Unique Video Games
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Unique Video Games Warren Spector, Director, Denius-Sams Gaming Academy
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Unique Video Games
- 1. Unique Video GamesUnique Video Games Director Denius-Sams Gaming Academy Warren Spector
- 5. Unique
- 6. What’s so important about being unique?
- 8. &
- 12. All games were unique
- 14. It was a frontier
- 15. No one cared
- 17. Millions of players Everyone’s a gamer now
- 18. We’re mainstream $100b - Bigger than the rest
- 19. Not just bigger More diverse
- 20. In the cultural crosshairs Threatened by lawmakers
- 21. These are not enough There’s a big “but(t)” in our future
- 22. To reach our potential We need to exploit our differences
- 23. What makes games unique? That’s the key to our future
- 24. Four elements of uniqueness
- 25. 1. The power to transport It’s YOU doing stuff!
- 26. 2. Immersiveness We’ll make you believe!
- 27. 3. Participation You’ll have to help
- 28. 4. Responsiveness The game will react
- 35. Player experience comes first
- 36. The power of dialogue
- 38. Create the RULES
- 39. Offer TOOLS
- 42. What Designers Do Give players tools to DISCOVER or CREATE gameplay
- 43. Provide a CONTEXT for player action
- 47. Formulate PLANS
- 48. EXECUTE plans
- 49. MOVE to the next challenge
- 50. Who Owns What? Developers = Meaning/Significance Players = Minute-to-Minute
- 52. Orson Scott Card on Collaboration • “Why aren’t we letting the player decide that?” • “Every freedom that you can give to the player is an artistic victory.” • Every needless boundary in your game should feel to you like a failure.
- 53. • Imposing unnecessary limitations Orson Scott Card on Collaboration
- 54. Orson Scott Card on Collaboration • Imposing unnecessary limitations • Imposing unnecessary boundaries
- 55. Orson Scott Card on Collaboration • Imposing unnecessary limitations • Imposing unnecessary boundaries • Not abdication
- 56. Orson Scott Card on Collaboration • Imposing unnecessary limitations • Imposing unnecessary boundaries • Not abdication • Not constraint-free
- 57. Orson Scott Card on Collaboration • Imposing unnecessary limitations • Imposing unnecessary boundaries • Not abdication • Not constraint-free • Collaboration!
- 59. How will we recognize success?
- 60. “I never thought to try that!” How will we recognize success?
- 61. “I never thought to try that!” “I always solve that problem another way!” How will we recognize success?
- 62. “I never thought to try that!” “I always solve that problem another way!” “That weapon isn’t useless - it’s my favorite!” How will we recognize success?
- 63. “I never thought to try that!” “I always solve that problem another way!” “That weapon isn’t useless - it’s my favorite!” “I didn’t know that part of the map existed!” How will we recognize success?
- 64. “I never thought to try that!” “I always solve that problem another way!” “That weapon isn’t useless - it’s my favorite!” “I didn’t know that part of the map existed!” Is that going to work? How will we recognize success?
- 65. “I never thought to try that!” “I always solve that problem another way!” “That weapon isn’t useless - it’s my favorite!” “I didn’t know that part of the map existed!” Is that going to work? How could you do that? How will we recognize success?
- 66. We’re starting to get it
- 74. But we’re not done yet
- 76. How cool is this moment?
- 77. Developers: Honor what makes us unique
- 78. Publishers: Take chances and honor your creatives
- 79. Gamers: Vote with your dollars
- 80. The Medium of the 21st Century?
- 81. Make it so
- 82. Director, Denius- Sams Gaming Academy at UT Warren Spector Thanks!Thanks! Any questions?Any questions?
Editor's Notes
- I’m a man with a mission. In a way, it’s a pathetic mission. But in some ways, it’s actually pretty important, I think.
