–
Noah Falstein
2. Using games to help change the world for the better
Another question that’s important
to me is how designers can help change the world for the better, aside
from the significant task of entertaining people. This question
has become increasingly practical as Serious Games have taken off.
Just in the list of games I’ve worked on there are a wide range of gratifying
outcomes - helping kids with Cancer or ADD/ADHD, training physicians,
staving off Alzheimer’s... I really like this area and expect
it will be my main focus over the next 5-10 years, and I’d love to come
up with other ideas of areas to pursue or ways to grow this side of
our business. But it’s more of an opportunity than a problem.
–
Noah Falstein
3. Putting creativity back into game design
I guess I would like to see the game industry get out of its RPG,
RTS, FPS mode and back into doing things that
are a little more creative. Most consoles now ship with “the worlds
most complicated controller”™ and most normal people will never pick
one up. I think half the reason Guitar Hero did so well is because
people could relate to the controller.
Remember back in the days when your Dad played you on the 2600?
Or you had to fight your Sister off to get at the controller to play
asteroids? Doesn’t happen anymore. How many
Dads play video games with their kids? A whole generation played Pac
Man yet we decided that wasn’t hardcore enough and went on to make GTA
3.
I guess what I am really saying here is that we used to experiment
with different designs, small designs, asteroids, tempest, pac-man,
and while these are not HUGE experiences they did develop interesting
core gameplay elements that we still refer
to today (well, some of us do). Where did that creative industry go?
–
Graeme Devine
4. Innovation v. Derivative Crap, or How Do We Avoid Becoming
Hollywood?
In many segments, the old garage game production methodology doesn't
work any more. Even games that do get made with innovative ideas
have trouble getting picked up for wider distribution, and it is rare
that we hire Developers from the ranks of the self-funded indy innovator. How do we make
sure that indy ideas
get funded and built, so that we don't turn into Hollywood and churn out exclusively derivative crap for the rest of
our lives? Actually, Hollywood at least has boutique production companies (often just smaller
groups within the big studios) who get promising projects seen and who
bring promising young writers/directors into the industry. Can
we get that going within the games industry? Why isn't there an
"EA Searchlight Games" label?
–
Dallas Dickinson
5. The Online Question
Do we believe that everything will have an online component within
5 years (even just leaderboards and high scores)?
10 years? How do we feel about that as a required feature?
Should we build games with that in mind, or should we just build games
and then figure out later how they interact with people and their online
personae? The same goes for multiple platforms. If I can
interact with my games like I interact with my music, movies and social
contacts (via phone, iPod, laptop, TiVo,
etc.), does that mean we need to build for that? What would that
service look like? Does this disrupt/alter the core design questions
of our projects?
–
Dallas Dickinson
6. Item business model
I would like to talk about how to make games around the item
business model.
–
Erik Bethke
7. Making iterative development feasible
Here's a really quick explanation of a very complex issue:
Conflict: the importance of iteration and experimentation in game
development vs. the restrictions of budgets / schedules.
This sounds pretty basic, but it's something I've been thinking
about a lot. If you look at where a lot of the Really Big Things are
coming from, you can see a pattern: extremely talented people who are
allowed to experiment, and not forced to ship before they get it right.
Think Will Wright, think Blizzard. How do you allow these people time
to do what they do best, with no guarantee of a usable result, and no
certainty of cost or ship date? How do you sort out the true talent
in this area from masses of mediocre developers who *think* they should
allowed to be work like this, but if given a chance, simply fill the
time they have chasing their tails?
I'm very certain that iterative development is what makes the difference
between bad / ok games and great games. I'm also certain that it makes
life for people like me very difficult. Good project management means
recognizing and accommodating this and creating an environment in which
key talent can thrive - without spending the company dry.
–
Dana Hanna
8. Why is there no equivalent to the XPrize for games?
If we had a million dollar fund and could award it to the first person
or group to answer just one question about our medium, or invent
a tool/process/algorithm - what would that be?
What is our GPrize?
–
Mark Terrano
9. Finding the Grand Unified Theory of Game Design
I’ve entertained a six-part list of atomic game elements for
years. Raph has written an important
set of axioms in his book. XeoDesign
has given us insight into players’ emotional states. And Noah Falstein is still cooking his 400 Project. To me, all
these attempts are worthy, but are like the blind men examining the
elephant (they can only touch a portion, so they don’t realize the whole
thing IS an elephant).
