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Chris DeLeon's GameDevLessons.com Text Lessons
Vol 12 - March 31, 2010
Hello!
I'm Chris DeLeon (about me), and thank you for joining me for my monthly videogame development Text Lessons, Vol. 12. This series is one of the ways that I aim to help new game developers get started, while helping current game developers take their work in new directions.
If you would like to be notified when the next edition is available, you can join the mailing list. It only takes a minute, I will never send out more than one e-mail each month (only to announce these text lessons), and it's easy to unsubscribe at any time.
Though these lessons are not intended to be cumulative, the various topics in each may prove helpful. If you're new to these lessons, I recommend Newsletter Vol. 1 for its non-technical conceptual introduction to programming, and the links it contains to free resources for image editing, audio work, 3D modeling, and other asset creation.
II.) Beginner - Learn it Like Woodworking
How Woodshop is Taught
The instructor first has everyone read a bit of text about shop safety (how to not lose an eye, how to not lose a finger...) and basic concepts (grain, sanding, estimating board foot requirements for rough sawn lumber).
A brief tour of the shop is given to introduce the various hand tools, power tools, and relevant shop features (light switches, ventilation fans, first aid kits).
Everyone does a series of simple projects, each of which involves 1 or 2 different kinds of tools. These are pretty much the same for everyone, possibly with 1 minor substitution. Common examples: a judge's gavel is made to learn the lathe and wood finish, and a simple picture frame is made to learn the router and joinery. For a younger or less comfortable audience, a birdhouse is a recognizable result that involves learning proper sawing and simple use of fasteners.
Once that series of beginning projects is out of the way - generally involving a semester and several finished pieces - a student is then able to bring in plans and suggest adaptations.
How Woodshop is Not Taught
Start drawing up blueprints for new ideas. To whatever extent drawing and the imagination are unrestrained by what wood and tools do, those activities are not woodworking - but to get a sense of that distinction first requires at least a little variety in hands-on work. Coming up with complicated, unrealistic plans is not woodworking.
Build a complex, detailed piece of a larger project (such as an ornate leg for a chair). Being 100% done with 10% of something doesn't feel or look like being done, it feels and looks like being 10% done. The person on the project would not get a sense of completion, and it would not be in a state that it could be shown off or given away. Making 10% of things then moving on is not woodworking.
Subtle variation on the above: team up with 15 other people that have never manipulated wood or wood tools before in an attempt to coordinate building an advanced project (say, a small ship). 1/15 of that inexperienced team working on a 1/15 as ambitious project is significantly more likely to be finished, because it removes management complexity. Team management is not woodworking.
Spend semesters making and discussing origami, under the guise that since both are construction from tree materials, there are similar principles at work. These are two completely different things. People skilled or interested in one may not be skilled or interested in the other. Papercraft is not woodworking.
Teaching and testing the history of woodworking, investigating ancient tools and techniques or old uses of lumber that it no longer fills today. The modern woodshop is very different from an ancient one, in terms of the tools and ease of material acquisition. History is not woodworking.
Discussing how to market and sell a wood project. Marketing is not woodworking.
Buying, using, and discussing the latest commercial products that are made of wood. If it's made by professionals, and/or reflects the cutting edge of industry, either way it is not an appropriate starting point or reference point for beginners. Becoming a collector or connoisseur is not woodworking.
How This Relates
Modern books on videogame design, many classes/workshops on game design, and other learning outlets focus on a number of the above bullet points. To clarify the metaphor:
Students often want to plan and innovate immediately, take on a big team project, or at least craft a complex piece of a never-to-be-finished videogame (standalone inventory system, dialog trees, etc.). Teachers, in many cases, want to go into great length about board/card/dice games, or the history of games (or "play") in general. Workshops and websites will often go straight into discussion of ways to make money from a videogame. Meanwhile student clubs have a tendency to devolve into a gamer culture group that plays and discusses design of commercial projects that are far, far beyond the design, engineering, art, and management abilities of the club members.
The passion is an entirely good thing. Almost everything listed above is a legitimate field in its own right, bearing its own complexities and unique utility in the big picture, whether it's marketing, history, team management, etc. Likewise, just as origami is a fascinating and involved field with cultural roots and a tradition of great craft, but it isn't woodworking, board/dice/card games are a worthwhile and important subject with history and conventions all their own, they just don't have much to do with real-time videogame design.
The woodworker is a helpful analogy to keep in mind, because the woodworker knows the process end to end, from sawing, to shaping, to joining and finishing. Projects are identified that are appropriate for 1 person to make, working alone, in a modest period of time (generally no longer than half a year per project, until very advanced). The woodworker is not interested in the subject for the pure sake of knowing things about it, nor is the woodworker interested in the subject purely as a springboard into a career doing such work. Just as any woodworker can transfer knowledge of the jack plane to fix doors around the house that don't perfectly fit the frame, or otherwise apply tool comfort and familiarity to minor projects around the house, the hobbyist/solo/indie game developer along the way picks up a myriad of skills and tools that can find application to meet the needs of future tasks (just as much for non-videogame related companies and non-videogame personal side projects).