- See, in 1978, I started playing Dungeons & Dragons. My Dungeonmaster was cyberpunk SF author, Bruce Sterling. Amazing storyteller. (If you ever want to embarrass Bruce ask him about the Rat Gang’s Sacred Quest in Shang, the River City…)
- But what hit me so hard wasn’t being told a story by Bruce. It was the realization that my friends and I were telling our own, unique story WITH Bruce. My entire career, all I’ve been trying to do - in every game I’ve worked on - is recreate the feeling I had that night. See? Pathetic. But also important - collaborative storytelling is something no other medium can do. And today, I want to talk about how and why it’s important that games embrace that capability.
- Put another way, I want to talk about the things that make games different from all other media. Since we’re all gamers here, I’ll even say that, in some ways, we may be BETTER than other media. When you leave here, I hope you have an even greater appreciation than you already have of what games can and should be - or at least what I think they can and should be.
- Why is this important? I’ll come back to the idea of “importance” a few times today, but for starters, it’s important because I don’t think games are a “solved problem” yet. We still have a long way to go. Some indies are going someplace very special, but the mainstream console and mobile developers seem to be in a heck of a rut. Like we’ve forgotten something important. To see what it is we’ve forgotten, let’s go back in time a few decades, just for a minute.
- This is me when I was a little kid. When I was growing up, things were a little different than they are now.
- There were no games, really, tabletop or digital - just stuff like chess and Monopoly. Ways to pass some time with family and friends. Nothing more.
- And computers looked like this - 16K monsters operated by guys in white lab coats. 4th graders need not apply. (I know. I tried…)
- This is what my first home computer looked like. I sure wasn’t playing Call of Duty on it!
- Everything changed in the late ‘70s when computers started looking like this. No white lab coat necessary. And you could even play games on them. Sound was primitive, graphics barely qualified as graphics and user interfaces took advantage of every key on the keyboard. But those games were really special, at least to nerdy guys like me who couldn’t get dates.
- No one knew anything about games - designers were making it up as they went along. There were no genres, no conventions, no rules at all. Back then, all games were unique in some sense - in content, in style - in ALL ways. There was and had never been anything like them.
- Nowadays, with graphics and sound that rival movies and television, and the ability to tell stories as sophisticated as anything Hollywood has to offer, games often seem like imitations of other media. Back in the day, designers couldn’t have imitated other media even if they’d wanted to - the tech was so primitive they came up with unique things even when they tried NOT to!
- Neither the situation nor the audience changed much over the next 5-10 years. Designers were creating a medium on the fly, with nothing to guide them but a love of Star Wars and D&D. The world of game development was a frontier and the people making games were pioneers. Those pioneers created genres, created rules and conventions - everything games are today is built on the foundation they laid down.
- And you know what? The real world of normal humans couldn’t have cared less. No one cared about this new medium, its unique qualities and its artistry. Games were for kids - and not the cool ones. Games were a fad - wait a while and they’d go away. If anyone cared at all it was because games were “dangerous” and damaging to young minds.
- But time marched on… years passed… decades flew by… and both games and their audience changed. Radically.
- Remember when games were for geeks? Those days are long gone. There are millions of people playing games. Console gamers are a big part of the scene, but how many normal humans passed some time today playing a game on their smart phones? Played solitaire on their PCs? Poker online? Whether we self-define as “gamers,” most of us are gamers now.
- As an economic force, games are at the center of the entertainment universe. We generate more revenue than movies. More than the music business. People spend more money on games now than they do to watch movies and buy music. According to Gartner analysts, we’re heading for a $111 billion year.
- Our audience isn’t just bigger - it’s more diverse. Kids, adults, men, women even Senators play games. In fact, more women play games now than men. And the average age of gamers topped 30 years ago.
- And as if all THAT weren’t proof of our importance, we’re now very much in the cultural crosshairs. When Congress goes after you, you know you’ve made it!
- So we matter, culturally and financially, and we touch a lot of people’s lives. But all the money and cultural credibility, while nice, isn’t enough to cement our place in the media landscape. From a creative standpoint we have some work to do. It’s like we’ve forgotten something we used to know - that we weren’t just like other media. We were something new and we reveled in it.
