Influences: Thinking Outside the Game

[Music] thank you so thanks for uh coming out to influences y'all we appreciate you coming I'm John Sharp I'm Colleen Macklin and Colleen is sitting in a chair not because she is lazy but rather she has a broken foot when somebody says like break a leg at your panel you know you can just literally do it she did it so uh Colleen and I collaborate a lot together on things like conference sessions where part of the company local number 12 with Eric Zimmerman uh our game metag game it's on Kickstarter right now we'd appreciate support we are also faculty at Parsons the new school for design uh we teach games in aside a program that is very much not about games um perhaps that leads us to why we would do a session like this yeah so up until now most of this conference has been about games we

focused our conversations on games how we make them what we're playing uh how to get people to know about them how to sustain ourselves in our companies how to monetize free to play how to monetize and free to play etc etc but we forget that games are part of a much larger universe right um we have done extensive research and our roles as faculty and we have identified exactly where games are in the uh Galaxy so that's the primary takeaway I think from this talk thank you very much yeah but what about all the thing other things we can learn from and be inspired by like film music spelunking for example so this is a session about everything but games that influences the work of a group of four game developers Colleen and I also um draw from many things outside of

games I for some reason have a PhD in art history um one of the things that I learned from one of the artists I learned from is Jad 14th century Italian painter and from him I learned the power of minimalism and of focus how can you distill things down to their minimal Essence to intensify an experience how can you remove and prune and refine to get down to where you could really enhance draw attention exactly where you want it to be so while John was getting his PhD I was hanging out in Raves I have my Foundation my doctorate in Rave culture in New York City um so as a I was a VJ I would DJ sometimes too but in New York City there was weekly iteration uh coding I was doing a lot of coding learning how to make things interactive so for the people who didn't want to dance they could play with the visuals or change the environment uh we we were

part of a learning community we shared a lot of knowledge uh and I feel like there's a real parallel to this scene in the 9s uh to where we are today and sharing knowledge as a game design Community for me Samuel Becket and this quote ever tried ever failed no matter try again fail again fail better I literally have it tattooed on my chest and for me it it's meant a lot personally and professionally that it's okay to fail it's a huge part of what we do as game designers right any of us who subscribe to a play Centric way of making our games we live by this every day this this is a mantra for me helps me remember that failure is essential and without it I'll never be better John might show you that tattoo later if you ask him um so I also uh currently I'm really influenced by by writing and by different authors these are some quotes from George Saunders who I would kind of call a uh David Foster with soul um so

he's he's incredible his writing makes me makes me feel so many different things but I think a lot of it's about surrealism and random perceptual um connections that illuminate how weird it is to be a human and also he talks a lot about death and Deals a lot about with mortality um so I think there is some relationship to human fallibility failure and his writings that as designers of failure as game design miners we can learn a lot from so yeah there's lots and lots of ways for us to be influenced by things outside of games to enhance our games to make them better to make us better practitioners of whatever part of game development we happen to be involved in we've got four awesome people here today that have agreed to uh share some of their external influences Richard L Marshon Kelly Santiago beness bazito and brendo Romero first up we we've got

Richard lerson come on up rich yay so rich is probably best known for his work on the Uncharted series uh more recently he has joined the ranks of the professors uh at the University of Southern California in their interactive media and games program uh he's also a DJ you've got a little Rave in you Richard uh uh he's been found spinning at uh several different game oriented parties under names like DJ Philip learon and DJ Cerberus of which were part of the Three-Headed Beast my fellow DJs take it away Rich thanks Colleen uh and uh thank you for that lovely uh introduction um it's a real honor to be on a panel like this today among such uh esteemed company um it says in the program that I was going to talk about um Georgians and victorians but I'll have to tell you about uh my heroes Mary wolston craft and William Morris another time I decided to narrow my focus um because I'm very interested in realism in video games uh now for what I want to

talk about today I don't mean realism in the sense of improved physics or better lighting though I am very interested in those things too today I mean realism in the sense of the realist artistic movements in painting literary fiction and film which emerged in the middle of the 19th century and which have been present in the Arts ever since the original goal of realism was to show what life is like for ordinary people without any kind of romantic idealization or sentiment Al ity or overdramatization of course for hundreds of years most of the pictures that got painted were portraits of of kings and popes the ruling classes um all those paintings were related to their Lifestyles and when other kinds of people were shown it was usually through some kind of ideological lens that really distorted how those people were shown now realism wanted to redress that imbalance I think it's fair to say that when games draw narratively from film and literature they usually draw from genre film and genre fiction mostly