A project or two that focuses purely on input, setting screen resolution and drawing rectangles, and doing collision detection (Pong) makes for a good intro project. Likewise, anything involving a small, simple tile-based world (either for bricks in breakout or a tiny dungeon world) can help with learning that method of level construction and collision detection. Building up from there, a similar mentality can be used to pick and adapt beginning projects to cover the skillsets and tools that one might be interested in applying later for a bigger project (loading and displaying images, playing music and sounds, programming menus, different types of AI, etc.), without needing to jump directly into using the table saw on day one.
Bird Houses and Gavels
In case you missed them, or missed using them at the time, these may help:
Or, for a simpler non-graphical example, check out this new starter example in C++ for a text-based RPG that I built as a reply this month. (ReadMe.txt in that zip includes suggested next steps!)
Remember: It Only Counts When It's Done
"We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done."
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
US poet (1807 - 1882)
Some people set mental goals in terms of identity, as in "I want to be a videogame developer", or "I want to know how to make videogames." The problem with these is that the first one is attained by simply starting, whereas the second one may never create a single videogame.
A more constructive way to think about it is in terms of completion of lasting artifacts - that is, "I want to have finished making a videogame" or alternatively, "I want to finish making my current project." Molding and twisting reality to come into alignment with these thoughts will necessarily include accomplishing the two identity thoughts from the previous paragraph, the difference being that this one will also yield one or more games as evidence of that activity.
No one knows what you're capable of until after you've done it - not even you.
III.) Intermediate - Best of GameDevLessons.com's First Year
Whether you're a first time reader, or a long time peruser, the following are pieces from past editions of GameDevLessons.com Text Lessons that I would like all readers to know are available.
Please Note: This section is an annotated/thumbnail index, not a summary! If its subject seems of interest to you, you can find the whole article via the link above the excerpt.
"Code is like a film script. However, whereas a film script can be followed without interruption, interruption is precisely what a player does. Because of this, code is a situational script..."
"Want to focus your attention at being the among the best in the world at graphics optimizations, writing scalable networking code, 3D modeling futuristic settings within a memory budget, or creating complex 3D levels? Those kind of opportunities are virtually non-existent in the independent game space, due to smaller teams, smaller budgets, and smaller time frames..."
"This is not intended to take the place of a good book on programming, or practice - it's here for warm up, review, or to complement other resources that are out there by providing a connection to how the most common code structures are used in videogame development..."
"Odds are, you've never played more than one published title that used the same underlying level design philosophy. What works in one game, given its AI, weapons set and player interface generally does not translate well to another title in the same genre. Goldeneye N64 levels make poor Doom levels; Doom levels make poor Unreal Tournament levels; Mario levels wouldn't work for Sonic and Sonic levels wouldn't work for Mario..."
"Being good with computers isn't about knowing everything. It's about knowing how to look up or figure out what you don't know. Similarly, teaching yourself to make videogames is largely a matter of knowing which resources are available to you, and how they can best be used to accelerate your progress..."
"AI in real-time videogames is not about trying to program intelligence. It isn't about making the best decisions, thinking through complex problems, or adaptive learning.
AI in real-time videogames is about creating the impression of intelligence..."
"Puffs of dirt kicked up from tires, smoke after explosions, empty shell casings ejecting from automatic rifles, and splashes of water are all particle effects. Shattered pieces of scored gems in a puzzle game, splatters of blood from gunfire, broken glass, chunks of wood, snowflakes, sparks, and shards of plants are all particle effects. Particle effects are categorically different from most other objects in a videogame..."
"A lot of programmers want to learn enough game design to make their own games, and a lot of game designers want to learn enough programming to make their own games. But let's not kid ourselves when it comes to art: thousands of years of human progress have shaped art, and drawing or 3D modeling (especially animating) can be a very time consuming practice that requires a healthy dose of talent. What can a programmer/designer do to cope with lack of art time or ability?"
"Sine and cosine are helpful for angle-to-component translation, for example when determining what percentage of a bullet's total velocity the x-speed and y-speed are given the angle of a firing cannon - this also applies to an overhead race car. Atan2 is handy for getting an angle between two things, given their relative offset in grid locations - good for getting an enemy to face the player, pointing a simple homing missile, and so on..."
"Technical ability is best thought of as a gate to entry - while it's great to have it behind you, it'd be counter-productive (and inaccurate) to presume that the most important things to learn and get practice with are already learned..."
