Reporter's Notebook

International Game Developer's Network (IGDN ) Conference

During the weekend of March 13th, I attended the International Game Developers Network (IGDN) Conference in Austin, Texas. What follows is what I learned and observed from that experience. I highly recommend that if you ever get a chance to go to one of these things -- a smaller conference, like this one was -- go for it! It's truly fascinating, and you'll learn a lot about the computer gaming industry.

General impressions

Young. The old hands I spoke of earlier were few and far between, and comprised maybe 10 to 20 percent of those in attendance -- and I'm including everyone who looked like they were much over 30 in this category. I'd guesstimate the average age at maybe 27, the median at 25. However, there were precious few "newbies" like myself there. Most of these people had been in the business for years and knew the trade.

Male. The males outnumbered the females maybe 10 to 1. Interestingly, this ratio seemed to extend across all age groups; the number of women in the industry doesn't seem to have changed much over the past few decades. Even more noticeable was the lack of racial diversity; I think I may have seen one black person and a couple of Hispanics out of about 300 in attendance.

Unsettled. As people talked about their jobs, I began to realize just how volatile the gaming market is. People seem to work at one company for maybe one to five years before moving on; whether this was by choice or by force was harder to determine. There seemed to be an inordinately large number of small bands of people who would form small companies, create a game, and then try to get some big-name publisher to pick it up. I also heard about a conference called Computer Game Developers Conference where people with the games find the people with the money, and from there try to get funded for the year ahead.

Issues of the day

While I heard much discussion on how to deal with these issues, I didn't hear any that were wholeheartedly endorsed by the crowd at large. I heard plenty about direct publishing, and general acknowledgment that the Internet could change the publishing industry, but no one ventured further to say how that might play itself out. It seemed that just about everyone had ideas about online gaming, but no one could point to any that have worked really well yet or even to the satisfaction of those involved. There is money being made in these endeavors, but nothing seems to have emerged as an industry standard yet. It seems obvious what people are doing wrong, but it is still unclear how to do things right. Whoever does, though, is likely to make a lot of money. Gender issues in games weren't resolved either, but I'll talk more about that later.

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Hear for yourself!
Several of the speeches given at the IGDN conference in March, and described in this article, are available for audio playback online. You'll need the RealAudio plug-in).

Chris Crawford's talk

and Jim Dunnigan's talk

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Keynote speaker: Alex St.John

What are companies? Are they their hyped product? Or are they the hype? What really endures -- any one given product, or the process?

One half of all applications running on personal computers at any given time are games. This should translate into incredible leverage for the gaming industry -- but it doesn't. Entertainment doesn't leverage anything, at least not in the manner of Word, Lotus, and others, with their continual upgrades, which you pay money for.

Leverage comes in the form of platforms. Why do we run games on top of existing operating systems, which are designed to do tons of extra things we don't need? Why not model the arcade games?

The main point is this: Game companies right now live or die by their latest product. This is no way to run a company. If we want to keep some of our leverage from our last product, we need to find a better way to keep customers.

Roundtable: Gender-inclusive games

A recurring refrain in this roundtable was, "Females represent 52 percent of your potential market. Why not pay attention to those aspects of your game design they feel is important?"

The first thing she said was: Males are visually stimulated, females are emotionally and tactually stimulated. Attach electrodes to guys and show them a car chase scene with no context, and they react. Females won't. Put a kidnapped child in the front car and a mom in the back car, and the females will react too -- and not just because of the mother/child relationship. Give a gun to the woman in the back, and the females will cheer along as she shoots at the kidnappers. Violence, excitement, flashy graphics, whatever -- a female will tend to be bored rather quickly unless a reason is given. She quoted the line, "A woman needs a reason for violence, a guy only needs a place." (I had heard the line elsewhere applied to a different subject, but no matter.)

Her most controversial statement -- to me, at least -- was that people don't want to role-play people of a higher social status than they are. Conversely, people don't mind playing people of a lower social status. In U7:SI, there were a variety of characters you could choose between. The females invariably picked female characters. The males picked anyone. There were also interesting divisions along race lines: Blacks picked black characters, while whites picked anyone. The largest demographic group that chose to play the black female character? White males.

