GDC Microtalks 2017: Playing with Our Hearts

[Music] the GDC good evening and welcome to the GDC micro talks of 2017 well this year you find us playing with our hearts just because we're really uh turley passionate about game design please mute the chirpings of your external brains and don't forget to use the feedback form to send us your love notes your constructive feedback and your favorite cat memes my name is Richard Lamarr shinned and I'm a game designer I used to work at Naughty Dog on the Uncharted games and now I teach game design development and production in the USC games program in Los Angeles where I'm also doing design research with a series of experimental games so what exactly is a micro talk well this session was inspired by those short talk formats that use a peculiar and game-like constraint to help people talk about their deepest thoughts their biggest dreams and their brightest hopes without running over on time each of

today's speakers has 20 slides each one of those slides will be will automatically advance after exactly 16 seconds giving each speaker a total of 5 minutes and 20 seconds to let us in on their game related preoccupations prognostications and wisdom my hope each year is that the GDC Micro Talks is a place where you can come to charge up your inspiration batteries broaden your outlook about games and play and walk back out into the Moscone Center brimming with passion for this incredible form of ours of course you have definitely realized by now that I'm already giving you my micro talk so with just one more pause for a very deep breath allow me to introduce you to the brilliant interesting widely traveled and wondrous micro talkers that we've lined up for you today Stephanie Bayer is director of social and community engagement at Sky dance interactive whose vr experience Archangel debuts this week stephanie has a wealth of experience in community

engagement including work with Disney Interactive insomniac games and pop cap cat small is a game designer UX designer and educator and is the co-founder of the Brooklyn gamer II creators of prism she'll and break Squad she is also a product designer at Etsy was a co-founder of the code Liberation Foundation and his Co organizer of the game devs of color Expo Darby McDevitt is a lead scriptwriter at Ubisoft Montreal and has shipped more than 20 titles in 17 years as a writer designer and producer including Assassin's Creed Revelations and Assassin's Creed 4 Black Flag he's also worked with EA Warner Brothers and Disney giselle Rosman is the executive producer of the global Game Jam as well as being the director of the Melbourne chapter of the International Game Developers Association and business administrator at hipster whale creators of Crossy Road and of shooty skies with mighty games Christine love is a game designer and writer her company love conquers all games and is the acclaimed

author of the independent visual novels digital a love story analog a hate story and of course her newest steamiest romantic comedy lady killer in a bind stone Lybrand is a lead game designer at Riot Games and has also worked as a creative director for Electronic Arts and as a game designer for Blizzard Entertainment in addition he's a game design educator teaching at Carnegie Mellon and Cogswell College Meg giant is a freelance writer game designer and digital producer known for her game samsara and for her work with inkle studios on 80 days with fail better games on sunless sea and on the forthcoming action graphic novel Xiu Yin saga and finally BRE code is the CEO and creative director of true love media formerly a lead programmer and AI specialist at Ubisoft on titles like Assassin's Creed and child of light with stints at pandemic and relic she's also an acclaimed writer and public speaker James Baldwin's said love takes off

masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within what a horrible year so many of our friends right now are suffering renewed injustice and persecution because of their faith because of where they were born because of their gender or sexual identity because of the color of their skin some couldn't get visas to come here for some people this is surprising and alarming for other people who have been dealing their whole lives with the violence born of the racism misogyny homophobia and transphobia that's built into our way of life it's maybe nothing new I've been trying to write an inspirational opening for weeks something something the ambiguity of play something something uplift people with our work but for once in my life I can't find the words maybe this isn't the time for my words James Baldwin again love does not begin an end the way

we seem to think it does love is a battle love is a war love is a growing up we're about to settle into a wonderful hour of game design thought and as you listen I hope you'll find something in here that helps your heart whoever you are and whatever you're doing our speakers are great and I know you're going to enjoy their talks I want to thank our wonderful speakers in advance and thanks to Megan Scarborough Megan Bundy and all the folks at UVM thanks to the GDC advisory board for having us back again this year and to the amazing conference associates for their tireless awesomeness and thanks to you the micro talks community both here and on the GDC vault that's my talk [Applause] [Music] Thanks so let's get the show on the road I would like to introduce you to Stephanie Bayer who has some advice for

all of you who are either directly or indirectly involved in community management please welcome Stephanie Bayer all right time for memes and for me to go fast as humans we all have hearts it's just a factor of anatomy what we do with those hearts how we express emotions empathy and feelings is how we begin to differ while enjoy robot robotic precision and neo retro futuristic I'm still a human with a heart and must remember expressing emotions is OK in regards to video games community management and player management that's where things can get a bit more tricky I play with players hearts every day and as much as they sometimes tell me they don't want me to do so this dance is required but and this is an important but if you're playing with hearts you have to be a player with heart Act one we all have to start somewhere and that start as the