"There's a pervading notion in videogame design courses, lectures, books, conference workshops, and online discussion forums that the best way to understand and plan videogame design is through a deep analysis of dice, spinners, playing cards, board games, and the like.
If our daytime work was with Milton Bradley or Parker Brothers, this would be a worthwhile use of time. For the more than 40,000 of us in the USA working on real-time electronic videogames, I think that most of the analysis in analog space is an inefficient way of highlighting some vague commonalities at best, and more often than not, a dangerously misleading waste of time..."
"Whatever we choose to put on the surface to capture imaginations, I'm hopeful that we can all start paying equal attention to the things we've been doing right accidentally for decades: teaching players new thinking tools, conditioning them to connect good deeds to desirable results, and keeping their hunger for new skill development strong and nurtured at all ages..."
"It didn't matter that my pictures were crude, it mattered that they were sufficient to excite synapses and fill in between my thoughts. It likewise didn't matter that the graphics, sound, and interactions of Mega Man were crude. For the same reason.
What happens inside the player's head, while and after they are playing the game, or even before (Gravity Man, Gyro Man, Magnet Man, Air Man... such cool ideas!), is the most important part. What happens on screen, how long it happens, and how it looks while it happens, is an instrument to implant, adjust, and shape ideas..."
"Smart engineers feel guilty about writing "special case' code. Special case code is a bad idea a lot of the time, because it's time and energy that cannot be effectively re-used elsewhere. But in the case of videogames, we must ask, "Is this a special case?" Should only 1 boss in the game do this? Does this effect only happen in 1 level? Do all other powerups disable when this bonus level is entered? Special cases in the game warrant special cases in the code, and those special cases are what can make boss fights in Mega Man so distinct, as opposed to the not-so-special-cased (but rather cost-effectively generalized) 4 types of bosses used 50 times in Superman Returns..."
"I agree, that 'games on a fundamental level consist of their rules'.
I disagree with the common argument that videogames on a fundamental level consist of their rules.
From the perspective of someone that seeks to breed, play with, judge, or theorize about dogs, we are most likely concerned almost exclusively with how they are while alive, and generally disinterested in the composition of their physical parts. Rex's body is not Rex after death (though we may use the name to refer to the body), and Tetris is not Tetris when it isn't running (though we may use the name to refer to the cartidge/machine/file)..."
"The transition in gameplay maturity from Doom 1 and 2 to Doom 3 is like the difference between Hitchcock/Kubrick/Lovecraft horror vs a teenage slasher film, like the difference in storytelling between Bram Stoker's Dracula vs Bram Stoker's Dracula; the classics respect that real panic is induced by psychological strain, while the latter assumes that it has to do with the amount of blood, screaming, and offensive imagery..."
"Whereas a narrative may carry a moral message, and whereas artistic representations may embrace expressions of love or struggle or madness, gameplay trains and tests particular ways of thinking. I built the gameplay of Alice in Bomberland specifically to require some of the basic considerations and thought processes that I perceive to be parts of sound thinking..."
"If I'm voluntarily staying late as a designer working on a wish list feature or extra level content, before doing the stuff that is on the must-do list (because I know we'll have to make adjustments for the must-do list, but not vice-versa, so this way I can be sure to pack more in), then it should be no surprise when soon after I'd be staying late even when it isn't my choosing to do the must-do items that I wasn't focusing on. But this wouldn't just throw me off. No, it could affect bottlenecks in the schedule, it could introduce a need for new bug fixing, sounds, or modeling work that otherwise could have been avoided, and so on. Now imagine every person doing this to every other person as the project gains momentum and people get excited. Combine that with a financial imperative to release on a certain ship date, and exactly why this turns into a train wreck nearly every time should be fairly obvious..."
Transcribed from audio: "Seven months; 219 games were done. Near the end of it, some of them were definitely not games which, again, was part of my goal... Some of these things I would crank out in two hours. Some of these things, like on Christmas, I made a maze type game that I probably spent a good 16-18 hours hacking away on and tuning. It was a form of illustrated concept..."
"Every year, many videogame development clubs start. Many of them initiate a handful of large projects, struggle with teams falling apart as member retention suffers, and after a couple years of sliding schedules, either close down or transform into a game playing/culture club instead of game development club.
Of course, what worked for us certainly isn't the only way to do things... All I can say for sure is that these rules of thumb worked well for us during the first few years. I'm hopeful that others with drastically different experiences will help share learnings from their organizations, as well..."
CD: Speaking of family, do your sons play videogames?
WR: Oh yeah, they play videogames constantly. I have more of the dad point of view than the designer point of view these days though - I can't get them off the videogames, they're up until 4am playing them.
CD: Are your sons old enough to appreciate your role in game history?
WR: Sort of, but they're not that impressed. It's kind of hard to tell. They think it's cool.
CD: Have they played your games?
