Babycastles Summit: Designing Games for Public Space

Greg Trefry, of Come Out & Play Festival, curated a panel between three public space game designers: Ramiro Corbetta of Hokra, Matthew Parker of Recurse, and J.R. Blackwell of Shelter In Place.

Ramiro Corbetta's Presentation

• Ramiro worked at Powerhead Games for 5-6 years, where he worked on many casual Nintendo DS games and Glow Artisan, which won an IGF award. He attended Babycastles and started learning programming. Then Charles Pratt approached him to make a game for the No Quarter Exhibition.
• He made Hokra, a 2v2 game played with XBox 360 controllers. It's a game that's meant for 4 people playing and 20 people watching. Charles told him to make a game that'll be entertaining for spectators, so he added motion trails and made the UI very easy to understand.
• He was looking for inspiration for a public space game and found it in soccer, which is the quintessential public space game for him (he's Brazilian).
• Abe Stein, a writer at MIT, wrote a review of Hokra. He mentions that it's the "physical and digital jostling, the shouts, jeers, grimaces, chants, cheers, roots" that make Hokra a sports game. The game is very much about the audience and the players as much as what's on the television screen.
• Ramiro also made OBMAD (Or Buy Me A Drink) along with a developer of Super Crate Box. It is a drinking game where people get a card with instructions when they buy a drink. They can give this card to anyone else, who must either do the actions instructed on the card or buy the challenger a drink. Ramiro is really interested in drinking games and is now working on a single-player drinking game.
• They key to making a public space game is to have meaningful interactions between players, make it entertaining for spectators, and make gameplay as performance.

J.R. Blackwell's Presentation

• J.R. Blackwell is the creative director at Galileo Games.
• Velociraptor! Carnivore! is a board game for 4-6 players where velociraptors steal body parts and eat prey.
• Bulldogs LARP! is LARP game taking place in futuristic space. Players fill out a Transgalaxy Employment Contract which is their character sheet for the game. This game also involves a puppet of a punk-looking bear.
• Shelter In Place is a zombie LARP for 10-24 players. A director decides how games will go. There are human players and zombie players. The game is played in three acts with zombies growing strong each subsequent act. The game is like a big game of tag where the character with the higher number value wins in an exchange.
• The human characters include a business man, construction worker, medic, architect, horror movie buff, and a child, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. The child, for example, is the last human to be bitten, which is an advantage to him. However, any other character that the child gets close to gets decremental value, which is a big disadvantage for the team.
• The zombie horde all work as a team towards one goal -- eat brains.
• There can also be twist characters such as a cyborg, vampire, werewolf, time traveler, MIB agent, or a tourist. The tourist is J.R. favorite twist char because he just came into town and doesn't realize he's in the middle of the zombie apocalypse. The game is lost if he is convinced that he's in a horror situation.
• The game uses props to make it more immersive. Physical engagement is very important for public space games.
• Shelter In Place has flexible game design and is adjusted based on the space and the audience. The game is based on zombie movies from Night of the Living Dead to Shaun of the Dead, so at the start of the game, the director picks the mood of the game based on the players.

Matthew Parker's Presentation

• Matt is involved with Deepak Chopra's Leela and co-authoring Hacking the Kinect.
• He designed Hali, a hide-and-seek game played with GPS-enabled mobile devices. In this game, everyone knows where everyone is at any given time, but GPS only gives the approximation of locations. The game is intended to be play on huge parks and fields.
• Matt curated "Fuck the Screen" event at Babycastles, which showcased Doug Wilson's Johann Sebastian Joust, Kaho Abe's Hit Me, and his own Duello. Duello is a cowboy duel game where both players are armed with a gun and a cowboy hat with sensors. The game is projected on the ground for both the players and the spectators.
• Recurse was commissioned to be a lobby piece for the NYU Game Center. It's a simple Kinect game where the player waves their hands frantically at passing green spots and avoid red spots. The game was also released for the iPad.
• At Jean Claude Van Jam 2012, the game jam ended up producing a lot of physical games, which was appropriate for the huge space at Eyebeam. The winning game was Wrong Bet, based on the film Lionheart. Two fighters play a simple game of Rock-Scissor-Paper on two separate laptops, while a crowd circles around them, yelling suggestions and making bets. This game was interesting because it made spectators a very big part of the game.
• Matt also worked on Lumarca, an installation piece that projected 3D objects onto string. This was hooked up to Kinect so that the objects on the string installation were mirrors of the objects in front of the camera. He tried many ways to turn this piece into a game, but could not find anything.