waiting game whether you're building a community or managing an existing community deciding the tone of voice discussion types and transparency into development must be decided before post goes up act - how do you break through the digital wall by listening and reading understanding the audience you're trying to interact with this key even if they are angrily spewing words on a screen they're there for a reason now to just shape the conversation positively and genuinely Act three your first post this can either mean nothing or mean everything it truly depends on the state of your community and what you post while main game updates or content releases can be written in the voice of the company individual opinions and responses should be in your voice it's okay to admit you're an actual human posting on a page humanizing helps you're totally thinking hasn't the internet and jerks screwed this up for us though let's never diminish those who have experienced the ugly side of the Internet never pretend harassment on the internet doesn't exist or that people don't suffer because of it but I still believe true connections can be made I have hope

that we can stand together we can unite finding commonality and simple thing can be powerful such as the explosive pineapple on pizza debate while amazing trivial it does prove the point that finding community can be as easy as agreeing or disagreeing on a pizza topping approaching an audience with a sense of heart means staying cool and balanced addressing negative issues swiftly while still highlighting the good things in the community all at once but still you wonder how how can everyone partake in the empathy game successfully some are gifted with emotional intelligence most have to learn it and put these a skill that becomes better with practice though you're still dealing with the changing landscape of human emotion no striving for perfection practice what you can like active listening micro expressions and tone can help make you a more heart forward communicator you're doing posts now what do spend more in-depth time with your biggest supporters don't stretch yourself too thin communicating on all platforms do you realize you can only do so much don't try to own every conversation be

honest and let the community know you still deserve downtime still too much negativity I could spend lots of time on this topic but here's my shortest version possible I run communities on a two-strike role first offense call them out and request respectful communication if they still go ham remove them don't be afraid to tell them to go if their goal is to troll you don't need them feel like you don't know what you're doing hesitation is normal in the beginning the reaction is negative don't beat yourself up just spend time figuring out where your message is going wrong is it content delivery tone don't give up when your audience goes negative in most cases a faux pas post can be fixed so take a breath and then get ready to work again go back to act 2 reading read the complaints read between the lines really try to absorb the issue stay open-minded don't get defensive protip pick aloud the center and a loud supporter and have a google hangout with them really listen to what they have to say good and bad don't allow yourself to

be abused though if it can't behave and the hang out take notes during the conversation create an actionable item list from it sometimes you have to apologize for the hearts you've broken if you truly listen to the community a mistake was yours sincerely apologize and move forward but direct apology is unnecessary create a posit displays understanding of the community's feelings directly acknowledging them is key to regaining trust in making amends once an apology recognition post is posted get back to business as usual remind players of positive stuff coming up feel free to highlight an in-joke in a post to show them that you're still reading what they're saying use digital icebreakers or pop culture posts to get them talking again it may seem cheesy but it works here are two ways I went hard forward at work innocuous contest post I did led me to chatting with a cancer patient who I ended up bringing into the studio to meet the team I reached out to the angriest grandma ever on Facebook and she end up becoming a weekly tournament runner for our game what can be gained by playing with hearts or sharing your heart you can

gain different perspectives on how players interact with your content as well as a reminder that players are people to 90% of your players just want to have fun and have their joy tank filled while you're playing your game you make content that touches hearts in summation playing with hearts is tricky but worthwhile it's okay to help make people happy it's okay to find joy and making others happy it's okay to play with hearts as long as you're willing to share your heart as well it may be scary or make you nervous but hearts and passion are what builds successful long-term communities while not trying to promote on healthy habits you ever speak to a community manager and they talk about drinking a lot that's because the toll on their heart is sometimes quite great you see your community manager looking down don't hesitate to ask them what's up offer a cup of coffee or even just say thanks this small gesture does wonders for the heart thank you thank you so much Stephanie thanks for getting us going and next please welcome

