Walt Writes Games

Coco & Co Quarter Presentation

2010-10-12T02:43:00.000-04:00

My project team, Coco & Co, gave our quarters presentation a few days ago. Here is a video recording of it:

San Francisco Bike Tour

2010-09-11T02:30:00.001-04:00

My team this semester went on a bike tour of San Francisco and across the Golden Gate Bridge.

http://www.etc.cmu.edu/siliconvalley/blog/2010/09/10/coco-co-s-sf-bike-tour/

Coco & Co

2010-09-07T02:24:00.003-04:00

My project team for this semester is called Coco & Co, which stands for Constructive Communication and Collaboration. The goal of our project is to create a two-player puzzle game in which the players must communicate with each other to solve the puzzles, but without using text or speech chat.

http://www.etc.cmu.edu/projects/cococo/

Keyboard Failure

2010-08-23T13:50:00.002-04:00

This just happened to my friend's computer.

What Happens in Vegas

2010-06-27T21:55:00.072-04:00

Las Vegas is probably my least favorite place on Earth. It's no fun unless you want to spend a lot of money on alcohol.

This weekend a few other interns and I made the 6-ish hour drive from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. The big reason we went was to see the Cirque Du Soleil show Ka. (More on Ka later...)

The trip to Vegas was super boring. It pretty much all looked like this.

On the way we stopped to eat in the town of Baker, CA. We ate at a Greek-themed restaurant.

We also saw "The World's Tallest Thermometer". It should really be called "The World's Lamest Thermometer", because it's actually just a bunch of numeric, digital temperature displays. (Trivia: It is 134 feet tall -- 134 degrees is the highest-ever temperature recorded in nearby Death Valley.)

We stayed in one of the cheapest hotel casinos in Vegas, The Excalibur.

After checking in, we went exploring!

And as it turns out, Vegas is pretty much entirely slot machines.

The outsides of the casinos are usually much more interesting than the insides.

You can, of course, gamble and swim at the same time.

Vegas is littered with all sorts of lame street performers, such as this couple in awful, awful (though at the same time pretty impressive) Toy Story costumes.

After taking this picture I was yelled at and shooed away by the performers, who wanted a tip that I would not give them.

Saturday evening we saw the Cirque du Soleil show Ka. It is easily the most technically impressive piece of theater I have ever seen. The show and it's incredible stage cost over $200 million to create. The massive stage itself can move in and out, up and down, tilt up and down, and spin. It also has a sophisticated camera-based actor-tracking system that allows them to project all kinds of special effects onto the stage. The stage is so massive that it was built by a company that normally builds large-scale industrial mining equipment.

Ka is a great show, and if you are ever unfortunate enough to be in Vegas, is not to be missed.

Hollywoooood

2010-06-12T01:23:00.042-04:00

Yesterday evening we went to see Prince of Persia at the El Capitan in downtown Hollywood. The movie was a reasonably entertaining summer action flick.

The El Capitan theater, though not owned by Disney, shows only Disney movies. It's also a pretty cool venue. Before every show there is a performance by a live organist, who then descends into the stage just before the previews.

The whole theater itself is decorated to match whatever movie is being shown, and there are often displays of movie props in the basement. Here are a couple from Prince of Persia:

Before the movie we walked briefly around downtown Hollywood. There's really not much to see, though the hand and foot prints of all sorts of movie stars are pretty neat.

Anthony Daniels (aka C-3PO) is a visiting scholar at the ETC. He's a nice, polite man, and very, very smart.

Someone once told me that I reminded them of Jack Nicholson. Personally I don't see the resemblance, but I took it as a compliment.

Maker Faire

2010-05-23T18:28:00.000-04:00

On Friday and Saturday, a few of us Imagineers ventured up to the San Francisco area for the Maker Faire. It's basically a bunch of do-it-yourselfers geeking out with each other.

Anyway, Imagineering went up there to showcase some of the cool technologies we're working on as part of Maker Faire's education day for kids.

One thing we showed is a cool trick whereby a webcam captures video of your face, which is then projected back onto this model of a human head. The effect is kind of like a really bizarre 3D mirror. It was definitely popular with kids.

