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Ethical Decision Making

Manveer over at Design Rampage threw up his Pecha Kucha style slides, notes and audio from his GLS talk about Ethical Decision Making in games.

He makes more or less the same points that I made in a similar talk back in 2004, linked here as well as in the stack on the right. PK talks are great because they cut right to the point. In all honesty in today's age, I am starting to lose faith in the 1 hour talk format.

I commented briefly on Manveer's site, but I wanted to recap the point here. One of the four points Manveer identifies in his talk as being important to designing for meaningful ethical decisions is `permanence`. He states in his notes "A dilemma ceases to be a dilemma if you get a do-over. Save games, unfortunately ruin this.".

I find myself unwilling to accept this. As I said in the comments over on his side, this is seeking to apply an author-centric narrative model to a medium with which it is not compatible. Games (at least modern single-player computer games) allow the ability to redo actions through save-load. This is inherent to what they are and quite possibly need to be.

In The Iliad, when Hector decides to go and fight Achilles, we know he's going to die... so does everyone else. So does he. And that's the point. Hector can't do anything else because Hector is Hector and that is why we care. Author centric media allow for this inevitability. In fact, they are dependant on it.

In a game, Hector is not Hector. Hector is the player and the player will keep fighting Achilles until he wins, and this is the way it should be. In fact, making it impossible to change the decision and do it differently - arguably even making it difficult to beat Achilles to try and make the player feel the way Hector feels - is contrary to what both games and difficult decisions are about. The emotional emphasis and resultant challenge should be on the decision to commit to fighting Achilles, not the rote mashing of buttons to launch the combos that will sever the tendon that bears his name and beat him.

The path forward - in my opinion - is to invent a new ethical decision making model specific to games that embraces what games are instead of rejecting it for the models used in other author-centric media that have been successful up to now. I don't know exactly what that model is shaped like (though I talked about it in my talk), but I know that if we adopt a narrativoid, author-centric model, we may one day manage to make EDMs in games that are as compelling as those in authored media, but we'll never exceed the emotional weight of those media.

If we truly want to be the dominant culture form of the twenty-first century, we have fight on our own terms, not on their terms. We have to do it the way that works for us. We have to step out on the field of battle and face our own Achilles, even if it means we will lose, because it's in our nature and we can't do it differently anyway...

Or maybe we can.

Maybe we can all try it our own different way and collectively solve the problem by trying all the different permutations simultaneously and seeing which way works and comparing notes in real time via the interwebs instead of waiting for someone to write down the authoritative solution and teach it to us.

That's what I'm talkin' about. How's that for a meta-post.

Far Cry 2 Map Editing Guide

Wow - two posts in a row about books that I contributed to - albiet this one is only indirectly as I didn't actually write anything for it.

A few months ago, Ubisoft announced that they would be facilitating the creation of a map editing guide to be written entirely by the Far Cry 2 map editing community.

It's done (age gated). I finally got my hands on a copy of the finished product yesterday, and I think it's pretty cool. Published by Charles River Media, the guide is hefty and acts mostly as a super-robust handbook for the (already awesome) editor. It discusses all the different classes and game modes and weapons, and breaks out all the different biomes that the game supports, as well as providing a lot of interesting discussion on the design implications of different topolgies, terrains and environments. It touches on the classic pillars of multiplayer map design and even provides detailed indexes of the object libraries (which is very helpful - particularly for the console mapper).

Since most of my readers here are developers, I'll be honest and say I don't think the book would be of much help to a pro (though it's not just for designers, a lot of programmers on our team played with it and were very happy with the results - I would recommend any programmer, animator, or producer who has never been hands on with a level editor give it a try just to see what they can do). Mostly though, for an amateur or hobbyist, or - perhaps more importantly - someone looking for a way to hone level design skills for a resume, I think the book is a really valuable contribution.

I'll also say I'm really impressed by a fan community who can organize themselves around the considerable and daunting task of seeing a collaborative book project all the way through from conception to completion in such a short time.

