Level Design in a Day: Level Design Histories and Futures

[Music] this is the last session in level design in a day so thank you for being patient and staying here this talks called level design histories and futures I'm Robert yang I'm part-time faculty at the MFA DT program at Parsons new school for design as well as the IDM program at NYU poly as well as the NYU Game Center yeah whoo sorry I have a student in the crowd I'm also a developer my most recent games have been a spanking game called hurt me plenty as well as a game called succulent where you just watch a guy eat a popsicle really erotic Lee and slowly so I make games too I'm not just an academic a mouth-breathing academic and unlike the other talks today that I've been super like really heavily grounded in hands-on techniques or

practice or case studies this talk is kind of about taking a step back and kind of reflecting on everything you've heard today so this talk is about analyzing level design in kind of a more critical sense about going beyond ideas of layout or enemy placement as interesting and important as those are and connecting it to kind of a bigger picture who's trying to it's about thinking about thinking kind of and if we can do that then maybe we can get a better sense of what level design is and what level design might be in the future and maybe even open our mind to like new ways of being level designers and as with the other talks today this talk has had is going to have a heavy bias towards 3d games where you control character there's many other traditions of level design unfortunately I'm not going to talk about those so let's imagine the world's most talented level

designer I did some computer modeling to generate what the greatest level design ever would look like I couldn't find a picture of Liz England so I just put a door there because England this person can generate through geometry with code they can tell story with careful prop placement they can also manage a team of 20 people but they also work really well alone but they also sculpt subcontinent's but they also build cities made of several neighborhoods but they also hand paint houses and they also hand model the electrical cords for each house lamp they did that and gone home by the way does it really make sense that level design is all of these things because like every speaker you've come today you've seen today they were coming to level design from a really different angle and for a very different purpose so why are we trying so hard to like unite all of these things under a banner of level design so I want to complicate

what level design is academics use the word complicate when we're going to talk a bunch I'd like to propose four different ways of thinking about level design there are actually infinite ways to think about level design but 50 minutes I'm just gonna talk about four in one sense levels are just another piece of data so what's level design as a form of like material in a game we can also think about the level designer as a job title in the game industry as an industrial process we can also think about level design as a theoretical branch of architecture as well as an act of design and control within a community and each level you make is interacting on all four these dimensions every level you make is actually a hypercube where each face of the cube is like another cube that's what a hypercube is so first let's think about level design as

material and data in a really kind of literal sense what is it on your computer we can think of a level as a bunch of data or an asset that reference is a bunch of other assets and in that case a level editor might be software that visualizes this data as something really useful friendly to humans and it lets us construct or modify this data ideally easily and effectively so the question is how do we fill these files with data and how do we manage these complex connections between all these files first you could technically use a text editor or Excel as your level editor and a lot of people do this the text on the left is actually data that is for a map file and source engine one it's just a series of keys and values you could technically make a counter strike go map by just typing stuff in in notepad or something that'd be really awful but I'm sure you could technically

do it and it's also worth knowing that not every game needs a dedicated LED etre you know if you're working procedurally or if you have a small amount of possible tiles it probably makes more sense to like code it or use text for this you saw David Pitman's talk earlier today about procedural level design for eldritch and he showed actual script files he does he's using a text editor as a level design in that case and so much but so much of game development is about working with specialized tools and if we study these tools we can kind of sense there's like a tension often between data and a designer so as an example this is Arsenal 3 it's a Starcraft 1 modding tool that I used back in the day when I did Starcraft 1 modding and notice that read checkbox there on the right that read checkbox made me so angry because you know that read checkbox if you don't check it that means you don't have shields on that unit in Starcraft

which made me upset because I feel like if you just type in a number greater than zero into the shield's box can't you just assume I want shields on my Terran Marine but if you uncheck it it doesn't put shields on it and it just ignores the number you put in there that's just adding like one more point of failure for me as a human being you know it's just really terrible so I can't the tool just check the box for me or maybe even hide it entirely so this is kind of what I mean by tension between data and designer the Starcraft engine might have a very good reason for having a separate variable for needing that checkbox in the game data file format but as a designer do I really need to know about that so this series of all these steps and stuff we have to do when working in a tool is called workflow and a history of level editing tools would involve a history of workflow so you might start and Hort the you might trace the origin of level editors back to AutoCAD in 1982

