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)

Twitter

I now have a Twitter account. Follow me if you like!

Samuel Drake and Baby Crunch Time

Our first child, Samuel Drake Worch, was born a week ago. It was quite a journey: from rushing home because Victoria’s water had broken; to driving to the hospital and seeing my wife go through six hours of painstaking labor; to supposedly seeing him being born “any minute now”; to rushing to surgery for an emergency c-section because as it turns out, Sam was so tangled up in the umbilical cord that it was pretty much impossible for him to come out the natural way. But mom and baby are doing fine, and we’ve been home since Sunday. The first few days have indeed been challenging – little rest, irregular sleep patterns, mid-night feedings, lots of diaper changes, and the ever-present need to care for somebody who simply doesn’t yet have that capacity for himself. I should be absolutely exhausted and dead in the water right now, but somehow I’ve managed. And I believe that a lot of that has to do with thirteen years of professional game development. Because really, all that Sam is asking of us is yet another crunch time.

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GDC 2010 Session Times

(201) Level Design in a Day: Best Practices from the Best in the Business
Speakers:
Coray Seifert (Game Designer, THQ – Kaos Studios)
Matthias Worch (Senior Level Designer, Visceral Games)
Neil Alphonso (Lead Level Designer, Splash Damage)
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)
Date/Time: Wednesday (March 10, 2010)

What Happened Here? Environmental Storytelling
Speakers:
Harvey Smith (Game Director, Arkane Studios)
Matthias Worch (Senior Level Designer, Visceral Games)
Date/Time: Thursday (March 11, 2010)   3:00pm — 4:00pm
Location (room): Room 125, North Hall
Track: Game Design
Format: 60-minute Lecture
Experience Level: All