science fiction fantasy and horror now I um loved genre Fiction with a passion as a kid and I still really love it um in high school I fell in love with the films of Terry Gilliam and David Cronenberg who have mainly made genre movies but whose works are Transcendent in the way that all great art is but as much as I love genre fiction I think that if you're really paying attention to the world around you there comes a point when you realize that real life is even more interesting than these kinds of fantasy worlds so later in my teenage years I started to see films by David Lynch Mike Lee Ken Loach and Nick Rogue and by the time I got to college I'd become a fully-fledged ouse cinema fan I saw a lot of weird experimental film a lot of International Cinema and a lot of great drama and eventually I realized that many of the films I like best which had the deepest emotion and the uh and that were most helpful to me in figuring out what life is all about we're set in the

real world and we're about the extraordinary situations that we regularly encounter in everyday life now what do we mean when we talk about realism in cinema well there are probably lots of ways to trace that history but here's just one of them a good starting point I think is Jean Renoir a French writer and director he was the son of the impressionist painter Pierre August Renoir in 1937 Renoir released a film called Grand Illusion uh it's about the Rel relationship between a group of people in a prisoner of war camp during World War I as they work together on an Escape Plan across the boundaries of their nationality their social class and ethnicity now Austin Wells cited this as one of his favorite films of all time and it has an authenticity and kind of a generous attitude to its characters that was pretty rare in film at that time um and it's an amazing film it's one of those films where two hours just flies by like that I can't recommend it highly enough

so jumping forward a decades to the end of World War II uh and the Italian film industry had suddenly been freed from the censorship imposed on it by melini's fascist government influenced by Jean Renoir a group of film critics took advantage of their Newfound creative freedom to Kickstart The Cinematic movement now known as neorealism they began to make films about the lives of regular people often using non-actors and filmed on location against the beautiful but poverty-stricken background of postwar Italy now one amazing film to come out of this uh movement is bicycle thieves uh from 1948 it's about a father searching Rome for his stolen bicycle a bicycle without which he will lose the job that feeds his young family a few years later Italian neorealism lit the fuse for the French new wave of Cinema which was also founded by Young film critics longing for Innovation and working in collaboration with older French filmmakers who wanted to bring their experience to do something

new I'm sure you guys have heard of the French new wave and its key directors Jean Luke Godard and franois trufo my personal favorite film from this time is Tru fo's the 400 blows it's a Loosely autobiographical story about a misunderstood kid getting into trouble with the system by the way I think it's really interesting to note that in both of these historically important film movements critics um that had been writing about film became filmmakers themselves and there work caused tremendous change all throughout the world so even though the directors of the French New Wave were often reacting against a lot of Hollywood convention they ended up being massively influential on the next generation of Hollywood filmmakers everyone from Steven Spielberg to Martin scorsi and in just the same way in games right now critics and writers like mattity Bryce Cara Ellison and Tom Francis are becoming game designers uh and the work that they're making is feeding right back into the mainstream

of games in many positive and very healthy ways anyway so that's some historical setup for realist film there are lots more reference points that you guys probably know about from the 1960s kitchen syn dramas of the British New Wave the to the gritty realism of the 60s and 70s American film making and of course there were lots of uh similar uh movements in International Cinema um as just one example the work of Indian directors like Chetan andand but now I want to tell you about a few great recent realist films that have had a big influence on me and that I think might not be very well known in our community of game makers in 1999 the Scottish director Lyn Ramsey released this moving film called rat catcher um the movie's Innovative cinematography and editing was described as immersive by some critics which I think is interesting in relation to games and it showed that you can always find new things to do with an artistic form if you work at it in games I think we've barely begun to push cinematography in the way that this film does in terms of unconventional Framing

and impression impressionistic use of light and unconventional editing stuff like that um the movie is set in Glasgow in the early' 70s and like several of the films uh I want to tell you about it's about a kid from a challenging background uh this boy James he's patiently waiting for his family to be relocated to a new public housing uh project as he tries to deal with a Fallout from something bad that recently happened to him coincidentally another of the films I want to tell you about uh is set in Glasgow one of two films that uh I'll tell you about by another British director Andrea Arnold Red Road from 2006 was made in response to a game likee project where a group of uh Danish and German film producers challenged three different filmmakers to use a number of the same predefined characters in three different movies Red Road was the first movie to be made in response to this challenge uh it's about a woman who works monitoring police closed circuit television feeds