To see this kind of commitment coming from fans of the game makes me even more proud of it.

Available from Amazon here.

Well Played 1.0

A few years ago, I was invited down to Carnegie Mellon by Jesse Schell to visit the Entertainment Technology Center. While there, I met Drew Davidson who is currently the Director of the ETC.

This past year, Drew has been hard at work trying to trick a bunch of us slacker game developers, bloggers academics and others to submit critical discussion pieces on (for the most part) well known games.

His hard work has finally paid off, and Well Played 1.0 is currently available online where you can read it for free on the ETC website, or available for free download or hardcopy purchase through Lulu.com.

I am one of the contributors to the book - but as I mentioned - I am a slacker, and all I was able to provide to Drew was a reprinting of my post on Ludonarrative Dissonance in Bioshock, which every single person to have ever visited this blog has apparently read.

Far more important than my own redundant contribution to critical thought are more than twenty other pieces contributed by all manner of game brains.

From game development legends such as Noah Falstein and Greg Costikyan the book offers insight into Advance Wars and Europa Universalis. Fellow blogger L.B. Jeffries extends the bredth of discussion on Rockstar's Bully, and professors and researchers of all kinds from some of the best schools in the world round out the book with examinations of games as complex and layered as Civilization IV, to those as casual and as accessable as Guitar Hero.

At very least, any game developer should have the online version in their favorites as a valuable reference, and any blogger, reviewer, critic or anyone else who wants to write throughful criticism of a game they feel is important should read it carefully.

Citizen Naruto

So back at Christmas 2007, I snagged a copy of my studio's Naruto game - Naruto: Rise of a Ninja (not our more recent sequel Naruto: The Broken Bond, which by all accounts is even better). I finally got around to playing it a bit, and honestly, I'm really enjoying it.

Consider first that, as I have said many times in the past, I am actually really bad at videogames. Due to this, fighters are my bane. I honestly do not believe that I have ever in my entire life won a single match in Street Fighter (sorry Sirlin). Fighters are just too demanding of twitch reflexes and an understanding of how to enter combos, and read an opponent's moves. I am literally unable to decypher the language of a fighter.

Consider also that I know nothing at all about Japanese Anime. I don't know Naruto from (some other famous anime character that I can't even name to complete the phrase).

So with those major strikes against the game right out of the gate, I'm happy to report that it's a really tight, well realized experience. I strongly suspect that if you are interested in Naruto, you'll really like this game a lot. As for whether or not you'll like it more or less than I do if you like fighting games, I can't answer that at all because I have no idea if it is a good fighting game or a bad one.

The most impressive thing about it is the design of the city itself. Anyone designing an open world should take a good look at this game to see how it is structured. It is possibly the most smartly designed open world city I have ever seen in a game.

Here's the Cole's Notes of why it's great:

First - it's not too big just for the sake of being big. Full stop.

Second, it has a credible population of ordinary townsfolk who go about their business believably. All of the townsfolk dislike you at the start, but one of your rewards as you progress is the admiration of the people. As you do missions and side quests and help people, you get them to switch from disliking you to liking you one villager at a time. Unfriendly villagers say mean things as you pass by, but if you interact with a friendly villager, he will give you directions to your current objective in the form of a little arrow on screen for a short while. What this means is that as you unlock more and more friendly villagers, you have this low-level assistance available to you more and more frequently. It's a really subtle and clever way to make it feel like you're winning the hearts and minds of the villagers.

Third - from a level design point of view, the village is really well thought out and put together. The village has four vertical layers to it. As you progress through the game and unlock new powers and abilities, you are afforded access to higher and higher levels of the city - each higher level connected more 'broadly' then the previous.

At the beginning of the game, you cannot even double jump, and you can only access the lowest level - the streets and the rooftops of a few single story buildings. But you quickly learn the major routes and the major landmarks and get a pretty solid understanding of the basic layout.