Kat small how nice is that a good height already cool so one of the many things that I do is user experience design or UX for short and UX design is a relatively new field and what user experience designers do is advocate for users while ensuring that business goals are met by making sure that technology is reliable so in terms of games UX designers ensure that games interfaces are intuitive and that games are challenging while also making sure that they're not frustrating enough to quit and game development studios are noticing and starting to hire them which is awesome so it's very easy to think that one must be an expert to know how to create a seamless intuitive engaging game but you don't have to be an expert to think about UX design and it's actually important that everyone on the team is thinking about it so here are several

tricks for in total to start thinking about UX design and these are things that game development studios whether you're a million people or one person can use to make your games more usable and therefore immersive if that's your cup of tea trick number one arts and crafts so UX designers are known to carry around a toolkit of like dollar store stuff including things like pens paper sticky notes etc because we basically never left kindergarten and it helps us to work better in the long term so firstly I usually start by drawing a user flow diagram and that can be on paper or digitally and this helps me to figure out logic before I get too far into the programming process so I'm not building anything yet so I can actually start focusing on systems design before I've started prototyping or programming I also then proceed into drawing those different states by fleshing things out again on paper so that I can visually explain my idea without getting too far

again so you can find that your ideas come out better when you're actually not preoccupied with a code or how things look and all of this requires just three which are circle squares and triangles and I just want to like really point out that you don't have to be an artist to be a UX designer or to do UX design because we're not making things pretty we're figuring out systems so trick number two is compassion and I use this word because empathy is a bit of a buzzword right now and I just want to know what the definition of that is is it's the feeling that arises when you are confronted with another suffering and you want to mode to actually relieve that suffering so in 2017 people are much less tolerant regarding things that take up their time right so you want to make sure that you're considering their emotions when you're making design choices so figure out ways to keep people engaged without relying on tropes that cause frustration like grinding and you want to also make your game worth playing by ensuring that every piece of

complexity that you're putting into your game is weighed against the value that it provides so usually what UX designers do is prioritize the most important features and either D scope or completely cut out ones that don't matter trick number three is research what happened which happens at every point of the design process because we all make assumptions and it's really important to kill those assumptions before they take your project basically so I'm going to talk about three that I rely on as a designer who makes games at the first of which is doing competitive analyses so I make sure that I understand the competitive space before creating solutions by asking things like who's doing a great job where's their space for improvement and how is our project different and this helps to provide a great direction for us then I do interviews so I talk to you perspective players and I again use that to help me kind of kill my assumptions by asking questions like what kinds of games do you play can you recall a time that you quit playing a game and why or just watching them play games like mine and then I get to testing so once you

actually have something built you can start to test your ideas and by testing those solutions you can get data that helps to back the solution that you actually go with in the final version and you keep testing until the product feels good enough to launch and then trick number four is sharing so one of the biggest things that I do as a user experience designer is killed a secrecy because people love to be in their own corners doing their own thing without sharing stuff with each other but UX is all about transparency so you just user experience designers talk to their team very often they share learnings and work to ensure that everyone's on the same page and this helps to let people communicate better and work better and deliver work much faster than they would otherwise next it also helps you to get more feedback which is great because everyone thinks differently and you want to make sure that you're figuring out who your audience is and that feedback can really help you because some of its not gonna

be that great to be honest so it's gonna be terrible and then finally it also helps you to get more attention by sharing your progress with the public for example you can actually get people excited before they actually see the game or or actually play it in real life and you can actually use that for feedback so that's not everything I wanted to cover in this very quick talk I hope this helps you understand a little bit about what I and other UX designers do every day because every game I've made has benefited from my work as a designer and I'm really excited to see us all making better more usable games so thank you so much and have a great rest of your conference [Music] superb Thank You cat next on deck please welcome Darby McDevitt just a quick preface to mine I have a couple hyperlinks on some of

these slides I don't expect you to furiously write them down but take a photo of the subject interests you or watch it in the poll have you ever read a good car chase I can't recall where I first heard this question but I do remember having more fingers than examples I know the question is reductive behind it is the idea that every medium has its own particular expressive power books communicate with language film through visual montage music through non linguistic sound so when we consume a piece of media its form acts as a filter for the kind of meaning we can derive from it even when the content is similar modern video games complicate this filter by scrambling existing forms together they are a multi medium often with no fixed source of meaning some games are novelistic some are cinematic while others flout all conventions but most games do have a common formal quality because of their

interactive nature games are singular and that they communicate meaning through dynamic systems and by interacting with these systems players can learn how to recognize them how to think about them and how to change them if need be we can call this heightened awareness systems literacy just as we talk about musical literacy or visual literacy or language literacy systems literacy is a description of a person's ability to think abstractly about dynamic systems click in real life the political and economic and social systems that influence our behavior can be vast vague and almost invisible to us and when they break down or fail us in some way we don't always comprehend the scope or the shape of the problem for example in the 1960s french sociologist maurice de vache observed that two party political systems were often an emergent property of women take all elections in