Another technology we're showed is a 360-degree camera. Once upon a time (a couple weeks ago) it was attached to one the ride boats for the It's A Small World ride at Disneyland. The cool thing about this video is that, though it is all prerecorded, you can still pan around within the video as if you were controlling a normal camera live.

But the most popular technology we demoed was the FLIR infrared camera. It can see heat instead of normal visible light. It costs about $35,000, so we didn't let any of the kids touch it, but they could see themselves glow bright on the screen. One cool thing is that if you touch the wall with your hand for a couple seconds, it actually heats up the wall, leaving an imprint for a little bit.

Friday was the education day, and on Saturday the main fair started. Upon entering the fairgrounds, one couldn't help but notice the giant rocketship in the middle.

A commonly-recurring theme throughout the day was crazy vehicles.

Robots were another common sighting.

Not to mention the obligatory R2 droids.

These aren't the chickens you're looking for...

There were a bunch of fun wood "sculptures" that anyone could bend into their desired shape. (Puppy!)

One group had a shadow-detecting projection. I only mention it because we've done much more interesting stuff at the ETC.

Another group had a cool tank combat video game, but not quite as cool as Tanky-Tank.

There were a bunch of wild-and-crazy art pieces.

And some human-powered carnival rides.

Lastly, there were a couple of awesome musical devices...

One was a mechanical percussion instrument:

And the other was a musical instrument using giant Tesla coils! The notes you hear are simple electrical current flowing from the coils. (Yes, there's a person in the cage between the two coils.)

Disney

2010-05-23T17:19:00.000-04:00

On Monday morning I had an appointment to hand in my paperwork for my internship at Walt Disney Imagineering.

Apparently, L.A. is not always warm and sunny.

The WDI buildings are very nondescript. Here's where I had my appointment:

Indeed, this is the only hint of Disney I could find anywhere outside the gated areas:

The inside of the WDI Creative building is full of artwork, concept paintings, models, and lots more. It's really cool. Unfortunately, I'm not allowed to take pictures inside.

On Tuesday was Disney orientation for new interns. It was pretty run-of-the-mill orientation (the history of Disney; the employee guidebook; etc...). We did get to spend a few minutes in the Disney archives...

The Wardrobe, of the Lion and the Witch variety:

Walt Disney... not the world's greatest artist:

While everyone else was gawking at prints from Snow White, I was nerding out with the Nautilus.

I held an Oscar! (Yes, it's heavy.)

This is a machine that animators back in the day used to do parallax of different layers in a shot. They would literally paint a layer onto each of several transparent panes of glass. A camera is positioned at the very top and photographs down through all the panes.

To close out the day, we went on a tour of Disney's studios in Burbank. Unlike nearby Imagineering, the main studios are definitely Disney-themed. Here's a shot of their main administration building, complete with the Seven Dwarfs:

Walt's Adventures in Burbank

2010-05-16T21:12:00.001-04:00

Today I moved to Burbank, California. I am interning at Walt Disney Imagineering in nearby Glendale. (I tried to get walt@disney.com, but that was already taken by some other, apparently more important, Walt.)

I flew in to teeny little Burbank Airport, complete with outdoor baggage claim. (Actual size image.)

My apartment building is not some large, soulless monstrosity.

My bedroom is a bedroom, but my bed is super comfy, meaning I will definitely have a hard time getting up in the morning.

And my closet pwns.

The dining room has funny little round balls hanging from the ceiling. We could have used them on The Iminintech Project.

My kitchen is finally larger than a closet...

And it has a dishwasher! (Though of apparently questionable effectiveness.)

Then I went exploring!

On my way to downtown Burbank...

I went to my local mall, which had a train ride for kids. (Why don't they make train rides for adults?)

In the mall I happened to spot a (non-functional) Reactrix box, which is apparently similar to the Playmotion we use at the ETC.

And this is my local GameStop. I suspect it will play a crucial role in my summer.

I wrapped up my excursion with my first-ever meal in Burbank!

Stay tuned for more of... Walt's Adventures in Burbank!