from public housing projects uh and in doing so she encounters a man from a very bad part of her past and these issues around voyerism and surveillance have been explored a bit by games uh and I think they're an interesting fit for interactivity and maybe this film shows us some new creative ways forward uh the main character in this film by the way you might recognize uh she's played by the brilliant Kate Dicky uh who also plays uh Lissa Aaron in Game of Thrones Andrea Arnold's next film uh fish tank um is one of those rare films that manages to be both funny and heart-rending uh it's about an isolated teenage girl whose only real passion is hip-hop dance as she struggles to find her way through life and to try and connect with the world it's got Michael fast Bender in it I'm sure you know uh he's done a lot of amazing work including his turn as Archie Hickock in in glorious bastards and uh firsttime actor ktie Jarvis is really brilliant in the main role another British realist film that I

think some of you might have seen is weekend directed by Andrew Haye this is a very powerful and moving film about two men who hook up on a Friday night beginning what initially just seemed like a casual sexual encounter but as the relationship unfolds over the course of the weekend the film manages to explore big issues around intimacy and commitment uh and as well as leading a political discussion about what life is like for gay people in contemporary society and like um number of other realist films this movie has great sort of documentary feel that comes from its camera work its lighting and its naturalized dialogue that was some of which was improvised um as game storytelling matures I think we're going to see these kinds of techniques coming more and more to the for in various kinds of cinematic games now I'd be remiss if I didn't quickly tell you about two star directors of contemporary realist film these guys Jean Pierre and Luke Darden better known as The Darden Brothers um this Belgian started out making features

and documentaries in the' 70s and then began to build an international following with a sequence of very naturalistic films about people struggling to get by in contemporary Belgian Society um any of their films would make a really great starting point for you guys but the kid with a bike from a couple of years ago is incredibly powerful and it's available to stream on your favorite digital movie service um also uh if you are looking out carefully there's an Uncharted two poster on a bedroom wall in one of the scenes that's not why I chose this but I couldn't resist telling you about that and finally I want to tell you about a really amazing movie that I saw in the theater just a few weeks ago um it's a groundbreaking film set in a part of the world that we don't often get a very clear view of I think uh it's called waja directed by hia Alm Monsur and it's the first Saudi Arabian film in history to be directed by a woman funnily enough it's another realist film that prominently features bicycles I don't know what's going on there uh it's about the Title Character

wajda's dream of buying a bike when everyone around her tells her that she shouldn't have one because she's a girl uh this is a really understated and subtle movie uh and it's also very funny and moving so check it out hopefully it'll come out online soon so what kind of influence do these films have on me well they make me long for more realist games games about our day-to-day lives and experiences and something you might notice about these films many of them are about women young people and children and these are groups that don't often receive very detailed or nuanced portraits in either films or games and I don't think I'm the only one who's interested in this stuff some of the most interesting and impactful games of the past few years could be seen as realist games um games like Anna anthropy dysphoria Richard Hoff me's cart life gone home by the Fullbright company and I get this call every day uh by David escalan now these games are about regular people struggling with the

circumstances of their lives and that makes these artworks valuable to us as individuals and as a society so I'm very interested in Emotion in games and I think that we as game designers have a lot to learn from realist movies like the ones I've told you about today these films work because they slow their pace and they take the time to show the Nuance in the Dynamics of the relationships between their characters and as a result they offer emotional experiences that are as deep and as strong as any that we can find in the Arts so check out some of these films I'm going to Tweet the list and a few more that I didn't get time to talk about today and I'll look forward to seeing how uh they might influence your guys game design practice thanks very much for your time cheers awesome thanks a lot Rich next up we've got Kelly son Santiago you

probably know she was a big part of Journey you probably know she is now the developers best friend at Ouya however yes did you know she uh performed in a high school competition show choir just like we see on Glee every week um a little known fact about Kelly so come on up Kelly awesome they said send two facts to say I didn't know what they meant so you both um kind of nervous about this whoa the font is super small so when when Colleen and John approached me about this panel um there was an artist that immediately came to mind um the work of this artist has been with me so long as long as I can remember and I feel that many many times over the course of my artistic life and my career in video games um his work has re surface again and again and each time I find something

new to take away from it um it's as though his work while it remains somewhat the same kind of evolves along with me and I think it must mean that that's a really deep ingrain part of myself um and I think it's led to some of the main guiding principles I bring to my work uh that they actually stem directly from his body of work but I thought uh instead of trying to describe its impact I think it's best to witness a sample um so you can experience its potential impact on on society let's wait the link didn't work though um did I just go over okay not the [Music] Atlantic where's my anybody see my mouse oh it's still on this screen there there you go oh