I'm not sure I agree with this, although it's an intriguing hypothesis. The observed behavior is what it is, but I'm not sure it implies what she thinks it implies. As my wife pointed out to me in a discussion we had later, it may be that when a guy plays a girl, he doesn't have any problem playing her 'like a guy' - - she becomes a tomboy, is all. The female, on the other hand, doesn't want to play a guy like a girl; she would want to play him like a guy, and this would take more effort than she wants to expend in something that should be entertainment.

There are other reasons I'm not sure I buy the 'higher social standing' argument. There are, of course, many scenarios where the player plays someone of a much higher social standing than they are. Kings, emperors... even an active and respected member of a community. This doesn't seem to have any bearing on anyone's comfort level with role-playing that character. Or consider the issues with the tables turned -- imagine a game set in a matriarchy, for instance. I may be alone here, but in this setting, I would suddenly feel awkward playing a female of any social ranking, let alone one of high status. I would imagine females would have no problem playing those characters. Likewise, in this same society, I think females wouldn't have problems playing a male, while males would feel compelled to play the male. It's hard to pinpoint where this awkwardness comes from, however. It may be that I feel instinctively that the social rules of behavior would be different in this society, and that I would be lost trying to play 'like a female' within it. This feels close, but I'm not sure I've pinned this down yet.

Other things that tend to be more important to female players: exploring relationships between people and their environment. Exploring alternative pathways of resolution. Finding endings that are mutually beneficial to the parties involved.

It turns out that both boys and girls play the same computer games up until the age 8 or 10, at which point the boys continue on (to games like 'Doom', more than likely), while girls tend to stop. As time goes by, females are socialized to never consider using computers for entertainment, but only for work. Sheri conducts a lot of surveys where she asks women questions like, "What would have to be in a computer game before you would buy it?" All too often, she'll get the response, "I work with computers all day. Why would I want to be on them more, in my free time?" If you think about this, this is dumb. Ask a TV studio exec if she caught the latest Seinfeld episode, and she won't say, "Ugh. I work with TV all day. Why would I want to watch it in my spare time?" It's a completely different experience. But females have been indoctrinated to associate using computers only for work.

Other trends: Males tend to approach conflict resolution mano-a-mano, strength vs. strength. Females try more to resolve conflict through compromise and/or manipulation. A female player will try to work out a happy ending for someone, not even necessarily her own character; she can be willing to sacrifice her own character if she knows the fortune of another character they care will take a turn for the better.

One disclaimer: Sheri told us, about halfway through one of her talks on this subject that usually someone will say, "But isn't that just good game design?" Bingo. The trends outlined above are not universal, by any stretch of the imagination. By incorporating into your design aspects that will appeal to the stereotypical female, you appeal to a huge swath of males, as well. If you can do both well, you only serve to widen your game's appeal.

Brian Moriarty: 'Entrain'

"Hi, my name is Brian Moriarty. Welcome to the premiere of my '98 rant."

Brian's talk was the only multimedia presentation I saw. Throughout the duration of his talk, he showed a video accompanied by a deep, rhythmic music. He started off by explaining what was in the video. First, he showed us the final scene from 'The Great Train Robbery,' in which a man lifts his gun, points it at the audience, and fires. The next scene was from 'Duke Nukem' and showed a guard approaching the player, getting shot, and then writhing around on the ground. After that, the video went into a continuous loop, with one second of the Train Robbery shot, and one second of Duke, each second punctuated by a silent gunshot.

Entrain (en tran'), v.t. 1. To carry along. 2. To trap. 
From MF 'entrainer' = en- + 'trainer' to drag, trail.

When Brian was in the fifth grade, he went with his class on a field trip to visit a small restored town. While most of his class went off in one direction, he wandered instead across the street into a little shop. Inside, he saw walls and walls of antique clocks, and an old man behind the counter. "Notice anything strange?" the man asked him, smiling. Brian looked around carefully, but couldn't figure out what the man was talking about. "All the clocks are ticking at once." Astonished, Brian listened, and found it was true. "How'd you do that?" he asked, impressed by the trick. The old man shook his head. "I didn't do anything. The sound of the ticking teaches them to beat in time." Wondering, Brian watched and listened to the steady "tick, tick, tick, tick, tick," for another minute. Then he realized something else. It was about five minutes before four in the afternoon. Slowly piecing it all together, he asked the man, "If they're all ticking together...does that mean they all chime together, too?" The man smiled. "Stick around. The place fills up." Sure enough, within the next few minutes, the place began to fill with tourists, including (fortunately) his own tour group. And sure enough, on the hour the clocks exploded together in a wondrous cacophony of chimes, bells, and music.

