Category: Thoughts

Adventure Games · Thoughts

The Death of Adventure Games that Never Was

Clara Fernandez-Vara5 Comments

Dear reader, I’m tired. A couple of months ago, I read a couple of articles, both academic and journalistic, that talked about the “death of adventure games”, more than 20 years since it supposedly happened. I expressed my frustration on Twitter, and the popularity of the post reminds me that I’m not alone in my frustration. Here’s the long version of why the phrase “death of adventure games” pushes my buttons.

Adventure games are a genre very dear to my heart – I wrote my dissertation on them, and I learned the ropes of game development making them. I had never heard of the “death of adventure games” until I came to study in the US, because in Europe adventure games kept being made and played by audiences well after the 1990s. Why do people mean when they say they died?

Most people refer to Erik Wolpaws’ article, which eviscerated one particular puzzle in Gabriel Knight 3, and identified it as the death toll of the genre. I’d say the article is a symptom of what happened in the North American industry, as well as the tendency that journalism and certain fans have to oversimplify game history.

What happened back then is that two of the largest companies making adventure games, Sierra On-Line and Lucasarts stopped developing them at the end of the 90s while continuing working on other genres. Why did they close down their adventure game divisions? We can probably guess some of the reasons, but my theory is that they probably have to do with mounting development costs, derived from projects that aspired to be interactive movies either using FMV or 3D spaces, as well as the market becoming larger and opening up to wider audiences. More importantly – and here’s a key difference between North America and Europe – game consoles were taking up a larger part of the US market, and the point-and-click interface was quite burdensome to control with console controllers, which limited the market to PC desktop machines. While the PC market remained relatively strong in Europe during the 2000s, it does not seem it was the case in North America. The profit margins were getting narrower, and investors will always take their money to whatever will give them the largest return of investment. There are probably other reasons, which may have to do with how good or bad the games were, for example, but my hunch is that it’s always money.

The adventure games of Sierra OnLine and LucasArts have been tremendously influential in the design and storytelling of games for the last two decades, including adventure games that were still being released after the supposed demise of the genre. Adventure games were not AAA blockbusters any more, they missed the “mainstream” train that would have allowed them to maintain ballooning development and publicity costs and reach larger audiences. On the other hand, they kept being developed by smaller teams, which in certain cases has allowed them a creative freedom that has kept adventure games fresh, as well as given way to a myriad subgenres, and reached smaller and underserved markets of players.

The “death of adventure games” is part of a narrative created by journalists, fans and even some developers, who revel in self-pity or want to feel special instead of celebrating the variety of games that have been appearing in the last 20 years.

Genres keep dying and reviving constantly, as Víctor Navarro-Remesal mentions – once everyone had had their share of playing with plastic guitars, music games were apparently done for. Never mind that series like Dance Dance Revolution has just turned 20, or Beat Saber (2019) was one of the runaway hits on VR headsets, and Just Dance just announced its next title. Music games had their moment where they millions of living rooms and tech offices, but although they are not as visible and omnipresent they have not gone away either, particularly outside the US. In contrast, there is no such discourse around flight simulators, which had a similar trajectory as adventure games – a relatively popular genre that did well in home computers, but which requires streamlined controls to play well in consoles. LucasArts, which was also famed for their fantastic flight simulators designed by Lawrence Holland, stopped making flight simulators a few years after closing off on adventure games. In comparison, the volume of flight simulators released in the last couple of decades has been much lower than that of adventure games, and yet the genre is celebrated with the release of certain titles, such as the latest Microsoft Flight Simulator or Star Wars: Squadrons.

And while flight simulators may have experienced a modest revival, there is hardly any acknowledgement that adventure games still remain a popular genre, even if they do not rack up the millions of AAA games. In comparison with flight simulators, we have a long list of games developed during the supposed “death” of adventure games: The Longest Journey (1999), and its sequel Dreamfall (2006), Syberia (2002), a couple of dozen titles in the Nancy Drew game series, and half of the games in the Blackwell series. These games, released during the first decade of our century, are key referents of the genre. But perhaps having women as protagonists, all of them investigators of one kind or another, independent and adventurous, may not have been in agreement with certain parts of the videogames discourse. They were plenty other titles released during that period: the Runaway series (2003-2009), as well as a good bunch of Frogwares’ Sherlock Holmes titles; both Quantic Dreams and Telltale Games rose to fame in those years. Mind how many of the titles listed are game series, which fostered enough interest to allow developers to release multiple titles and having loyal groups of players in spite of being titles of varying quality.

During this period, many people who started as “hobbyists” in the interactive fiction and adventure game communities have become comercial game developers of some of the most interesting narrative games released in the last 15 years: Emily Short (Failbetter Games), Jon Ingold (Inkle Studios), Sam Barlow (Half Mermaid) , Dave Gilbert (Wadjet Eye Games), and Francisco Gonzalez (Grundislav Games), to name but a few.

The influence of adventure games is also more than obvious in escape the room games. Originally, they were web games that took the lock-and-key mechanics of adventure games and turned them into their core gameplay. The became their own digital game form, to then inspire the thousands of escape the room spaces that are available all over the world.

The consequences of the US-centric, money-centric discourse on adventure games, which also extends to other genres, is that smaller game communities tend to be overlooked, as well as left out of funding resources because they’re not perceived as popular blockbusters. I already complained about how mid-budget games are becoming rare – when a narrative game makes a lot of money, investors considered an exception; if a narrative game by a “proven” team doesn’t make back its money in a month (even if it recoup costs in a few months), it’s supposed to be the norm. This bias derives from the way journalists, fans, developers as well academics talk about the games, not based on analyzing data, looking at the history, or finding the communities that love playing and making these games.

Adventure Games · Thoughts

The Vanishing of the Medium-Budget Game

Clara Fernandez-Vara2 Comments

Veteran game designer Jane Jensen, creator of the Gabriel Knight series as well as a slew of other adventure games, has set videogames aside to become a prolific author of erotic novels. She has written novels before, but this time she seems to have found her audience and a good creative space. I’m happy to hear she’s found a rewarding avenue for her creative energy–making a living out of your art is hard, people. And she’s successful and has a following–what is not to like?

