The Secret of Eternal (Product) Life: Lessons from J.R.R Tolkien and John Madden

[Music] you [Music] in the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth and the Earth was without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep and the spirit of God moved upon the waters and God said let there be light and there was light and God saw the

light that it was good and God called the light day and the Darkness he called night and the evening and the morning were the first day hello everyone this is the secret of Eternal product life I'm Ernest Adams and uh you've just heard the creation myth of the Israelites I want to start off with my usual disclaimers that I always have to give it these things what I'm about to say is not the opinion of my employers my lectures tend to take the form of sermons and a sermon is a highly personal view also for those of you who haven't been to church much lately uh the preacher does not take questions during the sermon I'll be happy to talk to people afterwards the uh subtitle of this talk is lessons from JRR tolken and John Madden two men than whom it is difficult to imagine more different

um the first part is the med part of the talk and uh basically to give you the background here this is a lesson on product longevity it's not going to be as boring as that sounds I hope uh those of you who are familiar with my lectures in the past know that I like to speculate about all kinds of weird stuff and the so-called topic of the lecture is really just a hook to hang other ideas on I'm not going to be talking about the shelf life of individual SKS by the way I'm talking about the life of entire product lines John Madden football or as it's known now Madden NFL football is the bestselling Sports video game of all time and it's been around since 1988 in one form or another it originally came out in the Apple 2 and then it moved to the IBM PC and then to the Sega Genesis and then more recently to the Sony PlayStation the Sega Saturn and the PC again um it is an unusually longlived product there are comparatively few products um maybe Ultima Wizardry and and so on that have lasted that long not

counting the ones that are online which of course are continuously updated I've been working on John Madden football since 1993 so I've seen uh a little bit less I guess than half of its product life and I wanted to start off by talking about some of the things that have I believe have helped to make Madden a success to start with of course sports games have uh some unfair advantages um how many other Industries can you name that have an entire section of the newspaper devoted to them all across the country every day um you know there might be a few pages on the Aerospace industry in Seattle um but the sports industry has an entire section every single day all across the country so there's an enormous amount of interest in sports already and the sports industry or or particular Sports consist of periodic events that is a sports season lasts for a certain C amount of time each year

with a great deal of changing data so you've always got something to uh sell people and that also gives sports games an unfair Advantage basically the flight characteristics of an F-16 do not change all that much from year to year uh if they do the general public doesn't know about it but the roster of the San Francisco 49ers does change from year to year and if you don't have it right you will find out about it however be that as it may um I think there are particular reasons excuse me for Madden's success and the first reason uh the one right at the top is the ever elusive fun Factor Madden has not always had the greatest graphics and the greatest sound and and I think uh we would freely admit that um but it does have an excellent license it's an easily identifiable individual um and

unlike having a license from a star player uh John Madden is much less likely to get injured or to retire suddenly or something like that and that obviously helps in product Longevity if you tie yourself to a given player then you're tying yourself to that player's career the other thing about Madden uh with respect to the fun factor is that it is easy to learn and easy to play um it uses contact sensitive behaviors rather than having a million buttons basically uh we don't feel that the audience for fighting games who are capable of handling complex button sequences that make very specific Oddball moves overlaps that much with the audience for football games and so we try instead of having a million buttons to just have a button that does the right thing at the right time if you need to hurdle it will hurdle if you need to spin it will spin if you need to jump it will jump and so on and this

Simplicity encourages rather than discourages new players now one of the consequences of this is that it's fairly easy to learn and that um it uh with some practice becomes fairly easy to beat the AI and that's kind of the downside of having a game that's easy to learn and easy to get into but Madden has always really been thought of as a multiplayer game anyway I mean you know the the it's sold rather like a single player game like all the other cartridges on the shelves but the vast majority of the officient Autos play it as a multiplayer game and that's where the real fun comes in and we think that it's worth having the downside of the fact that you can beat at 89 to nothing after you've been playing it 6 months um to get the upside of having large numbers of people be able to play it now there are counter examples to this out in the industry of course you know Indie Car Racing for example is the racing fiends game and it

also is a great success um so nothing of what I'm going to say is an absolute hard and fast rule another reason that I think Madden has been a success has to do with a programmer disease that I'm sure that a number of you are familiar with called creeping featurism you know the you know the phenomenon where a program is never finished because the programmer can always add one more feature and then one more feature and then one more feature and a lot of products kind of get this with Madden we have sort of deliberately made creeping featurism a plus we've we've turned into a benefit um in 1992 uh we had neither an NFL nor an NFL players Association contract so we had neither genuine team names nor uh player names in '93 we had an NFL contract so we got the team names but not the player names in '94 we added the Players Association so we had both the players and the teams in 95 we started adding oldtime teams so you could play with the 84 49ers or the 52 lions and 1996 we