15 Properties of Living Structures - Portal

2010-03-31T22:02:00.000-04:00

In Christopher Alexander's multi-volume essay, The Nature of Order, he identifies 15 properties found in almost all living structures and organisms in nature. They are: levels of scale; strong centers; boundaries; alternating repetition; positive space; good shape; local symmetries; deep interlock; contrast; gradients; roughness; echoes; the void; simplicity; and not-separateness. He also suggest that human-made objects, from cities to furniture to literature, also posses most if not all of these properties when they are well-designed. Few would argue that these principles cannot also be applied to the design of games.

So let's take a look at one of the most critically-acclaimed games of recent years: Portal. Portal is one of the very few games that nails every dimension of its design, from gameplay to visuals to audio to story. This makes it one of the very best examples to analyze with respect to the 15 properties.

1. Levels of Scale - The environments, entities, and challenges of a game should have a balanced range of sizes.

The environments in portal range from air ducts to open rooms to vast chambers. This keeps the environments varied and interesting.

The various entities encountered throughout the game range from small robotic turrets to man-sized rocket launchers to a massive computer. The personalities of these also range from diminutive to ego-maniacal.

The challenges in the game range from simple puzzles to maddening brain twisters.

The actions taken by the player also very from small to huge. One moment the player may be simply stepping through a portal, and the next she may be diving from a hundred feet high into a portal to be flung across a cavern.

2. Strong Centers - The environments, entities, and challenges should have strong areas of focus or weight.

Many of the challenge rooms in Portal have, at their center, the key to solving the puzzle, such as an energy ball that needs to be redirected or a moving platform that must be activated. This focuses the player's attention on what, specifically, needs to be changed; otherwise the player might feel confused and aimless.

Each of the levels in the game, while typically having multiple small puzzles, generally have one primary puzzle that occupies the bulk of the player's attention. These primary puzzles often introduce new challenges or mechanics.

The story also has a very strong central character: GladDos, the computer A.I. and main nemesis. Although there are many tertiary elements (Aperture Science, Chell, the companion cube, the previous test subjects), the bulk of the story focuses on GladDos's manipulation and, eventually, attempted murder of the player's character.

3. Boundaries - Outlines should focus attention on the centers.

Portal makes a subtle use of outlines to hint at specific areas or objects, such as an ideal location to place a portal or the climactic end-boss.

Like nearly all games played within an environment, Portal uses walls and impassible areas to keep the player focused on the current challenge. The barriers in the game (walls, doors, windows, pits of toxic ooze) are also a crucial element of the puzzles -- usually the player's goal is to find a way to circumvent a particular barrier.

4. Alternating Repetition - Elements within the environments and challenges should be repeated to give a sense of order and harmony.

Portal's walls are comprised almost completely of visually repetitive light and dark slabs. The checkerboard floors provide a great deal of alternating repetition.

The types and scales of the challenges are also repeated throughout the game. Huge, acrobatic challenges typically come before and after smaller, more cerebral puzzles.

5. Positive Space - The backgrounds should reinforce rather than detract from the centers.

The visual backgrounds in Portal, which can typically be ignored by the player, never distract from the objects in the foreground, which the player must focus on to complete the challenge.

6. Good Shape - The environments, entities, and challenges should use simple forms create intense, powerful centers.

Nearly all of the environments and objects in Portal are indeed made of simple shapes. Rooms are typically just boxes, objects used to solve puzzles are simple cubes, and even GladDos, the most complex entity in the game, is made out of dozens of spheres.

7. Local Symmetries - Small-scale symmetries work better than precise, overall symmetries.

Most of the environments in Portal are symmetric, and when they aren't, their asymmetry is used to call attention to a particular point. For example, in one level there is a large, highly-symmetric cavern with a large ledge running along one edge, from the leftmost corner to almost the rightmost corner. This break in symmetry -- a gap -- between the ledge and the rightmost corner draws the player's attention to the floor down below the gap.

Most of the objects are also symmetric, and when they aren't, asymmetry is used to convey character. For example, the friendly companion cube is symmetric along all three dimensions, the robotic defense turrets are symmetric along one dimension, and GladDos is symmetric along none. The decrease in symmetry corresponds to an increase in threat and hostility.