Well, I for one don’t like that the games industry loses someone with her extensive experience as a game designer, especially when there’s such a dearth of women designers. The article that covers her career pivot explains in detail the tribulations of developing and releasing Gray Matter (2010) and Moebius (2014). Jensen’s heartbreaking conclusion is that “There’s not much opportunity in adventure games anymore.”

The article linked above encapsulates the dilemma of being a creator in games and trying to get the financial support to make new games in the following passage.

“The very particular path Jensen had to carve out for herself is revealing of how the industry treats its superstars. There’s no real opportunity for an independent writer-director to lead a large budget work without either submitting to employment within a massive corporate structure or building a corporate structure of their own. The industry does not give any one person power and independence at once, especially not at the scale Jensen once enjoyed.”

The budget of adventure games is far, far from that of AAA games with filmic aspirations, which are made by hundreds of people over several years, to be released to thunderous PR in all platforms. Why wouldn’t publishers or investors give a chance to someone with the track record of Jane Jensen? Compared to the millions and millions that big companies spend in their games, making a story-driven game for a devoted fanbase should be a sure bet–may not make a fortune, but probably could get recoup costs and then some if they can reach their audience. Part of the struggle of creating the games Jensen wanted was that she and her husband were spending their own money to make the game, which adds to the stress and raises the stakes of making an independent game; when the budget is also tight, it can also stretch the development of a project over years because developers end up working on commercial projects to make ends meet.

Gabriel Knight in the streets of Munich in The Beast Within (1995)

One of the reasons why publishers and investors are reluctant to give money to make classical adventure games is the trite and untrue phrase that “adventure games are dead,” which the article linked above perhaps inadvertently contributes to. Publishers and investors tend to seek not only sure bets, but projects that have the potential to make obscene amounts of money–something that most adventure games are unlikely to do. And when there is a successful story-driven game, be it an adventure game, walking simulator, or something of that ilk, it is always taken as an anomaly, an exception. The money people just want more of the same.

My problem is that the tone of articles like these contribute to the insidious idea that there’s no money not only in adventure games, but in story-driven games that aim at being original and veer away from the cookie-cutter popular games , when it is patently not true. Surely, there is no AAA money to be earn, but there are plenty of people releasing so many exciting, original and refreshing games, and making a living out of it. Some of them make games evoking the style of 90s adventure games, and in some cases are directly inspired by Jensen’s work, others tell heartfelt stories with animals or mutants; some others retell works of literature from the point of view of women, there is an explosion of fantastic visual novels that tell LGBT+ stories, and a lot of the population that is wearily underrepresented in games. These developers, alongside many more, have managed to release fascinating works and find their audience, which is no mean feat. If we think about game development as an artistic career rather than software development, it becomes evident that the game developer life, particularly when one puts creativity over product, is really hard. That is why having the financial security and endorsement of publishers and investors helps being able to focus on one’s game and help developers find their audience through PR, and the final result is all the better for it.

There is a dearth of support to middle-sized games, in a similar way to how the middle-budget films disappeared for a while – think of the independent movies of the 1990s, for example. These are the kind of works that take a moderate investment, bring a gust of fresh air to the mediascape, and can recoup costs and occasionally provide a hit. This is where one can reach the myriad smaller markets, rather than one large mainstream; where we can find the works that are personal, political, innovative, quirky. As we say in Spanish, variety is where taste is. In film, this kind of works are now being produced by streaming services, which a loss for those of us who used to love watching movies in a dark theatre with other people before that was brought to a halt. Games have not quite found their equivalent yet, the space for these middle-sized games that need more than a Kickstarter, but much much less than Call of Duty. This is the budget size that Jane Jensen needed and couldn’t get. There are a few publishers who are aware that there are audiences who crave new, daring, original games, and are willing to bet on them, and work more as patrons of the arts rather than venture capitalist looking to hit the jackpot. But we need more.

I do not have enough information state with absolute confidence how the industry failed Jensen, particularly after she created her own company, Pinkerton Road, to make shorter, low budget games, which should have been the right move for her. The outsourcing of development, where she wrote the game design document for the team to work on seems to me a bit odd approach, since it may leave out the processes of playtesting and iteration that are also part of adventure games, albeit at times iterating based on player feedback can be a production challenge. Perhaps it was a matter of PR, and making sure that the game got to the right audience. Perhaps the games didn’t live up to Jensen’s ideas since she didn’t have access to the resources that she would have liked to have. Perhaps she needed better PR to get to her players–there are many wonderful games that get lost in the deluge of releases every week. I’m sad we couldn’t get Jane Jensen to stay making more games, and I hope one day the industry can lure her back to make the games she wants.

education · Resources · Thoughts

Mentoring for Diversity: Getting things Done

Clara Fernandez-Vara1 Comment

We can all make big statements on social media about increasing diversity in the video games, but when it comes to making things actually happen, it turns out that the problems are systemic at the core, and that it feels like there is little that we can do. We could throw one hands up in the air and give up. Or we can try to hack the area of influence that we may have – if we all manage to modify the cogs of the machine one piece at a time, maybe we can overhaul the system. It’s hard, but worth it.

For some of us, one possible way to do so is through mentoring of people of underrepresented groups who want to work in games. As mentors, we can help them navigate this broken system in which we’re trapped, teach them so they can figure out how to break into the industry, as well as how to thrive, persevere, and have the career they want and deserve.

This article is for those of us who are in a position of relative power in education and the games industry, and it is mostly based on my experience working in game development and education for the last decade. I cannot claim to have figured it out – I’ve made many mistakes myself, though I’m listening and want to do better. What I’m sharing here is what seems to have worked so far.

The Problem

The first thing to know about mentorship is that it is hard work, which not everyone may be in a position to do. Mentorship involves emotional labor because, more often than not, the support that mentors provide involves listening and understanding what our mentees struggle with, and offering guidance tailored to their experience. Real mentorship builds a relationship over time. Chatting with someone and giving them advice a couple of times can help, but productive mentorship needs to be a longer commitment.

