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Montréal International Game Summit

Montréal International Game Summit

Thanks to the GRAND research network and SSHRC I am at the Montréal International Games Summit or MIGS. This is an industry conference, not an academic conference. We are here, in part, to learn about the industry and how industry and universities might collaborate.

Ed Fries, Beauty, Constraint, and the Atari 2600

Fries started with Emerson on art and beauty. He worked for Microsoft on games and the xbox. He left Microsoft to, among other things, develop Figure Prints .

In a strange introduction he talked about identifying and dating Greek vases. Fries works on archaeological digs. He argued that the red-figure vases were some of the most beautiful objects made. By 400 BC the vases have gone over the top and in a baroque fashion they have lost beauty as constraints fell away. The more features and and techniques they developed

This discussion about vases linked beauty to constraint. He then talked about the constraints of programming for the Atari 2600. He created a version of Halo for 2600 (that works online). The constraints of this platform forced him to look at how Atari programmers did things. The tight code and tricks he learned to use were beautiful. He had to do beautiful work on the 2600 in a way he didn't have to on modern platforms.

The game business has been about taking constraints off, but has that made better art? Are games today any more beautiful? I can't help wondering whether the constrain lies in the artist or player. Does knowing about the constraint change the perception of beauty? Is Halo 2600 of interest today because it was programmed under a constraint (and it retromediates something we know as Halo)? Would it have been seen as beautiful in its time?

Fries then moved to talking about diversity and Stephen Jay Gould. He argued that there has been an evolutionary narrowing down from the variety of games that existed in the classic gaming period. The suggestion was that we could learn a lot by going back to the times when there were constraints.

He ended with a very funny history of art that paralleled the history of gaming. As techniques got better they ended up in a baroque phase where everything looked the same. Gaming, for Fries, has gone the same way. And then art went beyond realism and artists imposed constraints on themselves (impressionism, pointilism); can gaming do that as a way to go forward? He gave examples (like Minecraft.)

"Maybe we've had it wrong. ... Maybe its time to impose constraints on ourselves."

My sense is that constraints alone don't make beauty. The nature of the constraint, its reason is part of the beauty. The OULIPO played with constraints.

Catalina Briceno, Canada Media Fund

Briceno presented about how the Canada Media Fund funds games. CMF gets funding from Canadian Heritage and license fees paid to the government.

They have two streams - the Experimental Stream (ES) and the Convergent Stream. The Convergent Stream has to go to works that have a TV component. The Experimental Stream is for non-TV works and it gets about 27 million.

CMF goes to support drama, documentary, children's and youth, and variety/performing arts. There has to be Canadian themes and content. The works have to be created by Canadians and meaningful to Canadians. CMF Convergence Stream is allocated to broadcasters who make a first decision. For digital media platform are projects that have a significant digital component from web sites to digital distribution. This platform is really about added value to the TV component.

The ES doesn't have to have a TV component. Its objective is to develop leading-edge interactive content and software. The CMF will contribute up to 75% of up to 1 million. At least 75% has to be to Canadian costs. Funding is delivered as equity investments. The CMF does expect some sort of recoupment schedule. They expect to be treated as an investor. Projects have to have a letter of intent from a market channel partner. Can producers propose projects that will not recover investment?

For ES they want to see Web 2.0 applications, mobile applications, software with application to cultural sector, videogames, social media and so on. To apply you need to be Canadian for-profit production company.

They have a evaluation matrix for the degrees of innovation that goes from "interation", "improvement", "differenciation" to "revolution." Obviously everyone wants to be judged revolutionary.

The first round of ES received heavy demand. They funded 12 games, 5 websites, 3 mobile apps, 3 interactive webseries, and 4 software apps. Average contribution was 478K.

The http://www.cmf-fmc.ca/news-actualites.html?page_mode=innovate

John Nash, Investing in Talent

Nash talked about in-house training. He talked about how training can be set up so it is a functional part of a studio.

Why have formal training in a studio? His answer is that as the gaming industry matures (like other industries) you need more training and training is a productivity multiplier.

Where do you get training from? There are external companies that specialize in training for studios. Inside studios you often have people with knowledge. Conferences also have a lot of information, but participants have to return the knowledge and spread it. Then there are convergent skills (skills from other industries like film) that can inform.

When trying to sort out a training policy you should think about hard skills, soft skills, and attitude. Don't just train hard computing skills. It is also important to train attitude, motivation, time management and so on. This can include mentorship.

Soft skill can be about management, communication, organization. Attitude and approach is about "engendering positive mental attitude."

Issues:

• For training to work you need everyone committed to it.
• Training programs are very time consuming and they require infrastructure.
• In house experts often have to be trained to train.
• You need expertise on organizing, structuring, and communicating about training.

The most effective delivery mechanisms are lectures, discussions (seminars), workshops (participants try stuff), and personal training using materials on intranet.

He had an interesting graph of how people improve with training. Some learn to learn on their own and keep on learning. Some plateau and some fall back.

Nash then discussed metrics that show that training is cost-effective. What do you get? Improved efficiency and productivity. (But how do they test this.) Better communication. Better attitude.

Some things to keep in mind:

• Don't start the program until you are ready
• Do the training right before people need it
• Only train people who need a skill
• Make sure that training is sanctioned by managers or no one will come
• Train the trainers
• Training should be built into company culture and get buy-in from management
• Train craft and theory over tools - train the more theoretical over concrete tools so that people understand what is going on

Now Nash is going to "gamify" the training with rewards and leaderboards.