8. Deep interlock - The environmental, story, and challenge elements should be looping and interconnected to promote unity and grace.

I talk more about the interconnectedness of the game's elements in 15 Not-Separateness, but Portal's core gameplay mechanic deserves special attention.

There are few if any games in which the gameplay itself is so literally interconnected and looping. By placing portals in different areas, those areas become connected in a way they previously were not. And by placing portals such that the player can fall through them in a loop, the player can fling herself great distances, or simply fall forever, looping between the portals.

9. Contrast - Unity, focus, and emphasis can be achieved by using strong opposites.

Most noticeably, Portal uses contrast to differentiate surfaces on which portals can be applied (light-colored) from those on which they cannot (dark-colored).

Contrast is also used to differentiate the sterile lab areas from the dirty, unkempt "behind-the-scenes" sections.

One of the reasons that GladDos is such a compelling nemesis is because her dialog often sharply contrasts itself. One moment she'll be congratulating you on a job well done and the next she'll be hinting at your impending demise. The internal contrast in her dialogue makes each line seem more congratulatory or more threatening than they otherwise would be.

10. Gradients - The proportional use of space and pattern in the environments, story, and challenges promotes harmony.

Like most games, Portal uses a difficulty gradient to keep the challenges matched appropriately with the player's skill level. Generally speaking, the complexity of the puzzles increases as the game progresses.

The hostility of GladDos also gradually increases as the player progresses through the story. While at the beginning a helpful guide, by the end she becomes an evil nemesis who must be destroyed at all costs.

11. Roughness - Texture and imperfection in the environment, entities, story, and challenges convey uniqueness and life.

While most of Portal is played in clean, smooth laboratory environments, there are places where roughness is used to great storytelling effect. Scattered throughout the game are small areas where the rough, unkempt reality breaks through into the lab space, providing clues about the world outside and foreshadowing the end of the game. Near the end of the game, Portal shifts almost completely to rough environments, at exactly the same time as when the player finally breaks free from GladDos's directives.

12. Echoes - Similarities should repeat throughout the environment, story, and challenges.

Portal is full of moments that echo earlier moments.

In the gameplay, there are simple puzzles and elements of puzzles (such as crossing a divide or flinging across a cavern) that are seen again later in the game. Most of the puzzles are repeated again in some form in the final level. The helps give the player a sense of confidence and the feeling that she has improved her skills, since these puzzles are now very easy to solve.

Many elements of the story are also echoed throughout the game. For example, rough behind-the-scenes areas with "the cake is a lie" scrawled on the walls are repeated throughout the game.

13. The Void - Empty spaces and pauses in challenge create calm and contrast.

Portal uses the void to great effect. Large open spaces and rooms help focus attention on the few important objects within them. And the final battle with GladDos takes place within a huge room that is itself in a massive, detail-less cavern. Through windows the player can see this room within the cavern, and she knows that whatever is in that room is the center of everything.

Portal also uses pauses in challenge before and after particularly intense puzzles to let the player recuperate from the previous challenge or prepare for the next. The pauses also help to create a contrast, such that the next challenge seems greater than it would be if there were no pause. For example, the challenge before the final fight with GladDos is one of the most intense of the game, and fighting GladDos directly afterward may feel a little anticlimactic. But instead there are several long hallways before the final fight, which give the player the chance to recuperate and by contrast makes the final fight seem even bigger.

14. Simplicity - Use only essentials and avoid extraneous elements.

In a time where modern games are increasingly complex, Portal stands out as remarkably simple.

From a visual standpoint, the environments have in them only that which is absolutely necessary to guide the player and to tell the story. The rooms are barren, and the walls, ceilings, and floors are simple patterns of light and dark tiles. There is nothing extraneous.

The gameplay itself is also very simple at its core. It simply asks the question, what could you do if you could create two interconnecting portals on flat surfaces? The other gameplay mechanics (crossing divides, flinging, sending objects through portals) are all answers to that question -- they arise elegantly from the core mechanic.