single-seat districts in other words America's voting system has created its two parties political scientists know this statistical effect but there is little mainstream discussion of it resulting in those who argue that strengthening third parties in the USA is only a matter of voter willpower if we only voted our conscience than we'd fit we could fix it but this is wrong to produce real change we'll need to amend our voting laws in ways that foster multiple parties unfortunately this level of abstract thinking doesn't come naturally to many people but a well designed game could make this abundantly clear and that's a great website if you want to see it oops does our paths are another common example of a lack of systems literacy we've all seen situations like this desire paths occur when the system we design does not adequately serve the needs of the people using it but this failure can be instructive when we have a direct experience with dynamic systems we can think more clearly about how they

affect us and how we can affect them this is Michigan University all the walkways on this campus began as desire paths that were later paved over as game developers we're all familiar with this process we design we experiment we test we redesign and at the end of this process if we've been vigilant we haven't just made a game we've built a small system that can tell our players something true about the world games are good at teaching large large scale systems in meaningful ways when I play pandemic just learn about exponential DS disease propagation I manipulate it and when I play Twilight Struggle I participate in a zero-sum Cold War conflict what thrills me about our industry is that we can take this process much further we can explore political economic and social systems combine them and infuse them with empathy and style in a way that poses difficult questions does bioshock's gameplay critique Randy and objectivism

or missed the point entirely how does fallout for a survival mode fundamentally alter a player's behavior does spore champion evolution or creationism should Bungie have gotten rid of destiny's loot cave as a novel papers please might have been one of a thousand moderately interesting cold war stories but as a game players participate directly in an indifferent bureaucracy which on its surface seems a model of efficient protocol as a film this war of mine might want to might have won an Oscar for best set design and costume design but as a game it implicates its audience in the daily struggle to balance an individual's need to survive against his or her desire for trust and community I recently played this wonderfully infuriating game to build a better mousetrap it's a very sober look at the near impossibility of treating labor or laborers humanely in an economic system that prioritized prioritises constant economic growth this is only a sample of course consider

all the subjects that would be best served not by a story but through a dynamic system evolution climate change institutional racism the war on drugs mental health issues even subprime mortgage lending unfortunately we do live in interesting times interesting and increasingly complicated times but this complication can be offset by the work that we do through systems literacy we can teach players how to navigate a world full of intricate and dynamic systems that are guiding us whether we know it or not into the future thanks thank you so much Darby now she's a little bit husky I'm sure some of you losing your voice after a week a half week of hollering but please welcome Gisele Rosman let's do this

hi I'm Giselle and I've never been so nervous in my life fighting me along Richard I'm not a game designer I don't even know how to make a game but I can tell you about making spaces and communities both locally and globally I've been estranged you're not a real game dev person in games for about ten years now I fell into it through love specifically my husband's best man offered me a job at a games educator in 2007 things kind of snowballed from there Australia's been making games for quite a while The Hobbit The Illustrated text adventure published in 1982 is recognized as Australia's first major title it was made at Melbourne house where I also got started in games from then on we kept making games some of them rather good most of the most work for higher to us publishers things to

our cultural similarities in the law was a dollar it was a classic studio set up where it was all about NDA's and secrecy in silos and then and then the GFC hit the dollar strengthened and most publishers pulled out of Australia we lost around 70% of our industry between 2008 and 2010 those who remained did so because games of their love and their passion it was rough well [ __ ] let's go to the pub I rebooted I GTA Melbourne in 2009 to make a space where at least we could commiserate and maybe even collaborate good things can happen at pubs it you can lose your voice too at the pub and in the park and online we learned we're stronger together we developed a community of sharing we realized running competition with each other and neighbors success can actually help their own success hands up have you played any of these

canes the app store opening in 2008 was also a stroke of luck the destroying game dev capitalized on but mostly it was classic guts and determination they kept us going and yielded some impressive results across the road would never have happened if it weren't for supporting emerging dev developers and having industry veterans who aren't locked away in ivory towers thanks to a scholarship program and his son Matt all at G cap in 2013 and went on to form hipster whale through IG da Melbourne I discovered global Game Jam and Melbourne joined in 2011 as I got more involved well they all got to watch learn from and encourage some of the most diverse collaborations across please ray sirs and religions the language of play is Universal number of people across the world it takes to make a game jam like global is nothing short of inspiring with 800 organizers in a slack and everyone working together with their

strengths together magic can be made this year a game was our biggest yet and not even so smooth as Jam we came together and make good things happen but it was also in some ways unusual given the backdrop of the u.s. inauguration weekend which looked a little bit more like whoa we made in sunny dog Eurasian day and continued while minute women marched and it felt like the world burned we did what devs do when we expressed ourselves in the universal medium of games was a nice shield for a bit to be honest the Jam ended and reality set in but my reality includes communities came to organized spaces for collaboration innovation and experimentation we can use our craft to create our own realities and influence those around us we can share our craft we can empower an amplifier not always heard I want to hear those stories I want to see them I want to