The second thing to know about mentoring is that those who belong to underrepresented groups often feel like they do not belong. Again, it’s a feeling – hence the emotional labor. It has nothing to do with their talent or capacity for work. The world around them is constantly telling them that they are not good enough, that they have to like the “right” kinds of games and behave in a specific “gamer” way in order to “fit the culture,” and even when they do, they may remain invisible and still be shut out. This also means they feel they cannot be themselves, but rather follow someone else’s script. It can take a toll on their mental health. It also leads to almost unshakeable impostor syndrome, and makes them more likely to quit.

People from underrepresented groups have to do a lot of extra work in order to prove their worth. You may have heard the phrase that Ginger Rogers had to do the same as Fred Astaire but backwards and in high heels. That’s true of most people in underrepresented groups. The impostor syndrome is exacerbated by the fact that they are held to standards well above the average, which require extra effort and commitment to achieve.

The higher standards to which they’re usually held are also due to implicit biases that we all have – even people who think of themselves as progressive intellectuals fall into these traps. White men tend to be regarded more positively, and their faults are also more often forgiven – their threshold for making mistakes is way higher, whereas if a woman / BIPOC / LGBTQ+ slips a bit it’s often catastrophic and regarded as evidence that they cannot do the job.

Your potential mentees have to prove their merits, but meritocracy is a myth that elites invoke to keep their privilege. “Merit” involves having access to specific groups and knowledge, which are often selective and (surprise!) not diverse at all, so the vicious circle keeps going. Factors that can provide an advantage are being able to attend a renowned school, living in or near a city that grants access to meetups where they can forge social relationships in person, developing a specific taste that allows you to connect with like-minded people. Having access to games and a computer to make them is a form of gatekeeping – not everyone can buy games at full price on release date to be part of the current discourse or buy a high-end PC, for example.

Is there a solution?

The lack of diversity is a very difficult problem, and we’re not going to solve it in a few months, even if we have the best of intentions. But we cannot stand idle. So here are some suggestions that may work for you and your (future or current) mentees:

  • First of all, a bit of self-reflection. Check your own biases. Yes, this part hurts. But it’s for a good cause.
    • Who are you giving preferential treatment? Why are you doing it? How diverse are they? In an educational setting, students can tell who is getting extra help and guidance – and people of underrepresented groups can tell it’s usually not them.
    • Of your mentees, who has been successful? Who has fallen through the cracks?
    • Those who fell through the cracks, is it because they were not committed or talented? Was it financial? Mental health issues? Is there anything that you could have done to improve the situation? Would a white cisgendered male have eventually been given a pass in the same situation?
  • Offer yourself as a mentor, seeking spaces that may bring you into contact to underrepresented groups. Post it on your social media; if you’re an educator, reach out to students. Make yourself visible. Find groups that are looking for mentors, or team up with other mentors. The hardest part of this is that these potential mentees are less likely to ask for help / mentorship – remember, they are told they do not belong. But forcing yourself to mentor someone is definitely not the best way to make them trust you, particularly if you hold some sort of privilege (e. g. being white / male / cisgendered / in a situation of power). And trust is the foundation of mentorship.
  • When you mentor, listen to and try to understand your mentee. Acknowledge who they are, what they want, and what is getting in the way. One of the main reasons some people give up on their studies / careers is feeling that they are not listened to. Taking a moment to say “Let me see if I understand…” is a basic exercise to connect with your mentee, get them to know better, and get to know them as people and artists.
  • Reach out regularly once you’ve established a connection. As I said, this takes work. And again, your mentees are less likely to ask for help. So remind them you’re there. Calendar reminders, recurring items in your to do list, are easy ways to remind you and check the last time you talked to them.
  • Fight for your mentee. Show their worth to others. Send them job ads. You may be in a position where others are more likely to listen to you than your mentee, have access to contacts and information that they don’t. This is all work beyond meeting with them.
  • Provide constructive feedback. One of the main obstacles to keep underrepresented groups in games is that they often feel they don’t have the talent or skills, as part of the false meritocracy that rules the industry and academia. Feedback needs to be honest, because they’re learning and that’s why you’re helping them. But feedback that just points at what they do wrong without offering solutions or support does not help, and reinforces the sense that they do not belong. So when giving feedback, remember to:
    • highlight what they’re doing right. Remind them what they’re good at.
    • point them to how to make it better, if there’s something that they’re struggle with, or can be improved. Provide them with references (web links, video tutorials, articles, books if they can afford them).
  • Teach them the invisible rules (if you know them). One of the things that prevent people from thriving in specific industries and groups is not knowing the etiquette of a group, from social expectations to creative standards. This is another very challenging problem, first of all, because as a mentor you may not be aware of what they are. Maybe because you take them for granted, or maybe because you’re also part of the underrepresented group. The main challenge is mentees may feel like they have to change their behavior and who they are in order to adhere to those “invisible rules,” which are not explicit or easy to formulate, because their invisibility and haziness is what helps excluding others. Help them understand that these are arbitrary rules, that change from place to place (e.g. AAA vs casual vs indie; North America vs Europe); the balance they need to find is how to operate within those invisible rules while still being true to themselves.

These are just a few points – many come from having had great mentors and really terrible ones. I could have fallen through the cracks many times, so a lot of this comes from my experience as a recipient. It also comes from working with students; now that I’m in a relative position of privilege, I’m trying to do the work. I cannot claim I have figured things out, but I’m trying my damnedest to change the world, one bit at a time.

Thanks to my colleague Naomi Clark for her feedback on this article.

Thoughts

The Music is the Story

Clara Fernandez-VaraLeave a comment

Our lives have a music soundtrack—people often associate songs with specific moments of their existence and create emotional connections with melodies. A few notes can send us spinning to a summer in our childhood, a fun party, or the aftermath of a breakup.