Soon you are able to double jump and to run vertically up walls a short distance. This gives you access to the rooftops of most of the buildings in the village and is a very liberating step up. You also gain access to the first set of roof-connecting cables that allow you to 'slide' between interconnected rooftops.

Eventually, you upgrade your wall-running ability and can access the third and fourth vertical layers. The lowest level of cabling is the densest, connecting the most buildings with the shortest cables. The second level of cabling is sparser, connecting fewer buildings, but with longer cables. The highest level of cabling is the most sparse, connecting only a very few of the villages tallest structures.

Effectively these layered fast-travel networks allow you to 'climb up levels of movement heirarchy' giving you fewer degrees of freedom in your movement as you ascend, but giving you the ability to move much further and much faster the higher you go. It's really a fascinating topology.

The game has a really well thought-out economy and progression system as well. There are four currencies in the game: cash, coins, antique coins, and stars. Cash is the only unlimited resource and it is the resource you use to buy consumables (throwing knives, noodles, etc). Coins are (mostly) used to upgrade what you can carry - more knives, more noodles, etc). Antique coins upgrade the effects of your consumables (making all future knives purchased with cash into hardened knives or explosive knives or both). The stars are 'experience points' used to unlock and upgrade your personal abilities - combos and jutsus. Stars are doled out by missions. Both kinds of coins are collectibles (with the antique coins about 1/10th as common) and cash is given for just about everything.

The benefits of this system are obvious - it gives the designers the ability to maintain both limited economies (there are only so many abilties to unlock, hence a finite number of stars), and an open economy (once you have unlocked everything, you can still keep earning cash to buy more noodles to keep your health high - something which I desperately need). And further, by breaking the coins down into two separate limited economies, they alleviate decision stress on the player... not sure whether to save up 23 more coins to pay for that upgrade? You don't have to worry about it - the coin-based economy prices items in the 10's of coins and the antique coin economy prices things in the single units of antique coins (instead of in the 100s of standard coins). Very smart (unless of course, you are going for a more hardcore, more player-choice driven, and more consequential economy).

Anyway - I think the Naruto economy is fascinating and it taught me a lot about different concepts for game economies and I think it's worth a look.

There are also a few things I don't like.

First - I really don't understand the side-mission structure, as simple as it is. In the very beginning of the game, I am told that 'noddle delivery side missions' are unlocked. So I go do some. They are fun, easy, and help you learn the city. Then shortly thereafter, they tell you that races are unlocked, and also that hide-and-seek games are unlocked.

However - when you go to try and do a race or a hide-and-seek game, you cannot. The mission-givers tell you you need to train more - but I spent at least 4 hours (!) playing the game, doing missions, training and buying and unlocked new things before I was actually able to DO one of these supposedly 'unlocked' side-missions. Then - arbitrarily - the missions lock again after a few and you are told 'you need to train first'... but of course, I had no idea what I needed to train in or how, and went another couple of hours before being able to do these missions again.

I understand the notion of wanting to tease the player forward -but you need to tease the player forward with an IMMINENT reward, not one that they may unlock sometime this week. Additionally, by unlocking and relocking the side-missions, you end up playing two different games in parallel - you play a game where there are bunches of side missions and collecting to do - then you finish it all, and play a game of doing main missions until the side-missions are arbitrarily re-unlocked, then you switch back. It's weird. I would much prefer to just do side missions as they suit my whim.

Also - and this is probably the shelf moment for me - I am about halfway through the main story missions and a strange icon appeared on my health/chakra HUD following a major battle with a boss. This icon capped my health and chakra at 500 each, when formerly they were both around 1000. There is no explanation anywhere of what happened to cause it, or how I get rid of it (or even if I can)... I don't even know what it is or what it means - but it has stripped away fully 1/3rd of my power... and I am certainly not a good enough player to make due.

In both cases - the inexplicable locking and unlocking of side-quests and the bizarre 'capping' of my two main combat stats - are simply not explained, leaving me frustrated. Not only is it not explained to me what I need to do to continue forward and/or solve the problem, or when or if I might expect plot progression to solve the problem automatically, it is not even explained to me what the problem is - these impediments are just arbitrary.