There was a good question about breadth of training. It is useful to give people an overview of the skills others need - ie. explain to artists what programmers do.

Jason Bay, Designing Cross-Generational Games

Bay had 10 recommendations for people trying to developing for kids, families and adults.

• Don't sweat the reviewers. Reviewers often review from the standpoint of a hard-core gamer - don't worry about it. The gaming audience is changing, but not necessarily the reviewers.
• Build a social experience. Families like to play game together. Many adults play games mostly with their kids as a social experience. Games for families should be "emmersive" not immersive. Parents are teachers - give parents an opportunity to teach the kids. Kids like to play roles that the parents usually have - reverse those.
• Accomodate little kids. Try to understand the view of little kids. They have small hands, low dexterity. They are not great readers. They have limited spatial-navigational ability. You need to put in a lot of audio cues (instead of text) and be careful about the buttons needed.
• Use a presentation that appeals to a broad age-range. Have a positive and familiar story.
• Craft intuitive input. You don't have players coming to your game who know the vocabulary so you have to have easy-to-learn controls. You don't want users to have to do a lot to get a simple action on screen. You also want mimetic interfaces like touch screens or motion controllers.
• Leverage feedback. Audio-visual feedback is good. Encouragement and condolence. Provocations and accolades. Also have frequent unlocks and start them right away.
• Manage competition. The competition needs to be balanced. Kids will stop playing if the competition is too high. Use randomness. Reduce competition. You can even remove competition and build a cooperative or co-opetition game. Think about activities instead of games. What can families do together?
• Scale difficulty. You need to get the right level of difficulty. Watch how many times people try something. Make things easier when they are not doing well or offer them help. Tune things as players fail.
• Minimize fail states.

Tom Wujec, Visual Thinking

A small number of us had a conversation about visualization in management. How can we use visualization in such a visual business.

Tom gave us some books: David Sibbet, Visual Meetings; David Gray, Gamestorming; ? Resonate and Rom, Back of the Napkin.

He suggested some of the visual ideas:

• Social visualization - visualize lines of communication
• SCRUMs charts
• Use post-it notes

Some of the truths that came out:

• Multitasking doesn't work
• Sketch before coding
• Everyone wants clarity
• Talk about what the stakes are and who wants what out of an event

Panel on Positive Impact Games

There is lots of discussion on the negative impact of games, this panel was looking at positive impacts.

Genevieve Lord talked about a project where they have support from the UN to create positive games. The game is to be played globally to end violence against women. Their goal is to change the behaviour of boys and men. Why games? They teach through identification with characters. Interactivity leads to decision making. They had all sorts of problems trying to make this global. Their solution was soccer. It is a web delivered soccer game called Breakaway. As you play you make choices about how to treat women - you can't win if you mistreat women. See http://www.breakawaygame.com/

Dante Anderson from Seriosity talked about serious games. What they do is "gamification" for the enterprise. They are working now on the call center - how to make that fun and rewarding. They make games for job classes that are terrible to make them more rewarding (hmmmm.) Another game for everyone is Power House that uses real time telemetry to show how you are using electricity and how you could use less.

David Edery talked about Changing the Game, a book on how videogames are being used by business. He described a game to encourage testing at Microsoft. He talked about Google Image Labeler.

Day 2

Ron Carmel, A Brief History of Indie

Carmel, who worked on World of Goo, talked about how game designers need to work with people who are at the top of their fields in acting, art and so on. We shouldn't be satisfied with people within the game design industry. We should be forming teams that bring these creative people into game design.

In less than a generation games will be as ubiquitous as books and movies. What can we design for a broad audience.

There is an assumption that the indie scene will be more creative. One questioner asked what would happen if it turned out that the indies weren't any more creative? There is a myth about the indie that seems to me to parallel the myth about the independent musician.

He talked about the Indie Fund which is a pool of money he and others put together to fund some new projects. It sounds like they are funding independent games to the tune about between 100K to 200K. They want to define a new way of funding small independent games.

There is a discussion as to what is indie? The indie scene has been growing significantly - as there is growth there is more disagreement about what defines indie. Obviously there is a cachet right now to being indie. It speaks to some desire to be independent, free, non-commercial and associated with something radical.

The best way to get into making games is to make games.

A lot of indie developers are young and grew up with games. They have memories of favourite games such that retro gaming is important to them. They respond to references to favourite past games and gaming culture.

Tony Tseng, Gaming in Augmented Reality

Augmented reality combines reality with virtual information. There is a lot of augmented reality but not much interaction. AR has been out there for a while. Some tools he mentioned:

• Artoolkit - open tracking software under GPL http://www.hitl.washington.edu/artoolkit/
• Qualcomm AR Toolkit - Free toolkit that is very nice - http://developer.qualcomm.com/ar
• Gizmondo - an hardware platform - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gizmondo

Some of the challenges Tseng identified are:

• Artists make things that are pretty, but have no gameplay. Artists often don't know about the limitations of the technology.
• A programmer-heavy team however design to the technology.
• A challenge is getting the artists and programmers to work together gracefully
• Everyone wants to design a revolutionary game. Tseng thinks that this is unrealistic - new designers should aim to "reinvent" existing games (or media.)

Tseng showed an interesting FPS that used Gizmondo and AR so that you could overlay a game over appropriate boxes and images. The game was called Zombie AR. See http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/06/arhrrrr-augmented-reality-zomb.html