That's entraining. But this describes not only the entraining of the clocks to each other, but also of the tourists to the clocks! The town itself pulses to the rhythm of the clocks in that shop. Brian imagined for us a frontal wave of effect from that epicenter of entrainment, from the bakery across the street filling up with people ordering coffee and danishes a few minutes after the hour, to the rush on the bathrooms a predictable time beyond that, either or both of which could become entraining events of their own, perpetuating the wave an unpredictable distance from the clock shop.

But back to the video, which, along with Brian's steady voice, had been entraining us and pulling us into the talk. Brian's original idea for his talk was spurred by a particular game whose effects had pulled him in very unwillingly. "You write games, don't you? Why do you people put out games like Postal?"

Out of an urge to answer that question, he had planned a lovely diatribe: He would show examples of movies from the '40s, culling examples that showed that era's propensity to show violence for violence's sake. He would compare that to today's computer game offerings, catering to similar tastes and appeal. Then he would show how movies evolved past that, taking violence out of the spotlight, and enabling the industry to create wonderful works of art. In a dazzling final montage of video, he would show great scenes from Casablanca, Citizen Kane, Star Wars, and other great movies, and say that computer games had that same potential for greatness.

But first things first: the spectacular video montage. He worked up his two-second loop, and sat down to watch it. And started to think. And think. And he realized that what he had to say, at its basic form, was nothing more than snobbery.

But why does 'Postal' and its ilk bother him so much? Are players touched by the violence, or does it pass on by? What is the job of the gamewright?

Rhythms and patterns exist in all games, if you watch. Watch someone playing a game sometime. Not the game itself, lest you be sucked in, but the player, and the space around him or her. Watch the rhythms emerge, and how the player and the game interact. It will become clear that a game is really an entrainment engine. The job of the gamewright, therefore, is to reinforce patterns, and dampen dissonance.

Once you get into multi-player games, the job becomes more difficult. Like a phase-locked loop, multiple oscillators must all be entrained to the same phase. You must therefore give lots of feedback, generated from the game itself and from the other players, to teach the gamer how to play the game. The goal is fun, and shared intelligence.

[At this point during Brian's talk, the constant 2- second video began to change. The pulsing remained the same, but the picture began to shrink, slowly, eventually revealing behind it a turning kaleidoscope whose sections were those same two images of gun shots.]

Brian's wife, unlike Brian himself, may easily be classified a baseball fanatic. One day, she convinced Brian to go with her to a game because the Monkees were going to perform beforehand. What he found was one of the most astonishing examples of a multi-player game he had ever seen. Not on the field, mind you, but in the stadium itself.

Many stadiums and franchises have claimed to have started the craze known as the "wave," but legend has it that it was started by a fan known as "Crazy George" Henderson. Crazy George was known for dressing up wildly, and getting the fans to cheer just as wildly. One day, he managed to get the entire 22C section to stand together at once, and cheer. As they sat down again, section 22B stood up and cheered. 22A was soon to follow, as the newly-born wave crashed down towards the field, and proceeded to sweep around the stadium, all the way back to section 22C -- who, of course, stood up and cheered again, restarting the cycle.

Why is the wave fun? We're wired for it. Are fans particles or oscillators? "I call them: Customers!"

Violence in games is like dissonance in music. It can be a valuable tool, if used correctly.

Brian and his wife have had tickets to the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Generally, they played a lot of old standbys -- Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, and so on. One day, they had on the program, "Symphony no. 1, by Schnitlie," who turned out to be a Russian composer. This was its premiere performance in the United States, and Schnitlie himself was in the audience. They started off with something traditional -- Handel, maybe. Then the conductor raised his baton for the beginning of Symphony no. 1.

What followed, as one reviewer noted the next day, had only happened once before in the Boston Symphony Orchestra Hall, when Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" had premiered some 50 years earlier. As wave after wave of unadulterated Russian angst poured out of the orchestra, wave after wave of horrified Bostonians fled the hall for the safety of their cars.

This was no traditional piece, of course. At one point, the entire percussion section went on strike, and held up picket signs. And the cacophony was rather intense.