I’m not saying a Grand Unified Theory of Game Design exists, but it
might be worth exploring.
–
Thom Robertson
10. Interactive fiction format
When I started writing stories into my games, I quickly realized
how hard it was, and I assumed that I was missing something, that there
was a beautiful format or schema for writing interactive fiction that
I was simply unaware of. How anyone could keep track of 10,000
lines of dialog and make it all self-consistent was beyond me.
Sorry, no, there ain’t no
such beautiful format, apparently.
Recently, I’ve congealed my thoughts on this into a simpler form; the
Flashlight, Trashcan, and Dark Room. Suppose I have an IF game
where I get a flashlight in Act 1, and way over in Act 2 there’s a dark
room that needs the flashlight to navigate. No problem, except
that I also put a trashcan in Act 1, which destroys everything you throw
into it. If the user throws the flashlight into the trashcan,
they can’t get it back, and they’ll get stuck in Act 2.
Now, this is a bug, an error in my game logic, and there’s a million
ways to fix it, once you become aware of it. The problem I want
to solve is, how do I make it so this logical problem is self-evident,
or immediately obvious? The IF veterans I’ve asked all shrug their
shoulders and say “That’s what your testers are there to catch”, but
as a lone wolf developer, I don’t have those testing assets, so I need
a better way.
This problem seems like it could be rephrased as, “how do you write
a programming language that automatically detects every bug you could
possibly introduce”, and that seems pretty scary and rarefied.
But exploring answers to this question might be worthwhile, anyway.
–
Thom Robertson
11. Visualizing game systems
Our computers are now doing millions of calculations for our graphics,
but still only a handful for our game systems. Why is that?
Why has our display increased in complexity several orders of magnitude,
but our game systems haven’t? One answer could be that we can
see the results of our complex display code perfectly, right away.
If you have a 10,000 poly monster, and one of those polys is not right, you can see and fix it right away.
So it seems logical that our game systems could get more complex if
we could somehow visualize them, with some sort of toolset, such that
if there’s a single monster or sword that’s out of whack, we can immediately
see that it’s wrong, and see HOW it’s wrong.
–
Thom Robertson
12. Taking metagame structure
to the next level
If Raph is right, then one of the basic
rules of thumb to come out of his book is “a complex game is more fun
than a simple game, everything else being equal”. I’ve recently
had to explain to a business partner how a single level of a puzzle
game is fun, but the metagame, how you navigate
between the levels, is also a game. We spend a lot of time building
complexity and fun into the levels of a game, but the metagame is still usually given little thought.
Now, people continue to explore alternate shapes for the metagame.
Many Japanese adventure games expect you to play the whole game through
again, but this time with a chainsaw. Dead Rising, and an older
RPG, Breath of Fire, make you start over at the beginning when you die,
but you keep all your XP and items. I consider these design solutions
to be small picture stuff.
What if we designed an AI that ran the meta-game differently for each
player? Beyond a simple set of rules (level 3 comes before level
4, level 5 is unlocked with 10k points, etc), what if we actually built
something that worked almost like a human DM. Oh, you want to
get on the train and go north? Sure, you can do that. Let me prepare
the maps and encounters, while keeping the storyline and game balance
intact.
–
Thom Robertson
13. Games as a means of socio-political change
Regime change in Iraq was a noble goal.
Could we design a game that would have led to democracy in Iraq without military involvement
by any foreign country? Is there a way that Iraqis would have been
able to play this game?
–
Andrew Tepper
14. Making games more emotional than movies
How can games become more emotional than movies? What’s preventing
us from doing so?
–
Nicole Lazzaro
15. Alternatives to stimulus reward loops points and score
What’s next after stimulus reward loops points and a score? What
equally enjoyable alternatives can we dream up for games to set objectives
and create a sense of progress?
–
Nicole Lazzaro
16. New ways to create tension and conflict in a game
How can games create tension and conflict beyond time limits and
guns? What alternatives are there for creating games that will make
them deeply engrossing and reflect on the human condition.
Yes, I believe that games can become art. What I want to think about
is how can we move beyond the crayons of today to the broader emotional
palette of tomorrow?
