I'm back from Game Focus Germany, the second such event, held in Hanover on Thursday and Friday of last week. Approximately half the events were auf Deutsch and half in English; since, as a board wargamer, my German is pretty much limited to "panzerkampfwagen" and "blitzkrieg", I only attended the English-language sessions.
I gave the keynote on the first day, a talk entitled "The Independent Developer Shall Rise Again!" (the presentation is here). It was basically a discussion of emerging business models and distribution channels for independently created computer games.
Jonathan Blow followed with "Programming is Easy, Production is Harder, Game Design is Hardest", which essentially argued that because good game design is fuzzy and hard to measure, but of fundamental importance, it's the hardest part of development. He pointed out that by the time he's completed Braid, it will have taken three years out of his life--and while he doesn't regret the time, he also wonders about the difficulty of finding another theme that's worth spending three years exploring. (The subtext, of course, being wonderment at how readily most developers devote themselves to the creation of things that patently are completely unworthy of the time devoted to their creation.)
Stephane Bura, of 10tacle, talked on the subject of "Inside Out Game Design" in which he essentially presented an original and hermetic theory of game design which I don't quite understand but found interesting--I'll have to look at his ideas in more detail. In essence, he divides a player's interaction with a game into three levels--the Action level, the System level, and the Experience level--and the way the player interacts with each level into several different categories as well. He maintains that each combination of a level with a category corresponds to an emotion, and that his scheme can be used, in essence, as a means of planning emotional response to game events.
Risa Cohen's talk was "Zen and the Art of Production Maintenance," in which she spoke about her experiences as a freelancer working either for publishers or for completion bond agencies, walking into developers working on a project, figuring out where the problems are and helping them make things move more smoothly, using her experiences with The Witcher as illustration. (The Polish developers said their greatest worry was uncertainty about the quality of the English localization, which she solved quickly by hiring an American to look it over; they put as a lower priority solving the low frame rate, which she told them needed to be their highest priority before gold master.)
Noel Llopis of Power of 2 Games -- a two-man indie game developer currently working on an XBLA title -- talked about his development methodology, and how it differs from that required by large teams. Among his recommendations: test-driven development, a light version of agile development even in a small team, and use of open source development tools whenever possible (including Subversion and Trac, as well as Google apps for project tracking, documentation, and communication).
During the party on Thursday night, my most memorable conversation was with a German developer who complained that even though the German-speaking market is the world's third largest (after the US and Japan), only 6% of games are developed in Germany. I pointed out that everyone has some similar complaint. Australian developers bitch that they're viewed as a low-cost development center, and are handed platform ports and franchise extensions to do, rarely getting a chance to do original work; New York developers complain that the major publishers view the city as too expensive, so that (barring Kaos, a THQ studio), none of the majors will do business here, and NY developers are largely limited to casual games and advergames; Mexican developers would just like to see anything happening in Mexico. Doubtless, given its population and high level of technical education, Germany can do better; but if you're waiting for the likes of EA and Ubisoft to get a clue, it's going to be a long wait, and you're better off figuring out something to do on your own.
On Friday, Doug Church spoke on "Player Expression," by which he means something like expressing your inner personality through play. The main focus was on enabling greater expressiveness in single-player games by having the system remember past actions and respond in future accordingly -- Fable as an example of a game that does so, but tracks player actions only a single dimension (good/evil). He did discuss player expression in multiplayer games, e.g., performance for friends in Guitar Hero and equipment/clothing in MMOs--but it does occur to me that while player expression, in Doug's definition, is a nice extra feature in a single-player game, only in a multiplayer game does it actually matter, because only in a multiplayer game do you present your "expression" to other real people.
Kevin McGinnis of Harmonix spoke about the UI and HUD design for Rock Band. It was interesting because it was very definitely a graphic designer's perspective, something you don't often get at events like this. The visual design was inspired both by rock posters from the 60s and 70s and rock documentaries; the UI task in particular was complicated by the fact that the dev team would often ask for unanticipated screens from the art group. Luckily, McGinnis had commissioned detailed, hand-drawn art that could be cut apart and assembled as needed when new requirements came in. He also paid particular attention to type design, and kept abreast of the graphical tricks implemented by the programming team, so he could beg, borrow, or steal them for use in the UI frame.