that's what the original AutoCAD looked like I guess I own I wasn't alive I was like the zygote or something a computer-aided design tool AutoCAD is a computer-aided design tool use industrial design architecture and the difference between AutoCAD and do med on the right is that AutoCAD is really scary and making doom levels is really fun so Joel kind of touched upon this one he's talking about how modding made a lot of working with 3d really accessible is where level editors come into play there are stripped-down versions of really scary architectural drafting tools so that's what's really nice about them so on the right there's doom II D that's the level editor used to make doom one and notice that's just one big top-down 2d view doom is fundamentally a 2-d game there's no floor over floor construction well I mean now there is with the new engines and stuff but before it wasn't possible

bridge would not be possible in the original doom so you don't get really since when you're working in Doom ed you don't really get a sense of height it's a top-down floorplan so I think these days we kind of view this type of workflows obsolete because it doesn't give it a good sense of height so but I kind of like it still a little because I think it places a lot of emphasis on lateral movement you have a really good sense of the organization of the general level here a lot of people criticize modern FPS design is having really bad simple layouts if you look at a single doom or even a Wolfenstein 3d level the layouts are like super complex and that's because they were thinking in terms of floorplan and layout so maybe we can bring some of this back I don't know and even in that early doom ed screenshot from 1992 you can see there was a texture brow sir and this is something Jim Brown from epic talked about in level design and day back in 2010 that a good asset browser is so important for your workflow it might be weird to think of

an asset browser as a technology that someone had to develop and design but it's true and here's an example of that the model browser for the original hammer editor for source 1 looked like the thing on the left where it relied on thumbnail JPEGs to know what the model even was basically and you had to name it the same thing as your model file name and stuff and it wasn't there just said MDL this is really terrible especially because source actually embeds a lot of metadata into the models too it's really important to have a good browser here and it was just really painful so thankfully they updated their model browser to the one on the right and real-time 3d preview is very common in most 3d tool sets these days and then next kind of like in the evolution of what others we can also talk about quake II D this is the level editor for quake 1 it's the kind of the great ancestor of

today's radiant family of level editors and you can see two new fake features there's a 3d camera preview in the upper left that like blue blotch thing as well as an elevation grid view that's that thin white window to the right of the floor plan and that would show you the height of wherever you're currently building and radiant is kind of weird no one really copies this thing anymore is and I don't know I think radiance we like why would you push press spacebar all the time it's terrible okay well anyway the point is that this is kind of them transitioning from thinking about 2d floor plans to the true 3d thing that like quake 1 offered right and a lot of what makes that possible is again much like how we didn't think of the asset browser as a technology mouse look and WASD is actually a technology that we had to develop and it's now taken for

granted if you didn't have mouse koukin WASD in our level at our levels would be a lot worse because if you talk to any level designer or your level design yourself you know that you'll spend five or ten minutes just flying around your level not really doing anything and you'll feel really useless like you're not really doing anything but you're actually doing something really important you're testing your level you're testing the sense of space and that's really important it's almost kind of like this very conceptual like Situationist act where you're just drifting around your level so you can say mouse go transformed us into that conceptual artists in a sense on a fun fact Autodesk only added WASD Mouse to AutoCAD in 2007 so be thankful you're not in that industry and now we get kind of get to what we might recognize more as well editor's these days this is the standard for pane view from 3d studio

like one's the first one in 1990 and then here's also world craft in hammer I mean world craft or also known as hammer and also unreal edie and they still made heavy use of this arrangement when you have one 3d view and then three 2d orthographic views now and notice the 3d view is much more important than it was back in quake ed now and I think the grid views here are really important because when you're working in quake lineage engines there's something called a leak and if you have a really small one millimeter thin crack in the outer shell of your level that crack will like suck everyone at in the game out to space and everyone will die and your level will break and the map compile process will break - it's just really terrible so you need really exact kind of man a solid manipulation here and that's what grid views offer a lot of good accuracy when doing that stuff this type of window layout I think is still supporting most packages but it's no

longer the default I think instead this is the default now this is pretty much the standard set up now it's one big interactive 3d view you know across level editors architecture tools 3d modeling tools unity unreal sketchup trench broom which a new quake one editor people are still making quake one editors sandbox Maya they've all embraced this one big 3d view interface now and supposedly this lets us work in 3d natively so again several make things make this possible we have less of a need to tightly optimize levels you need unity there's no concept of a leak so you can just put objects wherever you want and also module workflows and also a gizmo interface metaphor so where is the future of love letters that was a history of level editors a future might be involved being like visualizing the