added the ability to trade players among teams and then in 1997 um we moved to the PSX and so we slowed down the pace of putting in new features to concentrate on handling the new technology so creeping featurism giving them a little something new every year has obviously helped Madden a great deal the third reason for Madden success in in my mind and this is I think the most important one is that it has has always placed content before technology there are technology-driven games out there and in in my mind a technology-driven game is a game which is intended to exploit a given technology for example uh Doom came out and Doom's real purpose was to exploit and demonstrate Ray casting and it did that extraordinarily well but that's really kind of what it's all about another example that comes to mind is Star Fox which came out specifically to show off Nintendo's f FX

chip the problem with doing that is that your technology will be copied in three months and three months after that it will be old news Doom comes out and everyone is amazed uh hexen and other things like it come out and everybody says oh yeah that's a doom clone big deal so new technology with poor content won't get you good reviews uh critical path for example was the first game to have a lot of motion video in it but it was a poor game old technology with good content can get you good reviews Maxis turned out good tile-based games year after year after year uh and civilization certainly was not using a lot of breakthrough technology and badly implemented new technology is absolutely the kiss of death uh Electronic Arts had a wonderful baseball simulator called Earl Weaver baseball 1.5 for the omiga which

generated Better Baseball simulation statistics than anything else on the market at the time and so they put out another version called Earl Weaver 2 and they put a very badly implemented 3D front end on it um and it died a terrible death in the marketplace despite the fact that it still had a wonderful baseball Sim underneath the badly implemented 3D front end just killed it so Madden is content driven it was originally on the Apple 2 and the generic PC right at the end of those machines product life cycles and its technology changed relatively slowly during the Genesis years what changed from year to year was the content and when the PSX came along obviously we took steps to support it and we beefed it up quite a bit but we did not make the mistake that we had made with Earl Weaver and try to overdo it we wanted to get on the PSX bring it out have a

good-looking product there without trying to overstep our abilities because we felt that it was important to be solid on that machine before trying to add truly amazing whizbangs that's for this year of course so new technology does not make a game that lasts because technology does not last itself and that's one of the conclusions from Madden if you are specifically trying to make a long lived game then I would suggest suggest that what you do is burn developer Cycles rather than adding too many features at a time use those Cycles to tune the game make the game play better rather than burning those Cycles to put in new features after all every uh new feature is two new bugs right also emphasize content and features over technology you should incorporate technology changes in your later releases of course you'd have to in order to keep up but don't make that the raise on Detra of the whole product not if your point is to create a long liveed game

and don't go after new technology until you are ready to use it and until you need to use it um you know going after new technology with a development team that isn't really qualified to do it is a mistake and uh we haven't made that mistake with Madden software is not the reason for playing the game the game is the reason for playing the game so that's kind of the the Madden portion of the talk um that will make my employers happy and uh that's the that's the kind of straightforward and direct uh thing about product longevity that I wanted to tell you about the lessons from John Madden in the beginning the world was inhabited only by animals and there were no humans and the tiger and the bear prayed together to God for wisdom and for betterment of

their status and they prayed together for many days but in time the tiger became hungry and he abandoned his prayers to hunt but the bear continued to pray and God heard her prayers and he sent his son down to earth to speak with her and the Son of God said for your steadfastness you will be rewarded take these herbs and eat and go into this cave and sleep and you will receive your reward and the bird the bear ate the herbs and she went into the cave and slept but not for a night she slept the whole winter through and when she emerged in the spring the Son of God was there and she was no longer a bear but the first human woman and she did cohabit with the Son of God and their children became the human race the Koreans so the second part of this talk is kind of the more speculative part the kind of tolken part of the talk um and I began thinking about these

issues of product longevity because one of the things I feel about most computer games is that they are just about 1 inch deep uh they don't really feel like they're part of anything larger when you get to the end of a computer game you don't feel like there's a great deal more to go on to you feel like you've pretty much seen all that there is to see and so our work doesn't last and obviously one reason why our work doesn't last is the inexurable march of technology and the fact that we're constantly having to upgrade that but I think we've shown with Madden that you can deal with that that you can create a product line which lasts despite advances in technology that's not necessarily uh a good excuse for having a product line that doesn't last I think the real reason that our product lines don't last is that we have a lot of short-term thinking we don't really sit down and plan to create product lines at last it's I don't I don't know whether it's not something that interests us or

we don't have time for it or what it is but most of the time we're only kind of looking till next Christmas and I think that's too bad and I began to think about well what would be the important aspects of long-term successes what kinds of conditions might be important to have and in my sole concession to audiovisual [Applause] AIDS I will put up my list I'm sure there's a switch here somewhere oh big one on top so here's my list compelling activity or premise obviously you want to have a uh an activity or some kind of an idea that you want your player to enjoy that will compel them to come back and want to do it again clearly you need to have