Panel Discussion

• Major influences of public space games are sports and theater.
• Most games (board and digital) have big barriers of entry, but public space games aim to lower that barrier. They're meant to draw in random bystanders and get them into the game in a seamless fashion, or at least bizarrely entertain bystanders with its strange spectacle.
• Ritual is a big part of sports and performance. Ritual is something developed and shared among people.
• There is an internal vs. external performance when it comes to public space games.
• Is accessibility the enemy of depth? There can be accessible games that are also deep. Examples include Baribariball, Tennis, and Nidhogg.
• What makes a game a public space game? It's the possibility of an audience and its permeability.
• Street Fighter is a public space game. It was made for arcades which are very much public spaces.
• Duello was more fun for spectators than players. It was designed to have realistic shooting and most people are very bad at shooting accurately, so players couldn't find too much fun from the game. But spectators were entertained by the silly outfits and the performance of the duel. On the other hand, Recurse was more fun for the players than the spectators. People watching other people play the game feel really uncomfortable or awkward, but once they're in front of the game, totally get into it and start doing silly motions.

Question and Answer

• Do you look at technology first or come up with the idea first? Doug Wilson looked at technology first for Johann Sebastian Joust. He investigated accelerometers, realized that they suck, and designed a game about not moving the accelerometer. Duello was very much theme first and then finding technology to fit the concept. Hokra and Shove were both technology first. For Hokra, Ramiro was excited about finally making a game for a big television screen after working on Nintendo DS games for the last five years. For Shove, he looked at the Kinect and designed a game that the Kinect cannot do well, ie. getting close and in contact with other players in front of the camera.
• Are cosplayers game players? Cosplayers are definitely inhabiting characters, but not necessarily playing games. However, there is a lot of crossover between cosplayers and LARPers. Costumes make games and role-playing much more immersive.
• Most LARP are centered around horror because there is a lot of opportunity for conflict in the horror genre. In addition, LARP is very effective at creating true fear, so it's playing at its strengths.
• Minecraft is not an accessible game and Matt doesn't consider it a game at all. Making a game accessible and deep is the hardest thing to do.
• Does technology limit accessibility? A controller is definitely more inaccessible than a camera since there are too many buttons and it's very intimidating for someone who's never seen it before.
• Not all games need to be accessible like Chess. LARPs are very inaccessible but are very engaging.
• The best LARPs are the ones that are highly curated.
• Drinking games are big public space games. Drinking games should be studied for inspiration for public space games because they succeed in how easy it is for people to enter the game and how quickly they can get players engaged.
• Recurse was meant to draw people, who don't expect to be playing, to play the game. It uses a mirror, which innately attracts people, but also skews it in an interesting fashion, which intrigues them even more.
• Public space games differ between spaces. The experience definitely changes for Shelter In Place depending on the location. Recurse was designed specifically for an individual space (the lobby of the NYU Game Center), but got more attention when it was brought to spaces with large audiences. Hali, on the other hand, was built to be played anywhere, but didn't really work in testing. It was brought to the Come Out & Play Festival in San Francisco and the game was barely playable because the fields were too hilly and the technology couldn't keep up. Hokra can be played anywhere, though it was meant to be played in public spaces, but will probably end up being playing in the living room. OBMAD is played at bars, but the game completed broke when it was brought to an event was an open-bar.

Babycastles Summit: The Bill Murray Theory of Game Design

John Teti of Gameological Society drew interesting parallels between game design trends and classic films of Bill Murray. The two films he specifically references are Groundhog Day (1993) and Scrooged (1988).