Anyway - I still enjoyed the first half of the game quite a bit, and for the city structure alone, I once again recommend it to anyone interested in a rock-solid level design for an open world.

If the two problems mentioned above have been ironed out in the sequel, I'll definitely be picking it up.

41 Days Down

So, after a doctor's appointment this morning, I have been cleared for a part-time return to work, starting tomorrow.

For the time being, I'll only be working four hour stretches, three days a week. That will leave me all the time I need for my physiotherapy, osteopathy, and acupuncture, along with swimming, cycling and whatever else I can squeeze in there that might speed my recovery - without overdoing it and injuring myself.

For those not already in-the-know, it's a herniated disk between L5 and S1, and the base of my lower back. The herniation was compressing the nerve down my left leg in classic fashion and limiting movement considerably. It was also extremely painful except when lying down, and much to my own disappointment, the prescription calls for stationary bed-rest... and they mean it for real (and they're right). I tried to resist it for the first couple weeks, but that proved itself pointless - so instead I basically got to sleep 12+ hours a day and play videogames the rest of the time. That actually turned out to be a big plus, because I missed so many of last years games, I thought I was never going to catch up. I got to play Fallout 3, Dead Space, EndWar, Bully, Left 4 Dead (with Tom and PY mostly),  Naruto, Chinatown Wars, and a lot of Drop7, and now my intimidating list of games-to-play is a lot shorter.

The other good news is that I was smart enough to take the 'opportunity' to change my eating habits so that I wouldn't gain 20 pounds while I was rendered immobile. Even without any exercise (aside from very light stretching in the last 3 weeks) I managed to lose almost 15 pounds simply by tracking my caloric intake versus my (non-existant) burn. For for any of you out there wishing you could lose 10 pounds - if I can do it with a hernitated disk, lying on the couch like a lard-ass all day every day for over a month - you can do it to. Even better - the positive messaging of today's post is not sponsored by Oprah or Wheaties or Weightwatchers or Tracey Anderson or anyone else other than good old fashion arithmetic. Calculate how much you need. Calculate how much you burn, add the two numbers, and count what you eat until you reach the sum and stop. So you know - it means that you have to either stop eating Doritos, Sour Cherry Blasters and One-Bite Brownies or you have a lot of fucking running to do - I chose the former option.

Alas, now the sick-leave that followed my vacation-within-a-vacation that came after my honeymoon that was embedded in my vacation that followed my world tour has come to an end.

Looking forward to getting back to work on that new game I can't talk about.

The Next Generation of Player

So I am finally posting the slides and other presentation matertials for my Generations talk.

The talk is about the current shift in player demographics taking place in population of gamers and game developers.

I originally gave the talk in Vancouver as a Keynote to Vancouver Film School's Game Design Expo back in the beginning of Febraury.

I also gave the talk to the IGDA Chapter here in Montreal at the beginning of March. The IGDA Montreal Chapter has a write-up of the talk here (thanks Caroline), and they're also linking a full video of the entire talk, here - it's actually hosted on Motionbox, here.

For those who don't know, I have been laid up with a herniated disk in my lower back for the past month. I was supposed to be going down to GDx in Savannah a couple weeks ago to give the talk there as well, but my injury regretably prevented the travel. Thankfully with the slides, text and now a full video, anybody can see the presentation at their own leisure.

One final note for you number crunchers out there: the talk presents - in rapid-fire format - a lot of graphs based on data pulled down from the US Census Bureau which I harvested here and then aggregated. I have included in the ZIP file all of my datafiles and the graphs that were generated from them. The data is included as notepad files, whcih were then imported into excel to make the XLS file.

GDC09 - Part 3 - Wines and Rants

The last set of slides I have to put up are those for my five minute talk about game rating systems that I gave as part of Richard Lemarchand's Microtalks session on Thursday morning.

