f13.net

GDC07 - Raphing It Up #1

You read that right - we did actually sit down with Raph at GDC this year. Belatedly, we bring you the first in a short series of articles, consisting of transcripts from the marathon interview conducted at the very beginning of the conference.

As is becoming standard with our designer interviews, we're roaming all over the landscape in terms of topics. In this installment, we touch on Areae, team sizes, Chief Creative Officers, game grammars, the play preferences of children and the fun of flapping, among many other things.

Enjoy!

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"Andean Bird."

The version shown at GDC is up here: http://www.raphkoster.com/2007/03/09/gdc-07-jon-blows-nuances-of-design-session/

Fixed, thanks. :)

Nobody likes our interview, Yoru!  :heartbreak:

SOE/Sigil stole your thunder. Apologies.

Irony++?

Edit: I make it a point not to have other site content when interviews and such go up, but this particular set of news posts couldn't exactly wait if you know what I'm saying.

Oh, I understand. :)

Don't worry, next time we'll just go get some Amy's Ice Cream instead. ;)


And this is why I'm probably going to hold the next installment until later this week; gotta let the Sigil thing blow over and get back to Slow News Time.

Feel free to reveal details of what your company is actually doing.  I bet you'll get the thunder back then.

Picturing the UO skunkworks was a nice memory. I always liked the story of how that came together, it helps explain goddamned U9 (ie: the only Ultima I didn't like). You should join other UO vets on  :nda: ;)

Or at least announce you're using a Planetside 2.0 engine for your sandboxy world-build. Dude...4WD + guns, mechanics as crafters. C'mon. Sorry, you know I feel compulsed to say this stuff by now. But I'll bring it around to your zen gaming thing...In Planetside, sometimes I just like driving around on a buggy. I roleplay that I'm 15 again, riding around on the trails behind my parent's house...but there are tanks shooting at me. I used to play 'Crazy Taxi' in BF1942. Pull up with a jeep, honk the horn, guys pile in ("Jump in!") and then I'd drive them to the front line and yell "Bail out!". To me, the game is cool, but the mechanics of vehicles and interesting gameplay elements like that allow freedom to do much more fun things at the fringes of everyone who is actually playing the game 'as intended'.

Don't know if you remember back on LtM when you first announced you were working for SOE, before SWG was announced iirc, I said I hoped you made enough money (and fame) to make the game you really wanted to make (this was just after UO, remember), /after/ the SOE gig. You replied that you hoped you /were/ making that game, at SOE. I love your idealism, man, I seriously do.

So...now make that game. We're still here waiting! :)

The bit about board games was cool. My singer and I were art majors together (our band started as an art project, making album covers!) and we used to make tons of our own board games, back in the day of your Gangsters or Star Frontiers with tons of little cardboard counters. We had a class project (same year as the album covers, both our ideas) for a board game. Everyone made like Sorry or some weak Monopoly rip. We made an Indiana Jones adventure where you had encounter tables around the game map, you'd roll to see if pirhana attacked when you crossed a river, you'd have combat tables for fighting the 'zulu'. You could choose from several weapons (whip, pistol, spear, maybe more) and take weapons from other players/npcs. The other kids hated us.

qft

I'm wondering about the anxiety expressed over the mechanistic notion of game as nothing more than math, or a clockwork. A sort of thought progression from fun as pattern learning, to realizing those patterns are mathematical, to game grammar/notation, to the anxiety part seems to be described. I'm not sure what the anxiety is about; Other artforms are governed by and/or describable by math, (music is an easy example). I know of musical scores that were contrived based purely upon mathematical principles, that when played can elicit extraordinary emotional responses. Maybe the issue is that our current computer languages, and the machines that process them are too simple of a clockwork to either spoof or more accurately represent more subtle and rich structures and dynamics? Quantization may not be an issue if the gradations are more fine than our perceptual abilities. If a gray wash is indistinguishable from a greyscale, they are the same thing to the observer.

6-8 weeks from now.

I suppose the best explanation I can offer is to point to this talk I gave last year:

http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/11/10/project-horseshoe-influences/

Werewolf looks like a fun party game. Thanks for the link to it.

I read the interview and felt frustration that Raph couldn't talk more about his project.  I went to his homepage and downloaded his game and played it.  Then I downloaded The Marriage and played that (I'm with the guy's wife - I hate the rules too).

Interesting as they are, I want to clicky clicky punch buttons too much for these games, I think.  I want my actions to do more - there's nothing subtle about me, and I suck at games where subtlety is required.

I did like the little floaty things and the music.  But I wanted to steeply divebomb my bird into the ocean or the island and smash it.

You want to make your seagull game fun?

Low brow it...

Let me poop on stuff. Bonus points if you can find cars their owners just finished washing.

*More bonus points if people shake their fist at me when I poop on them or something they own.
You also want to make sure you get a couple different "splat noises".

He's right.  Also, killing something in as graphical a manner as possible wouldn't hurt either.  You could tie them both together, once you've killed and eaten something then you can poop on something else.

I smell a WoW buster.

Ohh - yea - maybe make it a hawk and you can dive for kittens, bunnies, field mice, frogs and graphically tear them to pieces, while pooping on stuff. If you want to make it game of the year though... add human babies to the list of prey.

The pooping on stuff is key though.

... Pigeon of War?

With Boss battles:  Kid with a BB gun, a hoard of cats, a windmill, etc.

What's funnier - pooping on the hood or the windshield?

