I’m going to sticky this draft in the hope that it will motivate me to give a brief lecture (maybe during the rants) at GDC 2011 entitled ‘10 Things I learned at Pandemic’ based on my introduction to the video game world.
I had been excited about split/second from blackrock since last E3 and finally got my hands on it. My lord it is amazing. In fact, I’m gonna go play it right now.
Need for Speed felt and looked great. No one should be surprised since it’s Criterion developed.
Limbo was getting some much deserved attention. It seems like they managed to make something more than an art game and I can’t wait to play it, alone, in the dark and at 2am.
I didn’t go hands on with Epic Mickey but its mechanics looked very solid. If they can deliver on the storytelling front I think Mickey might be the start of a new franchise.
I’m so glad Codemasters was handed F1 2010. The move away from sterile Gran Turismo graphics is much appreciated and as always, Codemasters vehicle dynamics are top notch.
Although the look and feel of Marvel vs Capcom 3 hasn’t quite gelled yet, I can’t wait to mash buttons and Icebeam the hell out of everyone.
Scott Pilgrim wasn’t as rock solid as I expected but it has a very good chance of being the best movie tie in ever.
Resident Evil 5, PS3 Move edition. This was a shitty version of both Resident Evil 5 and Resident Evil 4 Wii Edition.
Speaking of the PS3 Move, it’s just a bad WiiMote. While the new Zelda game was drawing 2 hour lines, I was able to play any Move game I wanted with no wait. Sony is going to have to do better.
Kirby: Epic Yarn. I hate ‘Epic’ ’s prevalence in the mesosphere but Yarn totally deserves it. Based on it’s ability to turn a cynic into a 5 year old, Kirby’s sense of wonder gets my game of the show award.
NBA Jam actually looks fun, Goldeneye does not.
I wonder if anyone realized that Medal of Honor is just Frostbite re-skinned. Didn’t play it, not very interested.
Sony’s 3D TV stuff is terrible. The technology simply isn’t ready for primetime. There is a very noticeable 2-3 stop decrease in the brightness of the picture once your 3D glasses are on to the point where it becomes difficult to see anything at all. Combine that with a price tag of $150 per pair of 3D glasses, and the fact that you can’t move from the ideal viewing are or tilt your head at all- this particular technology is dead in the water. Only rich assholes who also bought laserdisc are going to pick this shit up.
The 3DS gets my vote for biggest game changer of E3 2010. If anyone is able to bring 3D technology to the masses it’s Nintendo. I enjoyed Avatar for the spectacle it is but remain thoroughly unconvinced about 3D in the living room any time soon (<5 years). Yet, Nintendo’s wonderful little machine makes 3D inviting and natural where other types of 3D are awkward and disorienting. Layer on top of that an apple-like approach of throwing in everything except the latest kitchen sink technology and you have a toy that sits right up there with the iPhone technologically and can capture kids’ imaginations.
Second biggest game changer is actually two products: steam on PS3 and OnLive. On the one hand, OnLive is paving the road to a huge install base (cable boxes) and the elimination of console manufacturers. At the same time, Sony teaming up with Steam- if this really becomes steam in all its glory- might be one of the best ways of protecting home consoles from cloud based gaming. Steam has even more to lose than Sony in this battle so the partnership seems wise.
My first WarioWare DIY Game:
I’m filing this under work even though I had nothing to do with it. Unbeknownst to him, Michael Saladino has had a measurable influence on the way I look at and think about organizations and teams. Although I wouldn’t be linking to his GDC ‘10 talk if I didn’t have a predisposition finding fault in modern systems. That predisposition is something that actually dawned on me this week.