WR: Yea, they've played my games. As you probably know, kids below a certain age are not worried about being bluntly honest, so they'll give you direct feedback. They told me quite clearly how stupid and old fashioned my game Adventure was. That just doesn't cut the mustard by modern standards...
"Japanese videogame artists work almost exclusively in the resolution, format, and fidelity required by the game, concerned almost exclusively with how their art looks during play. Concept art, and the sort of high detail imaginative sketching that appears on packaging and manuals, is often produced after the videogame's art needs are filled, while waiting for the game to ship. Rather than being a process step - except in the case of very rough sketches for personal planning - this sort of art gets done late in the process separately, explicitly for use in marketing materials..."
"This e-book highlights what I have learned about videogame development along that journey. This is not a programming book, nor is it an art book. It is not a how-to book. This is a page-by-page, succinct presentation of nearly every game that I have worked on, followed by what I consider the most valuable takeaways from each particular development experience..."
IV.) Advanced - Fun is a Bad Word (or: Is Meth "Fun"?)
What Does "Interesting" Mean?
My 11th grade English teacher was overqualified for her job. Brilliant woman, had no trouble seeing and speaking straight through the BS around her (whether from students or her coworkers), and won over her share of admiring students that liked to be challenged and appreciated being corrected.
On one unfortunate Fall afternoon, she overheard a few too many students offering one another the feedback, "Your paper is interesting...."
On the spot, our teacher fired the word "interesting" right in front of us. We had never seen such a thing as this before. Took its badge and gun and told it that it could no longer serve on the force. This gave us pause - after all, English teachers are supposed to like words - and we did our best to soak up what she said next.
She went into a rant on how inarticulate, dangerous, and useless of a word "interesting" is. What does it mean, anyway? It can mean many things - the most common of which are either contradictory or equally vague. It is extremely unlikely that the listener hearing the word will apply the exact same meaning to it as the person speaking it. If anything it only introduces room for misunderstanding or overextension that otherwise would not be assumed. In other words: saying the word was potentially going to do more harm than saying nothing at all.
She offered a workaround: if someone tempted to use the offending word were asked "what do you mean by interesting?" - that answer is what someone ought to be saying instead of the word interesting. At the very least, it might lead to another word that's more specific, since nearly every word is more specific. In the best scenario, it can lead to an explanation so specific to the case at hand that no single word could sum up, at which it's no longer just a label tossed out, but an articulated thought about the speaker's relationship to the work in question. Effort, in the form of words. In contrast to "interesting", which is laziness in the form of a word.
"Fun" is kind of like that. The main difference is that when we were lazy by using the word "interesting" in English class, doing so had no chance of contributing to the creative, artistic, and intellectual collapse of a huge industry that was otherwise showing incredible growth.
Fun Might Mean...
Challenging, empowering, thrilling, puzzling, beautiful, facilitating cooperation, leading to self-discovery, revealing forgotten curiosity, almost like knowing a set of real people that are consistently responsive and appreciative, producing many of the same mental sensations and snap considerations that are experienced while playing a sport minus the physical exertion and exhaustion, the deeply satisfying giddy sort of warmth and confusion that wells up inside the first time in life that we discover someone we're attracted to has mutual feelings, the fascination of being dropped into a world so alien and intangible that it seems as though none of our real-world assumptions about time or space will be applicable...
Your mom probably finds different things fun than you do. Your dad probably finds different things fun, too. Everyone that you know probably finds a different set of things fun - the important realization here though is that they do not feel the same way that you do, just about different things - they feel a very different way about different things. About the only thing their fun has in common with yours is that you both use the word fun to point to its role in life.
To some, fun keeps them in shape. To some, fun keeps them educated. To some, fun grows their social network, keeps them in love, enriches the lives of their pets, helps under privileged children, or makes them gain weight. Your fun is my work, your work is my fun, and so on.
To further illustrate this: think of a half dozen things, videogames or otherwise, that you consider fun. Can you rank them by most fun to least fun? (Or is it mostly a distinction of different kinds of fun?)
The "A" Word
An ingredients chemist for a pet food company once admitted to me that his company's goal is to make their food as addictive as possible. The intent here is that pets will reject an owner's attempt to change away from his company's food, creating the impression on the owner that their product is superior. After all, the animals will seem to prefer it to alternatives. That is not the same thing as tasty. That is not the same thing as enjoyable. That's manipulative, shady, entrapping, and has absolutely nothing to do with what makes the animal happy or healthy.
The word addictive gets thrown around a lot in the videogame industry, mostly as if it were a good thing. Lately, with subscription (MMO) and lead generation or ad revenue social games (Facebook) exploding in the marketplace, addiction has become a business imperative. It's not sufficient in these cases that a user get what they can from the experience, at their own pace, then move on - no, the greatest profit for the company is found in finding ways to get users to keep coming back compulsively, daily (or multiple times per day!!$!$!$$) until the Sun dies. Thus addiction has become a very popular word to use as a synonym for fun. Sometimes, it hides behind the word fun.