play them and I want to make spaces and have them made for them here are my challenges to you lift up and amplify the quiet voices this may be enough when I was practicing today the under-represented voices helped them be heard and teach them the language of games don't treat the games economy is finite your your neighbors success can help your success so help each other out you can share ideas and resources and support support others when we all make Graeme's the pie gets bigger come and visit us in October see for yourself meet our amazing and clever talented games community that struggled and work together to create a successful and sustainable sector there's a few of us around at GDC such sega day we're pretty friendly remember we're stronger together we're more interesting if we're diverse being

part of something bigger than yourself or even your studio is the most wonderful and amazing thing share care and collaborate thank you [Applause] Jakub May and Giselle thanks to you and all of your collaborators for the global game jam and now it is my very great pleasure to welcome to the stage the winner of the 2017 independent game festival award for excellence in narrative Christine love hi i'm christine and i make visual novels my most recent was Ladykiller to

bind an erotic comedy where you pretend to be your twin brother again to a series of kinky lesbian escapades you know it's a game we play if you're into experimental nonlinear choice driven narratives but also really like q-tips okay but seriously I'm the writing half of love conquers all games before the minds of games I originally wrote novels and short fiction I pleased that games are an incredibly powerful storytelling medium and then what making games the narrative should come first and I'm sure when you hear that you're thinking oh so she doesn't think game design is important is the story right no wrong game design is the story they're inseparable player interactions are how the story is told so I'm gonna talk about the most important to me and very neglected fundamental unit of game design storytelling pacing everything else is just built on that we've always thought about things structurally but it's especially important in a call me like lady killer the best description I've seen of what makes comedy funny is simply doing what's unexpected you can't subvert expectations without first creating them and you create expectations by creating a structure

that the player understands if the player doesn't understand your structure or worse if you're just playing everything by feel while writing and don't have when they get restless they start anticipating the next choice and stop paying attention to everything in between worse they get bored you could just break it up by having lots of small choices of course plenty games do this long explanation pause but hero what do you think of that this is bad too it comes across as needy as if the person you're talking to is desperate for your opinion I would never do that no that's a lie I absolutely would the kid is only good if it's conveying character it's weird if everyone cares about your opinion is meaningful if one person cares a lot but in order to actually pull this off you need to be flexible about your choices in Ladykiller we developed a unique dialogue system choices appear as they occur to the protagonist and they disappear as they're no longer relevant to the conversation this gives a more naturalistic feeling to the pace of

conversation and it also gives us a lot of flexibility and how we build sets of choices players learn quickly that they don't always have to say something the moment of choice appears it's really hard to write this system by the way we have to iterate a lot before we learned how to make this work here's just a few examples of some techniques that we discovered that work with this so the first thing that appears on screen is always the impulsive response the one where you fly off half-cocked it's something that's always tempting to say but it also is a player way to see if something better will come up for example a little more witty rejoinder come to mind as they wait we tie these into the game system so there's a risk/reward element involved we don't want the player to feel like there's always one correct approach sometimes waiting doesn't pay off with this particular character at the athlete he's always egging you on he's

the kind of guy who will just dominate a conversation if you let him and later on he'll just straight-up talk over you without even giving you time to interject but if you're silent all the time that's suspicious he thinks it's weird that you're being so quiet so in conversations with him you can't be defensive you don't want to fly off half-cocked but you don't see something you'll never even manage you get a word in edgewise the player feels like they have to be aggressive while talking with him however in other situations silence can be a meaningful choice too if you're quiet a romantic one-on-one conversation the person you're talking to will acknowledge that often it's even treated as a specific statement sometimes it conveys uncertainty other times it conveys a trust so let the other person take charge it depends on the context and it depends on when the choices appear at all or you can have someone who asks you questions one-on-one all the time and

that comes across as being very needy suddenly it's a lot more meaningful only one person does that all these different types of interaction pacings tell you different things about the character that you're talking to the whole reason why you have these rules is to break them think of the structures you're creating as a toolbox for remote evoking emotions if you set up the player to expect things to go a certain way then you undermine that expectation it'll stand out more it'll have dramatic effect maybe can even be funny all the supplies on a larger scale - we build conversations out of choices build scenes out of conversations and build character arcs out of scenes I'm not going to go into detail about this but everything I've said about pacing applies these larger units - but the base unit is the interaction that is to say the story itself is built out of interactions and everything that you've present to the player is just there to bring them to the next interaction by pacing things an expected way they'll anticipate and look forward to the next time they get to provide input let the player feel