I’ve been reading Dee Hock’s book ‘One from Many’ and must’ve been watching some pundit (or was it a mock pundit?) and got to thinking about how protective people say they are about the principles of this country. That reminded me of an argument that I used to have with my Grandmother. Whenever we would talk about the issues of the day and after discussing topics at length, my conclusion was almost always ‘we need a new government, we need revolution’. What I meant by that was simply: civilization as a whole has evolved many different forms of government, why should we so arrogantly assume that our democracy is the pinnacle of that evolution? So, like many Americans, she responded by stressing the importance of the principles upon which the country was founded. But that’s where there is a dissonance, I agree with most of the principles that helped found this country, but those principles no longer guide our country in any meaningful fashion. What do we say we do (as a nation) versus what do we do as a nation? Fiction vs. Reality.
Was that a weird lead-in to a video game presentation? You be the judge.
Wake up your team is on Fire! Why your real problems are cultural and how to change them
Summary: What’s the difference between a manager and a leader? One key separator is the ability to drive a cultural shift on a team, in a studio or across a global organization. It’s being able to identify a systemic problem and methodically refocus the lens that everyone is using until each person understands the change they must embody. But this sounds like a job for the GM or VP of Organizational Effectiveness. Not at all: any leader at any level can drive change from the grassroots as I’ve done inside Electronic Arts.
By Michael Saladino – Ex-Pandemic/EA Producer
Okay, that title is a little harsh for such an exciting game, but I’ll try to justify it. My God of War 3 experience had its ups and downs, but presentation was what helped me see it through to the end. Not the greatest compliment, but it’s more than I can say for Darksiders, Bayonetta and Devil May Cry, all of which are good games. Kratos’ achillies heel it turned out to be coarseness and storytelling and both prevented God of War 3 from being next-gen. And by next-gen I mean next-gen in terms of the experience offered, not the tech used.
The guys at Sony Santa Monica did an amazing job of crushing the bugs that break immersion and make the game experience less fluid. Things like perfect transitions between pre-rendered and game cinematics, virtually no loading and I never once saw a texture stream in or an LOD pop. Despite that amazing and immersive attention to detail, two very simple features consistently broke my immersion: death and saving. My battle with the 1000ft tall titan was ruined at least once when I missed a single button press and was greeted with the death screen. The save system also did an amazing job of pulling me out of the fiction when the PS3 UI popped up (HI I’M UR PS3) so I could save my game. It’s actually because they did such an amazing job of squelching all the other video game annoyances that I can even mention these two issues, but they stick out like a sore thumb.
Granted the God of War franchise has never been huge on story but the plot and writing in God of War 3 is just plain bad. And now that I’ve played Mass Effect 2 and Heavy Rain, it’s pretty bad for a video game. It’s the same old cheesy dialog and the same old overdone characters and the same old nonsensical plot. I appreciate story to tie my gameplay together but would it have been so hard to give Kratos a zelda style fairy to tell him what needed smashing? It certainly would have been cheaper.
Speaking of cheesy video game tropes, the sex game in God of War gave me flashbacks to working on Saboteur. “We open on tits,” now those are great memories. I’d like to think when I was a kid I wasn’t so dazzled by digital boobs, except, there was Duke Nukem.
This post by fellow westsider, video game person and facial hair activist, Dave Taylor reminded me that I’ve been living a human life in a automobiles world and I should share.
A year and a month ago I started riding my bike from our apartment in Culver City to work @ Pandemic in Westwood (about 5-6mi each way). I started riding for a number of reasons; my fiance was tired of sharing a car, I needed the exercise, it’s less expensive but mainly because I hated driving on the westside. Every Los Angelian knows that driving on the westside is akin to bathing in that negative-emotion-jizz from Ghostbusters 2. Driving on the westside was sapping my love for driving automobiles and that’s coming from someone who has owned 8 cars and raced/drifted for many years.
So since Pandemic’s closure, I’ve tried to discipline myself to walk whenever possible and it’s helping me be healthier, wealthier and greener. Things I frequently walk to: two supermarkets, dentist office, farmers market, movie theatre, bank, post office, art shows and over a dozen restaurants. Of course, when you live in a city as brilliantly designed as Culver, it’s easy to live locally. I still drive to certain parts of the city for the time being, but as we get more creative, driving becomes less important. Eventually, I can see giving it up all together- except at the racetrack.