[Music] great perfect [Applause] [Music] me [Music]

yes so [Music] [Laughter] oh here we go yes so as you figured out it's Jim Henson and a Muppets um so yes while I was sort of setting up uh a joke there my introduction is still true I Revis revisit his work and his life over and over again and keep finding things that resonate with me and the things I've learned in my work so I thought I'd share some of those themes and ideas with you so one of my guiding principles I credit to Jim Henson is that it is about the journey yes pun and not intended maybe but not the destination uh goals are awesome and drive us to challenge ourselves and one another to achieve great things but you

can't gloss over those days in between deliverables I don't believe that the ends justify the means um the that and it's the means those day-to-day experiences that really comprise the majority of our existence here on Earth and I think that's important to remember um Jim Henson really strived to create a working environment for his artists that was just as enjoyable to work in as the material that they were working on on and he wanted the people on his team to feel good day to day and that translates into their work um and I do believe that the experience you have while creating a work impacts the emotions felt through that work I think audiences have an ability to perceive heart through a game we often really get too focused on that next deliver bow and not on the days we spend getting there we spend most of our days with one another as code developers on a game and sometimes spend more time with one another than we do with our

family members and significant others um and please remember that as I say this that I am a huge advocate for the power of video games as a medium for video games as art and the and that gamees play a huge hugely impactful role in our society but at the end of the day we work on games like there's nothing about that and what we do that's worth hurting ourselves Hur one another um or or the ones that we love so we should definitely incorporate more musical numbers into our datab process as well so second is to be creative you have to take risks and in order to take risks you have to feel that you're an environment which is safe to fail um this was really a motto of Henson's and certainly came um came out through many of the trials and tribulations that the Muppets fac in putting on a show every night it's also one of of the biggest mistakes I see happening in our industry

which somehow I I feel is perpetuated this notion that everyone thrives better in a really competitive hostile environment in which you're asked to prove yourself every day and I think it's why we drive many brilliant creative people away from Making Games professionally um and especially in the commercial Marketplace uh so this statement right here it's the key to Innovation it's everything so now I'm not saying that you have to create an environment in which everyone is pampered and everyone wins all the time um I think you want to put together the right team for your game from the start but once I've decided to work with someone I give them enough rope to hang themselves with because that's when I think creative people produce their best work you want a team of people that push and challenge one another because they come from different backgrounds they're bringing different ideas to the table and all of those ideas can be heard um that's how you get the best ideas not by pitting a

homogeneous group of people against one another and this point might seem um a bit dodgy based on what I just said but going back to my second point the people you work with might uh you might as well be dating really you're in a in a totally committed relationship with them of ups and downs and you have to work through problems and you know and and at times you're really stuck with each other so you spend at least as much time with them them as as you would significant significant other and sometimes um that person is the person that is perfect on paper to do the job that you want them to do uh or that you need to get done on your project won't actually help you get your game done because working with them is such a chore or a challenge for you know whatever reason um I have never successfully just handed off a chunk of work on a game to someone and just have them go away and do the work and come back it's always um required some back and forth and a relationship there uh so

conversely I would rather change some of the aspects of my game that I'm working on in order to incorporate a person on my team who I think is brilliant and that I want to work with but may not have those exact skill sets that I needed to get the d game done as I was envisioning it so if that makes sense I would rather kind of curve the design of the game to incorporate a person onto my team that I really want to work with because ultimately I think that game is way better moving away from Team process um this aspect of the creative process has always been one um I've held dear and have it's been shown to me time and time again to be true I actually wrestled between kind of talking about David Lynch and Jim Henson for this reason um because I found it to be so core for those of you familiar with uh my talks on game design processing at that game company uh yes it's important to have a

core Focus or theme for your project and it's important to weigh features and work against that against whether or not they'll achieve your goal for your game um but sometimes I think you get that inspiration or if you're not the lead creative on the project the person you're working with will get that inspiration and I believe you just got to go with it sometimes um it may not always make logical sense but um you can feel that it's right and I say at those moments you know let the critical study students make sense of this later whe they will you know Hinson was inspired to create Dark Crystal uh despite its obvious departures from the work that he was most famous for and initial testings of the films were so bad that the Distribution Company was pulling so much of their confidence and support out of the project that Hinson bought the film from them to distribute himself uh initial box office was bad and initial reviews were bad um but of course we know it went on to become uh one of the

top 20 grossing films in America that year and has grown in critical and financial success ever since so confession uh you know sometimes when Jova and I are talking about our design process on one of the games that we published on on PlayStation Network um it sounds so neat our our journey from inspiration into application in the game and how it ended up but it really looks at times a lot messy ier than that and sometimes it is just you kind of wake up and you you see the scene and you know that's the scene that you know that's how it's got to be uh and you kind of in 2020 hindsight can string the pieces together but in the moment you just you're going on your gut and in the end sometimes you just can't take yourself too seriously and silliness is a virtue thank you right W thank you