Overall I really enjoyed the session - though the prep was a nightmare. I guess it's pretty easy to enjoy a session where you only have to do 10% of the work and then you get to listen to smart people explain to you what exactly it is that you do for a living.

Anyway, the five minute format is colossally difficult. Especially if you are trying to make a point and support it with arguments instead of being all hand-wavy and theoretical. I wish I could have brought to bear all the arguments I have as for why we should switch from 10, 20, 100 or even 1000 point rating systems to a simple five point rating system, but I just didn't have time.

I guess that's what blogs are for.

Here are the arguments I made in the talk:

100 point rating systems are so analog that the human brain cannot make sense of the granularity (what is the difference between an 86 and an 87 in real perceptible, measurable terms?). These systems nobly attempt to make a threshold-less system - but when the brain is overloaded we add thresholds back in... we say '61-70 is above average' and '71-80 is good' or whatever. This is effectively adding back in the thresholds that a 100 point system endeavors to remove... but it is adding them back in in a less rigorous way leading to a mysticism created around certain improbable thresholds at the far reaches of the curve. I called this mysticism the Cult of 90+ and talked about it specifically in the context of wine rating.

I talked also about the relationship between the review scores, the reviewer, the publishers of the review and the developers and publishers making the games. There are pressures in these relationships that push reviewers to give higher scores. This is very easy to do in a 100 point system (because of the bracketed question in the previous paragraph), meaning a reviewer under pressure can relieve that pressure incrementally by inflating a score ever so slightly to make everyone involved a little bit happier. This systemic, distributed pressure release into the system of review scores is inflationary and increases game review scores over time.

In terms of inflation, I present the evidence of it by looking at the aggregated game ratings taken from gamerankings.com and I discuss why it is bad: principally because it prevents cross-generational comparison of games (in fact, this need for cross generational comparison means we should impose and maintain a bell curve in ratings even if games are getting empirically better over time).

As an aside: Adam Sessler ranted against a different set of problems inherent with the way aggregators work at this years Rant session. Adam is also right, in my opinion, and a global switch to a five star system would also work alleviate his complaint to some extent.

In any case, if you want the discussion on the above points, you can download the slides and the text of the talk here.

Also of note is that I used Kent Hudson's 'How To Pick a Lock' talk from GDC 2008 as a point in the discussion and I have had a couple people ask me about it. For those interested in that discussion, Kent's slides and video support can be found here. Thanks Kent.

Now - over and above the points raised in the talk there are a couple other arguments for why we ought to undertake a global switch to a five star rating system for games that I did not have time to cover in the talk itself.

Firstly, 100 point rating systems leverage the 'fallacy of precision' to lend authority to the accuracy of the rating (difference between accuracy and precision is here). Essentially the argument here is that if I claim a game is an 82, then most readers are likely to think 'well, it must be somewhere between an 80 and an 85'. In fact, this is a fundamentally invalid assumption. If I were to use a 10 point system and give the game an 8, readers would assume it to be 'probably between a 7 and a 9'. If I were to use a five star system and give a 4, they would assume it 'probably between a 3 and a 5'.

The problem is that the precision afforded by an 82 does not make the accuracy of the rating higher. It is as likely to be a 60 or a 100, just as a 4 star rating is probably somewhere between a 3 and a 5. Accuracy and Precision are orthogonal concepts, but the fallacy of precision leverages the fact that our brains tend to correlate them. In a the highly subjective field of rating games, it is much more important that we be accurate than that we be precise and someone who plays a lot of games can be accurate in a five star system.

To go one step further with this argument, I would point out that in a world full of aggregators, we still have 100 and 1000 point systems and having these systems aggregating five star ratings into percentages is useful and good (provided everyone uses a five star system and their aggregation policies are standardized, fair and well understood - cf Sessler). Having them aggregating ratings that are already claiming 100 points of precision makes the aggregators susceptible to the effects of the aforementioned inflation (in fact it is in the aggregators that we are able to measure the inflation).