• In both films, Bill Murray plays an asshole in the television industry who eventually becomes better due to supernatural forces that only he experiences.
• In Groundhog Day, Bill Murray's character, Phil Connors, is trapped reliving a single day over and over again. Through the course of the movie, he becomes relatively superhuman and gains intimate knowledge of the everyone in the town of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. The film is regarded one of the greatest comedies of all time.
• In Scrooged, Bill Murray plays Frank Cross, a cold-hearted television programming executive. Frank is visited by three ghosts who show him the error of his ways in the past, present, and future. The film is a zany, loud version of A Christmas Carol.
• Imagine Bill Murray as the player and the worlds he inhabits are the video game systems.
• In Groundhog Day, Phil replays the day over and over again until he gets better. He retains memories of past events, even though nobody else does. This is very similar to a videogame where the player can die and revive, gaining more knowledge whereas all the enemies replay their same routines.
• Phil is ultimately able to leave Groundhog Day, essentially beating the game. But it took five essential steps for him to get there.
1. Exploration and testing of the boundaries.
• After realizing that he is reliving the same day, Phil decides to test the limits of the world. He drives his car in a crazy fashion, playing chicken with an incoming train, and when he is pulled over by a police officer, he makes fun of the situation by pretending to order fast food. As he drives his car, he claims, "I'm not going to live by their rules anymore!" This act gets him thrown into jail, but he wakes up the next morning back in his hotel room. He cheers as his test succeeded.
• As a player entering a new game, you explore the mechanics and systems. You find out what are your strengths and your weaknesses, your abilities and your limitations.
2. Strategic Action
• After understanding the mechanics, Phil takes advantage of his superhuman ability. He courts Rita, played by Andie MacDowell, by taking her out on a date over and over again. Being the self-centered and misogynous personality that he is, he often says the wrong thing on the date and gets himself slapped in the face. However, he learns from his mistakes each time and corrects it in the following date, ultimately creating the perfect date.
• The player plays with their perceptions of the conditions of the world.
3. Failure
• Phil tries to end the loop by committing suicide, but fails repeatedly. He electrocutes himself, gets hit by a truck, drives off a cliff, and jumps from a tall building, but none of his deaths can prevent the day from repeating.
4. Reassessment and Growth
• Nearing the end of the film, Phil shifts his focus on connecting with the people around him. He gains intimate knowledge of everyone in town. He also makes time out of his day to help people in need including saving a boy who falls from a tree and replacing a flat tire for a group of old women. Despite knowing that all these good action would be undone the next day, he still fits it into his personal routine.
• He did not necessarily realize this was the goal for him to leave the loop, but he does it anyways. The relation between objective and personal growth may not be superficially obvious.
5. Success
• After he finally gets the girl, he was able to break out of the loop. He came out of there as a new man and in the final scene, even suggested to stay in the town.
• Taking the five steps into account, we can define a "Groundhog Day game" as one that achieves player growth by the design of its world. In these games, failure is an option and the world has consistent ethos. The world itself is a source of guidance and the creator (the Hand of God) doesn't directly intervene. It leaves room for epiphany and also for disorientation. Examples of Groundhog Day games include Myst, Spelunky, Metroid, Journey, and Norrland (a game by Cactus).
• In Scrooged, the three ghosts lead Frank around and punish him for not following their directions. In one scene with the ghost of Christmas past, the ghost tells Frank that he must have an emotional reaction when he sees his parents. He leads Frank by the neck even though Frank is completely against it. Instead of letting Frank have that emotional connection naturally, he basically forces him towards that path.
• The ghost of Christmas present is a fairy who obnoxiously leads Frank around, very similar to The Legend of Zelda's Navi.
• John defined a new term. To scrooge is to subvert the player's agency, prompting or making decisions for them. The Hand of God directs the player where to go and the player ends up not trusting the world.
• Examples of scrooging include the "woman in the ear" that happen in many shooters like Splinter Cell: Conviction. Other examples are dialog boxes that pop up after you fail a few times asking, "Do you want to switch to easy mode?" or worse yet, a super guide mode that asks you to give up already and let the computer play the game itself. In the reboot of SSX, after failing a few times, the game allows the player to skip the level altogether while still gaining XP and bonuses from that level. The level does not even matter at that point. These mechanics let the players make the rules, in which case he's no longer the player anymore, he's a creator.
• Choices are the fabric of the game and when you are able to simply skip the level, all efforts have nil value.
• Some other examples of scrooging include internal monologues. In Arkham City, Batman constantly reminds himself that he should go to the next plot point, turning an open-world game into a very linear experience. In Alan Wake, Alan's internal monologues often gives the player the solutions to the puzzles. These types of scrooging alienates players from his own avatar.
• Problems with scrooging is that it values nominal success over personal growth. Without failure, the Scrooged game skips steps 3 and 4 of the Groundhog Day model.
• In the final scenes of each movie, you can clearly see the results of the different models. In Groundhog Day, Phil is genuinely a good person, having undergone a permanent change in his behavior. In Scrooged, he rants about having a second chance in life in a superbly crazy fashion. He seems completely crazy like he was tripping balls.
• Scrooged games give you thrills and power trips, but these only last temporarily.
• Scrooged games  are mass-market. These types of games are defined by business models. Older games followed the Groundhog Day model because they were arcade games that were meant to make the players pump as many quarters in the machine as possible. In the console generation, value was put into longer, more densely packed games, so games shifted to the Scrooged model to ensure more players are able to get through the content.
• Groundhog Day games force you to be more intimate and nuanced with the mechanics and world.
• In the current generation, games are too expensive to fail, so development cannot be put in the hands of the creative people.
• In the indie scene, however, financial motive is secondary. Indie developers have modest resources and personal expression is not directed by marketing or the lowest common denominator.
• There are also social factors. Helicopter parents (who over-direct their children's lives) tend to have better educated kids, but the kids are stunted in social development. Over-direction is not a good thing.
• In the US, there is a safe playground movement where seesaws, merry-go-rounds, and anything deemed remotely dangerous are removed from playgrounds. However, studies have shown that protecting kids would make them more neurotic. Parents shepherding kids are more harmful to them.
• Instead of letting kids go down a slide on their own, many parents put their kids on their laps and slide down with them. However, many kids get their legs caught on the side and the weight of their parents going down end up fracturing the kid's leg. This is a completely preventable disaster if the parents have more trust in their kids.
• "I learned something, I gained something, I found something."
• Hardcore vs. casual gamer is a false binary. Casual players are just like hardcore gamers but they are not so familiar with all the videogame tropes yet.
• Survival horror needs procedural generation to keep it scary without scrooging the player.
• Facebook games do not have true failure. Their type of failure, such as the withering of crops, is so binary and basic that it doesn't illicit any personal growth by overcoming them.