Robin Hunicke's presentation was "Collaboration FTW: What Game Studios and Game Studies Can Learn From Each Other". Her basic idea is that "industry" and "the academy" were initially leery of one another, but have learned to work together in productive ways. The most problematic slide for me was one in which she presented the "false" ideas that academics had to get over, learning better, before that collaboration could occur: apparently, academics "falsely" believed that big publishers are conservative, slow moving, and utterly uncreative, while independent developers are creative and the only real hope for innovation in the industry. My problem is that this isn't "false;" it happens to be true (in the, you know, objective and Platonic meaning of "true," that is, actually and demonstrably factual). What the academy has actually learned is that big publishers are the only likely source of actual money (witness EA's funding for USC's game studies program). To me, this implies that "falsity" in this particular dialectic equates with "poor," factuality not being relevant, or at least capable of being ignored in the light of more important facts, such as "the piper pays." Money is truth, truth money; that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. (No, Robin didn't actually go there, and yes, I'm riding my hobby horse.)
Stephane Admiak of Goa.com, France Telecom's game portal, spoke about the casual game industry. Very little new to me here, except a perspective into how this has worked differently in France, but perhaps useful for people in the audience not previously cognizant of the growth of casual games.
And so to bed.
personal expression
I registered here solely to disagree with your comment that personal expression only matters in a multiplayer environment.
One game alone will prove that this is not the case, that game being the mammoth which is "The Sims". Now The Sims may be about living a life but it is so much more, people spend hundreds of hours creating new Sims, homes and custom content for inside these homes and for these Sims to be wearing.
The Sims would never have gotten popular if people didn't love to express themselves, even more so than they love playing games. Why has the Sims became the behemoth that it is? why do people love to express themselves so much in a game that no one else sees? and why did the sims online flop if personal expression only matters in multiplayer games?
The Sims isn't the only place where we see this, however it is the most prominent. Many people make graphics mods to completely replace the graphics in a game, now these games are rarely multiplayer games, so why would they go to all that effort of expressing themselves in that sort of manner if no one will see?
I could go on for a long time about this but I think I have put my point across, feel free to argue but I will probably come back with some more arguments.
Only
I didn't mean to suggest that player expression is -only- important in multiplayer games, merely that it's -more- important in such.
Games as a means of creative expression
I think seraphic has a good point...Just because I find this topic interesting, I'd like to talk about it and provide a better example in the form of the "After Action Report". Here's an entire forum of play reports from Galactic Civilizations 2:
http://forums.galciv2.com/?forumid=350
Basically the idea is that the players go through the game and do their thing, taking notes on what strategies they use and what events happen during the game. After (or during) the action, the players write down all the events in the form of a story. Because Galactic Civilizations 2 supports a lot of different play styles, games can be very different...And more than that, the players can express themselves through their choices. So, for example, if you want to be an evil dictator who taxes your populace into near-oblivion and then brainwashes them to support you, you can do that.
The point I'm trying to get at is that the players are using the game to create their own stories, expressing their creativity in that way. I think there are great possibilities for games to be used as tools of creative expression. In this case the "story" isn't something provided by cutscene "beads"; the story is actually the chronicle of the experiences the player has while playing the game.
Of course, maybe the whole point is that the players share their reports on this forum. So, in a sense, even though the game is definitely single-player, they make it into a way to showcase their talents to other people. I suppose art isn't really art unless someone other than the author experiences it, huh? Or if someone does their Sims stuff and never shows it to anyone else, that still allows them to expression their creativity on their own. I'm not real certain on this point, but oh well.
This also ties in with the growing trend of people creating levels for their games and sharing them on the net. Of course that's been happening for years, but it's becoming more important; Richocet: Infinity has a powerful level editor that lets you upload your level packs to the central server, where others can download, play and rate them. So the best levels bubble up to the top of the list. And of course there's Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Little Big Planet, Spore...
Your description of Stephane
Your description of Stephane Bura's talk sounds remarkably like the "MDA Framework" by LeBlanc, Hunicke and Zubek (http://www.cs.northwestern.edu/~hunicke/MDA.pdf). The idea being that the player experiences a game from the outside in (first the play experience, then they start to grasp the dynamics, and eventually as they master they game they understand the underlying mechanics)... but that game designers normally go in the opposite direction (design the mechanics, which then automatically create the dynamics through their interaction, which then automatically creates the play experience). Designers have to go in both directions. Very important, but not terribly complicated. Was this what Bura was trying to say?
As for player expression only mattering in multiplayer games, if that's true, how would you explain playing Dance Dance Revolution on doubles (one player using both pads)? Single player, but performing for an audience, so expression is the whole point. Even leaderboards and high-score lists for single-player games offer a tiny amount of expression (choosing your username, or back in the day, choosing three initials to display on that arcade game). And let's not even get into all of the YouTube videos of people performing insane feats on any game of your choice, single-player. Or the whole realm of machinima. Or Sim/Tycoon games which practically require you to map your personality onto the game. Or, yes, Fable... one-dimensional though it may be, the player still must make a choice, and that choice is critical to the play of that particular game.