It's situational.  Is someone driving the car at 80 down the highway?  Or was it just buffed and polished?

You idiots.  You realize Raph is going to steal your ideas and then become a bazillionaire from this while you'll get nothing.

Go Ralph go. Do it. Do it soon.

Hay - Raph deserves some success after SWG... :rimshot:

Very interesting! Nice interview :)

Oh Good God, how high were you giving that speech ?

Completely sober. But somewhat sleep-deprived. And it was to an audience of equally sleep-deprived game designers. Ya know, sometimes we do talk about stuff like that when you put us all in a room together. :)

Sorry again, Raph.

So no comment on Baby Eating Defecating Eagle?

Also I was thinking about what makes the game of werewolf fun. It's not the game. It's the interaction and play between the people. Sure - the rules help bring it about. But the same can be said of Pictionary or Charades.

It's not the game that is fun. It's the play.

The problem with bringing it online is you will have one person that keeps their eyes open or shouts "THEIR THE WERWOLF!!!!!!" or does anything they can to interfere with the play. I'm starting to agree with Schild that playing with yourself might be the most fun... :P

I've always thought so.

You don't actually think that was an original proposal, do you? :) It's the first, most obvious place people go... and that means there's either a) a huge pent-up demand or b) it's too obvious, and there will soon be clones, and we need to position this title away from the crush. We need different bullets on the box!

(Sorry, my sarcasm muscle is weak before my morning coffee).

No matter what thunder stealing interviews came after Raph's, I'm still looking forward to the next installments of Raph's interview (s?) Hell, the reason I started lurking at the original waterthread was because I stumbled upon a long discussion with Raph involved, I think it was some HRose thread about FUN or something. Maybe UO. Probably UO cause you guys know how I roll.

Glad you have stuck around here through the years...now put that theory to work and make me something fun, I have no MMO to play at the moment. ;)

I was actually thinking along the same lines when I read the interview and found myself thinking, "Music is pretty much just math on paper... at least the old-school classical stuff."  I think the problem might arise when you Begin with the math and try to Create the art, rather than Beginning with the Art and then Discovering the math that already lies beneath it.  I feel safe in assuming Music predates Math.  People could design an instrument that played different notes before they could give you the mathematical relationship between those notes.

I think the same used to be said of games... people used to be able to design a good game and then sit back and Quantify the "good" and "bad" points.  Now people often just try to take a list of established "good" points and build a game around them.  It may not work so well in that direction.

Trial and error development probably isn't acceptable on 30 million dollar multi-hundred man year projects.

Neither is: "A, B, C worked for EQ2 so let's do that... X, Y, Z worked for WoW... let's try that too."  I think what Raph was getting to was that there needs to be some level of REAL fun that goes beyond just the numbers and the post-production reviews of previous games.  When you START with the analysis stuff and try to Create fun you often end up with a game that just Misses quite obvious things.

I sort of disagree.  I think you can analyze what was fun in something else and attempt to duplicate it or hopefully build on it.  You do have to remain objective enough to look at what's not working and either fix it, replace it or cut it all together though.

You simply aren't going to get funding for a project unless you can make some rational presentation on why your project should get funding ahead of someone else's.  That is going to require analysis upfront.

True enough... but I wonder if a game in which you just fly a bird would ever be created using that process.  Now, I don't know if the bird thing is something you could take to, say, Microsoft and get $30 million for, but the point remains.  Since we all have VG on the brain I will use it as an example.  When I look at the engine and world they have created I long to do certain things... like be a part of a guild that builds a large City and then defends it from the ravaging hordes (I play PvP servers pretty exclusively these days).  Obviously the people who designed VG did not have those same thoughts... why?  Possibly because they were using the "successful" parts of EQ, WoW, etc. to design their own game.  So, things like "premier dungeons" and "Raids" and "bigger than yours seamless world" were at the forefront.  But, are any of those things "Fun" by default?  Obviously not.  I think sometimes people stopped asking "Why was that fun?" or "Why did that work well?"

Computers are not good for some sorts of fun....

     Personally I think snowball fights are fun. Maybe it's thrillseeking, knowing that if snow gets down your back - it is not going to feel good and getting that secret delight of nailing someone just right. Now lets translate it to a computer game.

     It's really just a game of pong where you try to not get the ball to hit your bar. Boy, that would be fun for about 10 minutes if it was done REALLY REALLY well.

Music, art, philosophy, and science/math (am I forgetting one?) all lead to the same thing: Rome? No. God? maybe. Fun? Oooh yea! The starting point of making a game (based on math, based on feelings, based on ideas) doesn't predetermine the outcome, the process is the important part. Journey is the destination yadda yadda.

I'm still not getting the math design ---> game, anxiety thing. I did read that paper before I posted the first time, maybe I'll take another go at it...

Agreed that the process is the important thing... and in that Process, the GOAL is the key.  I have not been a part of any game development, but even from my limited information (seen screens/vids of developers and such) it seems to be spreadsheets linked to graphics, spreadsheets linked to sounds, spreadsheets linked to lighting, etc.

Even in my line of work (that is very people-oriented and "creative") if you don't have a strong and continually resounding message of "THIS is what we are going for" then you can get lost in the process.  I imagine that is even more of a possibility when your daily tasks for months and months is to make sure a certain spreadsheet does not conflict with a separate spreadsheet.

Communicating the "Fun" factor of a game to the point where every piece of the development team Gets It and Agrees with it is crucial.  That might be one of the reasons why a 6-man team can be better than a 60-man team.