Whenever I get back from conferences I always promise I’ll do a proper transcript of my session, and then never do, so this time I’ve bitten the bullet and just done some quick and dirty notes on the slides themselves. In the unlikely event you want to check them out, you can download them here.

NLGD conference report:

Swag haul: sweet fisheye camera, sisal friction mitt, two new T-shirt ideas, another Euro plug adapter, Smints, biros.

New big ideas: control and freedom are opposites; puzzle and strategy games are the same genre; creativity is best enhanced by limiting tools not increasing raw materials; games are disproportionate feedback loops.

New English words: aboutness, enculturated, Spornography.

New Dutch words: bluff (bluff), zwanger (pregnant), burgervader (mayor), success (good luck), slagroom (whipped cream).

Life-changing top tip: the thing that plugs into a MacBook adapter is secretly just a vanilla figure-of-eight cable, so if you’re feeling brave you can leave cable *and* country-plug-adapter at home, and just cannibalise something in your hotel room.

Unforgettable moment face off: discovering I’m exactly the same height as Ralph Baer vs popping my Rock Band cherry on a gold dump truck in the town square.

I’ll post slides and transcripts and stuff shortly, but for now, here are the games from my talk on Wednesday (links for playable stuff, fun for offline stuff):

God Hand (silly)

September 12th (solemn)

Braid (small team)

GTA IV (large team)

Cat On A Dolphin (rudimentary)

Bioshock (lavish)

Gravitation (emotional)

Dual N-back (abstract)

Perfect Cherry Blossom (reacting)

Advance Wars (planning)

Metal Gear Solid 4 (creator led)

Spore (user led)

And here are the del.icio.us tags I’m using to keep track of all the games, books and sites people recommended to me while I was there:

NLGD2008readinglist

NLGD2008playlist

NLGD2008linklist

Thanks to the NLGD team for running such a slick event and looking after us all so well. And thanks to all the exceptionally nice people who I got to drink and talk and think with.

I was up at Game Republic last night, sitting on a panel unusually rich in Edge DNA, which was a very pleasant way to spend an evening. In amongst arguing about how many popes died having sex (Google it at your peril), we also hit on the eternal ‘games need better stories to attract girls’ proposition. My problem with this line of reasoning isn’t just the fact that female gaming hours are mostly put into non-narrative games, but that it tends to trap the games industry into a bafflingly self-defeating series of assumptions, which go like this:

Games need to be more emotionally engaging.

The way to emotionally engage players is with better stories.

Stories are about plot and character.

Plot and character are best explored through dialogue.

Dialogue is best expressed via high-fidelity character models and voice actors.

Every single point along that road is wrong. And every single point along that road takes games somewhere expensive and difficult.

Emotionally complex games are great, but so are emotionally crude – or indeed emotionally barren – games. If only emotionally sophisticated games are great, I wouldn’t have spent two hours yesterday playing Verbosity.

Games are perfectly capable of emotionally engaging their players without story. I have an incredibly rich emotional connection with Guitar Hero because of the hours I spent being rubbish at the violin, because of the years when bad 80s rock was an essential escape from a dorky childhood, because of the memories I have of playing live on stage with the lovely (and sickeningly good) Jonathan Smith, because of the pride I have in my eventual mastery of Expert. These are all complex emotions. They have nothing to do with narrative. They have everything to do with why Guitar Hero is a brilliant game.

Stories don’t need to be about plot or characters. Even leaving aside the emergent stories that players create for themselves through their interactions (whether it’s getting stuck up a pillar for 3 hours in Warcraft or pulling off some amazing victory in PES), there are games that tell stories implicitly through their character design, their architecture, their music, their mechanics. Don’t believe me? Go play Gravitation.

And even if you have characters you want to explore and narrative threads you want to unspool, dialogue isn’t the only, nor necessarily the best way to do it. Shadow Of The Colossus has a story that’s told almost entirely without dialogue, despite it having a formal narrative and strong characterisation. It tells its story through the landscape, through animation, through subtleties of the control scheme. I get more sense of the hero’s character, and of the background narrative of the game, through they way that he’s slightly too small for his horse, shown by the idle animation that has him twist in the saddle to relieve the pressure on his hips – through the way the control scheme requires him to put his trust in a horse that has more experience of being ridden than he has of riding – than I would get from an hour of torpid dialogue.