Kelly that was awesome um I want to see like the comparison between Henson and David Lynch I want to see that mash up that just sounds incredible um so next up we have Ben [Applause] Esposito so uh Ben was a level designer for the PS3 game The Unfinished Swan um awesome game and used to run a basement music venue in Upstate New York was that your basement Ben or it was not my basement all right cool take it away Ben all right hey um I wanted to talk to you oh okay so first wanted to say that um I think like film definitely influences my work a lot but I would say music probably does more and so my background is a lot of it is from music and electronic music um and so I wanted to talk about Brian Eno who is one of the most influential electronic musicians um or or like did uh whatever like synthesizer uh in electronic music um so

he's also the most quotable guy on the planet so I'm going to show you quotes and um I'm going to if you talk to me afterwards I'll give you some resources for like awesome stuff that like interviews and stuff that he said um so the kind of the main idea I wanted to to start with was um this one quote which says the idea is to produce things that are strange and mysterious to you as the first music you ever heard um and to me that's kind of like a goal with a lot of my work is to reproduce those kind of like magical experiences that you you didn't quite understand at first so I'm going to I'm going to try to like tie that back up um so if you don't if you're not familiar with Brian Eno's work um he's known for work uh working with David Bowie and dvo and Talking Heads he also produced um uh like Coldplay and you for more contemporary um he popularized the term ambient music and he also popularized the term generative music um with his album discreet music um that I'm going to talk about a little bit later um which was kind of both ambient and generative um

he's also known for some video inst uh video and installation art um 77 million paintings was one of his like generative works that is kind of like generative paintings set to generative music and the idea is that there's 77 million possible combinations and it would take you like 450 years of watching it to see all of them um okay so first I wanted to I wanted to talk about how was introduced to Brian Eno so um I'll play you the first piece that I ever heard and it was like pretty influential to me um and so I want to make sure sounds on all right um and so uh you might have heard this this song too uh so I'll play [Music] it so it's 6 seconds long um it's uh if if you don't know where it's from it's the Windows 95 startup sound um uh so Microsoft commissioned him to um

produce like a piece of music that was kind of like they they used every possible adjective to describe this piece of music it's like futuristic and nostalgic and sentimental um and so uh he wasn't like a big fan of Microsoft but he did think the challenge of making a 3 second piece of music was was incredible and kind of funny so um I think that's like a a kind of good encapsulation of a lot of the stuff he he talks about um so what's important uh to Brian Eno is Theory over practice uh and it's something that I kind of subscribe to too where like there is like certainly a craft to music and there's a craft to developing games and and any form of art but uh in terms of being an artist like I think process is the most important thing to me um so uh Brian Eno has all of his work is informed by like a specific Theory or process that he wants to explore um and so he says like even though your even

though the viewer or The Listener the player might not understand or like be aware of the theory behind what they're experiencing it's the fact that it informed it meant that it it could create an experience that they might not have otherwise seen um so uh the next thing I want to talk about is constraint um so he's got this other great quote um there's a reason that guitar players invariably produce more interesting music than synth players and it's that you can go through the options on a guitar in a minute after that you have to make aesthetic and stylistic decisions um and so I think this applies to um uh digital artists because like when the syn synthesizer came out um it's got all these knobs and you kind of have infinite an infinite amount of options um and that often makes it way more difficult for you to produce anything interesting um and so yeah this this quote kind of ties it up nicely where he says what you need are fewer possibilities that are more interesting and so what he wants to create are constraints that allow you to be making

uh aesthetic and stylistic decisions rather than technical decisions um okay so I want to talk about one of his most famous works uh discreet music um it's a piece of ambient music and it's a piece of um generative music and I and I'll describe what ambient music means you probably are familiar with it now but um the story behind the album is that briano got into a car crash and he was recovering a in bed and he um wanted to listen to music and so he had a record of like classical heart music and so he got up and he like mustered all his strength to put the record on and he and he moved the needle on and he he he went back and laid in bed and then couldn't really hear the music and it turns out the volume was down to an almost imperceptible level um but he was he felt too weak to go and turn the volume up so he decided to listen to the music at this almost imperceptible volume and so it kind of came in and out of