- Today, despite all of our outward success, we’ve only begun to scratch the surface of what we can be as a medium. We’re still full of potential and I don’t want to see us squander it. And to ensure that we don’t, I think we have to honor and exploit the things that make us UNLIKE any other medium.
- It’s vital to our future that we stop and think about this. Figure out (or maybe just remember) what makes us unique and our future is secure.
- So what DOES make us different? In my view, there are four critical things:
- First, we can transport players to other worlds, other times and other places. It isn’t Lebron James dunking - it’s you. It isn’t some hero racing driver piloting that Ferrari - it’s you. In Bioshock? Same thing. No other medium can do any of this.
- We’re at our best when we remove obstacles to player belief in the things they’re experiencing - when we immerse players in our game environments. And with VR making a comeback, immersiveness is about to take a big leap forward. No other medium can do this, either.
- We’re the only medium in human history that requires user participation. Without players doing their thing, nothing happens in a game. Everything. Just. Stops. No medium other than gaming requires DIRECT ACTION on the part of the user to be complete. No medium other than gaming counts on the presence and PARTICIPATION of the user for its very existence.
- And we’re the first medium of expression capable of RESPONDING to user participation. In other words, we’re the first medium where creators offer something, users react and the work responds. Something totally new.
- What those four unique characteristics add up to is this: Games are the first medium of communication in history that is “two-way,” that can turn consumers into collaborators in the creative process.
- And what THAT means is that - alone among the arts - we can share the responsibilities (and joys) of creativity with our audience. We don’t always do it, but we can and, for me, that means there’s a moral obligation to do so.
- Sharing authorship means offering players significant opportunities to ACT, to take control of the experience. You’re not just funneled down a path, limited to a series of shots ordered by a film director or to chains of words strung together by an author. Players get to make decisions as they play.
- Those player decisions have CONSEQUENCES. If I do thing X, thing Y happens. Or maybe even thing Z or A, in a really clever game.
- Highly and immediately RESPONSIVE worlds make these consequences apparent to players. You get to see what happens if you pull that trigger (or don’t)…
- All of which adds up to games in which each play session is UNIQUE. And what makes each play session unique is in PLAYERS’ hands, not in the hands of an author, director or designer. In all of these cases (and many others, of course)
- Player experience comes first. That’s the most exciting thing about games to me - games shouldn’t be about how clever and creative a designer is. Players are the ones who get to be clever and creative - their experience trumps the creator’s message, creativity and intent.
- Other media make statements - audiences are told or shown things. They get to interpret what they’re told or shown. That’s it. Games are dialogues - between designers and players, and between players and other players. And as in any dialogue, each participant has a role to play, a job to do. Let’s look at the developer’s role.
- We tell players what they have to do at the high level. (But only, I’d argue, at the high level.)
- We create the RULES of the game - the “legal” actions that drive all game interactions as players pursue their goals.
- Developers give players tools to use in attempting to accomplish those goals.
- We create sounds and images that represent the events of the game, providing input about possible choices and feedback about choice outcomes.
- Then, paradoxically, we limit player choices by putting relevant obstacles in their path and sometimes by introducing artificial constraints to keep players from going too far astray.
- In other words, we give players the tools to DISCOVER or even CREATE gameplay rather than tools to reveal the designers’ intentions.
- We provide a CONTEXT in which players act. Like Bruce Sterling, ace Dungeonmaster in a D&D game, we provide a story skeleton, lacking muscle and flesh, only hinting at what the story will actually look like. (And btw, I’m not just talking about overtly narrative games - even Tetris has a story, the story of each individual player’s experience…)
- By creating that skeleton, we can bound player experience. We can put a box around it within which players have near, if not total, freedom to put meat on the bones however they want. I realize I’m stretching the metaphor, but we determine that the skeleton is a human one, but players get to decide how that human looks.
- Alone among media, we can bound player experience without determining what that experience will be. We certainly don’t always do this. Plenty of games put you on narrative rails and say, for example, kill everything that moves. But we CAN do it. And should.