But even if you’re certain you want plot, characters and dialogue, cinematic cut-scenes – even interactive cinematic cut-scenes – are the single most expensive and failure-fraught way games can try to deliver them. Emily Short does a great job in her Gamasutra column of demonstrating that ‘simple’ games like the time-management classic Miss Management have enormous potential for sophisticated, character driven narrative, at a fraction of the cost and the risk.

So please, someone do me a T-shirt I can wear to my next panel, so I don’t have to foam and rant at another roomful of perfectly nice papal sexologists.

Emotion =/= Story =/= Plot =/= Dialogue =/= Cut scene.

Final, hate-mail anticipation disclaimer: I’m not saying that any of these things are bad in themselves. There should be games with cinematic cut-scenes, should be games with gallons of dialogue, should be games with intricate plots, should be games which engage their players through rich stories. All I’m saying is that this is only one strategy, out of hundreds that games can employ, and that it’s an expensive strategy that’s difficult to pull off. There is no one right answer.

Thanks to all of you who pointed out the colossal maths goof in my BBC column yesterday. I’d love to blame it on some kind of hangover confusion from the great British vs US billion debacle, but I’d still be out by a factor of 100. Or maybe 1000? Loads, basically. Lots and lots. Like tons. Tonnes? Aw, man.

But yes, at any rate, we only squander hundred or so wikipedias a year, not a thousand. At least, I really hope it’s a hundred. Well, inasmuch as it’s 90. Rats. Can we all just agree on loads?

I have a new crusade. Can’t we make more boring games? Or rather, since we have plenty boring-gameplay games already, and plenty boring-story games already, can’t we make more games that are boring to look at? This week I’ve been alternating between Eternal Sonata, which is opulent in colour, detail, variety and the number of irrelevant little translucent things floating around at any one time, and The Fool’s Errand, which is, well – see for yourselves:

Which one has made the strongest visual impression on me? Fool’s Errand, no doubt. For those of you who aren’t, as I wasn’t, up on your late ’80s Mac puzzle games, The Fool’s Errand is a tarot-inspired precursor to games like the Professor Layton series. An over-arching story leads you from self-contained puzzle to self-contained puzzle, testing your memory, visual acuity, anagram instincts, logic skills and wretched, dogged persistence (unless you happen to like word searches). You can download it, and the executor needed to run it here, and I heartily recommend that you do. Not least because the graphical choices made out of necessity at the time mean it now looks both modern and timeless, which I swear isn’t a contradiction.

It’s got me thinking, though, about why there aren’t more monochrome games. Why were we so quick to leave black and white behind as we moved on from Pong and Spacewar!, and so quick to assume that these 15, 52, 512 or 16.7 million new colours were necessities not possibilities? Why, other than the small consideration of it being certain commercial suicide, did so few designers chose to keep things monotonous? Why can’t I think of a single voluntarily black-and-white game, from the last ten years, since my best candidate, Vib Ribbon, turns out to have a little hint of pastel indulgence in its scoring display.

However, to my delight, there’s a resurgence, led by those reliably awesome indiekids (even if they’re indiekids who’ve since been hired by the biggest game company in the world) behind Echochrome and Switch:

Beautiful both. So that’s my new crusade: more black and white games. From now on, I spurn the false god that is colour and pledge my heart and my thumbs to my new messiah, monotony. Until, that is, someone goes and spoils it all by sending me a poster of Okami. Swoon.

I’ve just finished reading Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, a very good book I can’t in clear conscience recommend to you, because it is, without doubt, the least dramatic novel I’ve ever read. In the course of its 500+ pages fundamentally nothing happens. Our hero goes to school, which he likes; he goes to university, which he likes; he goes to a monastery, which he likes; he goes to another monastery, which is also likes; he gets a job, which he likes; and he makes a decision, which he has no cause to regret. In between, he has interminably genteel, articulate conversations with other genteel, articulate people, whom he likes and who like him. Somehow, along the way, it manages to be an extraordinary and unflinching exploration of the nature of love, authority, regret, responsibility, religion, knowledge, aging, nature, civilisation, war, individuality, fatherhood, history, friendship, childhood, society, music, philosophy and integrity, which is probably why it won Hesse the Nobel Prize for Literature. Oh, what the hell, I’m going to recommend it to you anyway.