Update: Google Maps now has directions for bicyclists!
Update 2: I now have a shitty commute again.
I just finished reading Ikujiro Nonaka’s article entitled ’The Knowledge-Creating Company’ which was published in 1991 in the Harvard Business Review. There is a lot to unpack from such a short article and this write-up will be my reference for what I learned and allow me to theorize how his work might apply to the games biz.
‘Tacit’ Knowledge
“We can know more than we can tell” –Michael Polanyi
Nonaka’s article introduces the concept of ‘Tacit’ knowledge. Tacit knowledge is commonly described as know-how, but goes beyond technical proficiency and skill. Tacit knowledge includes the mental-models, beliefs or perspectives that we often taken for granted. Tacit knowledge is different from traditional explicit (or objective) knowledge, which is easy to formalize and transfer. Tacit knowledge is like brilliance in that it can be difficult to quantify but is very valuable. Who creates tacit knowledge?
People. Humans. We all create tacit knowledge, even unconsciously. Which is why we must emphasize the importance of Human Resource. Human Resource is not what fills a staffing plan; it is what drives creativity and innovation and where knowledge is created. “New knowledge always begins with the individual.”
I think it’s important to remember that knowledge is not always created in the office. Valuable insights or ideas might come from a hobby, a personal project or a long shower. It’s why modern companies like Google pay their employees to explore and digest. Time to think and digest is absent at most companies and needs to be improved.
The Knowledge-Creating Company
A Knowledge-Creating Company is a positive feedback loop of knowledge exchange that resembles a spiral. Knowledge goes through four transitions before repeating itself:
Central to Nonaka’s article is the concept of knowledge changing phases. Tacit knowledge becomes practical, easily communicated explicit knowledge and vice versa. As a company, this is how we can stay competitive because we constantly threatened by new technology and competitors. If our company is constantly innovating (parallels Lean’s constant improvement) we cans stay ahead and if we correctly manage the serendipitous nature of innovation, everyone benefits.
Managing the Knowledge-Creating Company
It’s important to note that a Knowledge-Creating Company requires both autonomy and personal commitment from its employees. In return, managers provide a flexible environment that is conducive to innovation. Leading through mandate or strict directives might limit their employees’ creativity or damage their commitment. Instead it is management’s job to inspire the company, not control it.
Redundancy is another non-intuitive principle of the Knowledge-Creating Company. Redundancy is usually regarded as waste, but redundancy can help can help the creation and spread of knowledge. Nonaka provides these examples:
Managing Knowledge Creation
Knowledge creation is a product of the interaction between three roles: frontline employees, senior management and teams overseen by middle management.
Who are we talking about when it comes to games? From a macro perspective, you might think of a whole studio as frontline employees, a publisher as senior management and the studio leaders as middle management. Or you could just look at a studio, with most of the developers being considered frontline employees, the producer or studio management as senior management and discipline leads as middle management.
Frontline employees are absolute experts at what they do and the day-to-day realities of the business. However, they are usually confined to very specific information sets, thus limiting them from seeing the broader picture. When frontline employees exchange knowledge with other roles, there is a chance that the context for their knowledge will be lost. According to Nonaka, that ambiguity or mistranslation of knowledge between roles is actually a good thing. It creates an opportunity for different roles to look at the information in a new light and question the status quo. Knowledge is born in chaos and it managements role to steer that chaos towards serendipity.