15. Not-Separateness - All of the elements in the game should be connected and complementary.

Many games have stories and environments that do not support their challenges, but Portal is not one of those games. Most of the time playing Portal is spent teaching the player all the various emergent properties of the portal mechanic, which works perfectly with the game's story in which the player is essentially a human rat in a giant lab. The necessary gameplay instructions given the player by the GladDos don't break the story because it is plausible that she would give the character those instructions even if Portal wasn't a game.

The environments also support both the story and the gameplay. The sparse rooms reflect the sterility of a laboratory while also keeping the player's attention focused on the objects that matter.

Challenges of Interactive Stories

2010-02-17T21:38:00.000-05:00

Interactive stories are hard. I'm not talking about stories with interactive challenges, a la Uncharted, Metal Gear Solid, Half Life, or countless others. Nor am I talking about "story machine" games in which non-scripted stories emerge from the gameplay, such as The Sims or Civilization. I'm talking about scripted stories in which the player's decisions and actions actually influence the events and, often, the conclusion of the plot. There are many games that attempt this at a surface level, such as Infamous, Fable, and Mass Effect, though very few attempt truly interesting interactive narratives.

In Jesse Schell's book The Art of Game Design and in his game design class, he identifies five big challenges of interactive storytelling that make telling interactive stories really hard. I'll briefly summarize each challenge and then provide some possible ways to tackle the challenges.

1. The Combinatorial Explosion. That is, every time the player makes a choice in the story it branches into two possible paths, and every choice after that makes the story branch again. So a story that is completed after five choices would need to have thirty-two different paths scripted and implemented by the storytellers. That's a ton of work for a story with only a handful of choices, and that's assuming each choice is between only two options, which is rarely the case in real life.

One such possible solution is to make the branches merge back with each other, which would greatly reduce the total number of paths that would need to be implemented. Unfortunately, this makes the individual choices much less significant since it is likely that both options ultimately lead to similar or identical conclusions. While this may not be apparent on the first play-through, anyone playing multiple times will quickly realize that the choices aren't significant and the story suddenly becomes much less compelling. For example: The recently-released game Heavy Rain has a scene in which the player can either befriend or offend a non-player character. But after that scene, the player then defends her from an abusive boyfriend, thus cementing a positive relationship between her and the player. This essentially nullifies the choice to befriend or offend her in the first place. Being a curious player, I played through these scenes multiple times and was ultimately disappointed by how meaningless the original choice was.

The better solution, I think, is to use chapters in which the choices made in one chapter only affect the outcome of that chapter and not any other chapters. For example, let's say that we're making an interactive narrative with nine choices. Normally, that would be 512 total paths required. But instead, let's make a story with three chapters, each with three choices. That's eight paths per chapter, which works out to 24 total paths -- a far more manageable number. Dragon Age is a good example of this system in action: There are multiple storylines running throughout the game, and the choices made while playing any one storyline usually only affect the outcome of that particular storyline.

The potential downside of this latter solution is that the choices will still be less significant because most of them do not affect the ultimate outcome of the story. But if the individual chapters can be made compelling stories in of themselves then the choices therein will still be compelling, even if they do not affect the outcome of the entire narrative.

2. Good stories require unity. That is, a good story is tightly woven with a beginning, middle, and end that work together as a cohesive whole. The challenge here is in creating an interactive story in which every possible path through the story works as a cohesive whole. This problem is related to The Combinatorial Explosion in that, while it may be feasible to make each of a few paths cohesive, making all of a huge number of paths cohesive is impractical.

Since this challenge is so similar to The Combinatorial Explosion, the solution is also very similar: Use chapters that each have few choices and can be made individually cohesive.

3. Multiple endings disappoint. Jesse argues that this is because players viewing one ending will feel like they aren't viewing the best or intended ending. This is certainly part of the disappointment, though I think that the feeling of having experienced an incomplete ending is more important. In a story with multiple endings, both endings are thought of as being part of the story, not just the ending chosen by the player. This reasoning can also be applied to multiple game paths in general -- picking one path over another will cause a feeling that part of the story is being missed. I had this feeling after finishing BioShock for the first time: BioShock has two endings, and the player views one depending on how many little sisters he saves or harvests. Since saving and harvesting the little sisters occurs throughout the whole game, viewing the other ending requires playing through the entire game again.