And that’s partly because, as the title reveals, it’s all about a game. Who knew there was a Nobel-winning cornerstone of heavyweight Germanic literature all about games? Nor is it just about a game, it’s about a time in the near future when gaming has become the highest expression of scholarship, creativity and intellectual refinement. From our perspective, as games take their first fledgling steps towards being seen as a credible creative outlet, it’s an extraordinarily remote concept. All the more extraordinary then for Hesse, writing in 1943 about the 25th century, to see a time when playing could be viewed as the finest of our arts. Not least since, in the nine years it took him to complete the book, the upheavals underway in Germany and the world must have been continually reshaping his perceptions of how bleak our future might be.

Quite what the Glass Bead Game is is never fully explained in the book. It’s described by the narrator as being based on ‘a kind of highly developed secret language drawing upon several sciences and arts…and capable of expressing and establishing interrelationships between the content and conclusions of nearly all scholarly disciplines. The Glass Bead Game is thus a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture.’ Lofty stuff, but its genesis sounds spookily close to something we already have, something that was invented by a game-maker. The Game’s roots were in a music student pastime of calling out shorthands for motifs of classic compositions, which other students would have to answer with continuations or improvisations. Eventually, to facilitate this, someone constructed ‘a frame, modelled on a child’s abacus, a frame with several dozen wires on which could be strung glass beads of various sizes, shapes and colours. The wires corresponded to the lines of the musical staff, the beads to the time-values of the notes.’ Sound familiar? It should if you’ve encountered the Tenori-On, the totally abstract electronic instrument based around a grid of light-beads, invented by the designer of Electroplankton, Toshio Iwai.

We are, of course, a long way off a time when devising or playing games could (or indeed should) be seen as intellectually challenging, creatively stimulating and spritually satisfying as the Glass Bead Game is portrayed as being. And, indeed, the heart of Hesse’s book is a debate about whether or not something so esoteric and abstracted can ever make a meaningful contribution to human life. But it’s interesting to imagine where we might end up if we’ve already taken the first steps towards Hesse’s future, not least thanks to the Tenori-On. A few brave souls have even tried to create working prototypes of the Glass Bead Game – the most playable of which is here – albeit in a form which is a long way from the calligraphy-and-meditation based displays which are described as forming the height of the game’s evolution. And if you’re still not convinced that Hesse might have been ahead of his time on foreseeing the future of gaming culture, consider this: what are the players of his Glass Bead Game known as? ‘Lusers’. For real, just like that, thanks to a corruption of the Latin. How’s that for futurecasting?

Thanks to having The Best Job In The World, I get to spend a fair bit of time brainstorming game pitches. These, I’ve noticed, fall into three categories. By far the most popular is the hybrid. ‘It’s Halo meets Cooking Mama!’ someone will declare, or reveal a sheaf of sketches demonstrating how Sid Meier’s Pirates! can be modded to work with the Wii Fit balance board. My experience of these is that the dumber the hybrids initially sound, the more fruitful the the design direction tends to be in the long run. Last week I sat in a room while someone explained a new project as ‘Mario Kart meets the single game in the entire world you’d think most unlikely to ever meet Mario Kart ever‘. I can’t tell you what that game was, because it’ll blow the team’s idea (feel free to barrage the comments with guesses, though), but I did have to grind the entire meeting to a point to vent my baffled scepticism. Three minutes later I was all smiles and nods. Obviously!

Then there is the blank sheet of paper. The actually new idea. These don’t come around nearly so often, and when they do they are brilliant and scary and hard. That initial blank sheet of paper soon becomes hundreds of pages of dense design doc, denied the pithy shorthands that more derivative ideas can take advantage of. Real, proper thinking has to be done. Imaginations are audibly stretched. Getting to be involved in projects like these is always a privilege but it’s a tiring, challenging and not infrequently demoralising one: actually new ideas have a scarily high failure rate.