Senior management is on the quest for the ideal. They create a ‘conceptual umbrella’ that helps frame the expertise of the employees. They ask big questions like: what are we trying to learn? Where are we going? Who are we? What do we need to know? Senior management imbues the employees with a sense of direction by “setting the standards for justifying the value of knowledge”. It is their job to choose which efforts to support and explore. In the Knowledge-Creating company, this is not just ROI. Bioware may not be a profitable studio, but EA supports them because quality is where EA wants to be. Metrics for deciding the value of knowledge may include: does it fit within the company’s vision? Does it express the goals and strategies of senior management? Can it help build the knowledge network? The company’s vision should not be so clear as to be seen as an order. This could effect the commitment of employees who should be self-motivated in their work. This is an area where management can use metaphor and symbolism.
Teams are central in a Knowledge-Creating Company because they give individuals a shared context for interaction and engagement. Teams create new perspectives, pool and examine their information and eventually form a collective perspective. Conflict is good within teams because it can lead them to question the status quo and new perspectives. As team leaders, middle managers apply the vision of senior management to the chaos of the day to day. They are the junctions between the perpendicular flows of knowledge. They combine the tacit knowledge of both executives and frontline employees, make it explicit and apply it to products or technologies. As Nonaka writes these are the “knowledge engineers” within a knowledge-creating company.
Thoughts
Video Games are illusions that require complex tricks to execute properly. So, I think game development is a natural fit for Knowledge-Creation. In the bigger picture, I think the industry is missing many opportunities by leaving such a big knowledge gap between publishers and developers. It’s more important than ever for developers to be communicating with publishers and marketers about business and consumers. Of course a few companies are getting it right (like Valve, Naughty Dog, PopCap, surely others) and have enjoyed consistent, long-term success as a result of open knowledge environments.
Watched a few DICE talks thanks to G4’s(?) coverage. I had no idea they were covering non-commercial industry events, maybe they’ll cover GDC for me since I can’t really afford to go. Anyway, here are some thoughts.
#OnLive
If I were a big publisher I would start figuring out how to make my products thrive in this ecosystem. Once games are on an even playing field, many of the advantages that big publishers had (distribution, marketing, etc) go out the window. And if quality is king, then publicly traded publishers will need to adapt. Also, while the value of OnLive to core gamers is obvious, Nintendo still rules the family + living room experience. So unless someone other than Nintendo can make Nintendo software, I don’t see OnLive being the single source of TV gaming.
#JesseSchell
Jesse Schell’s captivating presentation on ‘human game design’ got my wheels turning. The casual/social revolution is pretty clearly a business winner. I could imagine those products becoming the backbone of large publishers. Their developers may need to worry about the laws governing some of their revenue and/or Facebook driving up their marketing costs, but I’m sure they’ll do just fine. What I find more interesting about this genre is how these games work and what can be learned from them. As Schell points out, these games are deeply rooted in psychology/social psychology and we are just starting to see what that type of game can do.
The possibilities are endless: games to make everyday tasks more interesting, games for your health or the environment, games that can take advantage of people and finally, amazing new ‘core’ game experiences that can give us something deep. Sure I want a BioWare WiiFit/RPG as much as the next guy, but that last group of game is the one I’m excited for. And we’re already seeing it to some extent; look at the social connectivity in Demon’s Souls or how Microsoft makes Halo addictive or what Bioshock was trying for with ‘would you kindly’. I can’t wait to see if designers can use psychology to design games that can impact us more than other mediums. Can they teach us about our own nature or help us gain new perspectives? At the very least, Jesse Schell earned himself a book purchase.
Saw some twitter buzz today (by @jwhdavison via @shawnelliott) about the importance of spoilers in game reviews as the games start to get more complex narratives and deeper themes. I attempted to comment on the gamepro post but couldn’t be bothered to register (why>no>facebook>connect). So here it is:
My 83 year old grandmother loves film and has a system for getting what she needs out of reviews; she starts by building up trust with the critics she agrees with, then she skims their reviews for general impressions good/bad and after she watches a film and has formed her own opinion, she goes back to the review for more insight or a different perspective. Sure there’s a risk, she may need to ditch her geriatric companions to escape a bad film occasionally. Gamers don’t have less to risk when since we can choose between renting, buying used or borrowing within days of a games release.