By the end of the piece, maybe 50 Bostonians remained; Brian and his wife were among them. They gave the orchestra and Schnitlie a standing ovation -- Brian not so much for the piece itself, but for the effect it had had on the Boston cognoscenti.

[By this point, the shrinking picture had given way entirely to the turning kaleidoscope, centered on a pulsing white light in the middle.]

But now think about "The Rite of Spring." The cacophony was just as intense for those first listeners, but today it is an accepted part of the standard symphony repertoire, and we have learned to appreciate the dissonance. And why? Because Stravinsky used his dissonance with integrity. And once we understood it, it added an intensity it could not have had otherwise.

When we put violence in our games, do we use integrity? It's useless, if we have no justification for it.

[Here, the kaleidoscope itself disappeared, leaving only the pulsing white light in the middle of the screen.]

Those who criticize violence in computer games don't really know what all that exposure to screen violence will do to people. But we don't know either! There simply isn't evidence that clearly shows the effects. But all multiplayer games are lessons in how to get along. And therefore, we must use violence with integrity.

Chris Crawford: Demi-languages for non-techies

But enough of that. What he talked to us about didn't quite fit with my concept of "game design," which was what this track was supposed to be about, but it was, nonetheless, interesting.

His philosophy seems to be that if you want to create games which are also works of art, you will need to create a bridge between the "two cultures" -- the science/ engineering folk, and the arts/humanities folk. To illustrate this point, he said, "If I say, 'The ides of March are upon us!' what do you say?" There were scattered replies of "Uh, Julius Caesar?" He shook his head sadly, grinned, and said, "'Aye, Caesar, but not gone.'" Hmmmm.

These two cultures, he says, have been wed in shotgun marriages between Hollywood and Silicon Valley, with less-than-stellar results. What he proposes is a new way of looking at programming languages, one that abandons the whole sense of being general purpose, and which "tricycle-izes" the language -- makes it into a toy. That's what he's done with the Erasmatron, and that's what he told us we could do, too.

What follows are the specific points he told us about what his language did to make it more accessible to artists.

• No data typing. There's no generic data for the user to type -- they get numbers, then specific things to work with (like "actors" and "rooms").
• No compound data structures. I took no notes on this, maybe because I don't know what compound data structures are in the first place.
• No looping or branching (!). Well, this is only partially true. There are structures in the language that loop and branch, but the user doesn't have to know this. There are built-in functions like "Pick the best actor that ______" that loop, and there is a "script" that branches, but the concepts are opaque to the artist.
• No subroutines. None that the artist can program or get to, at any rate.
• A New Lingo. Instead of using the phrase "the array of characters," the program has a "cast." Instead of a "database," it has a "history book." These terms make the artist more comfortable with what they're working on.
• A "break with tradition." Why do we compile things? Because we used to take punch cards down to the librarian, who would feed them into the computer later. But there's no need to do this; the Erasmatron "compiles" continuously, since we have plenty fast- enough computers.
• An intuitive interface. It's impossible in the Erasmatron to get syntax errors -- it's all done with mouse clicks. Chunks of code are clicked on and copied over to where they need to go by the programmer, and come with default arguments. If something is "unspecified," it gets a special screen syntax -- it's underlined; the only thing on the screen that looks like that.
• No acronyms. Spell everything out; you've got the space.
• Use type styles, fonts, sizes, etc. to communicate. Underlining has already been mentioned; other things are true here, too, like coloring actors' names one color and "events" another. Sound is also used in certain special instances.
• Sniffers, scanners, and testers replace the standard debugger. These routines are running all the time to check for errors. In the "rehearsal," run-time errors are avoided by "poisoning" invalid choices, but the programmer is notified what happened. Should a player come across an invalid choice, they would never see it.

So there you have it: how to make your own Erasmatron in 12 easy steps. It's certainly an interesting idea, but I remain unconvinced. Frankly, I don't see anything in there that couldn't today be replaced by a team of two -- one programmer and one "artist." In fact, that's what is happening in the industry right now. With that, too, you get the advantage of being able to change the "default" behavior, which you simply can't do with the Erasmatron. (Well, not unless you're Chris Crawford.) While I applaud the effort to "chunk" certain aspects of programming, I still think there should be a way to get at the lower levels of the language if need be. Inform, frankly, is an excellent example, and I believe TADS to be, too. You can program in Inform all your life and never need to put in "Tetris," but it's still there if you need it. There are precedents for forcing one's creativity down tightly-constrained channels (the symphony and the sonnet being two good examples of this), but eventually you'll need to break the conventions if you're to come across a Beethoven. And the Erasmatron makes no allowances for these types.