unseen you know we went from 2d to 3d now we need to go from 3d to like 4d or something I think the future will allow will be more about automation of construction and design so there's a lot of people working on automation construction like joiner by Tim Johnson he's a Team Fortress two mapper and he made this thing that automatically generates wood beamed girder details for tf2 maps or there's also a thing called impromptu procedural ladders for unreal for by developer named Joe wintergreen and that one it generates a ladder mesh based on whatever you place in unreal which is really cool so that's like the editor making your map for you or constructing it for you and then we want we uh we also might distinguish this construction from design so that top right diagram there that's an NPC guard placement

algorithm from some very good research going on at McGill University that this tool can understand patrol paths in line-of-sight and simulate player passing so what if your NPCs could place themselves in a certain sense right or in the lower right that's the interactive story toolkit versu which has a plot visualizer and it draws all the possible paths between your different scenes as well as any dead ends so what if your levels could test and analyze themselves as well so note that a lot of those solutions actually weren't really coming from the triple-a space so now I do want to talk about the triple-a space so a common theme in past level design in today's is that level design is so important yet at the time yet at the same time we don't really know what it is it's kind of this nebulous thing what does a level

designer do well the advice is that every studio have a different definition of what a level designer is and the key word there is the word studio the idea of a studio is kind of more of a triple-a construct if I'm one person working alone I'm probably not going to call myself a level designer because that implies there's other developers working alongside me so I think of level designer as something that's mainly dictated by the needs of triple-a industry so now a disclaimer I'm going to talk a lot about job postings for this next section in case you're not familiar job postings are like there so it's it's mainly designed to like scare you away most of the time if you don't know to read the lines between like minimum one to two years experience means have a portfolio and laugh at our jokes it doesn't mean have one to two years of experience and also with job listings you know you might be hired for

one thing but then you end up doing something else or whatever so again they're kind of but I still think they're kind of useful because it's kind of story the game industry is telling to itself so I don't think they're accurate but maybe they're true if that makes sense so here's a Crytek ad for a level designer back in 2001 a scrappy small company called Crytek that's a lot of text but I just wanted to show you the whole thing here are the highlights that I wanted to focus on so I feel like this ad is actually very representative of most level designer ads that time you can see that there's an emphasis on art skills architecture modeling 3d environments also note that it's engine agnostic you know they want you to use a map editor what engine is that I don't even know they're just map editor okay because they'll just teach

you how to use their toolset later what's your ability to produce levels is not an engine specific thing that cuz they'll just train you when they hire you also not the language here you collaborate with the lead designer you work closely with project artists it sounds like a wonderful creative paradise here's another ad for a level designer at Crytek this time in 2008 Crytek is now a bigger company it's growing hair and place has never had before it's this is the full ad I want to show you it's about twice as much text as before you probably can't read that that's okay what's exactly change for level designers since 2001 the language here is very different now Crytek prescribes a specific engine tools onra and gameplay dynamic you have little choice about what this game is going to be about market forces and studio heads have decided what you're going to do already you also have to use

the CryEngine sandbox editor it's no longer engine agnostic you're supposed to train yourself and just hit the ground running they also use the heard third person pronoun he I hope that's just an artifact from 2008 I hope we know better by now and if and if you're one of the people who thinks that doesn't matter I don't know just tell me how many women are on the Crytek level design team it's hopefully not zero there's also a weird bit about the where the level designer writes and PC dialogue that's kind of unusual me that explains some things about crisis there's more emphasis on there's more emphasis on hierarchy you no longer collaborate you report to your lead level designer and in contrast to that listing from 2001 here now in 2008 they don't care if you have art skills or if you know 3ds max they don't even give an architecture degree they what

would architecture have to do with level design so now here's an ad for another level design position Crytek for 2012 and Crytek's now this much much bigger company now and it's for tech level designer which is actually of still a really new kind of job title in the industry tech level designer is kind of like a tech artist title you know you're interfacing more through level design and code and still again a pretty new thing here are the highlights of that job ad you know sure enough the tech mobile designer is a bridge between design programming mostly geared towards optimization with an emphasis on profiling tools and ai ai is traditionally something that consumes a lot of CPU stuff so that makes sense but the thing that really amazed me about this job listing is that second to last bullet in bulb prior level design experience is a plus this is a level design position where prior level design