For the record - this point was misquoted in IGN's article on the talk wherein they wrote:

According to Hocking ... 35 of the 100 current top-rated games (as tracked by an aggregate site) were released after 2001. That presents a skewed view of the industry's history and points toward a recent inflation of sorts in game reviews.

Note that an astute commenter then went on to reply this:

To say 35 of the top 100 rated games of all time came out since 2001 means that scores have been inflated since them is not consistent. Since 2001, there have been 8 years of games released. We can assume that almost all games with ratings have come out since around 1985, or 24 years ago. The past 8 years represents 1/3 of this time, and 35/100 is about 1/3 of the total game volume. It is consistent that ratings have NOT been inflated as 1/3 of the top rated games have come out in 1/3 of the time period of game releases.

The commenter is exactly right if 35 of the Top 100 rated games of all time were released since 2001. But the real quote was that 35 of the Top 41 highest rated games of all time were released since 2001. That`s not the 35% we would predict, that is 85%. Get it right IGN, you kind of invalidated the entire talk by erroneously reporting the most critical and central piece of data. Maybe it was the precision that threw you off?

I won't go into the other horribly broken arguments in the comments thread... I should know better... but here's my personal favorite:

Clint is a joke. Far Cry was overrated trash. The 100 point system is fine. It allows a more accurate score. Period.

That's like a straw-man multiplied by the denial of the fallacy of precision. Awesome stuff.

As a follow-on from the fallacy of precision point is the argument that the kinds of precision implied in 100 point systems feel elitist to 'ordinary' people. At a time when the industry is experiencing explosive growth - when new players of all demographics are starting to take up gaming - it serves our interest to give them reviews and rating scores they can understand. An 89.3 implies a level of refinement in perception among gamers and reviewers that not only does not exist, but is also intimidating for the mass market. It is the equivalent of terms like 'mature oak finish' and 'fruity nose' in wine discussion. These concepts are alienating for the market and make people feel excluded when - in the end - the entire purpose of game reviews and particularly of giving numerical scores at all is to help inform people about the product and invite them to play.

The final point I wanted to make was that - as members of a press with increasingly important social responsibilities - the reviewers, writers and editors giving the review scores should be the ones championing the push to a five star system. For all the reasons mentioned above, finer granularity systems are broken and compromise the integrity fo their work (and the utility of their work to developers). Chris Hecker also gave a mini rant this year and he called for the gaming press to do their job well. I believe the first step in doing that lies in radically reducing the importance and weight given to numerical scores and emphasizing the importance placed on quality reviews, well written.

I am pretty sure no matter what I say, this call is going to go unheeded... but I am also pretty sure that those who don't make the transition are going to find themselves very rapdily serving a smaller and smaller niche of an explosively growing market. I look very much forward to continuing to work with those who survive the transition.

GDC09 - Part 2 - Improvisation presentation materials

So I promised a lot of people I would have the slides from my talk up by Monday, but then I got lazy. But finally, a whole 24 hours late, here they are. you want a quick overview of what the talk was about, Chris Remo recapped it pretty clearly here.

Here's some usability tips for those who aren't aware:

Download the big zip, and open and print the word document (or have it on a second monitor) then run the powerpoint in presentation mode (or have it on your main monitor), then - every time you see a bold word in the text of the word doc, you advance the slides. This will keep all the slides and text in synch and give you the full effect of the presentation.

Just reading the presentation alone will be confusing without the slides, and the slides themselves will be totally meaningless without the text - it's really the synchronization of the two that you need if you hope to follow it.

Also - for reference, you might want the following:

My GDC 2006 Intentionality talk is here.
Harvey Smith's Orthogonal Unit Differentiation talk is here.
Harvey Smith and Randy Smith's talk on emergent gameplay design is here.

Thanks - obviously - to Harvey and Randy for continuing to host the slides and making all this great stuff available for freeloaders like me (and hopefully now you) to cash in on.