But I'd be happy to be proved wrong.

Jim Dunnigan: 'What Computer Game Designers Forgot'

• "Games have about the half-life of snow."
• Wargames are a niche market.
• The next pattern: the game as a movie.
• Non-violent games have a bigger potential market.
• Interest vs. fun
• A formula isn't enough.

At this point, Jim started talking about 'Rapid Application Development'. This means you churn out a bunch of game prototypes and follow up on the ones that go over well. At SPI they had a monthly magazine, part of which was a new war game. This meant they had to come up with new concepts on a regular basis! Jim was able to put together a game in a day, and had to a few times when someone else backed out at the last minute, and a deadline loomed. He told us not to use the Hollywood model -- we're forgetting the game part. We have to keep people entertained within the interactivity.

As part of the Rapid Application Development rubric, we shouldn't be afraid to steal ideas. At SPI, they had a big Sears' catalog-type book in which were compiled the various rules they had developed for all their games. So there was a section on movement, a section on terrain types, a section on conflict resolution, and so on. So, if someone was having trouble coming up with interesting movement patterns, all they had to do was flip to the appropriate section of the book.

We should also do extensive analysis of all our projects -- especially the failures, if only so we don't repeat the same mistakes the next time around.

Jim listed some possible areas the industry hasn't explored yet, which do well in the book market: historical detective novels, historical romances, and soap operas. And another piece of advice: don't put all your eggs in one basket -- develop those prototypes, and go from there. Try to avoid the Hollywood model, which is driven by fear.

Based on Jim's talk about Rapid Application Development, I have a great job opportunity for all you IF programmers out there. Find a likely game company (remember, new ones start up all the time) and convince someone that your skills would be perfect for game development. With the ability to quickly and easily develop a game or two in all text, massive amounts of time and money won't need to be spent on graphics in the create/test/refine cycle that most adventure games need to go through. Or, if adventure games don't go through such a cycle (and certainly some games out there seem like it), convince them how much better their games will be if they can be easily tested at first! Tell 'em Jim Dunnigan sent you.

FYI, Jim Dunnigan has his book, The Complete Wargames Handbook, available online. Chapter 5, "The History of Wargames" includes a fascinating section on the history of SPI.

Personal: Conversation with Brian Moriarty

Brian was... grumpy. There's really no better adjective for it. When I told him I wrote text adventures, he said without hesitation, "I'm sorry." He grumped about Cornerstone, he grumped about adventure games today, he grumped about the low quality of my LTOI map. (I am now the proud owner of a brown map saying "There are better maps! -- Brian Moriarty") Still, underneath the grumpiness was a great deal of kindness. He offered to mail me a "real" copy of the map, and took my name and address. And, sure enough, a few weeks later, I received a package from him in the mail. He hadn't been able to find any individual copies of the Trinity map, but, by way of compensation, he sent the original maps from Wishbringer and Beyond Zork instead, both signed. Do you see me complaining? No, you do not.

Brian wasn't much of a conversationalist, and neither was I, but fortunately there was someone else there to whom I am eternally indebted, who kept the conversation up and going. A few of the topics that came up:

• Had Infocom kept going, one thing Brian would have wanted to see improve was the parser. As good as it got, it could never pass the "Here, sit down and type something," test.
• Another dream of Brian's was the all-sound game. He doesn't believe that even now the technology exists to create it, though. One problem he sees is that if you're physically sitting in front of the computer, there's a big monitor staring at you, and you simply can't have it black -- there's too much expectation built up around it for that to work commercially.
• He firmly believes that Cornerstone killed Infocom. The games were still selling, but Cornerstone lost so much money that the company as a whole could no longer support itself.
• As Infocom was being dismantled, some scavenging went on. Details omitted to protect the guilty ;-)

Brian now works at Mpath Interactive, and although he didn't talk specifically about any particular projects he was working on, I've since discovered that he was Dani Bunten Berry's boss before she passed away recently. (Brian has set up a Web page memorial for her.) She had been working on updating her classic game Modem Wars to be playable over the Internet; I presume this project is still underway. Overall, I found Brian to be a fascinating character, and was glad I was able to meet him.

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