experience is optional so that's kind of a beautiful paradox right but the weird thing is that it kind of does make sense to us because level designer is an arbitrary title anyway so this kind of specialization I'll link to a wider trend within the industry called specialization where job titles and responsibilities are getting smaller narrower and more specific and it's important again to note that law Triple E Studios operate differently they don't maybe hyper specialized maybe they're more generalists but I think just as many Triple A Studios do hyper specialize and I think it's partly a response is something Ed Byrne of Ubisoft talked about in level design in a day 2011 and his talk on skating the goat burn was complaining about how his studio often blamed level designers for problems because the role seems arbitrary so you know their job is to

make the game fun and make the framerate not slow you know what does that mean it's actually a really complex problem right so if you specialized if you if you chopped up the level designer role into much smaller parts these are all real job titles that you probably used to be under the general purview of level design but now there are separate roles now in a lot of studios and a lot of these job roles I think follow the form of data in the game engine so you can see some of them are working with the level scripting files some of them are working with the light entity some of them are working with the crest quest scripting files and so on so the materiality of the levels is kind of bleeding in the level design in and it's it's fascinating the way that happens so in the past few sections I've emphasized the material and technological aspect of level design as well as the industrial

labor side of it now on addressed kind of what we might think of more as like the pure design part of level design you know we often think of level design as virtual architecture but the key word here is virtual they're not real buildings made of steel made to carry load or withstand earthquakes these are digital spaces so was this space made of and how do we architect this space so let's say you want a job as studio and you go in and they have you do a level design test and you make your level kind of like this where you're building it and detailing at one room at a time finishing one section before moving on to the next if you do this for a design test Tripoli studio you failed within the first minute because you're just doing it all wrong this type of art test approach is common for environment art but in level design we've erected a huge barrier between art and design which were thankfully taking down if you saw a

Steven Kate's talk but these are not levels to a level designer these are dioramas and this is a global design orthodoxy that argues environment art is just another asset endlessly repetitive replaceable look there's six different dock scenes do a level designer these are all the same dock scene because we can just replace it with whatever ask that we want oh and this is a Splash Damage art test I hope Splash Damage changes there are too soon because I'm sick of looking at this dog scene all the time so the right way to level design looks something like this and this is taken from CCP games write-up about their level design process level design orthodoxy argues that a good level design will start with a paper prototype or design document hand that off maybe for a concept art pass or something then do a geo pass or a block out or a grey box where it's

just rough 3d shapes and stuff and then do an art pass and do all that stuff later and this usually gets ok results and as we discussed before it's what Triple A level designers were complaining about they wanted more formal processes so this is that formal process of what level design is supposed to be but where's the shape of this kind of even like come from like like when you say a level can be chopped up into parts you're making a lot of assumptions about what a level is and that assumption is something called formalism you might have heard about the word formalism lately don't ask people about it I mean maybe you can whisper formalism and then Raph Koster will corner you in the bathroom or something and tell you all about it one origin of formalism is the philosophical theory of platonic form so whenever you see any one's talked about formalism they're kind of invoking this a little the

ancient philosopher Plato might ask us what is the cherries cherries in is that chair more like this chair is that chair charrier than that chair Plato argue that the perfect chair had to exist outside of human experience only an abstract thought only by contemplating endless chairs we had come up with like the real perfect chair and only philosopher Kings have access to that power you know this way the idea of like platonic friends comes from you know if your platonic friends you're not debasing each other with wicked filthy sex you're such good friends that you resemble the divine essence of pure friendship so platonic forms formalism it's interested in the essence of things formalism has some strong roots with Plato so it makes sense that ancient Greek architecture might be very

formalist so there you can see ancient Greek architecture had very ideas about very specific ideas about proportion there's three different types of columns no other types of columns are allowed those aren't architecture and a lot of pre modern architecture generally has similar appeals to divine form and inherent beauty of shapes and stuff and what proper buildings are supposed to look like today we mostly associate formalism in architecture with modernism in architecture where the famous phrase form follows function comes from a prompting a push for an international style a way of building that transcendent nationalism and culture so if you're if you've ever heard the architects Scooby Sullivan or Mies van der Rohe Frank Lloyd Wright or look or look or busi a these are all supposedly the forefathers of modernist architecture in the West so from form

follows function we can also derive other theorems ornament is crime is something related to another thing called truth to materials here ornament is defined as unnecessary detail so if you're working with concrete why would you sculpt concrete to look like a leaf concrete isn't a leaf concrete is casting blocks so you can keep concrete in block form you don't make it look like a leaf and that's what truth to materials kind of speaks to that materials have their own details involved with the process of their construction what they are inherently and that's beautiful in themselves so that's why you would leave the rebar marks and the stains there because that's what concrete is and it's beautiful in terms of the work level designers do we generally follow this when we gray box things or block out Maps work at a human scale is also another modernist idea with roots in pre-modern formalism so there's the Vitruvian Man by the Roman Rider

