The personal blog of game designer, programmer and Cand. Scient. Informatics, Jimmy Marcus Larsen. Currently working as a game designer at Cego ApS.
May 16, 2008 at 10:52
The second day at Nordic Game was pretty good too. It began with the guys from Harmonix showing of in Rock Band, before they told how they had approached the design of the game. Their simultaneous development of hardware and software was interesting, and I enjoyed hearing about their open company culture where nothing is kept secret from anyone.
Next I attended a session on designing games for children using either an existing or original IP. The difference did not seem to be that big. Both presenters agreed that children games should not be learning games. Learning is just a nice side effect - I completely agree, and finds that thought applicable to any game. Overtly trying to teach about a traditional school subject is pretty boring, but all games should teach the player something - even if that something is only usable in the game world.
The next session was the highlight of the conference. ICO designer Fumito Ueda and Forbidden Siren designer Keiichiro Toyama had joined a session on disruptive design. They did not talk much about that subject, but we all knew about their innovations anyway. The interesting bits was about their backgrounds. Fumito Ueda showed his early art exhibition design, and told that his first computer was an Amiga. He was thrilled to see the high amount of hands raised when he asked how many (former) Amiga users there were - in Japan no one knew the Amiga. His design philosophy was to affect people’s life, and he went about doing it by working on the visual side first. He also showed an early PS1 prototype of ICO, and an early multiplayer version of Shadow of The Colossus - three horse riders were battling a colossus together. Very nice and too bad it was left out of the final version! I was quite impressed with how much of the games Ueda himself had created - design and story are obvious, but he even did some of the character models and animation. Keiichiro Toyama talked about the new Forbidden Siren (New Translation) game, and how the sight jacking system had been improved using a split-screen setup. He also told the audience that he and Ueda was the only two designers within Sony who were allowed to do what ever they wanted. The last interesting bit from that session, was about Another World - apparently that game is an all time favorite and a great inspirational source to many Japanese game designers. Kind of strange that a western game has that position.
The conference ended with the usual panel discussion on the current state of Nordic game development. Apparently, the biggest problem is to get enough talent from outside our region. Peter Zetterberg from Microsoft also feared that Nordic developers would not reach their full potential unless they became more cocky and aggressive with their pitches. He could easily be talking about the phone conversation I had with him last year when he was with Codemasters…
All in all, it was a nice conference. Much better keynotes than last year, but the other sessions were not as good as last year I think - or maybe I just went to the wrong sessions.
May 15, 2008 at 7:05
I’m currently attending the Nordic Game conference in Malmö. A nice conference as usual. This is a summary of my first day conference experience.
The first keynote was with TT Games and about Lego Star Wars and Lego Indiana Jones. Their entrance scene was epic - Darth Vader, stormtroopers and dramatic lighting - never seen better. They talked about the company culture at TT Games; meeting free and surrounded by Lego they play their way to success. The main design philosophy behind their games seemed to be rich presentation above deep mechanics.
Next I was at a panel session on social MMO design. Legendary Richard Bartle was among the panelists, and brought along his deep historic insight and knowledge about what players do in a virtual world without games and content (they create it themselves). He also encouraged developers to not try to addict and imprison players - that way they will never return when they manage to take a break. The panelists seemed to agree that MMO-games should be a hero’s journey with your friends.
Then I went through a session showcasing impressive character art from the Furi Furi company, Heavenly Sword and a bunch of scrapped Rare-games - and some old and not that impressive art from Jet Set Radio.
Avalanche then revealed their pitch strategy and how they manage ideas internally. They had a small pitch group which worked to crystalize concepts that any employe could submit via a standard concept submission form. The best pitches was then taken to publishers - no demo was made before doing so, because they neither had the time nor the money to do so. Their strong internal technology was enough to convince publishers about their abilities.
Finally, the first day ended with an absolutely brilliant talk by Ste Curran. The essence was, that the best stories in games are the stories we tell about those stories. So he told some himself, and brought in people to tell other. I guess you would have to be there to understand how great and different it was. Maybe there is a video somewhere?
April 11, 2008 at 6:42
The final day was short for me as I had a plane to catch (and more than 400 stairs to climb, because I wanted to see the Duomo before leaving Florence). I attended the first and only full CHI session on games. Three papers were presented, and especially the first two were pretty interesting. The first speaker had created Game Over! - a universally inaccessible game. It broke every rule of accessibility and would to some seem like a truly bad game. As a serious game though, with the goal of teaching game designers about accessibility, it was truly great. I need to try that one.
The next speaker had created a list of heuristics for game usability evaluation. I like expert evaluation, but I’m just not sure heuristics are really needed for an expert to evaluate. Also, after the speak Rolf Molich commented, that evaluators do not actually use heuristics the way they are intended to be used. They spot problems, and then try to match the problem with a heuristic - it is meant to be the other way around. I also liked the comment from Florian “Floyd” Müller, that heuristics are better used by designers than evaluators. I agree with that.