–
Nicole Lazzaro
17. Core games vs. casual games
Will core games become more casual, casual games become more core,
or will games develop along an entirely new axis? I vote for the later
and wonder what it could be like.
–
Nicole Lazzaro
18. New possibilities for games of the future
Beyond Doom, Football, WOW, Civilization and The
Sims what new possibilities are there for games of the future? At this
past and last E3 it was much harder to find innovation in game play
than in previous years. I vote for changing this.
–
Nicole Lazzaro
19. Using games to enhance existing social bonds
Games create real relationships in virtual spaces. Some accuse games
of creating “WarCraft Widows.” What will games of the future do to bring
friends and families closer together in real life? How can games do
more to support enhancing existing social bonds?
–
Nicole Lazzaro
20. Blending in off-computer play
In addition to ARGs, what new opportunities are there to blend off-computer
play?
–
Nicole Lazzaro
21. Effect of game mechanics vs. game design intent
If every game designer in the world were to evaluate ALL design decisions
and design goals primarily in terms of what effect various game mechanics
have on the nature of the interaction and communication between the
people playing, and what kind of effect does the designer WANT the game
mechanics to have on those interactions - then what kinds of practices
and tools would best facilitate this way of working, and what kinds
of end results would this approach lead to?
–
Dr. Cat
22. Listing and evaluating all major factors in game design
“What is a list of ALL the major factors that need to be considered
in doing the work of game design, what do we think of each one, and
how are they best balanced against one another in actual projects?”
That sounds very much like a group-brainstorming type of question that
needs lots of people chiming in ideas to keep from having something
major get overlooked.
–
Dr. Cat
23. Using games to stimulate inductive reasoning
How can we improve our game design
practices in order to better optimize the extent to which our games
stimulate inductive reasoning in the players? I think it’s also worth
pondering questions of deductive reasoning, how and why to relate it
to inductive (and the gameplay mechanics that
stimulate them), etc. But I think inductive reasoning and pattern recognition
are the “atoms” of the learning process to deductive reasoning’s “molecules”,
and so I think that’s the place to start.
–
Dr. Cat
24. Ten really good questions about game design
Personally, I think if the only result from the first year of Project
Horseshoe was a list of ten Really Good Questions About
Game Design, and no answers yet, I’d consider it a success. But then,
I always was eccentric.
–
Dr. Cat
25. Serious Games and/or Bringing Game Design" to a
Socially Conscious Space
We have all seen astonishingly simplistic "Don't Do Drugs"
interactive ads out there, and I expect we have all cringed when someone
has describe them as "a video game." How can we make
our games have real social/political/educational applications, while
still being "good" games. Or,
conversely, how can we get better gameplay
into the existing and upcoming serious games out there. The SGS
folks are already working on this, but my perception is that very few
of us (the mainstream games industry) are directly involved with that
effort. IMHO, the existing serious games (some medical, some social/political,
the dreaded edutainment) are all too often failures as games.
Is that just a function of the subject matter? Is it due some
deep disconnect players have between "playing games" and "learning/thinking
about real problems?" Or is it that we don't have enough
of the best and brightest game designers working on the problem?
How do we fix that?
–
Dallas Dickinson
26. How do games really become mainstream entertainment?
How do we make games that appeal to people who currently find
their entertainment in other venues? When comparing games to (for example)
TV, the capabilities of the TV medium are a pretty strict subset of
the capabilities of a video game. In English: games can (and often do)
run the same types of scripted video seen on TV, but TV can't be made
interactive the way a game can. So why do so many people watch TV or
movies instead of playing games, even at generally greater expense,
and how do we make games they want to play?
–
Giles Schildt
27. Game design testing
How can we improve testing of game
/designs/? Most testing and QA today focuses on technical issues, and
all too often the only pre-ship critique of the design is a very subjective
answer to the open-ended question "is it fun?" - usually
from a very small number of self-selected, hard-core gamers (or sometimes
from a larger number of self-selected drooling fans). Frequently the
game /rules/ are buried under so many layers that even the testers who
want to analyze them are forced to approach the rules as a black box
examination. What roles could peer design review and early/extended prototyping cycles play
in improving designs?
–
Giles Schildt
28. Life in the Trenches
How can we make it less daunting
to create games? Should we make it less daunting to make games?
