The first day of the Game Developers Conference descended upon San Francisco like a heavy scent from geek-boy heaven. The characters from the night before – at the Uematsu concert – had disappeared behind a non-descript costume of khakis and black shirts, speckled here and there with an alternative hair colouring. Sessions were plentiful and many were over-subscribed. All, however, were deserving.
I went along to two of note, creeping into the cramped spaces, surrounding myself with computer gamer flesh. The first was the tremendous Design Challenge, running for the second year in a row, and packed with fan boys and designers alike gathered together to observe master game design minds in action.
The idea was to pose an impossible mission to some of the finest minds in the industry. Represented were Ubisoft's Clint Hocking, Lionhead's Peter Molyneux and the ever-entertaining and exceedingly popular Will Wright. They were charged with a task that seemed irredeemable: to create a computer game based on the poetry of 18th century eccentric American author Emily Dickinson.
It is an interesting and unique session idea, a sort of which which was underwhelming at last year's EIGF (now called Edinburgh or EIEC). The major difference between this and that, however, was that the participants in the GDC challenge could teach their methods from a standpoint of expertise and success, while in Edinburgh all that could be taken home was what lawyers and PR people thought went into gaming.
As host Eric Zimmerman, from gameLab, explained, this was an opportunity to look at games in a raw way, to give a sense beyond the finished product, in order to understand the challenge with game design problems.
This comes at a time, explained Zimmerman, when the industry is in a creative crisis (a bold statement from an industry veteran to a roomful of hundreds of industry employees), when released titles only explore a very narrow range of form and content in terms of what a game can be.
In light of the contemporary technical, cultural and economic constraints of creating a computer game product, the challenge was not going to turn up its nose at an important form of revenue. It specifically looked at what could be done with licenses, and difficult ones at that.
Emily Dickinson was a particularly prolific and eccentric woman, with over 1800 poems to her name by the end of her life. As a whole, they dealt with philosophical and metaphysical themes – awfully problematic to pin down for the purposes of pragmatic, goal-oriented game designs. What the contestants were able to work with was the content of these poems, the life of Emily Dickinson or any combination of the two. She was certainly an interesting woman, only recognised as a poet after her death, she grew increasingly secluded towards the end of her life and only wore white. As Clint Hocking pointed out in his presentation, surely a designer like American McGee, with his Tim Burton-esque interactive treatment of a variety of traditional fairy tales and stories, could do something with that.
For the Creative Director at Ubisoft, where he recently completed Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, it was a more difficult, albeit exciting and innovative, topic of game design. He explained that he believes that a good game can be made about anything, and in a situation like this one, where the sky's the limit, the biggest challenge is to constrain the problem.
He first approached it from a marketing perspective. How could he set up this game to make it appealing to people? First line of thought was Emily Dickinson Poetry Slam, a fighter in the tradition of Mortal Kombat with authors throughout the ages (think Mark Twain as Fathom, special move: stun enemies with wit). Unfortunately he couldn't think of what to do with Emily Dickinson.
His second idea was the American McGee-inspired direction, in which the spectre of Emily comes back from the dead to save her childhood home. He discarded that one as well.
Other constraints were technological. This led him to focus his project on the Nintendo DS, with specific attention on the stylus as an alternative to Emily Dickinson's pen. It offers interesting functionality, and might attract new audiences to the new things the machine can do.
He chose as his final design idea that the player should take the character of Emily's must, inspiring her to write her collected works. Each poem would be buried in a puzzle, but how to build the poems?
The answer was to develop a symbol language of nouns, verbs and descriptions. The main game would be to collect objects in five worlds (based upon the overall thematic element of the seasons plus one of Emily's "Fancy") which would contain symbols, which are used to build poems. The secondary game, a series of important mini-games, would be to assemble the symbols in their correct syntax in Tetris-style challenges. The player would need to create 13 poems each season to progress to the next. Some symbols would be easier or harder to collect in certain seasons, and those which are not immediately necessary could be save in a time-mechanic degrading form in Fancy.