GDC09 - Part 1 - GDW and Family Dynamics

Here begins my long slow recap of GDC wherein I will ultimately get around to posting all of my various slides and presentation materials, as well as different commentary on the sessions I saw and what I thought was valuable about GDC this year.

First up is my quick recap of the Game Design Workshop tutorial. The GDW this year was the best yet, even eclipsing last years. It seemed a little smaller, but that might just be because we (ie: Mahk) were better organized and there were some structural changes that made it run more smoothly (I think I foolishly resisted making those changes last year... my bad).

It's clear to me (and not just from GDC) that the quality of students, new grads and recently-employed game developers is going up rapidly. I am pretty sure the rest of the GDW 'faculty' agrees with me on this. It is humbling - even a little bit intimidating - to see these smart new people rolling in and showing us that they have already learned much (or all) of the theory that underpins the workshop... good thing it's not a talky thing - but rather a practical, hands-on thing, or we'd be outta business (whether we all end up out of business in the broader sense remains to be seen).

 

Speaking of practical and hands-on, above is one of the groups that signed up for my elective 'Family Dynamics'. Family Dynamics is an exercise that asks each team to take a random graph which represents the relationship between two unnamed variables (ie: a mechanic) and a random word from a heavily loaded list of things related to families (ie: an aesthetic) and attempt to join the two using limited materials and their own design sensibilities.

The above team made a game about 'impotence' using a two-part graph that plotted (what they defined as) fertility and a progression through three-stages of emotional and physical arousal to try and explore how it might feel to struggle to conceive a child under the pressures that can build up in a family relationship over time.

It was an excruciatingly difficult exercise, I think, and not all of the teams made it through. The point is not really to succeed, though - it's to learn and I hope everybody did. Either way, whatever I come up with next year will likely be a bit less insane.

If you have any interest in reviewing the exercise materials, or in replicating the exercise yourself, feel free to download the parts I am able to make available, over on the left.

My GDC Schedule

Honestly, as much as this is gonna look like a plug for all these interesting talks - mostly what this is, is easy access for me so I can see what talks I am going to and when becuase this is the easiest way to make this stuff quickly accessible from my phone.

Those of you who consequently get an endorsement - hey lucky you :)

(Parties, lunches and other stuff not listed for my own protection against the hordes of hot chicks who stalk me relentlessly, but also so I can crash your party without you knowing it in advance... that's right - I'm talkin' to you Microsoft!)

Monday, March 23rd, 2009

Game Design Workshop
Full Day Tutorial – (Two Days)
Date/Time: Monday (March 23, 2009), 10:00am — 6:00pm
Location (room): 2020, 2022, 2024

Tuesday, March 24th, 2009

Game Design Workshop
Full Day Tutorial – (Two Days)
Date/Time:  Tuesday (March 24, 2009)   10:00am — 6:00pm
Location (room): 2020, 2022, 2024

IGDA Members Party
Date: Tuesday, March 24th
Time: 8pm to 1am
Location: Westin Hotel, Metropolitan ballroom, 50 Third Street, San Francisco

Wednesday, March 25th, 2009

Fault Tolerance: From Intentionality to Improvisation
Speaker: Clint Hocking (Creative Director, Ubisoft)
Date/Time: Wednesday (March 25, 2009)   10:30am — 11:30am
Location (room): Room 2002, West Hall

Breathing LIFE into an Open World
Speaker: Scott Phillips (Design Architect/Lead Designer, THQ\Volition)
Date/Time: Wednesday (March 25, 2009)   12:00pm — 1:00pm
Location (room): Room 2020, West Hall

IGDA VIP Luncheon
Date: Wednesday, March 25th
Time: 1:15pm to 2:15pm
Location: Westin Hotel (aka The Argent), Metropolitan Ballroom III, 50 Third Street