excellent content good graphics good sound good acting and so on you need to have solid bug free code you obviously don't want to uh frustrate your player by having their game Crash all the time an intuitive user interface that doesn't confuse them one that makes them interested and and uh make it makes it easy to understand and come back to lots and lots of well-placed marketing obviously and a great license or tie-in is not an absolute necessity but it's an important thing to have uh some of the time it's certainly a useful thing to have if you can afford it now that's it you know what I have to say about that list boring who cares so what if you've been in this industry more than six months you've already got that list engraved on your soul nobody needs to tell you that you certainly don't need to have to pay 650 bucks at a minimum to come here and hear

that list now I want to talk about a lot more subtle issues I want to talk about the things that we need to do after you've done the stuff on that list you know you've got to do the stuff on that list I want to talk about the sort of uh second tier The Meta things that we need to think about when we're trying to do uh create product development and none of these issues that I'm going to bring up are either necessary or sufficient conditions for long-term success uh what I'm going to describe here is not a set of laws or rules just follow them and all of a sudden you will have a long-term success that's not the way this kind of stuff works these are lessons not laws and lessons are never absolute but I do believe that they lead in the right direction and I want to start hold on a minute by talking about Batman now if your experience of Batman chiefly comes from the 1960s era television show then I most earnestly

beg you to forget it likewise for that matter the recent movies I don't think the movies either capture the true Spirit of Batman no I'm talking about the Batman of the DC Comics Batman to me is much more interesting than all the other superheroes for a couple of reasons first off Batman is not in fact a superhero he didn't come from any exploding planets like Superman did he didn't inhale any weird gases like the flash he wasn't bitten by any radioactive spiders he didn't find a talking Lantern like the Green Lantern Batman is a normal man and he has to solve his problems within a normal man's limitations now admittedly he is a very rich and very smart and very strong and let's face it very lucky man but he is still basically just a man and that I think makes him more interesting interesting and the second

reason is that his motivations I I find more interesting most other superheroes are motivated by a kind of a naive dogism gee I am endowed with superpowers what shall I do I shall fight crime you Batman's motivations are somewhat different he's not endowed with the superpowers but when Bruce Wayne was a boy he was walking home with his parents from the movies one night and a man stepped out of an alley and shot his parents to death right in front of him and ran off the memory of this event haunts Bruce Wayne he has nightmares he can't sleep and so what he does instead is he gets on an outrageous costume and prows around at night looking for other crimes to interfere with that man swore by the spirit of his parents to make war on all criminals shortly after their death now that's interesting he did not swear to fight crime he did not swear to do good he did not

swear to seek Justice he swore to make war which is a much more morally ambiguous vow so Batman is motivated by an inner rage an inner hatred and we saw that in some of his early stories and then in the 1950s Along Came the comics code Authority and the tales of Batman were sanitized for several decades and his inner rage was suppressed and he became just another kind of naive doood or superhero but in 1986 DC Comics took a very bold step and they brought out a book called The Dark Knight Returns and in this book they chose to examine the question of what Batman's true nature really was and what it would really be like to have him in your town

and there's a scene in here that neatly summarizes Batman's character I think Batman is crouching in the shadows at the foot of some stairs behind his cape and a thug with a gun is coming down the stairs behind him and we hear Batman's thoughts in voice over narration in an almost chillingly detached tone he says to us there are seven working defenses from this position three of them disarm with minimal contact three of them kill one hurts and he whirls around and kicks the thug violently in the stomach now observe here Batman had three opportunities to kill and he did not take any of them he had three opportunities to disarm with minimal contact and he did not take any of them he had one opportunity to inflict pain and that's the one he chose that is the essence of Batman's real character

I don't think Batman does this stuff because he wants to I think Batman does this stuff because he has to because he is driven he is compelled he is obsessed and I think in some respects Batman has certain things in common with serial killers Batman's violence is cathartic it's orgasmic it's almost masturbatory it's what he does to help him get to sleep at night in short it's not about fighting crime it's about beating the hell out of people Bruce Wayne makes this morally palatable to himself by selecting victims that he's pretty sure deserve it so in this book the fundamental question is raised is Batman a heroic public-spirited citizen or is he an outof control vigilante I mean let's face it the guy runs around beating up

people that he thinks have done something wrong he doesn't answer to anyone he is judge jury and executioner he is not bound by any constitutional restrictions about things like privacy or probable cause and he has the Winking cooperation of the police department gee can't get a search warrant or a wir tap that's okay we'll ask Batman to do it for us I think the reason he wears that mask is because he doesn't want to get sued is this really somebody we want running around our town that's quite an interesting question there's another scene in here that I think is really intriguing too it's a scene where Commissioner Gordon Say It Isn't So is about to retire and he's talking to the captain who's going to be his replacement and uh the captain who's going to be his replacement has sworn to put out an arrest warrant for Batman as soon as she takes office and she says to Commissioner Gordon I don't see how you can support a vigilante and Jordon says I'm sure you've heard old fossils like