People often refer to film or videogame soundtracks and their capacity to evoke emotions, understanding that the music dictates how the audience has to feel about what is happening on the screen. I find this notion rather limiting, even irritating—think of documentaries or reality TV playing loud soundtracks to indicate that there’s a moment of suspense, or that the scene is sad because people are crying. They want the audience to feel a certain way, as if they couldn’t have their own emotional reactions to the events they’re watching. More often than not, these musical devices are trite because the emotions they evoke have very little subtlety, and they tend to be a stock library that repeats from episode to episode. These music cues can also be intrusive, trying to amplify a mood that is already created visually, verbally, or through camerawork, by playing predictable music in ways that can ruin the scene.

This is a pet peeve of mine because I’m the kind of weirdo who pays attention to music in films and videogames. (And in the muzak in the supermarket and the elevators. It can be torture, really.) And I do pay attention because the music also tells the story—characters, situations, spaces can have their own melodies. The use of leitmotifs is extensive in film—you can recognize the music that identifies James Bond, or the Force in Star Wars. Games also use them a lot in the form of loops that repeat so they can adapt to the length of gameplay. If you’ve played any Final Fantasy game, I’m sure you can recognize the different combat music loops. The loops change their tempo, key, or instrumentation depending on the situation not only to cue different emotional states, but also to give us game information. The soundtracks for the Metal Gear series have always done a great job to create both mood and tell the player what is going on, from loops closer to ambient music for the stealth sections to accelerated and strong beats when Snake is in danger. (These loops never resolve, because that’s what suspense is all about.) The music is also part of the interface, provides feedback about the world.

But there’s another narrative that game music also creates, which relates to what I referred to at the beginning. The music of games is also the soundtrack of our lives, in ways that perhaps – and regretfully – film scores may not always get the chance to do. Those music loops become engraved in our brains and our hearts after listening to them over and over and over again. The first notes of the menu music of an arcade game, the melody of difficult levels in a platformer, also have the power to make us travel back in time. It’s not a matter of nostalgia—it’s connecting those notes with the people we were with, what we were going through when we played those games. The story is not only of the characters on the screen, it’s our own stories; the emotions evoked by the melodies are not what the composition may dictate, but our own personal associations with those leitmotifs. I love to go to videogame score concerts and see the audience cheer and clap when the first notes of their favorite games start playing, celebrating their time spend with them. One of my favorite moments in one of these concerts was seeing several black and latino kids banging their heads to the notes of the Metal Gear Solid 2 Main Theme, in perfect unison, living the music. Videogame scores are part of the soundtrack of our lives in similar ways how pop music marks different periods of our history.

Detectives · Reviews · Thoughts

Mysteries Stuck in a Loop

Clara Fernandez-Vara1 Comment

The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton is the latest example of how time-loops and detective stories are a compelling combination–I hope it becomes one of those “must read” novels for game designers and interactive storytellers soon. Evelyn Hardcastle brings together Agatha Christie and Groundhog Day drizzled with a bit of David Lynch. The protagonist of the novel relives the day a murder takes place in an English manor. He controls one person at a time, and the only way to break the loop is to solve the mystery; to do that, he has 8 days / lives to find the solution. If it sounds like a game, it’s because it is a wickedly complicated story puzzle, delightfully put together.

Coming from narrative games, I particularly enjoyed how the protagonist notices the friction with his hosts–what he wants to do may be at odds with their impulses, while the intelligence or insight of the person he’s controlling allows him to notice certain details or have specific realizations. This is not dissimilar to how the stats of a character in a role-playing game can determine what we can do and what we cannot. Although the author does not list videogames as one of the inspirations for the game (he mentions the TV show Quantum Leap in the Q&A at the end of the book), the storytelling takes advantage literacies that games and complex TV shows foster these days. Audiences can follow stories with multiple points of view, gaps that are steadily filled out (or not), so that as they read / watch / play they’re assembling the story puzzle.

A protagonist stuck in the same sequence of events until they get something right is a story structure recreates how we navigate digital storytelling, where the interactor explores the possibilities of a story until we get the “right” version, as Janet Murray breaks down in her analyses of Groundhog Day or Run Lola Run. The pervasiveness of videogames, which often involve trial and error, has turned this structure into a commonplace in other media. The manga All You Need is Kill, adapted to film as Edge of Tomorrow, both thrive on the tropes of combat videogames, so the journey of the main character depends on him remembering his mistakes and learning from them for the next loop, just like a videogame player would. The structure of the time loop has also been long embraced by videogames, starting with The Last Express (1997) and The Legend of Zelda: Marjora’s Mask (2000), neither of which have got the attention and recognition they deserve. Now there’s a whole slew of games recently released or coming up in the next few months: The Sexy Brutale (2017), Elsinore (2019), Outer Wilds (forthcoming), 12 Minutes (forthcoming). The metalevel of the knowledge of the player now becomes part of the game mechanics. And let’s not forget interactive fiction, where there’s already a sizable collection of examples in the last 20 years.

What interests me of the time loop as a narrative / game structure is how combines with mystery, which is what initially drove me to read Evelyn Hardcastle. In a mystery narrative, the initial goal of the detective is to reconstruct the story of the crime. One of the challenges to design a mystery videogame is figuring out how to let the computer evaluates whether the player got the solution right or not–something that is easier to do in non-digital games. Questionnaires are a common device, while letting the player fail can also be a productive approach–maybe players want to replay the game until they get it right, making the loop something that takes place at a meta-level, in the time and space of the player.

Time loop mysteries make the trial-and-error part and parcel of the world of the story / game. Thanks to Groundhog Day, many storytellers and game designers do not see the need to explain why that loop is happening–Evelyn Hardcastle does, in what seems to be a seed to tell further stories with a similar structure (I hope!). The time loop mystery structure is alluring because each loop allows the player / audience to get more information about what happened, and then use that information to solve the mystery or change the events. Some events take place simultaneously, so they require making choices and revisiting the story over and over in order to reveal each piece of the puzzle–where and when people are at each moment. While traditional media have used the loop as a way to structure the story and keep the audience intrigued until the end, the game player needs to actually solve the puzzle and use as many time loops as necessary to get to the end.

Bonus: If you’re into time loop mysteries and science fiction, you may want to listen to the Doctor Who audio story The Chimes of Midnight.