Are potato chips a better food than fruit? Is a slot machine a more fun mechanical game than a pinball machine?
Addictive suggests that someone is compelled to come back to it. Ok, but why, and to what end? Maybe it's emotionally fulfilling, maybe it pushes and challenges our problem solving abilities which we find more stimulating than the routine day's work, or maybe it's playing cheap psychology tricks on its users and treating people like pigeons.
Maybe.
When a book keeps us coming back to it, most of us would not describe the book as addictive. Perhaps, just to go for some low hanging 1-word descriptors, we might describe it using one or more of these words: exciting, enchanting, mysterious, provocative, impressive, enlightening, deep, powerful, heartbreaking, terrifying, inspirational, curious, stirring, exotic, surreal, refreshing... ? (Some of these words are also applicable to what I enjoy about the best videogames produced over the past several decades. How many of these words can be applied to games that you have seen in the social games space? Regardless of platform: are there ways that we can bring more of these types of experiences into the forefront?)
We are not addicted to going to the restroom. We are not addicted to leaving the house for fresh air. We are not addicted to helping people that we love. We would not describe tennis as addictive, chess as addictive, or education as addictive.
In case anyone forgot: addictive is a pejorative. Cigarettes are addictive. Alcohol is addictive. Gambling is addictive. Meth is addictive. Addiction is something to seek recovery from, something to join a group in search of support to escape, something that messes up families, finances, and futures.
Addictive is indicative of a problem - it's artificially sticky beyond anything more meaningful that a player could call attention to. That problem extends to both the consumers (who have to handle it with caution) and the producers (who potentially face a growing tide of people swearing it off entirely when they start seeing career, grade, and personal goals lost to the time taken by it).
Our Time
Even more so than consumer money, many projects in the social game space are competing for consumer time and attention. Consumer time and attention have never, ever, in the history of humankind, been worth so much. Anyone can now wake up one morning and decide to write, draw, film, or otherwise make something that has a shot at reaching a million people and changing more than that many lives over the following week - anyone can wake up and start working on becoming an expert in something. Companies are shelling out serious money to buy your eye time, because if you're alive in 2010, you have potential unlike anyone that has lived before. They're paying to put offers and ads in front of (potentially!) very important people in human history.
Unrealized and under realized potential cheats everyone in the world out of having a better future.
When we craft, construct, and prepare something that is worthy of a thinking person's time, we do not need to go out of our way to make it addictive. As with my chemist friend working at the pet food company, making something addictive apart from its nutritive value is entirely feasible, not in the greater interest of the consumer being sold to, but often a smart short-term move for business.
Why short-term?
Because we're not cats. We're not pigeons. We're much smarter than that, and when people try tricks on us that work on cats and pigeons, we're in position to notice and call them out on it. We can't take back our time once spent, of course, but every second of our future time is still ours until we give it away. And no matter what a spreadsheet may project, no one else has any claim or rights over our future time.
Why This Matters
This is not just splitting hairs. This is not a minor semantic distinction. When people get sloppy with words, it becomes easier for someone to think that they're getting better at doing something worthwhile (engaging their players, enriching the lives of other players, developing fond memories for their players) when what they're really doing is switching to doing something much easier and much sleazier (tricking their players, damaging the minds of their players, making their players feel obliged until their play becomes a chore). If all of those things are called "fun", then it's easy for an unsuspecting developer to pick up some hot "new" tricks through magazine articles and conferences on how to make their videogames more "fun" - these strategies are then brought back into their development process. Gradually the meaningful, lasting, or deep computer-player or player-player interactions that once hid behind the word fun can then be overrun by the cheaper, easier, forgettable interactions that also hide behind that sloppy, dangerous word.
There's more to worry about though than increasingly crummy videogames - there is also a risk of doing harm to the human beings that play them.
Chris Hecker gave an excellent talk at Game Developer's Conference 2010 titled "Achievements Considered Harmful?" (check out the Gamasutra and Destructoid articles on the talk), effectively adapting Daniel Pink's 2009 TED talk (and book) for a videogame audience. In short: research on psychology, problem solving, and motivation have consistently indicated that conditional extrinsic motivators (carrots and sticks, reward and punishment) being used to compel behavior only improves efficiency for menial efforts (think factory labor), while impairing both efficiency and total ability for tasks involving virtually any creative or problem solving ability. The effect lingers, too: providing conditional extrinsic rewards for tasks that might normally or otherwise be intrinsically motivated (paying a person to draw or solve block puzzles) can decrease a person's future motivation to do the activity when it is no longer tied to reward.
In other words, we might be doing lasting harm to the intrinsic motivation of our players.