involved because their anticipation matches the protagonists anticipation of providing input all those interactions all those things that the player anticipates that's where you put those things that matter that's how you tell us they are using pacing as your fundamental unit thank you [Applause] I kind of had a feeling that Christine would play around with the format and do fun things please welcome Stone Lybrand all right thank you I'd like to spend the next five minutes talking to you about heartbeats and games but I'm not gonna be talking about the heartbeat of the person playing the game but the game itself the underlying rhythms that are present in all games before Starke before I start talking about game rhythms let me first tell you a brief

story about a rhythm game as you can see by my upgraded controller I was pretty serious about rock band drumming at some point I realized I should just learn to play real drums instead of pretending so I found an instructor and started taking lessons after teaching me the basics he assigned me my first full song without any prior experience I thought the notation was difficult to read so I decided to fix it in my own way I recorded a video of the song and rock band and ran it through a slit scan this is a process that grabs a bottom row of pixels from each frame and then stacks them next to each other it flattened out rock bands perspective grid into a top-down view I cleaned up the raw output and was excited to show my instructor how I had modernized traditional drum notation and made it much easier to read he just shook his head and said why are you wasting your time doing this you could have been spending all that time learning to read

real drum notation instead so that's kind of sad but all that time spent analyzing and notated in rock band song made me wonder if I could use his process on other games can I find a notation system that would allow me to see rhythms and other games in the same way an EKG allows a doctor to see and visualize heartbeats one common timing visualization for games is called the game onion this is a way of organizing player activities and a nested rings based on time periods this is helpful but I find the circular shape to be suboptimal since it makes it very difficult to actually measure time I prefer to flatten the rings out into horizontal tracks similar to a standard timeline this lets me zoom in and out at the various time scales while still keeping the overall sequencing relationships intact here's a real-world example this is the heartbeat of the New England Patriots football team the season two seasons at the top week to week for the 2016 season in the middle and minute-to-minute at

the Super Bowl last month as the ball moved back and forth across the field I was curious to see the difference in rhythm in the Super Bowl using the game clock of one hour versus the real-time clock of about four hours here you can see the gaps that are created by timeouts the halftime show and commercial breaks now let's apply the same technique to the video game pac-man I chose this game because it's relatively simple and it has a strong rhythmic pattern I hadn't played it in over 20 years so I downloaded an emulator and I started recording my games here's the second to second diagram showing one of my early five-minute games points per second which is a rough approximation of the players excitement level is along the vertical axis notice the peaks that's when the ghosts turned blue and you can combo them for bonus points but pac-man isn't about just one game it's a series of games over time at the minute-to-minute scale you play multiple

games while it's slowly learning the patterns at the session to session scale it's not about the most points achieving higher levels becomes the motivating driver let's do a similar analysis of a completely different game Resident Evil 4 this is the third a third-person horror game that I played obsessively and I analyzed for the ETCs well played journal the primary mode of the game is the campaign but I had a lot more fun with The Mercenaries mini game in this mode you try to earn 5 stars on 20 unique different challenges using 5 unique characters on 4 custom maps it usually took me about 2 hours to beat each challenge with 5 stars in the beginning you die quickly but with practice your score increases notice how the scoring system makes it relatively easy to get to 4 stars but it takes a lot of extra work to get to 5 an individual game might last about 5

minutes the blue areas are when you score Arwen collect a powerup and your multiplies your score for a short time your score also increases if you kill enemies quickly and grow your combo multiplier even though pac-man and mercenaries are completely different thematic Li it's interesting to note how they share several common low-level rhythms the session to session growth that's caused by pattern memorization and the burst of excitement that occur when you collect a bonus item I think this visualization technique is interesting for analyzing existing games but I'm more interested in using it for games that are in development by mapping out the timings first and then tuning using telemetry that the game appropriately to match the desired rhythms I hope to give another talk about this in the future so I know that's a lot of information to cram into five minutes these slides are all available on my website if you'd like to review them at your own rhythm thank you

two totally different approaches to game rhythm and pacing I love GDC people please welcome mcjones so yeah before I began I kind of wanted to say that I feel like my talk is the evil alternate universe version of Derby's talk from earlier by which I mean my talk is about goatees it's it's not so john scalzi once famously called the real world a role-playing game but earlier this year I realized it's actually a free-to-play nightmare demanding micro transaction after micro transaction until that final inevitable unscalable pay all and I came to that realization about two weeks and five hours into my needlessly and almost inexplicably complicated adventure in attempting to renew my Indian passport in India I was standing in a queue in