Spoil what needs spoiling and let the reader be responsible for filtration.
What began as boredom finally gained some momentum once I made it to ‘dystopian disneyland’ or ‘the animatronic guide to rapture’. Still, it’s difficult to justify two years for a sequel of the same length, using the same tech, maybe even some of the same assets? Apparently that’s the difference between the tin man and a well oiled machine. With Left 4 Dead 2 and GTA Vice city, Valve and Rockstar kept their teams on and were able to pull off 9 month dev cycles while improving quality.
Despite the relative lack of improvement over the first game, I am loving the strategic feel of setting traps which I don’t remember having nearly as much fun with in the first game. I get a Rube Goldberg-ian sense of satisfaction watching all of my little traps purring in unison, it’s like The Incredible Machine with ragdolls. Sigh. I also played the other game on my Bioshock disc- it’s called multiplayer and it ain’t pretty. Besides being buggy enough to make Mercs 2 look good, the team responsible for it fell into the same damn trap as the Uncharted 2 guys. Like Uncharted, it had the potential to give us a new and interesting multiplayer experience, instead they shipped with a poor imitation of Call of Duty.
One more thing that is bugging me about Bioshock 2 and Borderlands- stop making me look down- it’s ugly, disorienting and it hurts my neck. Either require me to look at the ground less or put less crap on the ground or how about some ground tits? You know, a little physical simulation on them and we’re good. Look, if you want me to stare at the shitty parts of your game I’m going to need more incentive.
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication? 
What would Leonardo think about his famous quote and the implications it has for game design? The more I play, the more I find this sophistication worth playing and the usual complexity not. This summer has been a great argument for the return to the simple with Trials HD, Shatter, Fat Princess and the wonderful one button Splosion Man. Even Battlefield 1943, with its somewhat taxing controls, makes good with its simple control point gameplay. These games are keeping my PS3 and 360 busy and provide a clue about the common thread that connects these games- neither console has a disc inside.
To be continued..
omg games
scribblenauts – I have no idea what this game is about but it has adorable, black holes and internet memes.
batman arkham – quality
dirt 2 – felt a little floaty and looked a little bloomy but sounded great and might be great fun
split/second aka michael bay’s mario kart – beautiful, exciting and so much fucking fun
trials HD – draws up excite bike but entirely physics based. the devs were super cool and I had a blast with the organic feel of the game.
forza 3 – feels and looks good. talked to their executive producer about adding some more smoke to the drifting.
brutal legend – didn’t seem very polished but it was hilarious so I decided to wait for its release.
need for speed shift – a lot of people complained about the excess blur when you crash or bump but I’m happy with the departure from rice culture to race culture.
gran turismo psp – clever girl, occluding 20% of the screen with UI. GT felt and looked great, I can’t wait to play it on my regular old psp-2000.
psp go – ellipses
god of war – hey, its god of war. looking good on a technical level but the art direction is not on par with the previous games.
uncharted 2 – instead of really refining the good stuff in drakes, they added multiplayer. which a) sucks b) it’s not something I want in this type of game. c) should have been replaced with episodic content
fat princess – adorable and could be addictive, with the controls had a better sense of weight
pixel junk shooter – squinty hd graphics are getting a little tired but the game is beautiful and fun.
left 4 dead 2 – looks weird during the day, didn’t get to try the chainsaw
dark void – forgot to play this, must’ve looked too similar to lost planet
endless ocean 2 – endless, yo
new super mario bros wii – a blast to run over your friends in co-op and finish first. I can see how cooperative co-op could be fun on much harder levels
dead space extraction – looks excellent but might not be running at full 480p?
blur – this game is suckass
mini ninjas – its adorable art reminds me of lost winds
tmnt turtles in time – ubisoft was bogarding this game and instead focusing on their shitty smash bros clone of the same make