The solution, I believe, is to make it easy to "rewind" the game and explore the multiple paths and outcomes. Do not force the player to play through the entire game again -- let them load the game to just before making a critical decision. (And please auto-save at that moment.) Ideally, the player would be able to access a branching tree of all the significant decisions in the game and the outcomes that have been explored, and they would be able to easily jump around the story to try all the possible outcomes. In that way they can experience the whole story without wasting time replaying parts, and they won't feel like they're missing any part of it. One of the games that comes the closest to this ideal is Pheonix Wright: The court room scenes in the game are interactive and allow the player jump around in time to try out different sequences of actions in an attempt to produce the desired conclusion.

4. Time travel makes tragedy obsolete. That is, the conclusion of a story will lose its its inevitability if the player can simply travel back in time and change the ending. There's really no way around this problem other than being aware of the kinds of stories that don't work well as interactive stories -- that is, pretty much any story with whose drama relies on its ending and in which the characters have the power to affect this ending. For example, Romeo & Juliet would lose its power if the player could alter the course of the story to prevent the tragic deaths of its protagonists.

But stories in which the ending is not crucial to the drama could indeed be very compelling interactive stories. For example, Hamlet may actually work well as an interactive story. Changing Hamlet's decisions and exploring the consequences of those changes could be really interesting. Hamlet may work better than Romeo & Juliet because the drama of Hamlet comes not from its tragic ending but from the series of interesting choices that Hamlet makes.

5. Not enough verbs. That is, in any remotely-realistic interactive story it is nearly impossible to fully implement all of the choices and actions a character may make. Classic adventure games, which make the most explicit use of verbs to perform actions, typically have a very small number of verbs that the player can use to control the actions of the character. Even text adventures, which attempt to interpret the text typed by the player, can only understand a limited set of verbs.

The solution is not to implement a huge number of possible verbs, for at least several reasons. First, implementing a huge number of verbs is technologically infeasible. Second, The Combinatorial Explosion problem will rear its ugly head if they player is given the freedom to do just about anything he chooses. And third, a huge number of verbs will confuse and scare the player out of playing the game.

The best solution, I think, is, in any given situation, to present the player with a few possible actions that are more compelling than anything else the character might be able to do in that situation. For example, let's say that the grass in Bob's lawn is way too tall. In real life he could buy a lawnmower or pay someone else to mow it, but in a game, why would you choose to do either of those things if you are given the options to either torch the lawn with a flamethrower or let a heard of triceratops graze it into submission?

Cautionary Tales

2010-01-27T21:54:00.000-05:00

In the art of storytelling, we game developers have many disadvantages when weighed against other mediums like film, literature, television, and theater. We don't have the visual expressiveness of film or television, or the liveliness of theater, or the analytic depth of literature. However, I believe we have some advantages that can be very useful when telling certain kinds of stories. My thesis here is about one such advantage and one such kind of story. It is a little brave and pretty cocky. But before I get to it, here's an introduction:

I often find myself drawn to stories about villains and bad guys, especially the ones that started with the best of intentions, only to end up the villain. They are the stars of their own cautionary tales. I like to know why the bad guys became bad. A couple such good-to-bad characters that come to mind are Darth Vader and Macbeth. but perhaps my favorite is Jimmy Markum from the film Mystic River. Mystic River starts with the murder of Jimmy's daughter and ends with him committing murder. The film effectively connects all the dots and shows his personal journey from distraught father to killer. Jimmy is a great character because we understand exactly why he does what he does, every step of the way. His tale is a cautionary one because he starts with the best of intentions and ends up committing a horrible crime.

So here's my cocky thesis for all you game developers and designers: Games can tell cautionary tales better than any other medium. Clint Eastwood, George Lucas, and William Shakespeare have got nothing on us.

But how?