front of an office door for the tert third time in two weeks and I thought to myself I should have just bribed someone it would have made the process much easier and I had this moment of clarifying rage that is exactly the effect they wanted to create bureaucracy is grind what I had seen as inefficiency a broken or ill functioning system was actually working exactly as intended my frustration had been commoditized they wanted me to question whether it was worth it to tell the truth and pay the price to buy back my time and my soul from them in increments and as a game designer at least around the edges that felt so familiar many of us in this room have made a game that does this to players or we know someone that has or at the very least we have played a game that does this it felt so terrifying to realize that the same design techniques that sustain abusively monetized or designed games sustain institutional corruption and it was a connection that

I just I couldn't unsee so I didn't get my passport that day but then I did go home and buy a horse in Elder Scrolls online bear with me it's relevant so it would have taken me hours of play to get enough in-game money so I paid real world money for my mount instead but that didn't trigger the same rage and feeling of being taken advantage of that I felt in that passport office and that's because the game was entirely playable at my level without a horse it was just slightly easier with one and I was privileged in to have five pounds but not five hours so I made that choice so I want to be clear that I don't think that monetization is in itself a bad thing or always corrupt elderscrolls stayed classy I thought so I believe that you can design games ethically and make money but a clever friend of mine once said yes but maybe not as much money and I'm not gonna stand up here and characterize wanting to make money as absolutely morally corrupt I too like being able to pay my bills but I do

think it's important to say that many of the designers making games that do monetization and free to play and good design ethically have done so knowing that they could be squeezing more money out of their players at least for a while but the thing is they don't and that is not an inefficiency or naivete but a deliberate design choice exploitative design is a choice - it isn't inevitable and we are abdicating our moral responsibility as artists and human beings if we pretend that it is when we use that excuse as designers we are in some small but real ways training our players to accept broken and disrespectful systems and ideas by normalizing them what we train our players to do in games leaks out into the real world so there is a porous boundary between games and the world in which we live game design and the thinking that comes with it all of these things are already influencing the world but unfortunately what is out there is the most banal game design at its most

exploitative and capitalistic reinforcing the worst practices all sanctified on the holy altar of optimization but I do also genuinely believe that we are a moment at a moment that is full of the possibility of change a lot of people so many people that would have not had the vocabulary to talk about systems and institutions actually do these days because they play games when we talk about a class being nerfed or overpowered we're actually just talking about privilege and so as designers and players we are in the space of unprecedented literacy about systems thinking and design these are the tools that helped me understand my own feelings of anger and helplessness sitting in that passport office and these are the tools that I use to take that helplessness and turn it into a conversation with you in this room and outside of it games can help us understand the world in each other and as designers of games and narratives and art we have so many

opportunities to completely radically reimagine how systems could work democracies and dictatorships bureaucracies and social and cultural institutions these are hard to change and I'm really not here to suggest that games can change the world all on their own but they can change how a person feels and thinks we wouldn't be here otherwise and games are a space a creative open and yet as yet largely undefined space where we can experiment with different ways of being interacting participating collaborating and competing so that when history Arce us what did you do in this moment at this particular time and place with all the possibilities available to you I don't want my answer to be I made a slot machine thank you

thank you very much indeed nning for our penultimate micro talk of this evening please welcome Rico I find I love video games but my friends find video games boring cultural reasons aside I think there's an underlying physiological reason why they find games boring I think it has something to do with stress reactions when you're playing a video game and lots of things are flashing on screen and there's danger and it's shocking and it's fun that's a fight-or-flight reaction your sympathetic nervous system kicks in and adrenaline is released through your system followed by dopamine and if you

enjoy games like this it's probably because adrenaline and dopamine are really fun adrenaline makes your pupils dilate your heart beats faster like mine is right now your Airways open up and you feel exhilarated you feel alive but I think my friends find games boring not only because they aren't interested in more stories about white men and not only because they don't know how the controls work but also because they don't get an adrenaline high they have a different reaction to stress this is my cousin Christina maybe a couple of you remember her from the thing I wrote earlier called video games are boring christina is one of my friends who finds video games boring what she loves instead our contemporary feminist art vegan food and longboarding with her friends a few years ago Christina was given a ps3 and I recommended that she play my favourite game Skyrim I didn't hear from her for three weeks and I thought she didn't play it then one evening she called me crying because she

