Kultima, A.  “The Organic Nature of Game Ideation:Game Ideas Arise from Solitude and Mature by Bouncing”

Kultima, A. & Stenros, J. “Designing Games for Everyone:The Expanded Game Experience Model”

First paper presents the results of interview study of idea generation habits of Finnish game developers. The main finding is that the process of coming up with ideas is mainly solo activity, but the maturing process of the ideas is more social. Game developers were talking about “bouncing the ideas”. The ways and tools vary among individuals, but even though it may seem that there is no method, individuals have developed intuitive ways to enhance their processes. The sources for new ideas lie also outside the digital entertainment realm, as many interviewees reported that they seek inspiration constantly from everyday activities. Paper also implies the need for educating game developers even more about ideation methods.

Second paper discusses the expanding nature of game experiences, not only because of the “casual turn” but also because of the rise of social games (Facebook and similar) and games turning into services. The paper presents theoretical model “Expanded Game Experience, EGE”, that we have been working on in several projects, including Gamespace and GaS research projects.

Here are the slides for both of the presentations. Papers will be available at ACM digital library later this year.

The panel was divided into two sections; first half was all about traditional questions and answers and the second part worked slightly in the same manner as GDC’s Design Challenges led by Eric Zimmerman. Serious topics were this way complemented with more concrete ideas of where to take the games industry.

The first and perhaps most important issue discussed in the panel was the team consistency and especially the versatility and differences between the members. The panelists encouraged game companies to hire outside their comfort zone. Even though this was implicitly referring to the lack of female designers, the notion was not explicitly only about the gender. “Industry doesn’t need another you” was one of the provocative expressions directed to the rather homogenous audience of GDCE.

After discussing the emerging issues of games industry maturing, these four panelists gave four different ideas for developing future games. Tracy started the presentations with forming an idea of a war game that is based on the mechanics of holding hands. Kellee took the same genre of games but applied the design philosophy of thatgamecompany and discussed an idea of a war game based on emotions, especially fear. Cynthia and Sheri presented slightly more open ideas, as Cynthia explored her experiences with observing girls and boys playing with Mattel toys and Sheri shared her expertise on learning models.

Over the years Cynthia has noticed that boys’ games are more straightforward and “fair” as girls’ games. Girls choose a different approach because their games usually involve three participants and have a more nuanced kind of competition.  As Cynthia concluded that girls and boys play differently, also Sheri took the same page – we also learn in different ways. As women are predominantly “modeling” learners, most of the games as being based on explorative learning model, exclude this group of people. Both women did also emphasize that this was statistically about gender – from the broader perspective it is all about taking different people into account when designing games.

In the end, the lesson of these designing women was definitely more wide-ranging than only applied while designing for women.

In the talk, Dino talked about how there are both non-negotiable constraints and negotiable constraints in a design. Basically, breaking the non-negotiable constraints will change the identity of the design, but changing a negotiable constraint will not. It is important for a design to maintain its identity in order to have integrity as successful designs always have integrity. This is true in other things as well, such as movies. A movie should have integrity and keep its identity in order to be successful.

As an interesting example, Dino showed how the key non-negotiable constraints of Kick Off define the game.

At least after seeing the game, it is easy to see how these constraints really give form to the game. It is easy to see how a game created in the era when Kick Off was made, following these constraints, would turn out to be a game like Kick Off.

GaIn got to meet interesting game professionals again, as we landed to Cologne, Germany last week. At Cologne we got another glance of game industry approaches to innovation and game development this time @ Game Developers Conference Europe. At the conference site we continued our data collection and were able to record yet again interesting views on the subject matter. We now have a total of 25 interviews and more scheduled to be conducted by phone. Happily the data seems to saturate.

The themes of recession followed to the conference speeches again, especially on the first day of the conference. Examples of these were Bostjan Trohas speech “Surviving Project Cancellation in the Economic Downturn” and “Top Trends in Casual Games” panel led by Ariella Lehrer, which turned out to be about scenarios that casual game companies are facing these days.

Perhaps on Tuesday and Wednesday people were more relaxed due to nice parties on Monday (Gameforge) and Tuesday (Crytek). Interesting views on design, innovation and game developing processes were expressed on several speeches. We also got a glimpse on upcoming Remedy title Alan Wake, as Matias Myllyrinne was sharing his views on developing entertainment to gamers.

Couple of interesting GDCE09 speeches:

• Generally on design and development processes:
• “Design, Constraints and Integrity” by Dino Dini
• “Outsourcing & Distributed Development: Smarter, Better, Faster Way to Develop Games” panel led by Alexander Fernandez (panellists including Olya Nikitova, Rajesh Rao, Jason Manley and Charles Speyer)
• “Creating Visual Identity for Games” by Viktor Antonov
• About the changing audiences:
• “Designing for New Audiences” by Don Daglow
• “Writing Interactive Narrative for a Mature Audience” by David Cage
• “Designing Women” panel led by Margaret Wallace (panellists including: Tracy Fullerton, Sheri Graner Ray, Kellee Santiago and Cynthia Woll)
• Processes and philosophies of specific titles:
• “FLOWER: Design Postmortem” by Kellee Santiago
• “From Max Payne to Alan Wake: Creating Intellectual Properties the Remedy Way” by Matias Myllyrinne

We will be covering couple of these presentations in more details in the following posts.