me talk about Pearl Harbor fact is we mostly lie about it we make it sound like we jumped up and went after the axis on the spot hell we were scared rumors were flying we thought the Japanese had taken California we didn't even have an army so we were there lying in bed pulling our the sheets up over our heads and there was Roosevelt on the radio strong and sure taking fear and turning it into a fighting spirit and we got our army a few years back I heard a news magazine with a lot of people and a lot of evidence that said that Roosevelt knew Pearl was going to be attacked and that he let it happen it wasn't proven things like that never are I couldn't stop thinking about how horrible that would be and how Pearl was what got us off our duffs in time to stop the axis but a lot of innocent men died but we won the war it bounced back and forth in my head until I realized I couldn't judge it it was too big he was too big since then presidents have come and gone

each one seeming smaller weaker the best of them like faint Echoes of Roosevelt and Captain Yandell says well I don't see what this has to do with the Vigilante and Commissioner Gordon says well maybe you will I was rather curious I was very intrigued by that interchange and I began to wonder I'm a guy with a philosophy major so I do these sorts of things in my spare time are some people's Souls simply too big or are their jobs or their situations too complex to render moral judgments about I don't think so I think that way leads tyranny if we allowed for that then every tinpot dictator who came along would be claiming that the end Justified the means and that his soul was too big to be judged now the more I thought about it more I realized that we are all complex beings

it's not that there are some people like Batman and Franklin Delano Roosevelt about whom it is difficult to moral render moral judgments or that their situations uh make them immune from moral judgments the reality is that it is difficult to render moral judgments period and the more that is its sake the harder it is we are all as complex as Bruce Wayne not as troubled Maybe not as driven but as complex nobody is a saint even Mother Teresa whom the media is fond of portraying as this little old lady who washes the feet of lepers and that kind of stuff cannot possibly be a saint because Mother Teresa in reality is a very very effective administrator and you don't get to Be an Effective administrator without being a heart ass some of the time and it is that truth about us all that makes for great literature and great movies and great works which stand the test of

time Batman is interesting because he is morally ambiguous and because there is a Mythic quality to his background Wolverine is interesting because Persons Unknown gave him an adamantium skeleton against his will in a process that caused him great pain I also find him interesting because he's only 5' three and so I you know really have a lot of respect for that Superman is boring because he showed up on Earth one day and simply did what his parents told him to Captain America is boring because he drank a weird potion and Tada he's Captain America so what computer games and comic books present a morally simple world and mainstream comic books present a trivial and artificial morality with no subtlety or depth and The Dark Knight was one of the first mainstream comic books to break that tradition they decided they were not going to

submit it to the comics code Authority and computer games present the same morally simple world for example in Sim City if you tear down an old residential neighborhood that's not producing very much in the way of tax bays and you rezone it commercial you don't have people demonstrating outside your office and saying that you're in the back pocket of big business it just doesn't happen you don't have to worry about it so it's this game context this what they dunesbury called years ago the thrill of victory SL Agony of defeat dichotomy uh that defines what is morally good basically what appropriate behavior is is the thing that gets you more points that which leads to more points is the right thing to do and I think that we need to rid ourselves of these simplistic moralities and create challenges for our players in which

judgments are not easy Comics code Authority Comics do not continue to sell year after year after year the same one over and over this book came out in 1986 and it is still in print it does continue to sell year after year after year and I think the depth and the nature of its story and the the recognition that Batman is not nearly as straightforward as the comics code Authority would like us to believe is the reason that this product has lasted I think we want to reexamine the game metaphor and ask ourselves if giving points is really what we want to do or perhaps we could give different kinds of points for different things you remember the board game careers in careers you could set up at the beginning of the game how much of different uh things you wanted to collect over the course of the game love money or fame and what you did is you played the game and you tried to reach your own goals the goals that you had set up for yourself why don't we create

more games like that another game that uh I think there's opportunity for more complex judgments in is Magic Carpet now Magic Carpet seems like a great shooter and you just run around and blow the hell out of everything um and it's one of the uh it's it's got a it's got a nice gimmick because unlike most games uh until recently when you hit something it looks damaged in Magic Carpet so if you uh shoot a fireball and the ground you get a burn patch and if you shoot a meteor storm into the ground you get a very large burn patch and so on and the object of the game is to collect Mana which resides in living things so you run around and you collect up all the Mana and when you win the game you get to the end and this sepulcral voice comes out and says congratulations Master wizard the world is restored to equilibrium yeah it's a burned mess and you've slaughtered every living thing on it but it's in equilibrium you know I think it would have been nice if if Magic carpet had had a socially responsible mode now I'm