Puzzles · Thoughts

Crosswords and Culture

Clara Fernandez-VaraLeave a comment

Apart from being one of the most brilliant music composers and lyricists of the 20th century, Stephen Sondheim is also a game geek and a puzzle lover. Makes sense that someone who marries music and lyrics for a living would also have a penchant for fitting words into grids. Back in the day, he also wrote an article outlining the difference between crosswords in the US and the UK–while American crosswords appeal to an encyclopedic knowledge of trivia, what he calls “British-style” crosswords thrive in being cryptic and challenge the puzzle-solver to understand what the clue is pointing to. He expresses a preference for the British type which should not be a surprise either–cryptic crosswords are more poetic, since they are basically posing riddles for each entry.

Sondheim’s article is a beautiful example of how game design and culture go hand in hand; it also becomes richer the moment that we start looking at crosswords in other languages. Although I can  play words games both in English and Spanish, I prefer crosswords in Spanish to the famous series of The New York Times. First, because the kind of encyclopedic knowledge needed to solve the NYT crossword requires being steeped in American culture and history in a way that is not accessible to a foreigner. Second, the phonotactics of Spanish allow many ways to make words cross in interesting ways. Opening some of the crossword magazines in Spain is a joy – some crosswords don’t tell you how many letters each word has (crucigrama blanco), some puzzles use words broken down in their syllables (crucigrama silábico), some have themes that many of the clues refer to.

My favorite type of crossword is the autodefinido (arroword in English) where the clues of each entry are written in the cell that separates each word. Some cells need to display two clues (one for a horizontal word, one for a vertical), so they need to be extremely brief, two or three words maximum. The clues in this type of crossword usually thrive on vocabulary knowledge, since most of them are synonyms, as well as cultural knowledge, most often geography, with toponyms and demonyms being some of the most common.

Autodefinidos are fast and easy – after all, crosswords were casual games before we invented such term. Although autodefinidos are based on linguistic and cultural knowledge, they become accessible relatively fast. Each crossword book publisher has a certain preference for specific knowledge domains and vocabulary – the first time a puzzle asks you for three-letter words in Spanish that mean “Turkish officer” or “River of Switzerland”, the reference seems ridiculously obscure. But as you continue solving puzzles, you keep coming across these riddles, and you learn that the answers are “AGA” and “AAR” respectively.  For the designers, these words become little stitches to hold the crossword together, and the puzzle solver learns to identify them over time. Each magazine publisher has a set of esoteric words that characterize them.

Autodefinidos also have a surprising variety – apart from having the same typology as regular crosswords (figure out where the blank cells are, divide the words in syllables, thematic riddles), they also do wonders with their layout – some of them have honeycomb layouts where words can be spelled in lines or around a cell. Others combine the crossword with the cryptogram, so the cells for each word in the crossword follow serpentine patterns, and when you find all the definitions, the square displays a literary quote. Everything falls into place and it’s beautiful.

Designing crosswords requires a level of craft computers can facilitate; in the end, it is up to the ingenuity of the designers, who often go uncredited, to create a challenge to one’s knowledge and wits. Some designers like challenging players with hair-pulling riddles, while others provide enough scaffolding so they can complete the puzzle. The NYT crosswords are all about proving the solver is “smart”, and has access to a certain knowledge and education that is highly situated in American culture – and, more often than not, New York City culture. If the puzzle-solver is stuck, they had to buy the newspaper of the following day to find the answer, though these days it’s a matter of having a subscription to the crosswords themselves. In contrast, collections of autodefinidos help the solver expand their vocabulary and trivia knowledge by repeating definitions from puzzle to puzzle, and magazine to magazine; the answers are in the same issue, so that knowledge is accessible immediately. Thus crosswords and their design also partake of different social conventions and levels of privilege.

 

Thoughts

Tea and a videogame

Clara Fernandez-VaraLeave a comment

Working at coffeeshocup-mug-tea-bokeh-56861ps is a relatively new thing for me. I see coffee shops as social spaces, where I meet people and have some tea and maybe a snack. (I’m not quite a coffee person.) But since my schedule has got impossibly busy over the years, I’ve learned to find a nook to work on focused tasks helps be more efficient and a bit less stressed.

So I was working at the tea shop the other day, and a woman sat next to me with her tea and The New York Times. And it struck me – some people get some alone leisure time by going out and finding a place to solve crosswords.  Being a videogame person, I had to ask on Twitter, as onedoes, whether other people went to play videogames to the coffeeshop.

I received a fair amount of responses, though nothing to call them strong evidence. There were story-driven games like Firewatch, Kentucky Route Zero, 80 Days; one person played Zelda: Breath of the

 Wild. There were casual games like Clash Royale or Plants vs. Zombies, including time-management games like Diner Dash. There was also room for sophisticated puzzle games like Beglitched. Farming simulation games such as Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley, get several mentions. One person mentions turn-based strategy games, which seems to fit the environment. All these games are single-player, mostly on mobile (I’ll count the Nintendo Switch as such) but some were played on a laptop.

The responses in the thread confirmed my suspicion that the kinds of games that one would play in the coffee shop are similar to bringing a book, a crossword, or any similar kind of puzzle (sudoku, nonograms). The idea is to abscond to spend some time alone with a story, or with a challenge that may requires a certain amount of focus — let’s say that Beglitched can be the videogame equivalent of the Saturday crossword of the New York times. Being offline also seems important. I don’t quite see people playing first-person shooters or MOBAs at the coffee shop – although I’m sure some people do – just because it’s very easy to get passionate and loud while you’re fighting, and you need a reliable connection to play online.

There are other social spaces to play other genres – there are board game cafes, there used to be cybercafes in the 90s with LANs to play first-person shooters. Perhaps there’s a business model for a coffee shop that organizesmulti-player events and competitions. But when it comes to going to a coffee shop, for you and your game, stories, puzzles, and turn-base strategy go well with a cuppa. Or coffee.

Thoughts

Game Educator’s Rant 2013: The Telltale Job Ad

Clara Fernandez-VaraLeave a comment

This year I was invited to take part at the Game Educators’ Rant at GDC. The topic I chose was rather close to my heart, as a humanities scholar looking for a game studies / game design job who wades through faculty job ads. So here are my thoughts on how game faculty job ads tell us a lot about what is wrong with games education and the games industry in general.