The technology would also allow parties to trade between one another, both in symbol format and in reward. After the player completed a poem he or she would be treated to a reading accompanied by a visual montage of the unique way each object was harvested. By swapping visual montages, the player would demonstrate their own personal gameplay flair, as well as offering visual FAQs to others who were having trouble.
Clint concluded his presentation by explaining how he went about the process of designing a game based around a challenging premise. He started by looking at different aspects of the problem, the constraints upon the design, and then fleshed it out with appropriate actions (taking a leaf out of Chris Crawford's emphasis on the importance of verbs in interactive storytelling). The important message he sent was to develop an interesting functionality to suit the platform and the target audience.
Molyneux's proposal was less intoxicating; indeed he admitted that he crowbarred the Emily Dickinson license into an existing technology which Lionhead are currently producing for next generation hardware. It was rather disappointing, to be honest, and served as advertisements for his "digital clay" and the session he held later that afternoon which went into greater depth about the tech at another time (opposite my Counting Women panel...). Still, being PM he wowed the gathered with a demo of his idea and did show a few insights into how he creates world-class games.
He first began by asking, "What is poetry?". It is, he argues, words creating visuals inside your mind. The digital clay was a method of creating the visuals which Emily Dickinson may have seen inside her head, based upon recreations of her home surroundings.
The objects that are created by the digital clay unlock a poem or allow the player to create his or her own poetry.
He examined the context next, in which he claimed that poetry is all about looking at things in a different way, so the mechanics the game would allow the player to look at rooms in a different way, through portals, and from different angles. The overall objective was to recreate visual poetry, inspired by Molyneux's admitted difficulty with writing and using written language to express his own thoughts.
Will Wright's design was the overall winner, a close first to Hocking's second. His design was called USBEmily (aka Unstable Synthetic Brain Emily), but before I get into the meat I'll go through his stated process.
First stage is research. He jots things down in a brainstorm fashion, looking at opportunities or problems based upon Emily the poet or her poems. The result of this was: 1. Poetry is all about compression 2. Text is boring, and today's market isn't interested in it 3. Should he respect the license (or should he recreate her into some kind of first-person shooting main character with muscles and a special weapon of cleverly-arranged words?) 4. Is it mass market? 5. What would he get out of this as a designer? 6. Because of the game-based medium, he could perhaps expose a lot of people to Emily Dickinson who wouldn't go to a bookstore and buy a book
He then gave answers to these issues and explored the raw material at hand. There are thousands of letters, which span emotional ranges. He liked the idea of interacting with someone from history, and slowly came upon a final design that was a cross between Tamagotchi, the Microsoft paperclip and the Dreamcast game Seaman. In short, he wanted a game character which was moody, dependent, portable; observant, concurrent and annoying; and one whom the player had a continuous relationship with, but was rather creepy.
After looking at the current trajectory and statistics about memory stick uptake, he chose to utilise this growing mass market platform by including his program as default software on a USB memory stick. "USBEmily" would be an artifical personality, slightly unhinged, who would require the player, her psychiatrist, to manage her state of mind. He devolved this idea as a result of a vague point in Emily's history, her most prolific, which she called "The Terror". The various poles the character could veer towards would be romantically obsessed, utmost respect or suicidal, the last resulting in her self-deletion from the stick.
Emily would contact you via email, Instant Message, while you were in the middle of an application or when you were online. She would be pervasive, asking if you want her to make a poem for you - a visual montage of first result images from a search using the two most relevant words from each line of one of her poems.
The assumption was that the customer doesn't buy into Emily initially, but that he or she develops a relationship with her over time. This emergent gameplay inspiration contrasts with Hocking's starting point – the stylus, and Molyneux's - his own difficulties expressing himself in the written word.
All very unique proposals, and an invaluable lesson into the processes top games designers go through. The presentations will be on www.ericzimmerman.com in a few months time for the chronically curious.