not saying that magic carpet should have been socially responsible but I'd love to have been able to flip a switch that said you know what you get points deducted for for causing a forest fire the manual tells you that you can you can cause forest fires and that will help you uh kill off the evil creatures which is nice but then you've got a burned Forest at the end of it so you know that that's an example of the kind of thing where it would have been fun to have a mode in which you had a more complicated decision to make gee you know maybe I should restrict myself to lower energy weapons so I don't do quite so much environmental damage moral ambiguity Mythic themes tough decisions these are the sources of great lasting Legends in the beginning the universe was filled with undifferentiated matter and all

was which is chaos but in time the matter formed patterns and became ordered which is Cosmos and of Cosmos was made Gaia the Earth Mother and Gaia labored and she brought forth uranos first of the Titans and Gaia mated with uranos and gave birth to the rest of the Titans and to Cronus last of all but uranos was despotic and Gaia encouraged the Titans to overthrow their father and at last cronis unmanned his father and cast his genitals into the sea and cronis took his place on the throne of the world now cronis married Ria and their children were the gods but cronis feared that his children would do to him what he had done to his father and so when each of his children were born he ate them and finally Ria tricked cronis and when he was ready to eat Zeus she gave him a stone to eat instead and Zeus grew up and overthrew cronis and forced him to discour his

brothers and sister Gods whom he had eaten and he and his brother and sister Gods defeated the Titans the Elder gods and they became the younger gods and established the realm of the Olympians but when cronis threw the genitals of his father Uranus into the sea they impregnated Gaia the Earth mother and she brought forth all the living things upon the Earth and in the sea and in the air the Greeks so on to JRR tolken now to start with I'm going to admit that I am a tolken fan and I realized that this is tantamount to admitting that one attends Star Trek conventions or plays Dungeons and Dragons or something like that neither of which I

do so I'll also say that I have my eyes open about tolken I realize that tolken is not great literature the guy is not in the same league as DH Lawrence and Virginia wolf and Jorge Luis bores it's just not that good writing and tolkin characters are fairly two-dimensional and his themes are not particularly morally complex oh good versus evil there's a new idea now you may ask how can tolken be successful without the moral complexity that I was just arguing for a minute ago and one of the things you will notice about this lecture is that practically everything I say is going to be contradicted a minute later by something else that I say um to which I would respond actually moral complexity as I pointed out earlier is not a necessary or a sufficient condition tolken has been successful without it nevertheless I still think it is a valuable thing to bring to an entertainment product I do believe that it's important and in this genre in particular I think moral complexity is too long neglected but I've already made that argument I'm going on to tolken now so while I'm a

fan I do acknowledge the limitations of his work nevertheless the average fantasy novel lasts on the shelves a few weeks or a few months or however long it is not very long and tolken continues to sell and sell and sell and sell and why what is it well I think there are some things that tolken did right and I think there are things that we can learn from first thing I want to talk about is how tolken handled sequels if you read tolkin works in the order in which they were published The Hobbit the Lord of the Rings the sil melan you notice something rather interesting The Hobbit is a completely self-contained work all the plot lines are tied up at the end all the major characters are dealt with when it's done it's done but it does contain some intriguing references there's a brief mention that the Elven King was descended from those long ago elves who never went to the land of ferry in the west and at one point the wizard Gandalf leaves the expedition to go help the

white Council whoever they are Drive The Necromancer whoever he is out of his Fortress in the fastness of do gor wherever that is we find out later that he was successful but we don't find out very much more about it so The Hobbit contains references to a more ancient past and to a wider world then are included within the story itself but it does not need them the absence of further explanation does not detract from the story if you go on to the Lord of the Rings you find out a bit more about the elves and those who went to the land of fig in the west you find out exactly who The Necromancer is and what's going on with him but it contains still more intriguing references there's a mention of the last Alliance of elves and Men the drowning of numor uh some people called the Valar and it's never very clear what that's about either and again at the end of The Lord of the Rings the story is completely tied up everyone is dealt with you don't have to know this stuff but it piques your curiosity finally you read the sil melan

and it answers them all because the sil melan is the complete cosmology theology history geography and ancient literature of tolkin universe so it it it brings this stuff to a close and answers all those questions another good example of this kind of thing is in Ursula kwin's Earth sea Trilogy Where each work is completely self-contained tied up at the end but contains references to an A Wider world and a more ancient Time by comparison let's look at how SE the sequel to Star Wars was handled when we saw Darth Vader regain control of his King Thai bomber and go zooming off into the Galaxy at the end Lucas might just as well have put up big red letters that said sequel coming sequel coming you know that uh part of the story wasn't wrapped up we didn't know Darth Vader's fate he was a major character clearly and he just somehow got away and we didn't find out what happened to him now