Topics to Make Your Developer Blog Interesting

At the game company that I work for, we've discussed internally about starting a new blog to build our studio brand and more importantly, attract new hires. We've had two brainstorms about topics that we think the blog should cover and as with all brainstorms, many out-of-the-box ideas came from it. Thinking about this more, I think it's not really a big secret about what makes a good developer blog.

To start, who is the target audience of this new blog? I think it can be broken down into three categories. The first are people who have talent but aren't currently in the games industry. To attract this group as hires, we just have to show them why games are the industry to be in. Thankfully, we have so many employees who are passionate about games. We live and breathe games. We should write about why games are important to us. We should show the awesome games we're working on, the amazing art we produce at the company, the fun game challenges we do, and cool tech demos of our game engines.

The second category are people who are in the games industry, but don't have that superstar talent yet. Attracting this group to our blog is easy. We have to educate them. Personally, I only ever spend time reading another company's blog if it's informational or educational. I'm a busy man so I'd only dedicate my time to reading and following a blog if I feel like I can walk away learning something new or thinking about something in a new way.

Fortunately, we have a lot of great talent in our company. Game designers should write about game design theory, dissect a game that they're currently playing, or walk through the reasons they've made a certain decision in our games. Artists should write about art techniques, or about the many iterations of art designs that a single game went through and the reasons why those changes were made. Programmers should write about programming problems they've encountered and the clever solutions they find, or introduce new tools that they started using. Analytics and revenue teams should write about how data drives game design or what kind of UI has been proven to monetize. Producers can write about their experiences with scrum or tips for managing a team.

There is such a breadth and depth of knowledge to be shared. While I understand that many things of the company are disclosed for contractual reasons, close-to-full transparency and sharing of knowledge is the best thing your blog can have. Ronimo, the developers of the fantastic Awesomenauts, has a great developer blog written by the lead programmer that is very transparent about their programming problems, art iterations, and even unreleased game concepts. I'm subscribed to over 600 blogs and this is easily one of my top five blogs to follow.