Many foolish projects are begun, but many worthy ones die for lack of
resources as well. The ability to gather the resources needed
to do more than just talk about making games is an inescapable part
of game development. What are some new and/or insightful avenues
for success in this area?
–
Mike Sellers
29. Game Design Potlatch
How can we stop re-inventing
the wheel and (especially) making stupid mistakes? Noah’s 400
project is a good start, but I’m afraid will end up with a mass of unwieldy
rules that won’t help most of us most of the time. How can we
know if we’re working on something that’s unsolved or if someone else
has a keen insight on it? How can we come to trust each other
sufficiently (beyond our immediate social-professional sets) to share
our insights, to potlatch each other past difficult design areas?
–
Mike Sellers
30. Beyond Aeschylus: Third
Millennium Storytelling
How can we move forward with
creating meaning via storytelling in many-viewpoint games? Single
player games have one viewpoint (the player) and a high degree of authorial
control. Games with many players and a persistent world have lost
all but the ghostly form of story because of this loss of viewpoint
and authorial control. This situation continues to not improve
despite years and years of a lot of people at least paying lip service
to it. What can we do about this? On a related theme, how
can we make games more emotionally and relationally compelling?
How can we make the relationships you have with your character, others’
characters, and NPCs more meaningful?
Shared experiences make for the most compelling ones, and also lay
the foundation for personal change, social engagement, and community.
Given this, many-viewpoint games are increasingly important, and these
questions of story, narrative, dynamism, emotion, and the like are some
of the main challenges ahead for games.
–
Mike Sellers
31. Games with (and for) Heart and Brain
Last year at the Serious Games Summit, Dr. Merrilea
Mayo from the National Academy of Science gave a compelling talk on
how important games are for education in the US – to her this is not
a frivolous thing at all. There have been a few examples of “games
to do good” but I’m wondering about doing good
within our games: without making players wade through heavy-handed moralizing
or the dreaded “edutainment,” how can we make games more than a cotton-candy-for-the-mind
experience?
–
Mike Sellers
32. The $100M Challenge
If you had $100M to produce a game, what would you do?
–
Mike Sellers
33. What happens if we invest in the things that make games
unique?
What is the soul of a great game? Can we strip away (or mangle
beyond recognition) many of the techniques that we've adopted from linear
narratives like novels and movies and still make a great game that is
meaningful to our audience? Each new genre that takes over the marketplace
tends to have a strong economic advantage based in large part on increased
'gameness'. Throughout the years, we've seen a slow (but steady)
progression of richer feedback combined with more interactivity. Yet,
we spend an inordinate amount of time trying to replicate existing content
in movies and books. What happens when we drop the baggage and
focus on making games that soar as games.
–
Daniel Cook
34. Next-gen mechanisms to secure funding
What are the appropriate next-gen mechanisms by which we secure funding for promising titles?
Short of market-forces, how do we thresh the wheat from the chaff?
Is this about early focus testing? Peer reviews?
–
Mike Steele
35. Choosing Wisely
How can we increase the hit rate
of those picking good teams and good games (reducing false-positive
and false-negative choices)? Whether you are an indie
or part of a large-corporate hive-mind, it is a tough job to be in the
position of filtering between good and bad player experiences. This
is well nigh impossible on paper, it's even
hard once they are done. There is so much more known about what makes
games fun. And then once we have that down pat we need to express this
in a tight easily digestible language or model that allows us to make
measurements (qualitative or quantitative).
–
Mike Sellers, Nicole Lazzaro, Mike Steele
36. Smart product innovation techniques
The current product innovation management
system (pitching and milestones. Aka "begging"
and "pleading") in the game industry has issues. There are
other product innovation systems that rely on public and open information
exchange between product developers and portfolio management.
They use statistically validated metrics for selecting which products
get resources and which ones are killed. By making the innovation
process transparent, they also open the door to other radical process
improvement opportunities. In other industries, the adoption of such
system results in improved success ratios and a greater percentage of
'new to the world' products.
If we were to create such a stage gate innovation pipeline for game
design, what would the stages be and what metrics would we use to judge
each gate?
–
Daniel Cook
37. Customer-centric design: What if we made games for our
customers?