that's not a problem with Star Wars Star Wars was obviously very successful because it was plenty compelling and we wanted to come back and find out about it anyway but with less compelling material it will eventually start to anger your audience two examples of this are uh the river World Series by Philip Jose farmer which just seemed to go on and on and on and you wondered if he was ever going to explain what the hell was going on on and another example was Twin Peaks and I began to wonder if David Lynch was laughing at us you know got them suckered I can get them watching Cilla nonsense for years now it's not that big a deal with television where all you have to do is tune in once a week and it's free more or less it's not that big a deal with books and movies where you have to go down to the bookstore or the movie theater and plunk down another $5 95 it's a little bit different with computer games where you have to go down

to the computer store and plunk down $59.50 10 times as much when I get the end of a computer game I expect it to be the end I do not expect to get to the end and find out that I'm going to have to go plunk down another 60 bucks for the next uh game in a series that's going to last God knows how long so the first lesson from tolken is make them want to come back rather than make them have to come back you can not create product longevity simply by stringing your audience along and tolken did not do that the next interesting thing about tolken is that while his books were published in the order of The Hobbit the Lord of the Rings the sil melan not counting some smaller works of poetry in between the sil melan was actually written first and as I said it's the complete cosmology theology geography and history of his universe and Tolen took it to the Publishers and

they said Gee the legends of a non-existent place containing no sex almost no dialogue written in a quasi biblical language oh yeah this is just going to fly off the shelves so it was published last but because it was written first tolkin work is incredible self-consistent between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and all his other stuff it really feels very much like it's part of a hole that tolken had completely envisioned from start to finish the world feels complete as an example of a world that to me does not feel complete and again this is an example of something which has been a success but I think it's been a success in spite of this rather than because of it uh that's the world of Star Trek I don't have a very clear picture of what going on in the world of star trekk I don't understand its

politics I don't understand how the Federation works or who's really in charge at Starfleet command or whether they actually have any money or don't have any money and you know there's been a lot of work afterwards trying to trying to go back and and and and make it consistent and another example of of uh people who do that absolutely all the time to the point of excess in my opinion is is Sherlock Holmes the Sherlock Holmes stories were dashed off very very quickly con and Doyle was not particularly interested in creating a complete and unified world and they're horribly inconsistent it's not clear whether Dr Watson received his injury in his shoulder or his leg and a lot of people spend a lot of time trying to make up explanations for why they're so inconsistent but I I know how the Star Trek world problem came about because the series was being developed Under Pressure they were creating a television series they had to crank out the things week after week after week but let's face it there's a problem I mean an example that has become a standing joke is Kirk and the prime

directive Kirk's always breaking the prime directive you know sometimes on flimsy excuses sometimes on no excuse at all now I approve of roddenberry's instinct here I mean America was in the middle of the Vietnam War and he wanted to make a comment about imperialism at a time when you absolutely did not talk about such things on Prime Time television and I think it was gutsy of him to do so but they wrote in the prime directive without really having thought through what the implications were going to be for the rest of the series and so you know as a result we have this the prime directive does not really feel like one of the great moral imperatives of the Imperial of the Federation despite the fact that they always claim it is Babylon 5 on the other hand is a world that does to me at least Feel Complete you just get the sense that shinski has thought it all out now he's told us he's thought it all out um but it it it feels as if he probably has and I think in time people will come to think that Babylon 5 is a better series than Star Trek God help me if you start getting into an argument about that here and now

but that's my opinion in any case and since I have the microphone um so the second lesson from tolken is if you are planning and intending deliberately to create a product with a long lifespan then I strongly urge you to create your world ahead of time as tolken did now sometimes you don't have that option as with Star Trek um another example of of a place where that happened is with the Electronic Arts stri strike series uh desert strike was a big success and so they went on to create jungle strike and it was a big success and so they went on to create Urban strike and it was a big success and so they wanted to create Soviet strike and you know they've been they've been scrambling to build this world just as quickly as they could as they went on um but sometimes you can sort of get caught by your success and and not have time to do it but if you're planning from the beginning to create a a world that you want to last then try to do it ahead of time at least try to do it before you bring out the first sequel to The First product now for the third lesson I want

to talk a little bit about my experience of reading tolken works when I got to the end of the selion I thought okay that's all there is you know I've read the geography and the history but then I was sort of intrigued by vogner's ring cycle it's also seemed to be about dwarves and dragons and uh magic rings that rule the world and I found out that Vagner was Loosely based on Old Norse and Germanic and Icelandic Legends and I started to get interested in them and I got interested in wolf and anglo-saxon poetry and that kind of stuff and all of a sudden I came across this word orc now I was absolutely sure that Tolen like all other fantasy writers had just made this word up you know that it was just this kind of kind of nonsense word that he conjured out of the air and and put down on paper and I shouldn't say all of the fantasy writers but but that that does seem to be common that a lot of fantasy just seems to be full of sort of gibberish that people have made up and tolken hadn't orc is in fact the old Anglo-Saxon word for demon and the name Bjorn which was a character in aulen