Cheap Tricks
Lots of naked bodies and explosions will bring in a lot of film watchers, but most people in the film industry don't want next year's film audiences to be even less sophisticated than they already are. Something is lost when those shortcuts are taken, like a comedian overrelying on bathroom humor or pop culture references.
Malcom Gladwell's Blink includes a story about the Pepsi Challenge, a blind taste test that Pepsi used to administer in malls to prove that more Americans preferred Pepsi over Coca-Cola. While the results of the taste tests proved that Pepsi was indeed favored in taste tests, other tests confirmed that if someone was drinking the full glass or bringing home a case, Coca-Cola was favored - Pepsi's sweetness was only better for a sip, but came out too sweet for continued drinking. This is a bit like saying that if you only get to watch 20 seconds of something live, 20 seconds of fireworks might be nicer to see than 20 seconds of a play - whereas 90+ minutes of fireworks would be gratuitous. No matter how well something seems to do in focus groups, unless the product is being made only for use by focus groups (and even then), there are other big picture considerations to keep in mind.
Pry Deeper Than "Fun"
Most people that I know who make videogames are, fundamentally, craftsman and artists. There are some people who are just involved in the industry to make a quick buck - they will generally not much care what we they mean by the word "fun". It's then up to the craftsman and artists to pull that word apart and dig into its meaning when it comes up. Players are trusting us to make their lives better. They're trusting us for hours every day alone with their kids (ideally maturing their worldview, exercising their imaginations, and expanding their problem solving abilities, rather than wasting their youth away). They're trusting us to not hurt them when they come to us offering their money and time in exchange for what we hand over with our implicit stamp of approval as "fun" (we are, after all, supposedly the experts on that word).
I'm not in the narcotics industry. I'm not in the tabloid business. I'm not in the gambling industry. I'm not a part of the lottery system. I'm not working for a company that makes its profits by misleading and scamming people. Few of us see ourselves of being a part of those cesspools, but if we let ourselves hide behind the vague word "fun" we may be a part of those things by honest accident, we may have gotten lost in our earnest efforts to make our game more "fun" without realizing that the type of fun, meaning of fun, the strategy for attraction changed altogether in the process.
Pornography is not the epitome of film making nor photography. If our medium is ever going to gain a shred of respect from outsiders, we're going to have to establish some values besides claiming that whatever generates the most short-term profit must be more "fun".
It's time for us to outgrow the F word.
V.) Special Topic - On the Meaning of "feelforit"
How I'm Presenting It
The following is the iTunes App Store description for feelforit:
Warning: "art game". People with an interest in (or a tolerance of?) art are more likely to appreciate this. Its novel core mechanic and presentation may interest traditional players, but it is definitely not structured as a videogame.
At first this will seem very hard. However, bear in mind that there is no time pressure, no penalty, and no way to lose.
As you get a feel for it, the movements can become natural, whereupon the second layer of meaning will become more clear for most users.
(Hint: if you don't look silly while you're doing it, you're probably doing it wrong.)
If you prefer straightforward entertainment, you might be happier with Burnit (my nifty digital fire toy) or Alice in Bomberland (my cartoony action game) instead.
Made by Chris DeLeon, developer behind the top-ranked apps Burnit, Topple, Alice in Bomberland, and iZombie: Death March.
Sell an opera as a monster truck show, or vice versa, and find an unhappy audience over something otherwise very popular. Sell tickets to the modern art gallery as tickets for pro wrestling, and vice versa, and find two more unsatisfied audiences.
If there is mismatch between a consumer's expectation of what they are getting and what they are given, it will often yield a frustrated 1 star review, and be perceived as a quality issue on the part of the developer. If happy customers and decent user ratings/reviews are a priority, then fewer people evaluating it can be a win if it means that it's the right fit of users evaluating it.
This time around I wrote an App Store description that's deliberately intended to turn away certain types of users (or at the very least, communicate a clear expectation of what mood someone should be in to get the most out of this), and so far it has had the desired effect of overall lower download numbers, in exchange for substantially higher quality user reviews. To be clear: by "high quality" of reviews I am referring to their uniquely articulated feedback on the app, not the star ratings given.
Interacting With It
There are 3 colored arms that can move: Red, Green, and Yellow. Each has a darker "shadow" counterpart that does not move. The color matched arms (red to shadow red, green to shadow green, yellow to shadow yellow) are connected at both the elbow and tip via a web that glows as the joints come closer to overlapping.
The effect/direction of gravity on the device determines the positions of all 3 arms, resulting in a non-unique 3D orientation serving as each solution. Likewise, each shadow arm arrangement acts as an encoding of a particular set of orientations in space that the user could mimic, by rotating the device in various ways, before getting a new challenge. Smooth, constant feedback on the current orientation's translation into arm positions via the brighter arms gives the user information on whether a current tweaks to the orientation are moving toward or away from the shadow arm goal arrangement.