How do we spread the techniques of product design throughout the
game design process? This is perhaps a philosophical preference:
Don't let production/craft be the tail wagging the dog. Figure
out and anticipate the customers needs and bend over backwards to meet
them.
–
Daniel Cook
38. Actual Methods for Game Design and Development
A discussion of how people have tweaked, combined, mutated, and
applied various methodologies – iterative, spiral, agile, extreme, etc.
– to game design and development would be welcome. I’d especially
be interested in how people have successfully dealt with the reality
of applying necessary milestones or other process bounds to a creative
process without sacrificing either the accountability or the creativity.
–
Mike Sellers
39. The Human Condition
I am opposed to thinking of games as "Art" (that's a longer
discussion). But one thing that much of our great art, entertainment,
and media culture does is help us understand something about what it
means to be human - to shed insight into our experience, or ideas, or
history, or the world. Can games do this? Are games already doing this?
Could they do it more fully?
–
Eric Zimmerman
40. Whither AI?
I don't want to put us all out of a job by creating the magical "FunGamifier2000
AI System", but AI is a gigantic failure area in our games these
days. The only thing we simulate at all well is Combat, and even
that is usually just a series of fight/flight decisions combined with
a handful of different fighting tactics. Given that much of what
makes Games different from, say, Movies is that they are INTERACTIVE,
shouldn't we be putting some efforts towards making those interactions
between players and NPCs as rich and meaningful
as possible?
What are the specific AI needs of Sandboxes versus Directed Experiences
(or even if that is a useful distinction). What other behaviors
(beyond Combat/Hate) do we need to work on simulating? How do
we get our players to *really* engage in the stories of our games?
A Love Engine? A Trust
Engine? A Fear Engine? At what point do these simulations stop
being useful - shouldn't we want to exert SOME narrative control in
our games? Pure online games may need *less* of this, but an AI-free
world is pretty sterile-feeling until the players have filled it up
(and even then, the results are often more chaotic than fun).
Graphics cards appeared on the scene so we could give dedicated resources
to the rendering of our environments (often to make those environments
more "realistic"). Physics cards are trying to do the
same. Are we going to make AI cards some day?
–
Dallas Dickinson
41. Responsible design of social systems
As humanity moves rapidly towards
becoming a vastly interconnected organism, Internet related memes will
rapidly come to permeate all facets of our culture. These social
mores, the new 'nettiquette', will become a core form of all human communications,
and will become in increasingly important form of safety; promoting
understanding between diverse groups of people, spreading information
and comprehension, preventing misunderstandings and even real wars.
The foundations of how an interconnected humanity will communicate,
and how they will reshape societies, are being laid down right now in
online gaming spaces! They are the pioneers of the vast digital archology
that is forming around us all with breathtaking speed.
The social systems YOU design into games; the rewards, the healthy-competition
mechanisms, the strictures and prohibitions and community building tools...
these will teach billions what to expect from their interactions
with other humans online. In a very real sense, with no exaggeration,
these lessons will have a great effect on how the rest of human history
unfolds. Todays game designers are VASTLY more powerful as agents-of-change than they realize: They are standing in
the right place at the right time, with a very long lever indeed.
By what conceivable conceit are we qualified to undertake solving
this ?! "Well if we don't, the foundations
will be laid down without us by 17-year-old L33t D00d Quake and GTA
players!"
–
Mike Steele
42. Healthy ways to have primal fun
How do we teach human beings to get along if we let them 'kill' each
other in spectacular gore-spattered games? Are there 'healthy'
ways to do this without sacrificing primal 'fun'? "Maybe these
are healthy ways... remember that Columbine was about bad parenting,
and not about video games"
–
Mike Steele
43. Next level community management
What level of hard-science expertise
do Game Designers *really* need to learn about 'Community" in order
to take this to the next level? "When you think about *billions*
of players, you realize that up till now, we've just been f*cking around with 'Community Management" in games."
–
Mike Steele
44. Mediation and arbitration between player groups
Are there scalable ways of approaching
mediation and arbitration between large and small groups of game players?
"Yes, they are called 'Wars'"
–
Mike Steele
45. Keeping real world ugly out of games
Games are becoming more 'mainstream' culturally relevant everyday...
is there are way to avoid having the abyss stare back at us? "I
think he means 'Can we avoid dragging some of the ugliness of real-world
culture into games so they might lift people to a higher/better
place, rather than just reflecting the bad parts of modern culture'"
–
Mike Steele
46. Game creators union
Should we form a Union, etc. to become
politically active around some of these points? "... and how not
be confused or tied up with the political activism centered around censorship issues?"