Finally, the third category are people who have the talent and are in the games industry, but they're just with another company. To attract this group, we have to show them what we offer as a company that others don't. Most certainly, the best thing about the company is that we empower employees to have creative freedom and give them many avenues to express themselves and have their voices heard.

We run a weekly brainstorm meeting where we tackle design challenges a project is facing. Every employee can attend the meeting and throw out ideas, no matter how crazy or farfetched they are. As we always say, there are no bad ideas in the brainstorm. We have an idea submission process where any employee can submit a snippet of a game idea and then a dedicated team develops a prototype of the idea in two weeks. If the idea is great, it might even turn into a full-production game for the world to play. We also run annual game jams where the entire company steps out of their everyday roles and get inspired to make off-the-wall games. Not many game companies give their employees the channels to have their creativity expressed, so that is definitely a strength of ours that we can expose.

Searching for Fun: Procedural Content Generation as Search and as a Necessity

Julian Togelius, an associate professor at the IT University of Copenhagen, spoke about the necessity of procedural content generation in game development. His main research interests include game AI, adaptive games, player modeling, and procedural content generation.


Presentation

• Procedural content generation (PCG) is the process to create content with zero or limited human intervention. PCG is done algorithmically. It does not necessarily mean NPC behaviors or game mechanics, but content, which includes levels, maps, terrains, dungeons, puzzles, quests, rules, characters, parameters, and rewards.
• PCG is necessary. Developers don't have the time or money to generate all content, especially in this age with high development costs. Players burn through content way faster than developers can design and implement them.
• Elder Scrolls: Skyrim is a huge success, partly due to some of its PCG nature. It pushes its budget just a bit more.
• Games with PCG include Elite which is a huge game that fits in Commodore 64's memory, Rogue, Diablo, Dwarf Fortress, Far Cry 2, Speed Tree, Civilization IV, and Borderlands.
• However, PCG sucks. It's unreliable, uncontrollable, lacks macrostructure, can produce boring and generic results, is poor with animations, and can't represent style.
• The future of PCG is search, the need to check generated results. Populate with multiple generations and pick the best choices. This is an evolutionary computation. Keep a population of candidates, remove the bad based on a fitness algorithm, and keep repeating until the remaining candidates are good enough.
• Evolutionary computation allows exploration of larger design space and better control. Most importantly, it avoids catastrophic failure where fitness equals zero.
• Julian developed a PCG system that created Starcraft maps. For the fitness functions, he looked for terrains that would create interesting game events such as choke points, paths from one station to another, enough resources in each area, and blockages. However, the generated maps were poorly received by playtesters because Julian believed that asymmetrical maps were more interesting, but hardcore Starcraft players would only play in symmetrical maps.
• When representing a dungeon, you can create a PCG function based on a grid. Getting more abstract, you can simply create the system based on position and direction of walls. Getting yet more abstract, you can generate based on patterns of walls and floor. Even more abstract, you can define just the number of rooms and doors.
• Cameron Brown's Ludi and Yavaloth are procedurally generated board games, not that its in-game mechanics are procedurally generated but the game design was all generated by a computer. The title Yavaloth itself was also procedurally generated.
• Julian created Infinite Super Mario Bros, a PCG take on Super Mario World. The levels were procedurally generated and during playtesting, testers were asked to rate the levels based on fun, frustration, and anxiety. Using this data, the system created better levels in an exhaustive search for optimal parameters.
• Galactic Arms Race is a PCG game where weapons would constantly evolve based on the collective player-base.
• Infinite Tower Defense is a PCG tower defense game where enemies learn player patterns and develop new tactics. Meanwhile, the player gets PCG weapons based on their most commonly used weapons.