- So that’s the developer’s part in the collaborative process. Clearly, we’re pretty powerful. But where do players get their power in this collaboration?
- Developers create goals, but players have to figure out a specific series of steps to accomplish them (using the tools and exploiting the rules of the game). Players agree to make step-by-step plans in the face of challenges provided by developers.
- Then players agree to act on those plans in reasonable, logical ways. So players decide what they want to do, decide how to do it and then give it a go.
- And then, of course, players agree to move on to the next challenge. Wash, rinse, repeat until the end of the game (or the next level or episode or battle). But here’s the interesting thing - if developers do their jobs RIGHT, players can replay the game, make different plans, use different tools, exploit the rules differently and the game plays out differently. That’s the player’s power.
- One way to think about this is that players “own” the minute-to-minute, while designers “own” the overall arc of the situation. In other words, players own “I did this and then this and then that” and so on, while developers own “you have to save your brother.” In even simpler terms, player’s do stuff and designers decide why what they do is important.
- The implication of all this is simple. In a game, nothing happens unless developers play their part and players play theirs. Gameplay is a process, and the heart of that process is collaboration. If we’re going to understand what makes games unique, and exploit the unique aspects of the medium, we have to embrace the power of collaboration. This isn’t a new thought, just one a lot of us have forgotten. In fact, this idea was apparent early in the development of video games.
- Author Orson Scott Card expressed this idea as far back as 1981! Here’s what he said: “Someone at every game design company should have the full-time job of saying ‘Why aren't we letting the player decide that?’… When [they] let…unnecessary limitations creep into a game, gamewrights reveal that they don't yet understand their own art. They've chosen to work with the most liberating of media -- and yet they snatch back with their left hand what they offered us with their right. Remember, gamewrights, the power and beauty of the art of game making is that YOU AND THE PLAYER COLLABORATE TO CREATE THE FINAL STORY. Every freedom that you can give to the player is an artistic victory. And every needless boundary in your game should feel to you like a failure.”
- The genius of this is that Card talks about not imposing UNNECESSARY limitations…
- He talks about avoiding NEEDLESS boundaries.
- This isn’t about developers abdicating their creative responsibilities…
- And it isn’t about making a game without constraints on what players can and can’t do (though many developers think, misguidedly, I think, that constraint-free play is some kind of grail).
- No, Card is talking about collaboration, about sharing authorship, about giving players the opportunity to think, plan, execute and create unique experiences for themselves inside a “creative box” defined by the developer.
- If we accept players as collaborators, as I’ve suggested, and as Card suggested years ago, then we’re back where we started - with the idea of “shared authorship.” When games are at their best, neither the developer nor the player can claim total ownership of the experience. And we’re back to “unique!”
- So how do you know if you’ve made a game of shared authorship, exploiting what makes us unique to maximum effect? How will you know when players have been sufficiently empowered to determine their own virtual fates? Listen to them. You’ll know you’ve succeeded when you hear statements like this:
- “I never thought to try this. I wonder if it will work?”
- “I always solve that problem another way. I’ll have to play again and see what happens when I try something different.”
- “That useless weapon’s my favorite” - true story, the Deus Ex team wanted to cut the pistol because it was so weak, but I always used it (along with explosive barrels and other in-world items that magnified the pistol’s puny effect). I loved the pistol because it forced me to think.
- “I never saw that part of the map before.” Another Deus Ex story - After we shipped, I heard players engaged in a conversation about how cool it was when you found the prison beneath UNATCO headquarters and interacted with a prisoner down there. And one player said, “Prison? What prison?” That was success!
- A year after we shipped Deus Ex, I watched our lead tester demo the game for Eidos execs. He was in a place I’d seen a thousand times. I knew what problem he was trying to solve. But he solved the problem in a way even I, as one of the creators of the game, didn’t anticipate. That’s success.