–
Mike Steele
47. Creating Deeper Community
How can we create more engaging and more substantive social systems
in games, especially ones that survive some degree of transference to
the outside world? (And how can we package these up in a way that
makes them palatable to funders, producers,
and eventual buyers without diluting them to nothing?)
–
Mike Sellers
48. Wasted Data and Wasted Nights
I recently became suspicious of traditional guitar tuning, and how
it threatened to break my big fingers. So I decided to attempt
to find an alternate guitar tuning, one tailor-made for me. As
always, I decided to solve the problem with code. Going through
every permutation of every chord of every possible tuning was a massive
bit of brute force, but my P4 3.0g machine chewed through it in less
than a minute!
My god, how powerful our computers have become. And yet, my workstation
rarely does anything useful unless I'm sitting and pushing the mouse
around. What about all those cycles wasted through the night?
Yes, yes, I COULD just turn the box off, but that's not the point.
How can we, as game designers, take advantage of the vast wealth of
computation we have available? What program can we leave running
overnight, which can serve the craft of game design? What would
"game_designer@home" be, and what
would it help us do?
–
Thom Robertson
49. Early design vs. concurrent design and dev
This is more of another way to look at the conflict between experimentation
and budgets than a new question, but one difference between game production
and other forms of video entertainment is that movies and TV shows tend
to be completely written before any other talent is committed to production;
however games are often designed concurrently with programming and even
art asset development, and that means tight design deadlines and the
need to commit to some "final" (or at least expensive to change)
decisions while other parts of the design may still be in rough form.
This analogy isn't perfect of course, but any movie producer would laugh
at the idea of dressing a set before the script was finished and many
game companies don't. How does this impact the quality of the game experience,
is the "Hollywood" model of early design
right for games, and if so, how do we implement that in the existing
game business environment?
–
Giles Schildt
50. How do economics impact game design?
Certain game design activities cost more money than others. For example:
You could rely on expensive level design and in game cut scenes.
Or you could add in a Tetris mini game. The choice can substantially
alter how much production money you spend. The profitability of the
game and your future job stability depends on the market adoption of
your title minus expenses. Who has taken a finance course?
Who creates a business plan for their game design? Who references
this business plan when making game design decisions? (Apologies
for being such a pedantic ass)
–
Daniel Cook
51. How do we avoid making "social destructive" games?
The flip side of the Serious Games discussion.
For most people games are a positive addition to their lives.
Much like flowers. However, a small percentage
of gamer seem to become highly obsessive about playing games.
Lives are ruined due to people choosing to consume the products that
we produce. Flowers don't have this problem. What
is the game designer's responsibility to his or her players?
–
Daniel Cook
52. Cool Tools
What game design/development tools do you use and/or wish for?
I'm especially interested in tools that make modular and parametric
design possible, but without limiting hand-crafted creativity.
–
Mike Sellers
53. New Kinds of Conflict
One approach to the question
of game content is frame it in terms of modeling conflict. All games
are in some way a conflict, usually about territory (military conflict)
or resources (economic conflict). There are many other kinds of conflict
for us to model, from emotional and interpersonal conflict to social
and cultural conflict. The conflict of an argument,
or office politics, or seduction at a bar. The design problem
is to simplify these conflicts into a numerical simulation, so that
game system itself is representing the conflict, not the visual and
audio assets.
–
Eric Zimmerman
54. Defining Game Design
OK, this may be too fundamental to ponder, but it struck me that
we aren't all necessarily operating from a common understanding of game
design. Do we all agree about what game design is and what a game designer
does? Just what is game design?
–
Eric Zimmerman
55. A Soulful Game?
Daniel has asked what is the "soul" of a great game. I'd like to ask what
makes a game "soulful" - in the way that Louis Armstrong can
be soulful, or the way that sex can be soulful. Is soulfulness linked
to aesthetics and player experience? Is it tied to the cultural response
of an oppressed people to their oppression? Are games doomed to be geekily analytic machines incapable of soulfulness? Or is
soulfulness tied to the use of a game in context - the way two Go masters
revere the game and its rituals as they play, very much apart from the
game design itself? What can we do to make our games more soulful?
