Unseen: How Non-gamer Input can Change & Improve Art & Storytelling in Games PG Connects Digital #2

topic is called unseen how non-gamer input on change uh can change and improve art and storytelling and games a really important topic because we often need to listen to non-gamers to improve games so i would like to introduce uh angel luis casas fernandez from tt from tequila works uh to present this topic hi can you see me yes we can see you okay i'm going to take it away the build 12 the virtual one just a second okay

so we are ready to start oh i don't hear you right now yes go for it you're ready okay perfect so i'm going to share here my screen okay you are seeing my screen now no yes we can see it fine okay so let's go to the presentation okay i'm going to start with a quang eye very quickly and i'm 35 and i'm called angra sukasas i'm the narrative director of tequila works but i do lots of stuff like other indie games i'm a novelist i write for tbr movies i write for papers and i teach class so i keep myself entertained and doing a lot of stuff but my major occupation is being the narrative director of

of the works of the whole studio and keep an eye on every project that we are doing in everything related to storytelling and narrative design so the story that i'm going to tell you because i'm a storyteller and i can help myself to start this presentation is something that happened during this christmas with my father and my mother so the first thing that i have to do is to present my my father and my mother to yourselves is my father is 60 years old he's a professor in the university but he's also a writer his specialist specializes on holocaust and has write and teach and do many talks throughout the world from israel united states every country in latin america so he's quite quite deep into that his copy is cinema and writes books about cinema too and he's a video game indifferent we could say he doesn't condemn video

games but he doesn't have much of a interest for it though when he was you know like when when i was like nine years old he became sort of hooked by sonic on the game gear and he was able to finish the game every every every day for more than two years with more than a million points so indifferent but sometimes couriers about my mom my mom is 60 years old also she's an ex-professor of philosophy because he she has retired this year she also writes his hobbies being an artist you can see there you know the his drawings and his sculptures and she's a videographer and hater you know a common video in hater he hates the whole thing she's very happy that her grandson can grow well because i'm successful in this career but

he hate video games a lot so this happened on the on the christmas and they were here in madrid because they are for the north of spain and we were watching my father and i read the redemption 2 because he's a very big fan of westerns especially you know john 4 hogwarth fox classes westerns for the 30s and 40s and we were having this conversation that i'm going to dramatize a little bit so first myself i say so what do you think that and my dad said it's impressive yes and suddenly my mom comes into the background and says what are you seeing and i answer the redemption those you know it's a while realistic take on western like corman mccarthy and center of myself and say in one of the shots where they were the characters wearing in a close-up they looked like toys so boom my head is closed because it was like

i can't i can't i can get it how how she can say something like they look that like those if this is the you know one of the crowning achievements of this generation in everything related to photorealist and you know and being immersing an atmosphere that seems almost as real as reality but a little bit later i put a both of them in the helmet of a playstation vr and made them play a tetris effect and also i made them play super hyper cue and another thing also with gameplay you know with a simple gameplay mechanics and they were amazed both my man and my dad you know with my death is more easy but he even said how much you said one of these caused because he was amazed but my mom was amazed too and it was not only amazed by the visuals he was amazed about the whole experience

about being able to play something that she played like tetris in this incredibly immersed way so that led me thinking a lot about things i was reading from that time related to how to grow the market of video games how to bridge how to fill the gap between gamers and non-gamers especially i was thinking about two things that i read this year one was this interview in gamasutra with nobuyana casato that as you you well know is one of the biggest creators of contra and he has created one of my favorite games in all time that this contra hardcores is just an amazing game from every point of view and see so in the is he said in this interview the game market is going to be in trouble unless we look towards the long term and reorient ourselves towards what makes games fun to play this was an interview related to the age

of xbox 360 and playstation 3 that as you know was aids of gaming more devoted to find a mainstream audience and the problem here especially in japan was that you know we tried to reach the mainstream audience by trying to copycat cinema and spectacularity of cinema and that is very well done already by cinema so the theory of nakasato is that for a time they were very attracted to this and as i as we lower the difficulty of the games they were you know quite into playing a movie but after a while they'll become an interest because they have already that in in movies and that were that made a big calling in some industries especially in japan because they they were used to center everything in making the the game fun you make it the mechanics fun and suddenly you know they center on

or they focus on making the games very visually appealing but not a little bit more hollow in the gameplay side and the other thing that i was thinking a lot this is one a person that i know very well she's a friend we meet together in a middle east conference in iran and it was amazing to hear them hear her made a conference to an audience that was more females than males in a game designer you know kind of ambience in iran so that was amazing and it really struck us both of us and as you know she made a very very very very polymeric and also important confidence about video games are boring that was a conference on gdc and she was a you know reflecting on his song and experience experience with friends that were very interested into art but it was almost impossible to get