When all joints overlap from all 3 arms, a heart made of water drops briefly fills the middle of the screen, and the shadow arms adjust to a new configuration. Solutions frequently (at least half of the time) require turning the screen like a steering wheel until it is upside down, tilting it from laying toward one side to laying toward the other, and/or looking at the device from underneath.
Touching the screen anywhere during the application toggles display of the instructions summary shown above this section.
Mechanical Meaning
A solution that looks nearby may, occasionally, be very far away. This can occur when most limbs align perfectly, but a few of the angles seem to only get further apart with any minor adjustment. Minor fiddling in this scenario can make it seem impossible. The solution is to:
Explore in proportion to how far the target is from the current configuration. If it seems very different, or seems to only get further from the goal no matter how the orientation is tweaked, flip and spin it to dramatically different orientations to see which others come closest. If the current plan isn't working, it may be a good time to wander wildly and take some chances to survey the options.
We often do not need to fix as many problems as we can see; fixing one problem often fixes several others. The elbow to shoulder region of each arm shares an angle with the elbow to hand region of another arm - this produces a curious visual and mechanical symmetry. At any given time, the main arms sharing the common shoulder point are built from three pairs of parallel lines. More importantly, it means that the problem space here is considerably smaller and simpler than it first seems. There are only two variables to adjust and fit, not six (!) - these map to the device's three perpendicular accelerometers into a pitch and roll (twist perpendicular to the force of gravity is undetectable).
The brain can learn much, much faster if it does not need to articulate it. As evidence: once you get a feel for it, and can solve pretty much any target arrangement in less than half a minute, try handing the device to someone else and telling them how to change orientation. The hand and brain develop a strategy of exploration, first at large and then narrowly, honing in with speed and precision, in a way that it is very challenging to talk someone else through. Explicit learning, the verbal and testable type, trails far behind the ability to do. The learning that goes on while getting a feel for solving feelforit efficiently is tacit learning - the same type of learning involved in riding a bicycle, performing arts (fine, martial, and marital), executing a profession at an expert level, or playing a sport/videogame.
Tacit knowledge, although it cannot be put fully into words and can only be learned by doing, is what the brain is best at deciphering, untangling, and applying. Prior to the development of language (and still for any animal, including a feral human) this was most of how we learned to survive. Episodic memory deals with locations and things (symbols are things!), and reconstructing memories of past events, but tacit is the programmable/trainable (non-instinctual) part to how we handle, respond to, and act on the intersection of episodic memories and the present. Words - and numbers as their symbolic partners - have since drawn a great deal of attention to the manners of thinking that are largely episodic, since after all they must be teachable and testable in school or they will not (can not) be taught and tested through school. However to miss that our brains have always been and will always be significantly better at not words, that thinking and learning do not all take place in words or symbols, is to force an artificial verbal separation between the mind and the outside world, ignoring on the way in whatever cannot be verbalized (except to whatever extent we can struggle to attach words to it), and ignoring on the way out whatever cannot be verbalized (except to whatever extent we can struggle to attach words to it).
Mechanically, the only way of interacting with this is through the accelerometers, like a Wiimote minus its IR camera and buttons. This is less specific than orientation in space, since rotation parallel to the force of gravity is invisible to the device. And yet something so simple and fundamental as holding a device at a certain angle (encapsuating no momentum, no action, no sequence) which can be naturally learned on our own through continuous electronic feedback is next to impossible to describe to someone else. If we tried to articulate a target device orientation to someone else, we would likely resort to the contrivances of angles, applied in a particular sequence, which likely won't work quite right, followed by needing the person to somehow articulate back it's resulting orientation to know what error might need to be corrected.
If this level of complexity and awkwardness in communication goes into conveying a mere static orientation in 3D space (again, with equivalence for rotation parallel to gravity!), it helps shed light on the intricacies that go into spending a lifetime trying to better understand the grammar of momentum and gestures for dance, athletics, and the less physical (but also procedural) applications of thought.
The upside, of course, is that mechanically this application measures, teaches, and communicates very quickly this very subtle bit of information that escapes the domain of explicit knowledge. This communication is not occuring between the device and the person, either - it is occuring between myself, as the author, and the person on the other end, no less than a blog entry is a letter written from anyone to everyone. This application is my way of conveying, to the finest detail detectable by the instruments in the machine, how someone that isn't me ought to orient their device.
How much more can we explain efficiently through non-verbal interaction with a device as intermediary, that from thousands of years of episodic education we have settled for leaving unconveyed, because for most of that time it was unconveyable? With this very primitive example we have already outdone what verbal non-assisted communication can say on the topic of orientation in 3D space.
Conceptual Basis
At the highest level of abstraction, this is visually and mechanically about transforming ourselves into new selves by untangling our feelings toward seeing the world a new way.