Making Friends is Hard: Social Mechanics in Contemporary Design
Speaker: Alex Hutchinson (Creative Director, Electronic Arts Montreal)
Date/Time: Wednesday (March 25, 2009)   2:30pm — 3:30pm
Location (room): Room 131, North Hall

alternate
The Game Design Challenge: My First Time
Speaker: Panel
Date/Time: Wednesday (March 25, 2009) 2:30pm — 3:30pm
Location (room): Room 135, North Hall

Meaning, Aesthetics, and User-Generated Content
Speaker: Chris Hecker (Technology Fellow, Maxis/Electronic Arts)
Date/Time: Wednesday (March 25, 2009)   4:00pm — 5:00pm
Location (room): Room 135, North Hall

Nominee Reception
Date/Time: Wednesday, March 25, 2009, 5:30pm
Locations: Esplanade Room, South Hall, Moscone Center, San Francisco

9th Annual Game Developers Choice Awards
Date/Time: Wednesday (March 25, 2009)   6:30pm — 8:30pm
Location (room): Esplanade Room

 
Thursday, March 26th, 2009

GDC Microtalks - One Hour, Ten Speakers, Unlimited Ideas
Speaker: Panel
Date/Time: Thursday (March 26, 2009)   9:00am — 10:00am
Location (room): Room 2007, West Hall

From CS to L4D: Creating Replayable Coop Experiences
Speaker: Michael Booth (Game Designer/Developer, Valve)
Date/Time: Thursday (March 26, 2009)   1:30pm — 2:30pm
Location (room): Room 2007, West Hall

alternate
Physical Play: for Interaction, Collaboration and Creativity
Speaker: David Merrill (MIT Media Lab)
Date/Time: Thursday (March 26, 2009)   1:30pm — 2:30pm
Location (room): Room 130, North Hall

Helping Your Players Feel Smart: Puzzles as User Interface
Speaker: Randy Smith (Game Designer, EA)
Date/Time: Thursday (March 26, 2009)   3:00pm — 4:00pm
Location (room): Room 2014, West Hall

Post Mortem: Mission Architect for City of Heroes
Speaker: Joe Morrissey (Senior Game Designer, NCsoft)
Date/Time: Thursday (March 26, 2009)   4:30pm — 5:30pm
Location (room): Room 3007, West Hall

 
Friday, March 27th, 2009

Game Writers' Round Table: Techniques, Tips, and Concerns
Speaker: Richard Dansky (Manager of Design/Writer, Red Storm Entertainment)
Date/Time: Friday (March 27, 2009)   9:00am — 10:00am
Location (room): Room 110, North Hall

Beyond Balancing: Using Five Elements of Failure Design to Enhance Player Experiences
Speaker: Jesper Juul (Lecturer / Researcher, Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab)
Date/Time: Friday (March 27, 2009)   10:30am — 10:50am
Location (room): Room 2022, West Hall

Paper Prototypes of SPORE
Speaker: Stone Librande (Game Designer, EA/Maxis)
Date/Time: Friday (March 27, 2009)   11:10am — 11:30am
Location (room): Room 2022, West Hall

The Human Play Machine
Speaker: Chaim Gingold (Designer, Levity lab)
Date/Time: Friday (March 27, 2009)   12:00pm — 1:00pm
Location (room): Room 2020, West Hall

alternate
Vast Narratives and Open Worlds, Part Deux -- Big Huge Problems
Speaker: Ken Rolston (Lead Designer, Big Huge Games), Mark Nelson (Lead Designer, Big Huge Games)
Date/Time: Friday (March 27, 2009)   12:00pm — 1:00pm
Location (room): Room 2007, West Hall

Destruction of Design
Speaker: Luke Schneider (Designer, Volition Inc)
Date/Time: Friday (March 27, 2009)   4:00pm — 5:00pm
Location (room): Room 2004, West Hall

alternate
Games Have Feelings Too!
Speaker: E. Daniel Arey (Chief Creative Officer, VisionArey Entertainment)
Date/Time: Friday (March 27, 2009)   4:00pm — 5:00pm
Location (room): Room 2022, West Hall