Game Developers Conference Europe drew over 1500 participants this year. And the trade fair gamescom following the GDCE09 almost quarter of a million (245 000) visitors.

Yet again we also took a look at the broader spectrum of the city as we started our trip by visiting Cologne Museum of Applied Arts on Sunday. The exhibition “Design Meets Arts” presented nice collection of furniture and objects of different era of industrial design. Worth to mention is also the architecture of Cologne that manifested the obvious impact of the Bauhaus school. The strong and impressive form of modernism goes surprisingly well together with the famous Kölner Dom.

As the abstract says, the focus of the paper is to have a critical look at the current game design literature through the analytical lenses of the current state of the art design research. The aim is not in creating a prescriptive framework for game design, but rather attempt to connect the game design studies to design studies in general.

The paper first discusses the notion of game design as an evolving design situation, which contrasts the narrow views of game design as problem-solving activity and instead acknowledges the complex network of issues that affect design at any given moment.

The central topic of the paper is in analysing a selected list of the current game design literature in light of the general design research theories. After presenting and discussing two models of design activity (one by Löwgren and Stolterman, and one by Bryan Lawson), we look deeper into the game design literature in light of these two models.

In conclusion, we note that in the game design literature the different forms of design activity are left to somewhat little attention and argue that game design research will benefit much from research that takes these into account.

The presentation consisted of Suda going through those influences, explaining what their effect was and then for many of them, showing a video clip. Showing videos turned out to be a good way to keep things rolling as the presentation needed to be translated from Japanese to English.

After presenting how certain works influenced previous games, Suda moved on to give a comprehensive list of influences specific to No More Heroes. It was very interesting to see how different things directly influenced aspects of the game, such as how the Motel where the main character Travis is staying in the game, and its surroundings were directly taken from the movie Memento or how the town and the streets were based on Dirty Harry.

Other movie influences were: El Topo, which was responsible for the boss battles, Spaceballs, for the beam katana, and Gozu, for a name of a store in the game, and Jackass the Movie, for among other things, the attitude of Johnny Knoxville, who also happened to be the influence for the main character in the game, Travis Touchdown.

Additionally other people such as Scarlett Johansson, Josh Barnett, Ian Curtis, Charles Bronson and Genichiro Tenryu were inspirations to characters in the game. In addition, even the anime series in the game are based on real life anime series.

In the end though, the main influences for the game were the games that Grasshopper had previously made. The combat in No More Heroes is especially similar to the combat in Samurai Champloo, a game based on the anime of the same name.

As a closing point, video was shown where the main character Travis is overlaid on top of real video footage. Suda wishes that the players could be able to meet the game character in real life.

“Pitching the game” was interesting panel from the point of view of ownership of vision and practical issues with communication between developers and publishers. The panel discussion included interesting approaches and was also rather entertaining – much obliged to our homeboy Jussi Laakkonen from EveryPlay.

The panel was led by Jason Della Rocca, other speakers included:
Johan Kristiansson, Starbreeze (SE)
Jussi Laakkonen, Everyplay (FI)
Jeff Hilbert, DDM (US)
Caspar Gray, Eidos (UK)
Peter Zetterberg, MGS (UK)

There is certainly a need for understanding the fine art of pitching your concept. It is not only about presenting a clear and inspiring vision, it is also communication between two different visionaries. Publishers are looking for innovation and good execution of innovation, but they also want to see the creative process as a collaborative process. There are certain directions that are set by the publishers point of view and developers need to understand what goes with these directions. Or see the possible gaps in the publishers line-up. From this point of view a finished product can be harder to sell.

From the developers point of view the burden of pitching can be too much and then the road to self publishing may be the only way. Jussi Laakkonen from Everyplay was emphasizing how frustrating the pitching may be, since there is almost never clear answers and it is difficult to know what the publishers are looking for. The response for the pitch is too often: “its a good pitch, we love the game” but then they will never sign.

Publishers advocates in the panel were emphasizing that they have strict plans and these plans may not be unproblematically opened. From the publishers perspective, the direct response is challenging, since there are so many things to do. There simply is no conspiracy in the sense, that the concepts would be stolen and then produced elsewhere. Fortunately there are agents, that can work in between these two delivering the message to both sides: whether publisher is looking for something that you are developing or whether there is a client that is working on such titles that you are looking for.

As a practical example of the form of the pitch, Johan Kristiansson was describing what pitches of Strabreeze consists of. Typical pitch is a 20 pages power point presentation with story, theme, rough budget, reference games or other inspiration sources.

Publishers also reminded that there are many pitches that are uninspiring and concentrating on the logical stuff over the passion. “Speak to their heart, sell what makes them/you excited” was one of the advices of the publishers.