Vitruvius championed by Leonardo da Vinci and a lot of Renaissance architects and then there's the modular man the MOT or the module or by Corbusier based on a six-foot-tall Frenchman actually was originally shorter but then he said everyone should be 6 feet tall so he raised the height imagined as this international unit to unite Imperial metric units you know it's like the essential form of all buildings the central human and scale in video games is actually really arbitrary so a lot of video games in level design follow this kind of idea about working a human scale if you saw the first talk of this track the fire watch talk by nose and Jake they talked a lot about how the space didn't feel right and they were thinking a lot about how the player actually experiences a space same thing with gone home where Kate had to shrink these spaces to feel more

intimate right it's about how this kind of space feels to humans that's what work at a human scale refers to and then another idea that we can borrow from formalism and architectures the idea of the party and a party is usually like a simple sketch and statement that describes generally what that building or structure is so there on the left you can see a page from 101 things I learn in architecture school that's a really good text I recommend you check it out for your level designer but I don't think we've really adopted this language so I'm gonna impose that language on some other level designer II things on the right that's a party diagram of what we might call gated hub where you have to get a key and another key and unlock another door and we're keep returning to the hub that's kind of a generalized sketch of how that building functions same thing with this image of

what we might call a funnel from level design org and if you really like this stuff you check out level design org they have a lot of good resources for that and again that's the idea that it doesn't matter what those gray boxes are or what that red boxes or what that green box is there's an essential form to this kind of structure and that's what all levels inherit and use so now I'd actually want to look at a building because I think feel like level designers don't look at buildings so this is me making level designers look at buildings this is the VC Morris gift shop and it's in San Francisco I totally urge you to go actually visit it it's a really great building by Frank Lloyd Wright I think it's just like a 20 minute walk from here I think I mean you're 30 minutes the exterior of the building is just a big kind of blank window with facade and it's made of this

beige brick with an archway entrance at the bottom and then inside there's a spiral ramp leading up so there's a bit of like a Guggenheim kind of feel to this so to think and make arguments about buildings similar to how we might do it in architecture first you make an observation about what we call the significant form of a structure so that means the most important parts the party then next you tell us how that thing functions or how you think people experience that party so here I'm gonna argue that big featureless brick wall is a really jarring contrast with other buildings surrounding it and by being featureless with no windows next to all these buildings with a lot of Windows it's actually drawing more attention to itself and it's actually really interesting that it's brick brick is actually a really rare material to see in buildings in San Francisco because brick doesn't withstand earthquakes very

well and then that's also why they had used a lot of wood in San Francisco too and that's why they planted eucalyptus trees because they need more wood anyway that's a tangent but anyway the point is that they're highlighting the brick here and the brick is part of a system within the whole site and the whole surrounding community we can also do this on a actual video game level so here's a app called dead simple from doom - and it's the first fight against these man cubist monster things he's like giant blobby things and these spider brain monsters so it's your first fight against these two new monsters and floorplan wise this is a kind of really simple structure it's just a large courtyard or cloister with the exit in the middle you have to run to the middle and press a button to actually exit the level and that's after you kill all the monsters so an argument

about the party and dead simple would be dead simples mostly one courtyard with toon Avenue never seen before enemy types and then why did they do that well the contrast between a simple floorplan and fighting two Newmont enemies you've never seen before is kind of a joke you know the level actually isn't so simple and I feel like we would never do that in modern triple-a level design these days you never put two new enemy types you do one new enemy type and make sure the players watching what that enemy does or something for the even encounter it not a fan of case you can tell next I want to talk about level design is politics and as a part of a community dialogue and I think we rarely think of level design in this kind of dimension so I want to emphasize it the question here might be who is allowed to be a level

designer recall the root of Western formalism in his theory of platonic forms was the idea that human experience is fallible so it can't be the source of absolute truth so maybe you can only access it through disinterested contemplation follow blah the cherries chair doesn't exist it's only a mental prototype in our minds and post monitors and had a few things to say about that maybe there is no absolute truth or universal form of a chair maybe these are all culturally constructed ideas of what a chair is you know if I sit on a milk crate does that milk crate suddenly become a chair in the lower left you can see a notorious story of a farmer who was denied permission to build a horse shelter so he built tables and chairs and there was no ordinance against building tables or chairs are those steel chairs right or like why are we even like contemplating and studying chairs anyway like if you stare at a