Consciousness and that was oh this is his quote uh this presented what was for me a new way of hearing music as part of the ambience of the environment just as the color of the light and the sound of the rain were parts of that Ambience um on so ambient music is about the gray kind of like gray area between attention and background um and so that's kind of an area I really enjoy exploring in my work where instead of kind of like upfront systems and and game mechanics I think uh creating environments and worlds that dance between like things that are worthy of attention things are the background are kind of the most interesting places uh to explore um and then the other part of discret music is that it's generative and what that means is that um the piece is started with a seed and then some other process that is set up by the artist finishes the work for you and so

you don't necessarily have control over the final product you just started it and that's kind of um video games and and uh software does this really well um but it kind of was being explored for generations and generations before that in other forms of art um and so uh on the back of discret Music uh he generously reproduced the diagram of how the work was produced it's a 30-minute piece um and the idea is that it starts on a synthesizer and then goes into a tape recorder and then that tape goes to a tape player which goes back into the tape recorder and then gets recorded um and so the idea is he starts with a synth line um and there's kind of like an idea A melodic idea behind it and then it feeds back onto itself at a different point in time and he can stretch he can stretch the delay and make it shorter or longer to kind of create new new results that were

unexpected um and that was in amazing at the time um and the technology allowed that but it's something that we can uh something uh we can do now where we can plant the seeds of and have an intention behind it but I think letting the viewer take hold of what that means and how like the system affected it is is like some is really important to digital works so I want to talk a little bit about um this game um so this game is UN finished Swan if you don't know it it's it starts and it's all white and you throw black paint to reveal the environment um and this was kind of for me like an ambient game in a lot of ways so there's not much gameplay other than kind of getting from point A to point B um and a lot of the level design um like the focus for me on the level design was were things that were ambient so like because there is no like game playay per

se interacting with um like other agents in the system I wanted all the details and objects and backgrounds to take the place of that and kind of be able to go in and out of your Consciousness um and your attention so uh this is a deck of cards called oblique strategies um this has more to do with his idea of constraint and I think has helped inform my process a lot um so oblique strategies is a deck of cards that's uh a bunch of challenges or dilemmas for to help you get over blocks in your work um these are a couple of examples like honor thy error as a hidden intention an idea is when you're blocked you can take the card out and a lot of them are kind of funny and and will make you laugh um and that's really important to to the idea because um I think and what Brian says is like when you react to something as it like with a laugh it kind of means that it's

there's some like truth to it that you had probably hadn't considered like it's it's a subversion of expectations and so I think these are really useful literally but also just uh in the sense of creating a constraint that you maybe didn't have control over will help you become like way more creative um so this is my current game it's called kacina it uh you control this hole in the ground and you move it around and stuff Falls inside um and it gets bigger every time um so this came out of a game jam and I think game jams are really important to game development not necessarily as a way of starting a game but just in terms of uh having a constraint for your process that will help you come up with brand new ideas and innovative solutions so in the case of a game Jam your artistic constraint is time um and the time constraint led me to this art style um because it's so simple um and it's 3D but it's it's all flat Shad there's no lighting and then

also the mechanic and focusing on one thing that I found interesting um so uh for me uh this game is interesting because you don't control an avatar you control the whole which is negative space um and the entire game is physics driven so all these objects are physically simulated and they have their own and the characters have their own kind of like very simple rudimentary AI um and all you're doing is kind of just playing with that system and there's a couple puzzles but it's a lot of it is just kind of seeing what happens when you remove things from a scene and when you add them back and if they change or not um and so the whole uh so briano um you uh started in like pop music and then he started and then he started to do ambient music and removed his own voice and he thought removing his voice was really important to the work because the voice is if you put a voice in music it kind of focuses all your attention on it um and so this is his quote about removing the voice he says if I'm not

there taking them through the audience uh then it's an empty space for them they can move into it and they can go through in their own way and so that's kind of a framework for me in terms of design so in this case we remove I remove a lot of authorial control in terms of the physics simulation um but I also remove your avatar and any kind of like thing to hold on to in within that simulation um and I think it allows you to kind of be inside of that system uh instantly rather than having to like rely on a lot of narrative immersion that I don't think is necessarily important um so I wanted to talk one more one more time about the Windows 95 sound how it encapsulates everything um so the the challenge was to create uh this three in a 1/4 second song um and so he he he said uh this was really funny because um to make that piece of music that

contained all those ideas was like an incredibly silly challenge um but he took it up so um it it and he used these like three ideas of like having a guiding Theory um having an incredibly incredibly rigid constraint of 3 seconds although he did produce the song that was six seconds um but also that his reaction to it his gut reaction of it being kind of like a ridiculous idea helped guide him towards producing like much more interesting work cuz he never would have uh explored that kind of like super compressed time space without that um so I'm I'm Ben bazito again this is my Twitter if you want to talk to me about uh some more materials like documentaries and interviews and stuff I'd be totally happy to share so thank you very much all right uh and next up we've got