But one has to be prepared for the questions. If you cannot say what your players are playing currently and how to get them to play your game, you are not in a good spot. Generally questions are good signal, if you get loads of questions it usually means that publishers are interested. But there is one exception: if the conversation turns into money, they probably are not that convinced.

As a final note, publishers were advising not to skimp when it comes to getting the deal. Preparation and a good presentation is a key. And don’t come with your fathers suit and feel awkward. Be yourself instead!

In the beginning of the presentation Lars Gustavsson was describing the studios design philosophy as “suicidal approach of making games: Let’s do something that no one has done before”. This applied also with Mirror’s Edge. According to Gustavsson the innovation and risks in the Mirror’s Edge were: introducing a new heroine Faith, game being 1st person platforming adventure and fresh art direction of the game. The innovation paid of, since the game has been a commercial success as well as praised by the critics. This years Nordic Game 2009 the bold approach of the studio was also rewarded with first positions in two categories of Nordic Game Awards:

• Best Nordic Game: Mirror’s Edge by EA DICE
• Best Artistic Achievement: Mirror’s Edge by EA DICE

Gustavsson revealed that it was the prototype that sparked the idea of Mirror’s Edge. The direction was set to “enhanced experience in an urban environment”. Other inspiration sources included movies and other games, such as Casino Royale and Prince of Persia. Most obvious source was of course the parkour subculture itself. The art direction slowly evolved from the white room prototype. Faith’s world was all about white and slightly clinical surroundings.

At the end of the presentation Gustavsson made the statement that we should keep on innovating despite the economical crisis. There is no reason not to innovate, as well as there is no contradiction between execution and innovation. The sum of the package is itself an innovation. Gustavsson ended his speech in a poetic, perhaps even slightly sugary manner with a reference to Mirror’s Edge: “In the end, making a game is about making the leap of faith!”

On this session Gorm Lai, co-founder of Nordic and Global Game Jams, was introducing the movement and some of the projects risen from the workshop weekends. One of the many interesting Game Jam projects included The Dark Room Sex Game from Nordic Game Jam 2008. The same game was also on display and free to try on the expo area of Nordic Game 2009 . The theme of 2008 Nordic Game Jam was “Taboo” and it is safe to say that this particular game succeeded in this goal. Nobody volunteered to play with Dajana Dimovska in the middle of the session (maybe it was just the Nordic shyness). Another interesting project presented at the session was  Love Child. Love Child is a game, where you are playing parents manipulating the genes of a child to get the best possible combination.

As a guest video appearance we witnessed  Kyle Gablers Global Game Jam keynote on YouTube. It is worth to check out since it is very entertaining as well as informative (and you get to see also Jason Della Rocca and Susan Gold).

Game Jams are usually set for one weekend workshops, where participants are free to form different production groups with a goal of a playable game at the end of the weekend. This practice ties together with other time constraining experiments, which are quite popular at the moment on indie game development circles.

The Game Jam movement is highly relevant for our project. It is an interesting movement from the perspective of systematic creativity and innovation practices. Game Jams provide place for collaboration and time constraints without commercial pressure. There is definitely a lot to learn from this practice.

Next Global Game Jam is scheduled for January 29-31 and is going to have a call for hosts in mid-July. More info can be found at: http://globalgamejam.org/

More info on Nordic Game Jams: http://nordicgamejam.org/

Ian Bowden from Rockstar Leeds talked at the Nordic Game conference about what kind of challenges they encountered while developing the Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars on Nintendo DS. Chinatown Wars is the first GTA game for DS, and it is based in the world of GTA IV. You would think there is not much innovation in developing the twelfth sequel for a well-known game series. Surely, they had an established concept; they even had an already created city environment. However, as we heard at the Nordic Game, it takes much creativity and a bunch of innovative decisions to take a big-scale game and to convert it to a small screen and other limits of a handheld device.

The lecture started with a formal announcement prohibiting all cameras during the show. But when Ian Bowden got started, the atmosphere changed. He started by commenting the Eurovision song contest and both the Norwegian and the Swedish song got their share. He also showed some “mug shots” of himself, demonstrating how the game industry changes you. After the humorous start and some background information about how Rockstar Leeds was born, we got to the main point.

One of the biggest challenges designing the Chinatown Wars was making the game world and the characters convincing. It wasn’t just making things smaller and simpler; you had to make it look so believable that the player could identify with their character. They decided to use cartoon style graphics, not even trying to make it too realistic. They also had to decide what to leave really simple and what to polish more in the city view and how to make the characters and animations look real while still being easy to reproduce. They ended up using sprites with a few parts they could recolor, thus giving them an easy way to reproduce different looking characters to the game world. They also took notice on how to make game characters similar enough both far and up close, so they would be recognized as the same people. In addition, they made the close-ups of characters out of polygons and then added textures, making it easy to create new impressions of the same face while keeping the style. That way, they didn’t have to use exactly the same image of a face twice anywhere in the game. All this was in the purpose of making the game convincing for the player.

And you would say they managed it all pretty well, considering for instance the MobyScore, which is at the moment an astonishing 94.