One of the greatest advantages we game developers have as authors of fiction is that we have the potential to place our guest into our character's shoes (metaphorically, until Nintendo invents the Shoemote) more snugly than any other medium of fiction. I am not talking about our guest relating to, identifying with, or empathizing with a character -- anyone can imagine themselves in the place of a sufficiently strong character, and games afford this no better than any other medium. What I'm talking about is that we have the power to make our guest think and feel in the same way that our character does. When our guest plays our game, his mind merges just a little bit with the mind of our character and they act as one. When an obstacle or problem (gameplay!) is encountered in our game, the guest and the player solve it as a single entity. Because of this, we can use gameplay to indirectly control our guest's thoughts and feelings.

So now, imagine this hypothetical game: It is the great depression, and you play a character with a wife and children. You are out of work and must find a way to feed your family. Within the gameplay, you try to find a job, but all the jobs are either already taken or pay so little that your family can't even eat. The gameplay engine is flexible enough that it is possible to steal goods from shops. And so, without a single prompt from the game, you steal bread from a bakery because that's the only practical solution. You return home and your family eats, but the next day you are out of food again. So you go back to the shop, but this time the baker is waiting in hiding. He attacks you with a knife. To save yourself, you grab the knife from him and, in the heat of the moment, kill him. Maybe you didn't mean to, or maybe you did. Either way, you need to dispose of the body, because if you get caught and go to jail, your family will starve. So you go to the dock and dump the body in the water. But a guard sees you and attempts to arrest you. You kill him as well, and before dumping his body, you search him and find a valuable diamond. You take the diamond, but there is no way to sell it on the legal markets, so you take it to a black market. There, you find and get involved with shady thieves, working for them for good pay. Finally, a job that will feed your family!

It's hard to argue that you are a good character. Initially well-intentioned, yes, but ultimately your deeds are very, very bad. Your initial act of petty crime spiraled out of control and before you knew it, you were a bad guy. Certainly there's nothing unique about this story -- it's pretty generic and told much better in plenty other great works. But the difference here is that you, the player of the game, made every choice that led down that dark path. You acted out the cautionary tale. The game never prompted or hinted to you what you were supposed to do -- it merely set up the conditions that made your actions seem the most reasonable at the time.

When watching a movie or reading a book about a similar story, it's definitely possible to understand why a character goes down that bad path, but you can still say to yourself, I wouldn't have made those decisions. But by playing the game, you did make those decisions! There's no way around the fact that, yes, you are just as capable of being that bad guy as everyone else, given the right motivations. (And these motivations must be intrinsic to the world of the game, not extrinsic to the world of the player.) Hence, we have an awesome power to humble our guests, to open their eyes, and to teach them about themselves. That's why I believe that games can tell cautionary tales better than any other medium.

While there are many games in which you play or have the option to play the bad guy, there are very few that come anywhere close to telling cautionary tales as driven by intrinsically-motivated player actions.

Grand Theft Auto IV, despite its somewhat-deserved reputation as a mindless killing simulator, actually shows some hints of what I'm talking about. In GTA4 you play as Nico Bellic, a recent immigrant who is thrust into a life of crime for reasons largely beyond his control. The story told in GTA4 effectively conveys the journey of Nico from well-meaning immigrant to ruthless criminal, and he never loses the core of his humanity. Where GTA4 falls short is that the player rarely makes decisions that advance the plot -- most such decisions are made by the character in cut scenes. (Not to mention that the believable plot is surrounded in the "open world gameplay" by a lot of mindless killing that is out of Nico's character.)

Another game that comes to mind is Dragon Age, a recently-released Western RPG. The choices that the player has to make in this game are many in number and high in meaningfulness. Often the player must choose to help one NPC or another, and the choice between them is not clear. Dragon Age effectively puts the player in a situation where he has to make a choice and then deal with the consequences. What it doesn't do is provide compelling reasons to make bad choices. Yes, it's possible to be pretty evil in Dragon Age, but there is no compelling reason to be so, other than that it's fun, which is rarely if ever a reason in real life.

Many other games, like inFamous and Black & White, give the player the option of being either "good" or "evil". While playing an "evil" character is often a lot of fun, the choice to do bad acts is rarely backed by intrinsic motivations within the game world, rather than the player's extrinsic motivation of wanting to be bad because it's fun.