chair for a few minutes people are gonna think it really weird because you're staring at a chair don't be so weird no one stares a chairs a chair means however you use it a chair means sitting a chair is an obstacle to stub your toes on chairs do so much a chairs a weapon to lay smackdown on your opponent and in professional wrestling is actually really important that this is a metal folding chair and not like a baseball bat right it's really important that's a chair and that's what makes that moment amazing and if you're interested in this kind of philosophy go find in bogus and i'ma drink or something so a political critique of the most famous architecture might be that it was just architecture for powerful people most of the preserved buildings you see around the world are for religious institutions royalty military or just plain old rich people the same point applies to a lot of modern architecture a lot of the modern masterpieces are vacation homes

corporate headquarters huge institutions the message here is kind of clear architecture with a capital A serves rich people while the weak and poor must suffer architecture so who gets to live in Frank Lloyd Wright's falling water who gets to even visit it how do you even find out where it is how do you you have to rent a car to go drive it well now you have to have a driver's license and car insurance so that's a quote that's a political critique of this kind of architecture when you think about who actually gets to use it and experience it and in the middle there that's a little Corbusier's plan called plan was an his plan was to bulldoze the middle of Paris and replace it with housing projects wasn't too popular the other plan over there on the right was the notorious New York planners Robert Moses plan to go through West Village or Greenwich Village in New York and bulldoze all of it and put a giant highway going through it and that was

kind of the fall of Robert Moses basically architects wanted to govern and people rebelled another story about architecture how many people are familiar with the Vietnam War veterans in the mayor of Memorial in Washington DC it's one the most beloved pieces of American architecture which is kind of amazing because the Vietnam War is not the most popular or proud war in American history and it was designed by Maya Lin she was a young architecture student at Yale who was an underdog in the competition she proposed a really bold design it's this dark metallic cut into the landscape and it breaks with most memorial architecture in Washington DC you know usually like Greek temples with like a giant statue of a dude or something this is very this is like the opposite of that kind of so when's design was a wound in the landscape and

as you slowly descend into the ground past all these names until you reach the date of the first death in the middle and she wrote in her brief for death in the end is a personal and private matter and the area contained within this memorial is a quiet place meant for personal reflection and private mourning Milan won the competition but only because it was a blind competition and when her identity was revealed all hell broke loose like don't get me wrong I I really like white men some of my best friends are white men I'm married to a white man so I probably love a white man more than most white men you appointment but love also means knowing when to tell someone they up so this is kind of a case of racism

in architecture that probably couldn't even be more clear it was a blind competition they find out the winner was Milan a young Asian woman u.s. senator Ross Perot called her an eggroll and then he and Jim Webb another racist white senator withdrew support for the design you know so before it was really great but once they found out who the architect was oh no we can't have that at all and you know the argument was that oh it's insensitive to have an Asian person make the Vietnam War Veterans Memorial which is one racist and to like even if you believe that logic Milan was like from like Ohio or something like it's not it's like totally not relevant even if you follow the racist logic Ronald Reagan's Secretary of the Interior James Watt threatened to revoke the permit for building it it was basically just all these white men conspiring to destroy her and architecture just like text there's actually a lot of architecture

events about women right now architecture just like tech has a huge sexism and diversity problem you know whose society permit to succeed who wins competitions so what these white guys did to Milan was kind of like an architectural murder kind of yeah I mean they reached a compromise and by compromise I mean they did their very best to destroy Maya Lin's design so what they did is they wanted to be put this big tacky bronze statue cast by Frederick Hart he's the white guy in the upper right to symbolize all the soldiers who died but the whole point of the memorial was to communicate the sheer scope of all the lives lost to give every soul some space and respect to defy any co-optation of their lives by the government to by refusing to reduce fifty thousand lives to three symbolic figures of melting pot patriotism but they did it anyway and the statues

like right next to the memorial now and it kind of ruins it but as a final slap in the face they paid the sculptor four times what they awarded to myelin so this is why modernism kind of died because even giant racists like Ross Perot they have to admit that buildings are more than just their party more than just their shape parties buildings also have their politics and they might even be conservative politics too so maybe it's not form follows function maybe it's more form follows worldview you know you have to ask whose function are we following what's the common language whose terms become the common language for an entire discipline so therefore you know form follows worldview architectures political listen and include the communities you build for so here's some examples of that