Brenda Romero serious OG in the game industry 32 years inside and out games that are plugged in and are not plugged in an amazing variety of work right now she's uh the program director at UC Santa Cruz uh Masters programm in games and playable media come on up Brenda yeah hi everybody um I'm going to move this back I talk fast I've only had two cups of coffee this morning it could be a little slower okay it doesn't want to go back all right um so today I'm gonna talk about Jackson Pollock um Jackson Pollock I he's a huge inspiration of Mine He's a a painter um I'm I'm not sure actually when I first become aware of Jackson Pollock um my my guess is that even that my first my first uh knowledge that he even exists as an artist was probably not this that Jackson Pollock was a great artist which is

certainly something I believe today my guess is that that I I heard about it like this uh much more obviously Jackson Pollock was someone who threw paint at a canvas and would have been excellent in unfinished swan in fact so ni setup I don't know if you paired those together on purpose um but of course anybody can make a Jackson poock painting right I mean and we all know you know good job Mom and Dad you can do Jackson Pollock on your nails if you'd like to you know the kids can do Jackson Pollock in the backyard and there's this idiot on YouTube you know telling how everybody can this guy's such a tool how everybody can be uh Jackson Pollock and then you can have accidental Pollocks on your shoes if you if you really get involved in it but absolutely none of them so this is a piece called number 11 uh absolutely none of them has the Beauty and the passion and the movement the intensity of a real poock a real poock is breathtaking a real pollet can bring me literally to tears just just being there in their presence they're beautiful beautiful works and when I first start to study poock it's it's not

a way you would think but it's through level design and and let me tell you tell you why um it occurs to me that that Pollock's process is not unlike a game designer's process he's circling the canvas again and again much like we might Circle a level again and again fine-tuning it here or there creating the actual thing the exact thing that we hope to create and as he's moving around the canvas so are we our canvas of course you know comes in a whole variety of different ways be it digital or non-digital and what we're looking at when we see a poic painting isn't so much a painting but the artifact of a painting experience and to me I feel like a game is an artifact of a game designer's play experience and the thing I love about Pollock is poock was the paint he was literally The Petal to the metal it doesn't get any better than that he isolated and elevated the paint if you see a painting of a house if you see paintings of people you see paintings of Angels whatever you've lost sight of the purity of the paint that's

what he deeply cares about and for me poock was all about action it was all about the movement the motion the depth the rage and the joy in every single line of AIC painting you can see how he was feeling you can see it it's just like I I mentioned before an artifact of his painting experience and the paint even when it's dry even when Pollock is long since dead even when it's hanging on a museum wall the painting is as real it is still as moving it's still as alive as it was before and for me Pollock is as pure as it gets as far as painting goes and PO is also super alone now this is a piece called number 9A um and Pollock when he was doing this nobody else was doing these things I mean granted there was a lot of abstract expressionism happening and those those are who his peers were in the New York scene but he wasn't uh he wasn't doing this with lots of other people um in fact he was not doing it with anybody and he faced harsh criticism from his

contemporaries this particular line is is easy to detect the following things in all of his paintings this is an Italian critic in Time Magazine chaos absolute lack of Harmony complete lack of structural organization total absence of technique however rudimentary once again chaos you know this had been this had been a review in Game Spot it would have been a zero out of 10 and so Pollock replied to the author and just wrote no chaos damn it um and you know it maybe at the time poock actually you know as much as he he faced criticism and in part he just felt really alone because nobody was doing what he was doing um and he so he he actually had a lot of supporters including Peggy gugenheim and a lot of prominent critics who were saying this guy's on to something uh but he still never felt secure in his work ever and then he got a break that many of us as game developers would kill for Life Magazine ran an article in 1949 asking if he was greatest painter in the United States and whatever your profession is just you

know is is is John Sharp the greatest game designer in the United States and of course there'd be this moment where you'd think like that's me mentioned in time I'm going to immediately show my parents right but then there's the other hundred people in the room who are going John Sharp's not the greatest game designer in the united so what the hell is this I'm going to go to Twitter and start you know so so for him you know fortunately he didn't have Twitter right um he didn't have to he didn't have to deal with Twitter rage uh but but this is what his real this is what the real world you know of course my perfectly scientific estimation there Paula got a lot of Praise but the way he really saw it was much more like this and and because he he he painted the drip method from 1947 uh until 1951 um and at the peak of his Fame he walked away from it so when people had known him when they actually revered the work that he was doing when people who said anybody could make a pollic actually tried to reproduce it Pollock and tried to get in there some of the mathematical movements and moments that