I'm hopeful for the upcoming release of Heavy Rain, which looks like it may have the kind of meaningful, intrinsically-motivated choice to do bad things that I'm talking about.

In summary, we game developers have the awesome power to make our guests think and feel in the same ways that our characters think and feel, and we can use this to tell better stories -- not just cautionary tales, but any stories in which we want our guests to go through the same thought and emotional processes as our characters. So why are we so under-utilizing this power? Certainly learning to wield it will not be easy and will take time, but if we don't explore our possibilities and push our boundaries then games will never mature as a storytelling medium worthy of standing side-by-side with film, television, theater, and literature.

Building Virtual Worlds

2009-12-15T11:33:00.000-05:00

Building Virtual Worlds is a course taught at Carnegie Mellon University's Entertainment Technology Center. During the course, students are assigned to teams of four students (programmer, modeller/animator, 2D artist, and sound designer) and work together for about two weeks at a time to create a "virtual world." Once the two weeks are up, the teams are scrambled and the new teams start anew on a different world. The virtual worlds range from games to interactive stories to high-tech performance pieces. All of the worlds use uncommon interactive hardware, such a head-mounted displays and the Playmotion shadow-tracking system.

On this page are videos and short descriptions of all five of the virtual worlds my teams created. All five of my worlds were very well-received. Two were featured in the end-of-semester B.V.W. Show, and a third was featured as a guest-playable game at the reception following the show. In all of my worlds I was the sole programmer as well as contributing significantly to their designs.

Student Short Films

2009-12-08T20:38:00.000-05:00

At the Entertainment Technology Center, we have a first-semester course called Visual Story. In this course groups of 4-5 students are assigned to teams for the semester and work on about 5 short films. I have compiled the best of these on my website. My particular favorite is a music video in which I star.

Exploding Demon Bunnies vs The Eyeball Monster

2009-09-10T22:08:00.002-04:00

This is a vey short game created in one week at the Entertainment Technology Center as my submission for "Project 0" of the Building Virtual Worlds class. It's fun for a play-through or two.

http://www.waltdestler.com/index.php?page=demon-bunnies

Tanky-Tank 0.10.4 released!

2009-07-03T20:06:00.003-04:00

A new version of my game Tanky-Tank has been released! This is mostly a lot of little fixes that added up make for a considerably improved experience.

Latest changes:

Added some weapon physics, such as recoil when firing a weapon and force exerted when struck by a weapon. For the most part these are minor and fairly unnoticable.
Adjusted the way the camera tracks the player tank when Smooth Scrolling is enabled. It's now smoother and less jarring.
A.I. players now use real names instead of just "Private 1".
Host can now adjust the time it takes to respawn after being killed.
In Juggernaut mode, the game starts with all players belonging to no team. The first player to kill any other player becomes the first juggernaut.
In Capture The Flag, you can now rescue a flag while holding an enemy flag.
In Capture The Flag, return locations are now shown on the minimap as red or blue circles.
Fixed a bug in Juggernaut mode that caused the occasional crash.
Some stability improvements to the network code.
Added a button on the Internet screen that allows you to create your own lobby.
The Lobby Launcher application has been updated to work on Mac and Linux.
Tanky-Town map has been updated to play nice with the new A.I. pathfinding.
Opposing Shores map has been updated to fix some issues where the A.I. got stuck and sometimes killed the framerate.
You can now double-click to load/save a map, join a lobby, or join a game.
Fixed a few other miscellaneous bugs.

Download it now! Or start Tanky-Tank and wait for the "new version" message to appear.

Walt Writes Games

2009-07-03T19:39:00.000-04:00

Hi!

I'm Walt. I am an aspiring game programmer and designer -- NO! -- I take that back... I am a game programmer and designer. Yes! I have designed and programmed many games, most notably my years-long personal project Tanky-Tank. I have also designed some board games, including my personal favorite Thermonuclear Warfare on Catan.

This blog is an offshoot of my personal blog Walt Writes, which I will use to write about topics not directly relevent to games, such as movies, politics, and happennings in my life.

Thanks for reading!