work who was a man who could turn himself into a bear at night that is in fact the Anglo-Saxon word for bear and so on there's quite a lot of these and the names of all the dwarves are taken right out of the Icelandic sagas and I began to realize bear in mind that I was young that token's work is based on an enormous body of earlier work and all this stuff that I thought he just made up out of his own head all those names and all the rest of that stuff were in fact only borrowed tolk's works are not works of Pure Imagination and I talked about this a little bit last year but I want to I want to go into it some more this year now as creative people we prefer I think to create works of Pure Imagination we want to express our own creativity and ideas imagine that you're an art student which would you rather do you know they they plunk down a a vase in front of you with some irises in it and and they say I want you to paint this in the style of Van go I want you to paint it so that it look like van go painted it would you rather do that or would you rather paint

it in your own style would you rather compose music in your style or would you rather be told that you have to compose it in Mozart style would you rather create computer games in your style or would you rather create computer games in Chris Crawford's style I mean you know we don't really like being told that we have to do things in someone else's style and I think works of pure imagine to us imagination to us somehow seem sort of more honest more personal if a friend comes to us with a painting and they say look I painted this painting that's one thing if they say look I made a copy of Van Go's painting that's another thing you know it it it feels more honest somehow we give more credit and more attention to work that is entirely someone's own than work which is a copy or into someone else's Style and what was one of the slogans of the 60s do your own thing right about one of the nastiest things you can say about a creative work is that it's derivative but as I began to think about this and think about tolken and what he had done

I began to wonder if that attitude is really appropriate thing about Pure Imagination is that it's fairly easy to do rapidly but it's not easy to do well works of Pure Imagination do not require any study of existing work they do not require any knowledge of culture history when you're creating a work of Pure Imagination you don't have to know anything it just all comes out of your own head and I think this is why much of Modern Art like abstract expressionism leaves people cold because it has no cultural Roots it doesn't have any frame of reference it doesn't Reach Out And Touch the viewer's soul most works of Pure Imagination that are done rapidly are about 1 inch deep and that applies to computer games which are made in one or two years we simply don't have the time to devote to works of Pure Imagination than they require by contrast token's Works which are not works of Pure Imagination still took most of a lifetime to create to the

level of depth that it has in an analogy to building a work of Pure Imagination is like a column standing by itself it's held up only by its own Inner Strength it has no other support and it's fairly easy to knock down a work of derived imagination is a bit like the block at the top of a pyramid tolken works are like the block at the top of a giant pyramid the top is what everyone wants to see the top is where everyone wants to go you get there and the first thing you do is climb up to the top and look around but after you've looked at it you begin to realize that it rests on an enormous foundation and you start to ask yourself if maybe there isn't something inside too many computer games I think are works of Pure Imagination they're all done in one or two years they're all one or two inches deep they don't reach in and touch anyone's Soul as Isaac Newton said if I have seen farther it was by standing on the

shoulders of giants the third lesson from Tolen is borrow steal rip off plagiarize whatever we need to stop trying to make it all up ourselves we need to learn to draw on other resources we need to acknowledge that we are not Giants go out there and look for other stuff and you will have a longer live product in the beginning there was nothing but endless space and Tower the sunp and tawa took of his own Essence and he made the first world but the people of the first world were all insects who lived in caves and fought among themselves and tawa was displeased and he sent the spider grandmother to them who led the up to the second world and when they arrived at the second world the people

were transformed into wolves and dogs and bears and still they fought among themselves and did not understand the meaning of life and tawa again sent the spider grandmother and she led them up to the third world and when they arrived at the third world they were transformed into human beings and spider grandmother taught them to weave and to plant corn and to make pots and she bad them to be virtuous but the third world was cold and the corn did not grow well and they could fire the pots and then came hummingbird bearing the bow drill a gift from masao The Lord of fire and hummingbird told them that there was an upper world above the sky so the people began to cook their meat and to make fired Pottery but they became lazy and began to gamble and to turn their faces away from virtue and finally spider grandmother came again and she led the people up the inside of a bamboo Pole to the fourth world the upper World beneath the Open Sky which is our world near to the sacred San Francisco Peaks where the kachinas live now the fourth world is

our world and there is much work to be done here but at the bottom of every Kaa there is the seapo the sacred hole which leads down to the third world and which is the reminder of our Journeys with the spider grandmother the hopes if you go to Oxford University near Oxford there is a little pub called the eagle and child better known to its uh denisons as the bird and baby and there's a small room in the back where tulen and a number of his literary and academic friends um CS Lewis and so on used to get together regularly and they'd read aloud to each other from the stuff that they had been working on they call themselves The inklings and there was one man I don't know who it was it wasn't CS Lewis I know that who whenever hulin would pull out his manuscript he used to put his hand over his face and say oh God not

