The Intelligent Design Movement

“If you really want to know what is at risk from the anti-evolution movement, look at Kansas. And the reason of that is, when the anti-evolution movement got control of the state board of education, what did they do? They rewrote the definition of Science itself. Not just Biology. Not just Evolution. Science.”

This is a great speech by Ken Miller about the dangers of the anti-evolution movement in America, and the very real danger that they pose to our education system. In the process, he presents conclusive proof of evolution (as if we needed any more) and rips apart the reasoning behind intelligent design. It’s almost two hours of video, but half of that is taken up by the QA session. Even that part is well worth watching all the way through.

Meaningful Button Mashing

When we were kids, my brother and I would steal my parents’ calculator to play a simple game: entering 1 + 1, we would then repeatedly press the = button, incrementing the counter by 1 with every press. The objective was to reach 100 in the shortest time possible, with the (non-digital) clock ticking – leading to many rounds of wild button mashing (and a dubiously timed leaderboard). What does this primitive game, invented by two boys below the age of 10, have to do with modern game design? Quite a bit, if you go by the state of current console games. Button-hammering gameplay is ubiquitous in today’s titles, usually in the form of “press X quickly to perform some act of strength”.

It would be easy to react cynically to this historical parallel, to the effect of “oh boy, look how far we’ve come as an industry!” If a couple of pre-teens could come up with the mechanic in the 80s, shouldn’t today’s multi-million dollar games do better? But, if framed correctly, there’s meaningful gameplay in these button mashing minigames. That is true for three reasons:

Investment
Button mashing sequences are often connected to high-stakes, high-reward situations, with the player very interested in the result. In God of War, the player mashes a button to kill off various enemies (often by ripping them apart.) In Dead Space, the player mashes A to escape from grappling Necromorphs. Both situations are high impact; in the first the enemy gets back up and continues to attach the player if he fails, in the latter the attacking enemy quickly drains the player’s health which, if not shaken off, results in his eventual death. The player is heavily invested in the outcome of each situation, and this investment adds meaning to the mechanically simple action.

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Why High Fructose Corn Syrup Is Evil, Part 2

I don’t claim to understand the low-level science behind all of it, but if you watched Robert H Lustig’s lecture from a few weeks ago, this new study from Princeton University university shouldn’t come as much of a surprise: High-Fructose Corn Syrup Prompts Considerably More Weight Gain, Researchers Find. Several of the points from Lustig’s lecture return in this article, for example that

as a result of the manufacturing process for high-fructose corn syrup, the fructose molecules in the sweetener are free and unbound, ready for absorption and utilization. In contrast, every fructose molecule in sucrose that comes from cane sugar or beet sugar is bound to a corresponding glucose molecule and must go through an extra metabolic step before it can be utilized.

The researchers go on to show that “rats with access to high-fructose corn syrup gained significantly more weight than those with access to table sugar, even when their overall caloric intake was the same”, and conclude that even though

“some people have claimed that high-fructose corn syrup is no different than other sweeteners when it comes to weight gain and obesity, [...] our results make it clear that this just isn’t true, at least under the conditions of our tests”. [...] “When rats are drinking high-fructose corn syrup at levels well below those in soda pop, they’re becoming obese — every single one, across the board. Even when rats are fed a high-fat diet, you don’t see this; they don’t all gain extra weight.”

I’m not on a holy crusade against America’s corn industry, but that pokes conclusive holes into their propaganda and proves something that a lot of us have known intuitively for a while. I used to drink one Coke per day, thinking that by closely monitoring my sugar calorie intake and treating the soda for what it was, candy, I was still maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Maybe I was, but HFCS is ubiquitous. With the evidence mounting, we’ll hopefully return to a life where consumer goods like simple bread aren’t “enriched” with sugars anymore.

GDC 2010: Level Design Tutorial

I cleaned up the slides from the lecture I gave during the GDC 2010 Level Design tutorial. This was an introductory look at the world of level design – what he does and how he does it. The material is entry level, but a good overview of the disciplines. You will find some overlap with the environmental definition that Harvey and I used in our “What Happened Here?” session.

(201) Level Design in a Day: Best Practices from the Best in the Business
Session Description:
In this intense day-long tutorial, attendees will gain deep insights from some of the most experienced level designers in the industry. The tutorial will cover every aspect of the level design process, from basic navigation and object manipulation tips and tricks to best practices for encounter design and level flow. As the development discipline responsible for crafting the vastly important moment-to-moment player experience, a deep understanding of core level design principles becomes essential for level designers, game designers and design managers alike. Likewise, an intimate familiarity with the level creation process can be a massive advantage to producers, testers or artists. This year’s session will focus on the Unreal Engine, while subsequent years will focus on Source, Quake, and other popular engines.