this building is Inner City Arts in Los Angeles and there they provided an underserved neighborhood with arts programs and community events they specifically chose to paint it white to show that they would invest and maintain in this building and infrastructure they also kept the garage doors to kind of harken back to their past as a converted car garage in industrial Los Angeles they also built the facility in several stages so you can see on the left they just started with that core there and then they actually expanded it and added more buildings on later so you can think of as kind of early access architecture they could immediately start making an impact and earn more funding and get the trust of the community before doing more with it another example here is the agua del Children's Center in Colombia where you know building with prefabricated sheetrock and steel frames might make

sense in New York but it doesn't make sense here so they used local building techniques they cast the concrete with bamboo local bamboo and they also got well craftsman they trained the local craftsmen to do all this and there's no big expensive HVAC systems they spent three years consulting with the community as to what they wanted and needed and the result was really wide sidewalks a really large courtyard bathrooms in every classroom so student doesn't have to ask permission to go to the bathroom so the post-modern critique of modernism might be that architecture must not just be site-specific it should also be community specific next there's also the Quinta Monroy housing development in Chile a firm was hired by the government to renovate a neighborhood popularly meaning by squatters so instead of evicting the squatters and building a condo or something or replacing with a housing project

they actually talked to them and found out what their needs were and what they wanted and they actually turned their limited budget to into a design strength rather than build an entire project at a low and cheap standard they chose to just build half of a house but that half of a house was an entry-level middle-class living standard and then the squatters are used to improvising their own structures and building structures so they made use of that and they let the residents fill in the rest of the building as they need it according to their own needs and that way it's kind of they're making the neighborhood their own still improves their living conditions and you're sharing control over the appearance and structure of neighborhoods with the architects so there's already kind of a rich tradition actually of postmodern level design existing in video games so I kind of want to highlight that so a lot of postmodern level design comes

from modding and multiplayer communities there on the very left is a notorious map called achievement all v4 so in Team Fortress 2 they had this thing where you could get achievements to get items so people start grinding achievements and idling in servers where they could just grind achievements in order to get items so what happened was all these achievement grinding Maps and then someone made an achievement trap map where it's all these players playing in their treatments grinding achievements blah blah and after a few minutes a giant cat comes out of the ground and it shoots lasers at everyone and kills everyone and keeps killing them and then like nukes the entire level and punishes them all for grinding for achievements it's really beautiful it's a really beautiful map and then their second is a map called surf Thunder boom surf map and surf map culture is a really interesting thing that's coming out of the CS counter-strike community and it's just

really beautiful architecture it's all these surreal kind of slanted shapes very unusual an FPS level design maybe like quake 3 floaters are like the neck are the nearest analogue maybe and then next there's my ice world which is a very notorious map played in countless saloon cafes and it's by our terms a really bad map but it doesn't matter because it fit a need within the community and they're gonna play it anyway instead of like de perón se or something so the idea of an achievement trap or a surf map or a fight yard ice world map those came for more from players not from developers or we can also consider maps like the Gary Hudson project there on the lower left that was a marriage proposal made in the form of a portal to map or the next one is love punks that's enough it's an amazing game made in collaboration with neighborhood kids in rural Western Australia and you know imagines game development as a kind of

community mural kind of thing or we can talk about the work going on countless schools that use Minecraft as a teaching tool so you know how did Greek architecture work well let's try to build a Greek temple and we'll find out a lot about how Greek architecture worked what matters more is the story around the level right the process of making it playing the portal to marriage proposal might be an okay level but what we care more about is oh did he make it himself as a labor of love or did he pay something to do it did the person say yes or no right those are more important and what the actual puzzle in the portal to marriage proposal was right so what matters is the process the context not so much the actual puzzle or game mechanic stuff going on here and again these are all rich traditions of level design that exists outside of steam for storefronts and humble bundles and I think it's important we acknowledge how much happens outside of our developer

bubble so I'd like to end this talk with the discussion of what might be the future of level design what will level design look like what other alternate level designs can we imagine there's a picture bias speculative architect named webOS libous woods if you're not familiar with him you should walk up his work chances are your favorite like sci-fi movie in the last five years like stole shamelessly from his work so I want to imagine three possible level design futures there are in reality an infinite amount of futures blah blah but these are just the three that I can kind of semi-coherent Lee described so and they're already happening right now and they'll continue to happen probably so first industrial I'd characterize industrial level design