- Maybe best of all, if you hear players questioning each other’s decisions - “you killed that guy?!” - that’s a victory. In Deus Ex, we had people arguing about how the world would be better off, and disagreeing about it as if they were talking about the real world. Success!
- So how are we doing, as a business and as a medium? I’ve been ranting about this shared authorship and unique experience stuff for a long time, and (finally!) I’m encouraged by what I see (though not in the mainstream). It’s like the indies and newcomers have woken our medium up from a long slumber and started celebrating what makes us different. The variety of game offerings make this something of a golden age.
- Today, there’s room for a Candy Crush Saga, playable on a billion smartphones. No two playthroughs the same? Yep.
- There’s room for a World of Warcraft, played at its peak by well over 13 million people around the world. And while there’s an overarching narrative, how players navigate through that narrative is up to them.
- There’s room for retro indie games like Papers, Please, made, basically, by a guy alone in a room, and making players complicit in a discussion of a profound political and social statement. And you’re definitely making consequential decisions as you play.
- There’s room for emotional journeys where the only real narrative is the one player’s construct for themselves.
- There’s room for MOBA’s. Boy is there room for MOBA’s! Again, players are in control and no two battles play out the same way.
- Occasionally, though too infrequetntly, a mainstream game offers players the kind of freedom, decisions and creative role I’m talking about.
- Do I have to remind anyone there’s room for mind-blowing, shared authorship games like Minecraft? I didn’t think so…
- So, we’ve made progress. But there are still too many games that put players on rails… that show off the designer’s creativity at the expense of player freedom… that imitate other media instead of moving beyond them. I know it’s not for me to say what should be made or played, but it seems a shame to turn our back on what makes us special.
- At the end of the day, there are a handful of things I hope you’ll take with you when you leave this room: First, games are IMPORTANT - they enrich a lot of people’s lives, fatten a lot of people’s wallets and are now central to Western culture. And as I hope I’ve convinced you, games are UNIQUE, something we need to celebrate. When we do so, we can even call ourselves art. (Yeah, I said it…)
- Here’s another reason why all this uniqueness talk is important: Opportunities to watch the birth and coming of age of a new medium come along maybe once or twice a century. The opportunity to be a PART of that coming of age story is rarer still. And everyone in this room has the chance not just to witness the process, but to be a part of it.
- Developers can choose to exploit our unique characteristics. Don’t assume the design problems are all solved. We haven’t yet seen our Citizen Kane as some have put it. Don’t assume that technology will answer all questions. We have design advances yet to be made. Don’t assume that games have to be about alien invasions and slaying dragons. There are content cages we must break out of. And jettison the idea that games provide an opportunity to show off how creative you are. Engage in dialogue with players, honor what makes us unique and our place at the adult table will be assured.
- Publishers - take a FEW more chances and trust the creatives more. Four out of five games fail in the marketplace. Game developers given more creative room COULDN’T do any worse than an 80% failure rate! And creatives given some room are going to try things we can’t even imagine (Minecraft… Journey… and many more). Making unique games instead of more-of-the-same games might even make you more money.
- Players, for their part, can vote with their dollars for different kinds of experiences, instead of just another Game X (number 72 in the series). If you buy my argument, support games that express more explicitly the things that make us unique and deliver experiences that couldn’t be delivered by any other medium. You can advance the state of the art every time you lay down your credit card or pick up a controller, mouse or smartphone.
- If we all play our parts, we have the potential to be THE medium of the 21st century, just as movies were the medium of the 20th. But that future isn’t certain. We still have creative work to do. I’ve told you what I think makes us unique and why I think that’s important. For me, it is, and has always been about, collaborative storytelling - Dungeons & Dragons for the 21st century. (I know. I know. Pathetic.)
- You don’t have to agree with me. But I ask that you consider what YOU think makes games unique. Then go out and MAKE unique games, PUBLISH unique games, PLAY unique games. Don’t settle for conventional games with prettier pictures. Focus on our differences and imagine what they’ll say about us when the 22nd century rolls around!
- Questions?