I must thank Michael Mateas for inviting me to be rant in illustrious company, as well as Mia Consalvo, Jesper Juul, Michael Jakobsson, Konstantin Mitgutsch, TL Taylor, and Matt Weise for their input while writing the rant. Here’s the text.

Let me tell you a story.

A school dean hears that students like videogames and thinks “Hmm, students are very into this “video game” thing. If it didn’t exist we would have to invent it! Well, let’s get some of that student money!”

“We should have a ‘game program’. But we don’t have money for that. So let’s hire someone who can teach courses on that videogame thing and call it a program.”

After asking a few people, including his grandson, who knows everything about videogames, he posts the following ad:

Associate or Assistant Professor, Game Design

  • Requirements
    • PhD, Computer Science or similar field
    • AAA experience, having shipped a title at least.
    • Teaching experience
  • Required Skills:
    • AI Programming
    • Graphics programming
    • Physics
    • Proficiency in 3D engines (Unity, Unreal)
    • Level design
    • Experience in online games / networks / social games
    • 3D modeling, usually Maya
    • 3D animation
    • Prototyping

Job requirements include teaching 4 courses per semester, student advising, academic service, and whatever else the dean thinks appropriate. Compensation: not very good.

By the way, this ad is a conflation of some real job postings, by the way, and not much of an exaggeration.

You know who this ad wants to hire?

A unicorn.

One person who has endured both the videogame industry and gone through the pains of getting a PhD. That takes some guts.

I know plenty of people who’d be great game professors, but they see this ad and they are terrified and don’t apply. The laundry list of required skills is intimidating, when those are things that are separate specialities, particularly in the AAA industry.

But this is not the worst problem.

The position is advertised as “Game design”, because it’s what sounds cool and what the students want, when what is listed here really refers to “game programming” and “technical art”. Of the skills listed, only Level Design and Prototyping are things that a game designer usually does. There are missing things like:

There are missing things like:

  • game theory
  • systems design
  • statistics
  • puzzle design
  • storytelling
  • playtesting

The ad is also implying that all that one needs to know to design games is using technology. Which is not the point for several reasons. As I just said, the skills described are not really all game design.

First of all, there are other disciplines that are routinely left out, for example:

a) Audio Design

Why do these game ads always forget sound and music? Audio makes your game come to life! And no, slapping some mp3s from creative commons sites is not audio design.

b) Production

We need to teach production! Project management is an essential skill to have in life, and essential to videogames.

Students will make their games as they do the rest of their homework: doing things at the last minute, crunching, not getting much sleep, not testing their games, let alone iterating. The result is that when they go into the real world making games, they think that’s how you make games.

This is the source of a lot of problems in the industry: poor work / life balance, crunch and overtime are the norm, crappy games that are released because they really had so ship. There are companies that release successful games and have to close because the millions they made selling the game can’t pay the years of fooling until they got started with their game. Those developers usually make games as if they were still in their college dorms. By not teaching things like scoping, scheduling, cutting features, iterating, we’re perpetuating some of the worst vices of the videogame industry.

Requiring a computer science PhD (or related field) is a further issue. It’s really unlikely that any women will apply for this job. Today, only 13% of Computer Science graduates are female. Only 11% of game designers in the industry are women. What is worse, only 3% of programmers in the games industry are female (source) Never mind if the ad says it’s an “equal opportunity” institution–with a PhD in computer science *plus* industry experience, the final hire will probably be a man.

We need more women making games, and female instructors are a way to encourage women to enroll in game courses. The requirements in the ad are not helping to do this.

By the way, having a computer design degree does not mean you can design games. You don’t need technology to design games. You don’t have to have a computer science degree to implement videogames, although it does give you some advantage.

Here are some game designers, with plenty of teaching experience, who would make a fantastic hire for a “game design” position:

  • Coleen Macklin: Professor, Parsons The New School for Design: BFA Media Arts
  • John Sharp, Associate Professor of Games and Learning at Parsons The New School for Design: AB, MA, PhD History of Art
  • Brenda Romero, Visiting Designer at UC Santa Cruz: BS Media and Communications
  • Brian Moriarty, Professor of Practice in Game design at Worcester Polytechnic: BA English
  • Tracy Fullerton Chair, USC Interactive Media and Games Division, School of Cinematic Arts: BA, Theater Arts, English Literature; MFA, Cinematic Arts
  • Frank Lantz , Director, NYU Game Center: BFA Studio Art (Painting)
  • Eric Zimmerman, Instructor, NYU Game Center: BFA Painting, MFA Art & Technology
  • Lee Sheldon, Associate Professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute: BFA, Directing (Theatre); MFA, Directing (Film).

These people are top of the crop, they are the people that people go to GDC to listen to and learn from. One of them is in part of the advisory committee of the Game Education Summit at GDC.

None of these people would be qualified for the “game design” position in the ad. Only of one them has a PhD, and only a couple have worked in AAA.

Colleen Macklin and John Sharp, in their GDC Education Summit keynote, stated that games and play are liberal arts. But the ad is chasing away people who have a background in art and the humanities. Videogames are not only the result of technology, they are a human activity. You need to understand humans, as well as computers, to make videogames. There are of course some computer scientists who are also game designers and artists (Michael Mateas at UCSC, Andy Nealen at NYU Poly, Fox Harrell and Nick Montfort at MIT).

But the list of qualifications and skills does not mention any skills or qualifications that have anything to do with art. You know how we can prove that games are art? By having actual artists to teach game design, artists and humanists to groom students to be creative and innovative by understanding games as an artistic expression.

So these are all the implications of that job ad that our friend the school dean posted because he wanted to have a “videogame program” and make some profit from it.

Since he will not find a unicorn, he’ll hire whoever can convince him he’s adequately qualified. Chances are the teacher will do his best, struggle with little resources, and teach something half-decent with in the constraits.

The students keep signing up for courses, the dean will just keep one or two overworked instructors and say they have a “game program.” This is not the games education that we want.

