description of OASIS itself: a giant network of virtual spaces, capable of encompassing pretty much every sort of virtual space you might want.

So the article asks, what about building something like that. Well, we did.

Metaplace predated the novel. But really, the book describes basically what we built, and which is now gone. (The tech survives, within Disney, but isn’t used in this fashion anymore).

I think many MMORPG fans were barely even aware it existed, because really, it got almost no marketing. And while we were around, people were perpetually confused as to what it was. Frankly, I found it too big an idea to wrap up well in a marketing message.

a generic server architecture that could handle anything from arcade games to MMOs. Servers ran in the cloud, so it was designed to be really, really scalable. Just keep adding worlds. At the time we closed it, there were tens of thousands of them.
the ability for players to own and make their own spaces. You didn’t even need to know how to make stuff in 3d modeling, it imported SketchUp from Google Warehouse even. You didn’t need to host your own art.
scriptable to the point where you could make a whole game in it. The scripting used Lua, which was a barrier for people. We had made moves towards letting people snap together behaviors (drag and drop AI onto something in the world, for example) but probably didn’t go far enough.
full web connectivity in and out, so that you could have stuff from the real world manifest in the games, or game stuff feed out to the web. Like, an MMO where the mobs are driven by stock quotes was easy to make. Or hooking a Metaplace world up to say Moodle (for education) or having NPCs read their dialogue from external sources. We had one world which performed any Shakespeare play by reading the plays off of a remote server, spawning NPCs for all the parts, and interpreting the stage directions.
agnostic as far as client, so you could connect lo-fi or full fancy 3d — in theory. We never got to the 3d, but we had clients running on mobile devices, PCs, and in web browsers. If we were still pursuing it, you can bet we’d be doing an Oculus version right about now.
worlds connected to one another, and you might change from world to world, but you also had a common identity across all the worlds. You could walk from Pac-Man into Azeroth, so to speak.

I think a lot of people were turned off by the 2d graphics, and a lot were turned off by the fact that there wasn’t a full MMO there to just play, and a lot of people found building too hard. A huge part of why we didn’t succeed is that we were too many things to too many different people, and that split our efforts in far too many directions. The result was a tight but small community that never started to really grow.

But if you were ever wondering why something like the Ready Player One/Snow Crash style world hasn’t been made — well, there it was… open from 2007 to 2009. It saddens me to see it forgotten so quickly, though in many ways it really did end up as just a footnote in virtual world history. I get a lot of “the last thing you did was SWG in 2003″ from people who clearly didn’t know it existed or weren’t interested because it wasn’t a hack n slash gameworld.

I might spend the time to dig through some screenshot archives and post up some examples of what got made. I miss that community a lot.