the interest into games so that was a very important conference for me and i think it's a very important conference for the media i want to to rescue this quote what forms of art and entertainment are more most relevant now collapse memoir no it should be video games interactive entertainment that many people don't like videogames why so i mix these two with the the conversation that i have in christmas with my mom and dad and i started to sing very deeply and also to ask many ex-gamers you know long gamers of the 8-bit 8 or a 68-8 16-bit eights and non-gamers at all to trying to grasp this question what can we do because we have seen with the launch at estadia that the numbers are still not there but we are seeing that the technology starts to

close to have all the medium in the same platform so the competition is going to be even more direct between games movies music comics literature and we have to think how to compete in this arena so i came with three conclusions for my talks with many non-gamers and the first one is related to art i am going to divide it in art design and narrative because i get inputs in all of that and i started to work in how you know it's impossible to solve this uh only by talking with people but starting to think how we can approach this problem so the first thing that i notice with art and non-gamers is that non-gamers have a much sharper eye than hardcore gamers as myself to the photorealistic approach because they see all the things all the nuance that they are still not there we only seen the evolution and this is you know something video

game you know it's something very very very popular in our medium to talk about teraflops and and how many polygons you can move uh you know it's it's it's getting less popular in this last five years but there still is a a trend to to to to talk about this stuff but for for them is like watching a movie of toys that doesn't move very well and there is a lot of details there that just look awful so uh i think one of the biggest things of talking with them i get in the art department is how far we are away of what we think we have already grasped because for their standards they look like toys like my mom says so that's a made me think that a possible solution of course is but more for non-photorealistic approaches so the conclusion will be in this line but more for

non-photorealistic approaches erased uncanny valley also allows more emotion you only have to see what happened with the lion king in cgi photorealistic with the faces of the characters and the motion they convey versus the original one also increase the immersion in the gang world because we have our own rules of what words can what not and that's something that animation has in general and if we are not mimicking the reality we can create our own reality and our own rules in and inside that rules is very difficult to find uncanny valleys because they are the rules of our own game world and also attracts more known gamer people especially in the family audience i have been noticing with games like greece cuphead or wrong gaming tequila rank of course every major mobile game has a non-photorealistic approach or almost any major mobile game has a non-photorealistic

approach so we see their great commercial success we see that attract non-gamer people and we still don't bet as much as we should in the console and pc area so i think this is one of the things that we can do better design design is very related to what contra creator says and this is a little content intuitive because if you hear comments like you know confidence like write code just start to think that you have to do games maybe less about the game itself and more about the experience but i think that's not the case the case or what i get for for the non-gamer people and especially x gamers people that left the the medium at 8 bit or or 16 bit is that for them there is an impossible gap in the control path

something as simple as this you know i was watching playing one friend of mine that is a writer writer of the great success veronica the horror movie of paco plaza and she loved to play billionaires in super a super nintendo 8 and when he tried in my home to try a modern game it was impossible for him because too many things going on wrong you have two sticks you have eight buttons and you have tutorials of one or two hours to get the controls if you know how to move with these new controls for him was impossible and he was complaining all the time you know why i don't have one stick and two buttons like in the old age why everything has to be so complicated so this is something that we really have to look and it has deep consequence because we you know the control path is decades to the games but i think the gate is you know is one of the biggest problems that we

have now so i think that the solution will will be in the line of simplify the controls and recover a philosophy of the arcade days that every game should be very easy to pick from the get-go and very hard to to master so i put here the you know the images of a master system console path a playstation 5. and it's amazing how many stuff we have put into this and i'm betting that that we can do it that we can do later and many buttons there can be simplified or rethink to not being so complicated for new people so uh conclusions are returned to an arcade mindset because in our caves we have like a window of one minute to every new people coming to the arcade to get the game and every game hasn't the luxury in that day it's to assume that the people coming where gamers

so you have one control stick and you have two or three buttons and you have to work with that and it has to be found from from the first minute you don't have two hours of tutorials you have to be fun for the first minute so that will for the controls i think also arcade mindset will help a lot on the fan aspect the thing that nakafama say is that you know you we need to focus on the fun aspect of the game cinematography is great visuals are great but we need to focus on the fan because the fan and the game size is what make us games and we have to return to that i think return to archive may say mindset makes sense because of mobile market because many games that are successful on mobile market and are in fact very old games are games that we used to play 30 years ago and suddenly they become new because there is a completely non-gamer audience discovering this and that's a clue and something that