more elves well I know how he feels we are inundated with elves and dwarves and Dragons now those of you who are descended from Anglo-Saxon and Germanic and tonic Stock May object well that's my cultural heritage you know I mean I'm why is tolken the only guy that has the gets to have the block on top of that particular pyramid and you know I would say no you can be on top of that pyramid as well if you want to you're free to put out yet another elf dwarf dragon game that's fine but what the hell are you going to do to differentiate yourself from all the other elf dwarf dragon games I'm not arguing for multiculturalism here for its own sake okay I'm not arguing for multiculturalism here because it's right or socially responsible or politically correct God knows we're not in the business of trying to broaden anyone's mind in this

industry no I'm arguing for multiculturalism out of pure self-interest the market is saturated with elves and dwarves why not be a little bit different look for something else look at Magic Carpet Aladdin Prince of Persia all these are hit games and they're all drawn from a culture that Americans regard with hostility and suspicion I have here two great science fiction novels both of these are winners both of the Hugo and the nebula Awards one is Dune the culture is derived from the bedan Arabs one of them is Lord of Light by Roger zasi the culture is derived from Hindu mythology both of these games won both the Hugo and nebula Awards both of them are towering masterpieces of imagination both of them are still in print but would they have won if they had been

about elves and dwarves yet again I think probably not I think the reason they won is partly due to the fact that they're about something else and I think we should consider that most recently uh I've become addicted to a game called marble drop which just came out from Maxis which is about dropping a marble down through a sort of a series of puzzles to and you have to try and figure out where it's going to go and get it to go in the right place and that's that's um I it's it's a great game I'm having a lot of fun with it but the background behind everything else are notebooks which look like the pages of Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks and I find that very charming and I really appreciate that they uh went to the trouble to do that now Leonardo da Vinci is yet another dead white male and I'm sure there are people who would say no no no we should shove them aside entirely but nevertheless at least it's not a dwarf so how you going to find this stuff okay

I've told you no more L's for God's sake go do something else how you going to find it well there's a gimmick some of you have got it some of you don't I'm very interested to see this now you've been sitting for a while so what I'd like you to do is reach in and get your wallets out okay get out your wallets purses whatever we're going to look through here because I'm hoping that a bunch of you have the thing in here that you need okay we are not looking for the money we know you need the money okay we're not looking looking for the credit cards we're not looking for the AAA card we're not even looking for the cgda card which of course you all have we are looking for somebody over there got it right your library card who's got them hold them up come on come on let's see let's see who's got a library card that is pathetic those few of you can patch yourselves on the back the rest of you how in the hell do you think you can possibly work in a creative industry

without access to a library you don't want one of the very first things George Lucas did with his money from Star Wars he went out and he built a beautiful library and he filled it full of wonderful books because he knew that a creative business was going to require access to a great Library it is not all on the web the web is wonderful don't get me wrong I looked up some important stuff about 24 hours ago on those terminals outside that I needed for this lecture but it is far from complete and it is very badly organized it's great for reference it's a terrible teaching tool you can't really learn anything systematic and if you really want to learn something new and use that to create a product that's going to last you're going to have to do some systematic learning so the second thing you got to do with that life Library cart is you have got to use it you do not make brilliant wonderful Long

Live products by keeping your nose so close to the grindstone all the time that your work is out of focus you got to take time off to study and to learn and to think and that what that means is you got to take off half a day a week which in this industry means six hours and tell your boss that during that time the video is not going to get compressed and the is not going to get written and the design and the music and the ad copy and all the rest of it are not going to get made because you are going to go down to the library and you are going to sit in a comfortable chair and you are going to learn something if you are doing a football game go read about new rockney and Vince Lombardi and modern past uh past defenses if you were doing a flight simulator go down to the library and read Jane's defense weekly in all the world's aircraft if God help us you are doing an elves and dwarves game then go down and read the Icelandic sagas or at least something other than

tolken in the course of this lecture I have read to you four of the world's great creation myths I would guess and I may be underestimating you that most of you had only heard one or two of them when you came in here there are at a rough estimate 160 living religions in the world and that does not count the ones that died out like the ancient Egyptians a religion is a Mythos it is a psychological and linguistic and philosophical and cultural structure which attracts and holds people's Souls there are 160 sources of myth of Legend of stories that have touched people deeply I've told you about just four it's all there for the taking so I set you a creative challenge when you leave here go back to your work and look for its Mythic foundations and if you don't find any then start to dig

go out to the library and try to find some Mythic material to work with do some learning now for you hard-headed materialists out there and I know there are a few I would point out to you that Oral Roberts and Reverend Moon and bwan Shri rajnish have all clearly demonstrated that when you have someone's Soul their money will soon follow you want to make a product that lasts then find a way to touch your players's soul stop thinking of him or her as a customer start thinking of him or her as a convert here endeth the lesson

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