The dean is old and senile, so we have to tell him that game education can be more things than a “game program.” One can have games courses that are part of the curriculum, as a way to introduce games. It can be in the department of computer science, or literature, or history of art, or sociology. Just find what fits in your curriculum, to expand and enrich it rather than just cashing in.

For example, the previous ad can be presented as a “Game Programming” position in computer science. That’s fine! (although the skills should be preferred rather than required)

If the goal is to hire someone to teach game design, here’s another job ad that gets it right. It is also based on actual postings.

Game Design Professor

  • Preferred Requirements
    • Terminal degree (PhD or MFA)
    • Creative leadership
    • Track record of shipped games (commercial / academic / non-profit; digital or non-digital)
    • An artistic track record or background
  • Preferred Skills:
    • Game theory
    • Systems design
    • Statistics
    • Level design
    • Puzzle design
    • Storytelling
    • Playtesting
    • Prototyping (paper and digital)

If the dean wants a game program, then the school has to make a real investment, not a cheap cash in. Two teachers are not a games program, it’s two very overworked people.

A program needs the equivalent of an RPG party, professors with complementary knowledge, so they can teach production, art, audio. The party should also include someone from game studies who can teach students learn to think critically about their work, relate games to other game forms, appreciate the beauty of the medium.

And, hey, if the deans throws in some incentives for these professors to do research, they can even bring in grant money. How about that?

There are many ways to create a game curriculum, but the exclusive focus on technology is a mistake. Plus thinking that one or two people make a program is a mistake. Overworked teachers can only teach students to be overworked themselves. A team of teachers tells students that one needs to work together to make games, and provides different perspectives on what games are and what they coud. Otherwise, we are teaching students work themselves to death making games rather than making games as a way of life.

Thoughts

Game Production, the Great Unknown

Clara Fernandez-Vara5 Comments

William Goldman said of the film industry: “Nobody knows anything.” The games industry, in its cinema envy, is taking that to heart. This is painfully evident when we hear about the tortuous process of production of failed games. Even the successful ones  are painful to make, if one trusts the postmortems of videogames in industry publications.

The leaked information on why Aliens: Colonial Marines is a trainwreck is an example of the kind of unhealthy, stupid practices that are too common in the industry. The moral of the story is that, if there’s anything that budding game developers should learn is basic, healthy production habits: iteration, scoping, scheduling, communicating, and learning what the different relevant aspects of production are. Game curricula are too focused on technical aspects to remember that games are made by humans for humans. (There are many other things I need to complain about game curricula, but I will just focus on this one thing today.)

Making games is hard. Making huge AAA titles involving hundreds of people and where a lot of money is at stake must be a nightmare. The problem is that game development, big or small, still makes very stupid mistakes. Common sense turns out to be the least common of senses in game production.

Gearbox dropped Aliens: Colonial Marines on the lap of TimeGate, who thought they had to complete a game but ended up having to make the game from scratch. It’s one of those situations in which the developer has to deal with somebody else’s mess. TimeGate was in a pickle. As I read through the article, however, I saw how the developers themselves were wringing a thick noose around their own necks with every decision.

aliens-colonial-marines-wallpaper-in-hd
If you’re not prepared, the realities of production will devour you.

The first red flag in the postmortem is that they immediately put some of the blame on the narrative designers, who changed the script and that forced level designers to scrap whole levels. First of all, the fact that they were working on a narrative game should have triggered off all the alarms in production, because content can spiral out of control very soon and very fast. It is also sad that some people call themselves narrative designers if they are only doing writing. Narrative design is a new discipline, which we’re defining as we go, but if there’s something that should be clear by now is that the writers should have worked with the level designers side by side. It does not sound like communication between writing and design was clear either, which is a serious production issue. It is as bad to design a game and then call the writer to stick a story on top of it as to write a script for a game and then ask levels designers to overhaul what they want. Narrative design bridges both writing and design, but it does not seem that it was really happening in spite of people working under that title at the company.

A bigger red flag is when TimeGate compares their work ethic with Gearbox’s: they’re all about shipping, while Gearbox does “work, work, work, iterate, iterate.” The deadline that they were given was surely unrealistic and the amount of work was probably insane, because that’s how the AAA games industry rolls. What I don’t understand is what they mean by “working to ship.” I believe Gearbox also ships games (and pretty successful ones for that matter). The fact that they had limited time does not mean that they did not have room for some iteration. If you don’t iterate you’re not designing a game. In fact, TimeGate should have been iterating, since they said they had to change the game when the script changed. Isn’t that an opportunity to iterate? Did they really scrap their work and start over?

Which takes me to what is probably the pinnacle of dumb practices that was the final undoing of the game. While producing the demo, someone in power told the developer (publishers? external producers?) “Don’t worry about performance, just make it awesome”, which is the kind of vague, meaningless direction that sounds like a knell to any game. (This is why educators must teach our students to communicate sophisticated ideas in a clear, constructive way.) The developer then went on to make an awesome demo which astounded everyone but wasn’t playable, plus it needed the kind of computer they use at NASA instead of the PC that you can buy at the store. This is the complete opposite of a philosophy that aims at “shipping the game.” It seems that it didn’t even occur to them that they had to fit the game in a disk. “Scoping” does not seem to be have been a word in their vocabulary. If you have limited time, you try to figure out how much you can get done, which will still be over-ambitious, then cut, and then cut some more.

Then they had to spend a lot of time shrinking it and re-doing their work (rather than iterating) to be able to ship it somehow. Then, oh surprise, they run out of time, and Sega, the publisher, refused to give them any more time because they had been waiting for their game six years. Their philosophy of “working to ship” then became cobbling together a game and putting the sorry result on a disk.

The sad thing is that the story of Aliens: Colonial Marines is all too common. I know of plenty of successful games that went to similarly dysfunctional production woes. Thing is, nobody seems to learn their lesson, and this keeps happening. Hey, we shipped, so it’s okay.

