GDC18 videos

The GDCVault has posted videos of sessions from this year’s GDC already! That was fast!

I’ve linked videos for the three sessions of mine that were filmed (a fourth was for a private event and wasn’t; a fifth was on the Expo floor and wasn’t). You can find them each on the page with the slides:

• AI Wish List: What Do Designers Want out of AI? (panel with Noah Falstein, Robin Hunicke, Richard Lemarchand, and Laralyn McWilliams, moderated by Dave Mark.

I want it all. I want to have the tools, the machine learning, the AI, the rich data environment, to be able to make a single, probably online, connected universe that we are in fact simulating down to the point of the little pink alien gophers on the thirteenth planet around that particular green sun (which was entirely procedurally generated) actually have a history and care about one another, and I want it to have all of that stuff and have all of it be alive. Specifically because I want to drop a player into that world and have them realize, as they play, that they are touching lives, messing with things that are alive, they are trampling grass that struggled to grow, “goddamnit, you’re stepping on me again,” to realize that when they build their virtual cities, when they conquer their virtual enemies that they are being colonialist about, you know — all of those things, I want them to realize that in their daily lives, they do the same thing in the real world. Because I want the AI and the machine learning and the code and the systems out there to hold a mirror back up to us as humans. I want them to use that space as practice for being better here. So give me all of it so that people can wake up and realize what they do day to day.

• Classic Game Postmortem: Ultima Online at 20 (panel with Richard Garriott, Starr Long, and Rich Vogel).

Raph: The King was dead. Right? And I think for all of us that was the moment that we realized, right, this was no longer about control. Right? The new rulers of our virtual world, that now we all play in all the time — this was really the moment when we realized — the players were going to be the ones who topple the kings. This was the moment we realized what we had set free. You. We had set you free. And you know, no offense, but Richard was no longer the ruler of fantasy worlds. The power was now in your hands. And from the bottom of all of our hearts, I think we actually want to say “Thank you for that.” Thank you so much.

Starr: Thank you for killing Richard!

Richard: But don’t do it again!

• Rules of the Game: Five Further Techniques from Rather Clever Designers. (panel with Erin Hoffman-John, Soren Johnson, Stone Librande, Richard Rouse III, Josh Sawyer)

This matters because of game longevity, which matters to me because I want my art to live for centuries, but also because it includes a bunch of stuff that drives revenue, if you like eating. It’s driven by how much space the game can have, right? And despite what we might want as creators, a lot of the power in a game experience actually comes from a loss of control. It comes from letting players have the actual authority over the experience. And so what gives that? What is it that gives that core sim? The three critical ingredients I end up looking for: first is a space that just is an interesting mathematical or structural landscape. And by this I mean, you know… a physics system meets that. Interesting relationships between objects. Like the relationships between suits and numbers and colors in a deck of cards is an interesting landscape of relationships. I look for it to be simple, with only a few rules even though it might have room for tons of data. What usually works is a way to have lots of kinds of data that work on top of the same underlying sim, and you can stack as many separate rule systems on the sim as you like. So Poker leverages the set of playing cards, but so does Blackjack and Go Fish. Pokemon leverages Pokemon types and attack types, with systems. And lastly, I look for that set of relationships, that sim, to not actually have implicit goals. I want it to be a toy. I want it to allow players to create their own goals on top of the system. It doesn’t mean then that you can’t layer goals on top of that. You can have AI with goals. It doesn’t mean the game can’t provide as many goals as you want. It means the system itself doesn’t imply them. We choose them based on the narrative or experience we want to provide. Because there is a difference between a system where all you can do is get to the other side, and a system that says “here’s cool movement physics, let’s build Portal.”

There were so many standout talks that I am hesitant to provide recommendations here for fear of forgetting a really good one. A huge amount of the videos are completely free, so I’d suggest just heading over to the GDCVault and digging in!