A person's character is fairly rigid. When I say character, I am referring to someone's personal sense of right and wrong, of value and worth, of what is objectionable and what is allowable. Character tends to be exceptionally difficult to change, and very slow to change when it does, either gradually eroding over a period of time or undergoing a concerted effort to build it up very slowly.
By comparison, personality is on a whim. Personality is an act. Personality is a style choice about how we present ourselves to the world - it can change in 5 minutes, it can turn a 180 in 5 seconds, or if someone so desires it can be fairly consistent for years on end. Inevitably, alcohol or caffeine may affect someone's personality, as will whatever happened in the past 24 hours or depending upon whichever time of day it is. A talented actor, socialite, or career deal broker often operates on an unusually broad spectrum of potential personalities, adapting their style to what their audience or role presently demands.
Even though some positions and life trajectories afford a greater diversity of personality exploration than others, everyone at least wonders what such a change might be like, and almost everyone at least tries on a few changes throughout life.
Animals brains involuntarily wonder about how things that are not could be.
The shy wonder what it would be like to be more social. The brave wonder what it would be like to be more protected. There is no personality trait so universally desirable that people possessing it have not at least entertained the thought of how the world might look different without it.
We are drawn by curiosity to investigate how things might look from another vantage point.
This creates a mental target of how we might want to be, and tension between the current self and target self. Standing up for others (more social and more assertive). Getting more done (less social and harder working). There are always tradeoffs - not the least of which the current position is often the one that we have the most practice with, and it's the one that most people around us have been conditioned to expect - but the wonder is merely about trying on another personality, not necessarily for keeps in lieu of the current fit.
We have an extraordinarily narrow, limited means for adapting our world to fit our image of how we wish it to be. Think of a few sliders or dials that we can tune based on how we want to relate and react to the outside world: We can act firm or we can be flexible. We can work hard, or we can loosen up. We can keep more to ourselves, or we can get out and socialize. By adjusting these sorts of behavioral sliders, we can shape shift into virtually anyone that we wish to be, at least as it concerns the types of choices that we make.
Being more social and loosening up go hand in hand, but that may mean backing off on being so assertive. Personality is constructed from a number of delicately counterbalancing positions, and it can be hard to change one without impacting others.
In our mind's eye, we can picture who we want to be, how we want to sound, what sort of outcome we'll start seeing from conflicts or conversations or collaborations based on the way that we want to be. It is extremely clear whether or not such a goal has been achieved.
What is the reward for successfully contorting oneself into the current mental image? A new mental target. Necessarily, the drive to the last one was at least partly arbitrarily driven on account of wondering what another state would be like. Once that target state has been achieved, the mind sets its goals elsewhere. The tension between reality and target reality has not really been removed, but only relocated. At some point, passing the diminishing return from mastering the skill of transitioning to match mental targets, changing for its own sake decays into a distinctly human way of chasing our own tails.
We get better at anything with practice. The same is true for trying on new perspectives.
We get interested in doing what we do see ourselves getting better at. The same is true for trying on new perspectives.
Until someone has made their first match, there is relatively little pull from the idea of doing them, except the vague sense of mystery that something is being missed until it's figured out. With each match made, making matches gets a little more natural, a little more compelling, and a little bit faster. This positive feedback loop can become quite satisfying, as each success makes it feel like the next success will come that much sooner and that much easier than the one before it.
It leads nowhere, at least within itself. Although the user is not helping other people by execution of the task, let alone through further mastery of the task, in theory (as is true for any learning scenario) ideas and skills developed during practice may find productive application elsewhere. The state of the game does not change through the user's successful matching events - the state of the user changes.
User Reactions
"Enjoyable This is an interesting object to interact with; I like looking into its space and having it become more tangible as I intuit its workings. I like this." -pastrylikewolf (via iTunes)
"Challenging The solutions are simultaneously complex and simple. I find myself smiling the entire time. It's very much an intuitive process, an elegant game overall. The accompanying music is beautiful, and adds to the experience." -Madameblue (via iTunes)
"Huh? I must be getting old! I don't get it!" -Christinesdragon (via iTunes)
"Simple, but endlessly entertaining. This is a truly stunning game experience; it is one of the best uses of the tilt functionality of the iPhone. It is extremely simple in design, yet yields an endless amount of play possibility. You will consistently find yourself learning and surprising yourself as you play this game, even long after play sessions. I could play this forever." -Aaron Vanderbeek (via iTunes)
"Ummm... I must not get it because I see no point to this app. The instructions are non-existent! I am glad I didn't pay for this." -IrishDruidMama (via iTunes)
"@ChrisDeLeon's feelforit is brilliant. It's the most physical game I've ever played on the iPhone." -@GregoryWeir (via Twitter)
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