Of course it’s easy for me to say these things from outside and in hindsight. It’s difficult to see what the problems may be when you’re mired in the middle of production. The games I’ve worked on are way smaller and not as technically complex. But we also worked under insane constraints: 8 1/2 weeks to make a game with students who had not make a game before, and then most of your team would get on a plane and go on with their lives. We also made mistakes, we learned from them, and we tried not to repeat them again. We’re all figuring it out, making games big or small; the difference is how willing we are to be self-critical and to admit we may be wrong.

The Aliens: Colonial Marines fiasco tells us that future game developers, the same that are attending our schools, need to learn basic production practices, from understanding what narrative design means to clear communication, iteration and scoping. Students have the room to make mistakes, and teachers should help them think about what worked and what didn’t, not just give a grade to the final result. Some of us are working really hard to emphasize the human factors in making games. But the whole team needs to know these practices: the publishers and producers seem to be the most at fault here, but the whole team needs to understand these practices. Bad production habits lead to wasted effort and talent, as well as to insane crunch and eventual burnout. As educators, we should teach students not only healthier practices, but also to reflect on the process of game making. Technologies will change a lot really fast, but humans tend to repeat their mistakes.

Adventure Games · choice design · Puzzles · Thoughts

Choice vs. Puzzles in Adventure Game Design

Clara Fernandez-Vara5 Comments

It is the season of writing game of the past year lists and hyping the games of the new one. I’m delighted to see how Telltale’s The Walking Dead haunts most of these “best of 2012” lists. Its success proves that adventure games still have a lot to say about game design and game narrative, and that there can be a wide audience for them. It also proves how choice design changes how we play and design adventure games.

The Walking Dead confirCaptura de pantalla 2013-01-09 a las 6.11.29 p.m.ms the potential of choice design in adventure games, something that my friends at Choice of Games had already been doing for a while. The core gameplay is making decisions, usually quickly, and living with the consequences (or dying horribly). Although many scenes change depending on your previous actions, because otherwise the choice would be superfluous, the game does not degenerate into out-of-control branching. Instead, it changes specific aspects and scenes of the story. Designing this game must have still been rather complex, which is what happens whenever we have to set up a choice and a clear narrative consequence, but it is done in such a way that choices create a hyper-tangled rhizome.

What I have not seen mentioned often enough in reviews how different The Walking Dead is from other Telltale games, as well as from many other point-and-click adventure games. This may come from the misconception that adventure games are the electronic version of Choose Your Own Adventure books, so it may seem that this is more of the same.It’s not.

Adventure games are simulations. This is obvious to anyone who’s written IF with Inform, or created games with Adventure Game Studio, for example, but it’s a concept that finds resistance from people who only play them, and usually without much enthusiasm. Zork, Maniac Mansion, Machinarium are all based on creating a world, a space, populated by characters and objects, which have different relationships between them. The simulation creates challenges usually in the form of puzzles, and the player has to solve it by understanding how the simulation works. The story unfolds as the player interacts with the world and solves the puzzles.

The Choice of Games series, as well as The Walking Dead, shift the attention to choice and consequence. This is obvious in the Choice Of… games, where the world of the game is described, and our only interaction is selecting items from a menu. We don’t interact with a simulated world, but with a world represented through text. The Walking Dead is a nice hybrid between traditional point-and-click and choose your own adventure, where some scenes allow us to walk around and explore the world at our leisure, to learn about the place and gather information, which will inform our decisions later. There’s less puzzle-solving, the core of the game is choosing the right thing in the moments of crisis. Best thing of all, what the “right” thing to do is never clear, and often makes you feel like you’re trapped in an awful situation.

As someone who designs adventure games focused on simulation and puzzle solving, I really welcome games like Choice of Zombies or The Walking Dead. It’s refreshing, it proves that there is still so much to do in adventure games beyond paying constant homages to our favourite games from Lucasarts or Sierra (I’m guilty of that too). There is a wide design palette at our disposal, we just have to use it.

ChoiceOfZombies_512x512_c

The Walking Dead and Choice of Zombies also fit choice design with their topic very well. It makes sense that we cannot go many places, that there is not a lot to explore: it’s the zombie apocalypse! Plus you’d better be careful with what you do, because any choice could be your last. The limitations in the environment bridge very well the world of the game and the game design.

Choice design is not new, RPGs have explored this for a long time, with varying success. Think of all these games series: Fallout, Knights of the Old Republic, Fable, Dragon Age… Often choices in RPGs are limited to “save the baby or kill it” pseudomorality, where the consequences are relatively predictable. Some of the examples just listed demonstrate how much more interesting choices become when your expectations are thwarted, or, better enough, where there is no easy choice, which is what probably is impressive about The Walking Dead.

Choice is not alien to adventure games either–Infocom’s Suspended depends on your strategies to try to save the world before you are disconnected, for example. Point-and-click adventure games included important choices, usually at the end, because it’s easier to generate three different endings than start working on different outcomes all throughout the game (see The Dig, or Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, for example). More recently, Resonance did a wonderful job of incorporating choices. (It’s hard to talk about it without spoiling it, but I’ll try.) Resonance also has multiple endings, but does have choice points throughout the game that feel really important, and even if the consequences of the choice are not so different (or inevitable, when it comes to the twist of the game), the game makes you stop and think about what you’re doing. This is mostly achieved by getting you to know the characters and empathise with them, you spend time with them, and when the crisis comes about, you feel for the characters, you feel the pain and the betrayal. The consequences are emotional rather than changing the events. Resonance does in practice what the publicity of Heavy Rain kept announcing, and the game eventually failed to deliver.

resonance_best_scene

The Walking Dead combines plot consequences with emotional consequences very cleverly: early on, you see how your decisions can have awful consequences, people die if you don’t act fast enough or do not make the right choice. Later on, the consequences become more emotional than changing the events. Unlike the adventure games listed in the paragraph above, where it’s a final choice that changes the ending, The Walking Dead takes you to an inevitable ending with slight variations, which may feel different depending on how you have chosen to play your character. That’s eventually the triumph of the game: choice design is about the psychology of the player, not about showing off a complex system.

The possibilites of new adventure games are wide open, it’s our choice. Those who said that adventure games were dead didn’t expect them to come back shuffling their feet and try to rip their gut open.

the-walking-dead-episode-3-9-5-2012