are in his paintings uh they were unable to do it and so at the peak of his style he walked away Pollock was an alcoholic he'd been sober for a while um but he he resumed drinking at some point and within six years he died he created another uh he tried around he tried to mess around with a lot of different styles but man none of them had the beauty the intensity and and the Purity none of them had the hymn none of them had the Jackson that those those four beautiful years had and so this is a this is a piece when I was at a a really up point in my life a lot of bad had happened um and I'd finished my level design study of Po quite a while before and I was at a really up point in my life like I said a lot of bad had happened and there's this painting it's called the deep and and you to this day I don't know why I would stare at this painting it's part of my process as a game designer I just St I just stare at I am working God damn it um but I'm but I would stare at this painting

and I think like am I looking at the white am I am I trying to see what's through it um you know what what's happening in this painting and to this day you know there's a lot of blue poles is is often thought of which is number 11 I showed you before this often thought of is one of his best pieces but to me this is his most nuanced piece man it's just him and white and black and it is just breathtaking and I still don't even know really what it means but it it was at this very low point in my life um and out of that low point in my life came a series of games that I'm still working on now this is one of them called train and and I wasn't intending I was just doing these things because because I had to because I still have to uh and for me uh maybe this is what it looked like maybe like even as I put this up here I'm suffering a whole hell of a lot of impostor syndrome with the word amazing so let's just put the word work there uh and stop making games and that was some stuff people said you know Brenda brathe which was my name at the time um you need to stop making games games you're hurting games uh and so it looked like that probably but it felt a

whole hell of a lot like that and the detractors seemed so incredibly loud and so what at one point in time was my me studying poock and and and looking at how his work could influence the work of level design in general then somehow turned to be about me researching what I would need to know about poock many years later when I was at a Breaking Point and poock he became my inspiration and my support now poic felt about paint the way I felt and still feel about game mechanics and this is one of my favorite quotes of his on the floor I am more at ease I feel near more a part of the painting since I can walk around it work from the four sides and literally be in the painting what the hell happened there okay just the so it's supposed to there it is that's art deal with it supposed to say I'm on the table I'm more at ease I feel nearer to the game and this way I can walk around the work from all sort four sides and literally

be in the game and I remember when the PS4 conference happen the big event and I had this horrible feeling I was saying to my husband I'm like I should be there why am I not there and because I was not there somehow I'm a failure somehow I up somehow I'm not part of mainstream games where I have been since the beginning and I'm looking at the work that my friends are doing and my friends games are you know some of my closest dearest friends are getting game of the year nods you know and I'm not doing this I'm doing something that doesn't even match a box that they're in and I feel like I'm outside of the actual game industry right instead of thinking maybe I'm pushing the boundaries of the edge of that industry and and pollot tells me that it's okay to be there right like it's absolutely okay to be outside I'm not missing anything by not being at the PS4 launch event um and I find myself again and again referencing him when people say like well you have to make copies of train you have to no I don't no and I'm still not going to Pollock's not making 20 lavender Mists for all the housewives

and hus House Husbands who want it Pollock I love his his you brutal compression of exactly what it is he deeply loves you know I don't care so much about graphics and cutcenes or story or or audio I just want to deal right now with the mechanics and there's something I'm still puzzling about with poock he he actually got rid of uh he actually got rid of names uh at some point in his painting and he called this number 11 like he didn't even want the names to to color what that paint could possibly be he just wanted it as pure as it as it could could conceivably be in his world um Pollock basically gives me permission and he gives me permission to be here or or to go even further if I want to that I can do what I like to do and not worry about whether I'm going to be accepted and that it's all right to do stuff that none of my other peers are doing and that I don't necessarily need their approval or even my own because clearly I sometimes feel anxious about

the stuff that I am working on Pollock inspires me to match his dedication he inspires me to think about painting and painting designing in ways that I've never designed before he inspires me to keep going to keep exploring and to keep doing what I feel called to do thank you yeah thank you Brenda that was great awesome you should do this part time all right so uh so we talked a little bit about Brian Eno Jackson Pollock that's where he lives now on that star after the wreck um of course the Muppets nothing more important than the Muppets George Saunders the RAV Samuel Becket who I always want to call

either Thomas aquinus or Thomas Becket for some reason but I made to do it correctly today um realist Cinema jot but what about you all what are your influences what are the things that inspire you if you take anything away from this I think it's go back and think about something that isn't a game that's really meaningful in your work and how can you bring that into the process how can that help change you and make you better as a developer so thanks very much you all thanks everybody