The final paper was about social gaming on the Nintendo DS. The information from the study did not seem new to me though, so I found it kind of boring. There was one good idea though; provide a spectator mode for Nintendo DS games. That would be really cool, and it might actually be doable using the wireless connection to stream the action to the Wii.
April 10, 2008 at 7:54
Day 3 has been a bit boring compared to the first days. I followed a session on multi and large screen techniques. Nothing was really neat, but a technique called ninja cursors was kind of inspiring to me as a game designer. It was basically a fancy name for using multiple cursors per mouse - all moving synchronously. The average mouse movement distance was reduced, but there were some problems of resolving ambiguity when two or more cursors had a target. In a game though, that might just provide a fun puzzle element.
Another session presented further fancy cursor techniques. The most promising seemed to be pie cursors, which utilized mouse movement direction for making selections on a pie shaped cursor - quite a clever way to remove regular selection menus and tool palettes. Autodesk is currently implementing it in some of their applications, so it should work for huge command sets.
I also joined a special interest group on the field of user experience (UX), discussing how a shared definition is missing. Unsurprisingly, no shared definition was reached. The preliminary result of a survey was promising though, and might provide some consensus once it is finished. The practitioners’ view on UX differed wildly from the researchers’ view - something which is also apparent at the conference exhibition, where UX looks like a big business dealing with very different things. Somehow the practitioners get user-centered design mixed up with user experience. At least that is my impression.
April 9, 2008 at 9:38
For me, day 2 has been about automatic logging, or instrumentation as it is called now, which apparently is gaining lots of interest at the moment - nice and a bit strange then, that it has a part in my thesis as well. Microsoft Game Research showed how they instrumented Halo 3, using the logging data to fix bugs, learn about player strategies, balancing the game and many other things. Their instrumentation strategy relied on three things; context logging (game situation at time of logging event), attitude logging (player mood at time of logging event) and data visualization (graphs, maps and videos). They did player skill logging too, but did not get much into that in the talk.
The next good talk was about instrumentation as well. An open source project named ingimp was designed to log usage data from the Gimp drawing application, and had some interesting ways to actually show the logging data to the end users, instead of just using it for usage analysis. For example, each user was granted a persona drawn in a unique way based on that user’s usage data. I like this direction, as it matches with the ideas I have of applying game design techniques or concepts to the design of other applications.
Of less interest I attended a talk on the history of video conferencing and a talk reaching the not very surprising conclusion that Donkey Konga is more fun using the bongo controllers - how did they miss that the game was specifically made for the bongo controller? No wonder it is less fun using a regular controller.
I then sat through a full session about sound. Fascinating stuff which created melody and music from just a song using a hidden markov model trained in producing popular music, and then a talk about an amazing gadget which produced sound by touching a surface - every surface gave its own distinct sound. I hope to try the gadget later.
I ended the day with a panel debate on agile development. The panel consisted of people who had participated in both waterfall and agile development, and they all had a nuanced view on agile development. One claimed that iterative development and short sprints are hindering user experience experts and system architects or designers in their work, because it is difficult to keep a hold of the big picture when everything is evolving - it cannot be any different though, because iterative development is good for everyone else. One suggested having functionality requirements produced upfront, keeping only development iterative and another recommended keeping everyone in the same room - including creative people and user experience designers. I can support that last recommendation.
April 8, 2008 at 9:48
Having completed the first day of CHI 2008, I am writing down my experience of it. The day opened with a great talk about memory, creative synthesis and interaction design. The speaker gave examples of renaissance mnemonics, such as the memory palace and a rose window and then mapped her model of creative synthesis to the latter. Having studied creative synthesis myself, I found her model very interesting and insightful.
After that, I walked between different sessions trying to find something interesting. Eventually I found a fun experiment combining physically simulated sound and motion sensing to create direct sound feedback. The example setup had motion sensing build into the equipment on a dinner table - strange and funny sounds came from eating! Another experiment made virtual boxing more physical than on the Wii, but the technology was still quite clumsy.
The next interesting talk was about a simple concept the speaker called temporal trajectories. It is a simple 2-axis graph which can be used to map multiplayer narratives to a shared timeline, with game time on one axis and clock time on the other. Seemed like a nice design tool if one is creating multiplayer story-based games, and the goal is to let people affect each other’s story.
Quickly forgetting a few dull robot talks… I went to a great session about touch and target selection. Three innovative touch screen interaction techniques were presented, as well as variations on the bubble cursor. The talk I liked best, presented a touch selection technique named Escape. It allowed quick and accurate target selection on small and close targets using only your thumb - even though the thumb occludes and touches all the targets at once. Very neat! Diagonal rubbing was another interesting technique, demoed as a way to easily zoom in and out on an image or map.
The day ended with a reception and more crappy Italian food. Their appetizers taste bad, their pizzas are dry and thin and their cakes are boring. Italian food is better in Denmark. I’m so disappointed. The only redeeming factor is the pasta - it is quite good.
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