But then there’s the anti-game. The deceptively simple process of taking an existing game and flipping its ideas – its rulesets, its assumptions, its goals, its resources and restrictions – and finding something new. I have one of those on my desk at the moment, which takes a gaming classic and adds one bit of red pen to the core design idea. And that little bit of red pen changes everything – it’s like in Saramago’s The History of the Siege Of Lisbon, where a proof-reader impulsively inserts a ‘not’ into a sentence in a history book and inadvertently remakes the entire world. I love working on anti-games; it turns game design into a game in itself, as the thought-experiment unravels and you have to jump ahead anticipating and extrapolating the consequences of that initial reversal.

Still not convinced? Then let me bring you today’s favourite anti-game. Yesterday I sent you off to Burn The Rope. Today, I invite you to solve a Fruit Mystery (sound required for both). It does exactly the opposite thing to YHTBTR, in exactly the opposite way, and yet made me exactly the same kind of happy, exactly as much. Good times, good times.

I’m a juror for Indiecade, a roving festival which celebrates, promotes and rewards independent games and their designers, which means I’ve been horribly remiss in not publicising the call for submissions for their 2008 tour. If you’re a game-maker who isn’t funded by a major, ESA-member publisher you have until April 11th to check out Indiecade’s exceptionally hospitable eligibility criteria and get your game submitted. And if you’re not a game-maker, but you’ve spotted something of late which you think deserves to be paraded round the world and showered in glitter, then lose no time in firing off an email to its creators encouraging them to get involved. I’ll be doing just that to Kian, who made the epically satisfying You Have To Burn The Rope, which if you haven’t played, you should at once. Me? I’m off to watch a video.

My GDC swag this year consists of: 2 USB memory sticks, 1 bruised spine, 6000 air miles, dozens of business cards, a 3-figure mobile phone bill and hundreds of un-answered emails. So, apologies if you’re waiting for me to get back to you – I’m catching up, I promise. In the meantime, as literally several of you have requested, here’s the powerpoint (10 meg, sorry) for my ‘Treat Me Like A Lover’ session. I’m not sure how much sense the slides will make on their own, so I’m working on a transcript, which I’ll post up here when it’s done. Hopefully GDCRadio will be up soon, so you can download it there, in the highly unlikely event you want to spend $8 on hearing me be smutty about Advance Wars. Cheers to everyone who turned out at the painful hour of 9am Friday to hear me rant, and thanks for all the kind comments after.

How many things have you named? A dog and a couple of rats or hamsters, maybe. Perhaps your car. Hopefully no parts of your anatomy. And that’s usually about it.

But think again. Dozens of RPG heroes. Hundreds of Pokémon. Squads of worms, phalanxes of chaos soldiers – heroes, pets, sidekicks, nemeses. Gamers have more experience naming things than all the world’s entymologists, rabbit breeders and orphanage mistresses put together.

So, the chances are you’ve been through all the systems. System one is usually naming everything after your friends and family. System two is usually naming things after parts of your anatomy, just to see if you can. System three is when you start to get cute, reckoning that it’s worth going through the entire game with a character called ‘Cancer’, just for the moment when ‘You’ve been killed by…’ pops up on your mate’s screen and all the politically correct people in the room heads explode. Stage four is when creative fatigue starts to kick in, and you start sticking with the defaults – not least because checking GameFAQs is a ruinous bore when you can’t remember whether your SpottleBrink was originally Balthier or Basch. Stage five is when you start devising your own systems, naming things alphabetically, or theming them by character class. Stage six is when you start categorising all your different naming systems, all the better to cross-reference.

There’s no doubt that getting it wrong can ruin a game – indeed, the better the game the more ruinous the introduction of a goofy character name can be. And in some games taking over naming duties feels almost sacriligeous. I’ve shared Zelda carts where everyone was so determined to be purist that one save had to be ‘Link’, one ‘LINK’ and one ‘link’.

But after decades of finding names for dinosaur hunters, FOmarls, space pirates and chewnicorns, here’s my question. Are gamers better or worse at naming their kids than normal people? Does our experience pay off, now that we’ve got all the dumb names out of our systems, and have learned the hard way how being kooky and original starts to pall after 300 hours? Or are we over-confident, straying from the ‘A-Z of Baby Names That Grandparents Will Know How To Spell’. Will we give rise to a generation of Sarias and Dantes and Bastilas who’ll never forgive us? And if we do, will they rebel by calling all their Pokémon things like David, John, Mary and Ann?