Question and Answer

• Improviso is a puppet theater game about acting. It is a multiplayer game which pairs players anonymously online to dramatize a story together. Meanwhile, an AI system collects data from thousands of players and once trained, it can autonomously play the role of one of the characters in the play.
• Can you represent the game rules as a vector such that it simulates a new player who doesn't know how to play and then builds levels that fits the simulated player? For example, in the original Super Mario Bros., the levels slowly teach the player new mechanics as he progresses through. This can be computationally expensive.
• The most memorable PCG stories are the failures. Nobody remembers the successes.
• Can the game "yes, and" the player? For example, the game builds itself around what the player is expecting to do. The game sends a slow walking enemy towards the player, expecting the player to jump. Whatever the player presses to jump, that becomes the jump button for the rest of the game.
• Julian developed a game where you drive around a car in a field of colored blocks. The player can set up specific causes and consequences. For example, whenever the car hits a red block, create two green blocks. While the player is setting up these rules, the game itself is trying to figure out what the goal of the game is and it builds additional rules to reinforce that. In this way, it is yes-anding the player, but it became clear that things get really chaotic very fast. Yes-anding only works when both sides are in agreement with each other.

Trials of Designing Procedurally Generated Adventure Games

Clara Fernández-Vara, a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, gave a presentation about her procedurally generated adventure games. Her work concentrates on adventure games and narrative in simulated environments.

Presentation

• Procedural content generation has existed in video games since early maze games and rogue-likes. Even the shuffling of cards from a card game can be considered procedural generation.
• Will Wright's presentation of Spore at GDC focused on letting the users do the work of creating content. Procedural generation is focused on letting the computers do the work.
• Clara's primary genre of focus are adventure games. Her influences include Heavy Rain, Machinarium, and Phoenix Wright.
• Her goal is to look for innovation in adventure games. She wanted to create a system based on psyche and recreate the logic of dreams. Dreams happen to be unstable and random, so it fits perfectly with the somewhat random results of procedural generation.
• The initial system that she designed involves creating a puzzle structure -> populating it with puzzles -> creating object combinations out of a list of NPCs, properties, and items -> and selecting and placing the objects in a specific order.
• The puzzle generation system she used was inspired by GRIOT. She created Symon in 2010, in which the player is trapped in the dreams of a paralyzed patient.
• The designer's role in a procedurally generated game is to figure out the puzzles and objects that provide insight into the narrative. She focuses on adventure games as simulation, thus it's important that generated puzzles have to create narrative. In Symon, for example, there's a puzzle involving a carnivorous plant, which signifies gardening. Symon doesn't like gardening, but he's been doing it for the last couple of years for his wife. The plant blocks Symon from progressing, but he can choose to kill it or give it something so that it leaves him alone.
• The development of Symon had several problems. The design was dependent on the code, so whenever the designer wanted to make a change, she needed the programmer to implement it. Secondly, the process and iteration was slow due to the programmer being a bottleneck. Finally, there was only one type of puzzle with one variation (fetch quests).
• Many players don't expect to replay adventure games, so a lot of the procedurally generated nature was ignored by the audience. There was a big challenge to write walkthroughs as every player experienced a different game with different characters and puzzles. However, once the game was played through a few times, it was very easy to figure out the system and the game got boring.
• Many tools were built to help the designers such as a tool to create puzzle patterns, a puzzle map, and a database editor.
• Generating puzzles procedurally doesn't mean it's playable. There's a lot to add to make it an actually meaningful experience such as giving hints to the player when they're stuck.
• Clara worked on Stranded in Singapore in 2011. It took place in the real world instead of in a dream. With this game, she had more control over the design and was able to add more puzzle patterns, although the generation algorithm still needed work.
• Randomness can be an enemy of believability. For example, there was a puzzle in the game that involved finding ice cream and two slices of bread, combining them into a literal ice-cream sandwich. This is an actual food found in Singapore that the designers wanted to include in the game as a means to expose Singapore's culture. However, many players thought it was a random result of the procedural generation and didn't believe it actually exists.
• Stranded in Singapore had a problem reconciling fiction with the mechanics. In Symon, the procedural generation made sense in the dream world since dreams are random and wacky, but it was odd in Stranded in Singapore.
• Stranded in Singapore was focused on food, bargaining, and commercial transactions.
• Lessons of designing procedurally generated adventure games are to focus on simulation, design relationships that generate narrative, and ensure that the game premise and fiction complement each other.

Question and Answer

• The environments of Symon were generated based on the characters that were randomly selected to be in the game session.
• The variation of objects is the biggest factor to give more narrative range and better replayability.
• Clara's games are designed to not let the player get stuck. In order to do so, the games allow an undo or reset ability.
• Her games are basically parodies of adventure games.
• To generate the game session, the game has to generate the puzzles in backwards order.