Intended Audience:
Level designers, mission designers, game designers and scripters will gain deep insights into the best practices and proven processes used by our industry’s leading teams. Additionally, writers, level artists and quality assurance professionals will come away from this talk  better prepared to collaborate and contribute to the level creation process. All attendees should have a solid understanding of the level design process, as well as a basic familiarity with the tools of the trade. Experience with the Unreal Editor will also be beneficial this year, but is not required to fully participate in the tutorial.

Takeaway:
Newcomers to the world of level design will gain a solid foundation in the art and science of level design while experienced level designers will come away from the talk with a bevy of tips, tricks, and best practices in use by some of the best level designers in the industry. Experienced producers, artists and testers will gain an intimate understanding of the level design process, and will be better equipped to manage and collaborate with this essential part of the game development process.

Speakers:
Coray Seifert, Game Designer, THQ – Kaos Studios
Matthias Worch, Senior Level Designer, Visceral Games
Neil Alphonso, Lead Level Designer, Splash Damage
Richard Carlson, Level Designer/game designer/musician/sfx dood, Digital Eel
Ed Byrne, Creative Director, Zipper Interactive
Forrest Dowling, Lead Multiplayer Level Designer, THQ – Kaos Studios
Joel Burgess, Lead Level Designer, Bethesda Softworks
Jim Brown, Lead Level Designer, Epic Games

Download the slides for this session below.

GDC 2010 LD Tutorial Downloads
Slides (PowerPoint 2007 .pptx, 4.5MB)

Hockey Fixation

This chart from The Globe And Mail is pretty cool and enlightening. The level of water consumption in Edmonton during the USA – Canada gold medal hockey game. I wonder what that chart looks like for an American city during the Superbowl.

Bug-Induced Environmental Storytelling

When driving home from GDC on Friday night, the iPod shuffle started playing the Dungeon Theme from Ultima VI. Of course I started to reminiscence, and with our environmental storytelling lecture fresh on my mind, I remembered something that strongly relates to the topic of our talk. You see, I played Ultima VI on the Amiga – and that is very important in all of this.

Dismissed as technically infeasible and not financially viable early on, Origin eventually released the Amiga version of Ultima VI two years after the original PC version. I loved it, but the conversion did come at a price: some music had to be cut to fit into memory, dungeons with many enemies often slowed to a crawl (forcing the player to wait as long as 10 seconds between moves), and the game had a few bugs. One of those bugs is of particular interest here: Ultima VI, on the Amiga, liked to duplicate inventories. Every couple of hours, upon either loading or saving the game, the party would end up with two versions of every inventory item they had possessed. But rather than celebrating this unexpected gift from the heavens, I cried foul! As the Avatar, I wasn’t in the business of saving Britannia through cheap tricks. So I diligently went through my belongings, character after character, weeded out the duplicate items, and dropped them on the ground. Of course the game saved all those item locations, and after a while I had “taboo” item caches all over the world, reminding me of my journey thus far I returned to the various towns and dungeons.

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GDC 2010: “What Happened Here?” – Environmental Storytelling

What Happened Here? Environmental Storytelling
Speaker: Harvey Smith (Game Director, Arkane Studios), Matthias Worch (Senior Level Designer, Visceral Games)
Date/Time: Thursday, 3pm – 4pm
Track: Game Design
Format: 60-minute Lecture
Experience Level: All

Session Description
This lecture examines the game environment as a narrative device, with a focus on further involving the player in interpreting (or pulling) information, in opposition to traditional fictional exposition. We provide an analysis of how and why some games in particular create higher levels of immersion and consistency, and we propose ways in which dynamic game systems can be used to expand upon these techniques. The lecture presents the techniques for environmental storytelling, the key to the creation of game spaces with an inherent sense of history; game spaces that invite the player’s mind to piece together implied events and to infer additional layers of depth and meaning. In addition to commonly-used environmental storytelling tools (such as props, scripted events, texturing, lighting and scene composition), we present ideas for using game systems to convey narrative through environmental reaction. Environmental storytelling engages the player as an active participant in narrative; game systems that reflect the player’s agency can do the same. The lecture will analyze existing cases and provide a framework for dynamic environmental storytelling in games.

Intended Audience
This session is aimed at creative directors, narrative designers, level designers and level artists who want to take the environmental storytelling of their games to the next level. A good understanding of the subject matter, and game environmental design in general, is a bonus.

Takeaway
Attendees leave with a clear understanding of traditional environmental storytelling techniques, the current state of the art, and ideas on how to expand these concepts to new proportions using systemic environmental storytelling approaches.

Download the slides for this session below. I recommend the notes file, which gives you all slides along with the talking points. You can also download the slides and speaker notes individually.

GDC 2010 Downloads
Slides + Notes (Adobe Acrobat .pdf, 7.5MB)
Slides + Notes, Compressed (Adobe Acrobat .pdf, 2MB)
Slides Only, Compressed (Adobe Acrobat .pdf, 6MB)
Speaker Notes (text file)