had accidentally killed Lydia Christina finds video games boring but she loved Skyrim she isn't interested in medieval warfare or swords or dragons whatsoever and she found the controls hard but she loved Skyrim because she loved the characters Christina doesn't like being shocked but she loves taking care she loved creating her character doing quests for other characters joining guilds and bringing Lydia along on her adventures she said to me that it turns out that it wasn't that she didn't like video games it was that she didn't know what video games could be Cristina doesn't like adrenaline but with Skyrim there's something similar that was probably going on with her it's called tend and befriend like fight-or-flight tendon a friend is an automatic physiological reaction to stress if you experience tendon befriend your body releases oxytocin or vasopressin when you are threatened followed by opioids this calms your

sympathetic nervous system so you don't get the flood of adrenaline instead of wanting to fight or to flee you stay relatively calm but aware your pupils dilate you become fearless and you are less sensitive to pain you instinctively want to protect your loved ones and to seek out your allies and form new alliances oxytocin intensifies social feelings and opioids feel really really good and the oxytocin opioid thing isn't limited to threatening interactions it's also there when you touch or even think about someone you love when you play fetch with your dog or even when you exclude someone you don't like when I read about tendon befriend I was like [ __ ] this is how I usually react to stress most of my friends do to most women and many men have this reaction but have you heard of it before maybe not because it's barely been studied it's barely been discussed it's barely just been identified at UCLA in 2000 like much other research most

stress research had been done with men and with male animals researchers traditionally prefer bodies that don't menstruate maybe everything we know about ourselves is wrong we see these kind of mistakes also in the design of cities design of airbags etc and a games researcher once told me that his team also doesn't try to study women because in his words you can't predict women this is really [ __ ] boring a woman I very much respect though told me that you can't change the world but you can make your little corner of it better I'm bored of patriarchy and it's lasting effects on my life but I'm very interested in looking at the gaps in research and in design and fixing them are you what is game design missing I asked this question not just in terms of cultural elements such as diverse protagonists which are very important but also in terms of satisfying game mechanics and game systems I asked in terms of what we take for granted about

play styles player motivation etc about adrenaline dopamine oxytocin opioids and other reward systems about what it takes to induce a flow state in the player who designed these rules what players are we studying and who should we be talking to and I want to be clear that care is not weak or simple or cute and doesn't only belong in simple or cute games caring for your chosen loved ones and the formation of new alliances are sophisticated actions and can be acts of warfare care is stronger and more interesting than brutality or fear there's a lot to be explored here I encourage you to question what you take for granted about yourself and other people and about games and if you are underrepresented look into your heart because maybe everything we know is wrong but you are right thank you [Applause] [Applause]

[Music] [Applause] [Music] cat Brico Steen Jonah come up here with me we'll get started on our last micro talk of the day which was crowd-sourced online from among our networks of friends and from you the micro talks community we asked for messages of resistance and hope and here's what people said in times of great doubt you might hear again the voice is snickering at your heels games are a waste of time but now like every work of art games allow us to see further and live a thousand lives be soft and open to sharing knowledge with those around you especially the younger folk your wisdom will help fortify their success towards progression and excellence in their field it is quite possible to create

dramatic internal change with language and symbol this change then reverberates into the outer world reshaping and reorganizing it you can use this in good times and in bad the desire to create and to play unites us as one human family every game is political keep making them boldly with your with your head and your heart there is nothing a tyrant hates more than the sounds of laughter and of play there's a ball you tighten your grip and what star systems will slip through your fingers Cottam says I went into 2016 being seen

as one gender now I'm universally known as another trans people in games you've done so much thank you when life is becoming increasingly harder on the outside don't forget to cherish your inner creamy caramel filling take a break from your work often and spend your time with good people good food and warm blankets make your games to show others what the world could be like not as it is in my mind a lot of the bad things we currently have in our world don't stand a chance in light of what we are capable of when we work together we are stewarding so much influence here and I'm inspired by you all who live out of the fullness of that be compassionate the growing gap between

rich and poor is the root problem resist racism resist anti-immigration and fight for everyone's right to work be generous in prosperity and thankful and adversity be worthy of trust of the trust of that neighbor and look upon them with a bright and friendly face be a treasure to the poor and had mana sure to the rich an answer to the cry of the needy be as a lamp unto them and that walk into in darkness a joy to the sorrowful a sea for the thirsty a haven for the distressed and upholder and defender of the victim of oppression never surrender the dream these words are in honor of everyone who couldn't be with us at GDC this year for every kind

of reason thanks to everyone who sent in their thoughts for us to share here this evening have a wonderful rest of GDC everyone take care of yourselves and each other thanks again to all of our speakers and to thank you for coming have a wonderful you