–
Eric Zimmerman
56. A Business for Indy Games
Music has its small record labels, indie dj cultures, and rock &
roll clubs. Film has independent film investors, festivals, and grant-making
foundations. Yes, the internet is changing everything. But games lack
a middle ground between fan-created game culture and Hollywood
Blockbuster-sized megaprojects. The margins
that supports the creation of experimental culture is where popular
media like film and music invent new forms, which then go on to reinvigorate
the big-budget center. What will it take in terms of funding, revenue
models, audience, or distribution for games to have a commercially viable
independent industry?
–
Eric Zimmerman
57. The Next Big Game Technology
Graphics technologies drove innovation in game design and player
experience for the first few decades of videogame history. Now that
role seems to be taken by network communication technologies that enable
multiplayer play, as well as artificial intelligence and other complex
systems-related technologies. Are there other technologies on the
horizon that will drive new directions in game design? (Note that I'm
not arguing that game design is technologically determined, but
certainly some videogame technologies have made new game experiences
possible.)
–
Eric Zimmerman
58. Business Design
When will game developers realize that business concerns are
just as important as any other decision in developing the game?
How long will we allow people with business savvy but little or no real
interest in games as a creative medium to dominate the economics of
games?
–
Brian Green
59. Putting Tech in Its Place
It's obvious that there is a huge
emphasis on technology in games. Graphics have improved much faster
than the field of design because graphics are an "interesting"
tech problem. How much should we rely on technology to fix problems?
For example, is better A.I. really what we need, or is there some other
design-related issues we should be looking at?
As a programmer by training, I realize I'm a traitor to my profession
by asking this question. ;)
–
Brian Green
60. Games and Media Envy
Why do people always compare games
to other media? Is it realistic to look at the usage numbers for
other non-interactive media and expect that games will ever match the
numbers of these other media? Should aspiring movie-makers go
work in the appropriate medium instead of messing up our industry? ;)
–
Brian Green
61. Games As Legitimate Medium
This the single most important question facing our industry, in my
opinion.
I hesitate to use the word "art" here, but that's usually
how this is described. A less loaded way is to ask: What will
it take to have games considered a legitimate medium? Right now
most people consider games as something for kids, and this is why we
get slammed for things you see in nighttime TV.
To paraphrase Scott McCloud in _Reinventing Comics_: "As long as
the broader community assumes that comics [or, in our case, games],
by their nature, are without social value and, by their nature, are
suitable only for kids -- then charges of obscenity will always hit
their mark." So, what do we have to do to be considered a
serious medium like movies, books, and TV?
Related to this, how can we make "mature" games without resorting
to sexual titillation or hyperviolence?
–
Brian Green
62. Reconnecting the player and game creator
As I think about what's missing from
current games, one of the things that has struck me for some time is
that players no longer have a sense of personal connection to the game's
creator.
In many art forms (some more than others) the beholder gets some
sense of the personality of the creator. This used to be the case
with some games, where we as players felt in some way that we were playing
"against" the person who made the game, and we formed opinions
of what that person was like.
I miss that -- a lot -- both as a player and a creator. Games
today seem impersonal. Naturally, part of this is a byproduct
of huge team sizes and corporate decision-making that goes into our
products. But I think something valuable has been lost, so I would
suggest that "one of the toughest problems facing game design today"
is figuring out how to get that personal connection back.
–
Bob Bates
63. Game industry specific metrics
Can we come up with our own metrics, or will we forever be stretched
out against the Procrustean model of Hollywood?” So much of the
discussion that goes on either places what we do in opposition to movies
or holds them up as our shining example. Are we by necessity locked
in, is there another paradigm for discussion that we can develop, and
is it worth trying to do so?
–
Richard Dansky
64. What do we want to teach?
It seems clear that players around the world know a lot more about
the technological development of mankind after the variety of games
like Civilization and Age of Empires; and a lot more about combined
arms tactics and the stopping power of a MG-42 from games like Company
of Heroes and Call of Duty.
Therefore, I would ask: What body of knowledge do we think it is critical
that develops in society, and how do we infuse it into gameplay?
–
Chris Early