is the main ideology of the triple-a game industry here we see a temps a la Universal theories things like the idea of like a Vista and all your maps should have vistas every now and then or Ubisoft has something called rational game design where they kind of put a lot of their games through that kind of framework or even when you're working on sunset over driving and come up with a thing called a bouncy right you're coming up with your formalism you're coming up with your grammar and it's the developers dictating that but I mean it doesn't always apply to things like does gone home have vistas does the concept of vistas really apply to gone home because you're inside all the time or what about dear Esther does the console vistas applied to dear Esther dears there's a hundred percent vistas write it all it's almost like redundant to call out every Vista in that game so you know these grammars I would argue are often problematic and can't be applied to any

game just lazily and over time I also think we're gonna see increased specialization of Labor so already we're seeing absurd things like a content designer what's a content designer you know what's content you know maybe job tells you can get so specialized there's gonna be a junior rock rotator that person will just rotate rocks and levels or or a to tree intern they rotate the trees and your levels junior trash placer you know like will labor get more specialized maybe I'll depend on the changing nature of Triple A games I guess so industrial level design imagines level design as this fundamentally human oriented thing the solution to batter levels is for humans to think better or to put more humans to work on the problem and that's generally how you solve problems within this mindset their critique of this is that's kind of pretending postmodern has never happened and it's kind of pretending you can just kind of work your way out of

things when maybe you might have to adopt a different approach or a different kind of formalism future B might be what I call cyborg level design you know much like how there are different programming languages all with their different strengths and weaknesses there are a lot of different ways to generate levels and code simulations of levels so you know you'll often hear them talk about like them I mean like proc gen level designers how about you know this framework worked for this problem prims algorithm worked for this thing in eldritch but I had to modify it for this other thing but when I'm making this new game I'm not gonna use prims algorithm because that didn't work for this so you see kind of multiplicity of different formalisms and these are all just tools instead of one formalism that you just use for the entire game maybe and the concept of a cyborg is kind of funny you know like we usually think of cyborgs there's something like the Borg from Star Trek full of all these

invasive implants but law theorists argue that we're already cyborgs the way we use smartphones they might as well be implanted in our hands we've been using ebooks to augment our memory we use wheels to augment mobility to a certain sense a cyborg isn't a technological concept it's a social construct so that was that's what leads us into the politics of human machine authorship you know why is a good procedural level generation algorithm well it depends right but I think a lot of people would say good procedural generation output would ideally like the most perfect one would resemble human a third output we won't be able to tell the difference between procedural generation and handmade human generation but why should we do that well if we judge procedural generation on its different terms and I think that's what David was getting at in his Eldridge talk he was talking about how he was aiming for semi coherency and he was

involving Lovecraft Cthulhu stuff so that means the levels didn't have to look like they were hand-built because it works when they're not totally elegant and currently I don't think of this is a very like triple-a kind of domain because I think it needs immediate triple-a usually needs immediate payoff and they don't want to invest in long-term research or if they do they treat as a trade secret and not tell anyone so I think this will seem academic or indie endeavor for now and then the last feature I want to talk about might be local level design what if we made levels that were just for our clan for our multiplayer server for our school for our church what if levels were community murals that told our collective stories what if we made marriage proposal levels what if we made levels just to give as small gifts to each other local level design is characterized by a rejection of

top-down formalism if the purpose of a level is to deceive its players and make for really good YouTube fodder how's that change the structure of a level right you're not going to be think in terms of choke points you're gonna think in terms of what will look cool on YouTube or something or what will PewDiePie likers thing local levels are local level speak to things outside of videogames they speak to ourselves they imagine level design game development as something we do for specific people not an abstract player derived from market research local levels are process oriented they care about how they were made and that story is part of the level again the wedding proposal you want to know if that player said yes or no in response to it right that's an important part of that level you know meanwhile you don't might care a lot less about howdy dust was made or something I care a lot but I recognize a lot of people one it's also about thinking about who you talk to

did you consult everyone if you're making a level set in Harlem or in the Arab world why do you have to make into a war zone is that kind of racist what are you saying when you make levels like this so a critique of this might be that it's kind of slow it's labor-intensive it's unpredictable because if you're genuinely keeping your mind open to a dialogue with players you don't know what's gonna happen so maybe that's one reason why you'd be scared to adopt this kind of design methodology so to sum up level design is no longer a big monolithic practice the idea of just level design is dead sorry no level design in a day for next year I just said so it's it's final so what we might propose instead is an intersectional level design you know you draw on as many different level design traditions as possible when someone says level design you say which level design are you talking about maybe thanks for

listening you