console and pc market can can use and also return to an account mindset will lower the barrier entry for on gamers for all the reasons above because suddenly they have something like in the mobile they can pick and start to play and have fun and then they decide if they want they want to become deeper gamers but we need this you know these products that allows them to entry in the industry and they are not always in the mobile so finally a narrative what i found always in narrative is you know little nuance that i that like i found in art like why this character doesn't say anything in this situation why it's not scared now why it doesn't remember what happened two hours ago these sort of things speaks to us to a expectation of character quality

that we grow you know very very used to in tvs because in tvs you have actors that do all this effort to keep a character very nuanced and very subtle of course in games you have actors too but i think we still haven't read the bridge between the actor and the avatar to become one in all the situations i working on this very you know very intense in tequila and how to bring the gap between the golden path where everything is very reactive and outside the golden path when suddenly you go with an avatar to a cave where it's a monster and the monster starts to glow and more or less nothing happened and if that monster will be and that case will be in the golden path we will have a lot of stuff there of course this is a this is a production issue but we have tools in many companies ourselves we have one of these tools

to make reactions and procedural reactions inside inside games so we have to start to think on this because i think it breaks the immersion a lot especially for non-gamers so the approach of narrative conclusions so develop the presence of gang avatars to allow to develop a deeper bond with the player develop the presence of king avatars hello games to narrow the gap between tv and cinema and we are going to compete directly with them i'm sure develop the presence of wing avatars will attract non-gamer cultural press to write about characters in games as we have seen with the last of us too which is amazing i finished it a couple of days ago and is one of the best examples in the industry how to do this well and develop the presence of king avatars empowers the deep of characters if we want to do transmedia strategies that are mandatory right now if we have a a big you know abi

franchise we cannot go only on one channel we have to go to all the channels and try to do the best in every channel because if not it's very difficult to compete in the arena of big franchise right now and get attention so the final slide will be great but why bother ourselves and you know we have to do so many things each generation to keep with the all guys expectations of what all gamers want to the next generation why bother ourselves with these all these problems for non-gamers that are not still here well because i think this exactly this what you see in this shot is happening very soon this is a uh a slice of amazon and of amazon prime and i'm convinced that very very soon we will have mixed their you know movies and games so you could find an episode of metal gear 3

inside all the snapshots of tv shows and cinema and you know the the audience will choose between ones or the others so we have to be very aware on how to get them because choosing a tv show or a movie is click but choosing again is doing hard work actually so i think we need to rethink many things that we are doing in the industry now to wait when we are in this point uh we are prepared to compete as well as any other medium that's there and that's the end that's all folks and thanks for listening that was uh that was fantastic thank you um very intriguing topic so you've got um you have three questions here so i don't know if you've brought up the question window or you want me to facilitate it's your choice uh if you can tell me the questions i will answer yeah so the first question we have is do you

think the inverse is true can lessons learned from game design art and ui be applied to the real world to make our lives better yeah i think so of course i we we were seeing this you know with vr anywhere that vr is being applied and even being much much more successful as a tool for the real world than uh as a new arena in games so of course this relationship is bi-directional because non-gamer input can better games but games of course in all their aspects from ux to whatever can get better their reality so i totally agree with that perspective i'm not hitting you now in just a minute oh sorry um so do you think that

the touchscreen is the most universally accessible controller that we have created so far or if not how do we create a truly inclusive controller well i think we have to go to ground zero here because every control of the new platforms that are coming are just iterations of the last one and the last one and the last one and you know if you want to bring people that only play 8-bit 8 or haven't played anything at all it's virtually impossible to do it with a playstation controller or xbox controller is completely impossible so we have to think uh you know i think in two ways one way will be how we could create controls for these platforms that reduce the amount of buttons and doesn't lose the amount of interactivity so go for that and make that inclusive control very available in the market and

marketize very well for everyone to know it that will be one thing but another thing that i think is even more important for the long-term approach when the streaming platforms start to have everything inside we have to come with another solution to manage all kind of games without being so full of buttons because this is going to break you know it's going to make a impossible barrier between the non-gamers and gamers it's true that eki's you know that the newer generations of people are mostly gamers so that's very good for the industry because they are used to but you know to have the same amount of audience and numbers than movies and tvs we have to do something there and you know in in the old age we have master systemness gameboy with very complex full of deep games and we only use one cross and two buttons so it's not

impossible at all to do this we only need to think again about these things instead of being comfy and bad for the you know the old control pad that we always use because we know it works for gamers but i really i really know that it doesn't work for non-gamers or x gamers great and so the final question you have actually you just had another one but we're closing out on time but um designers have become better at adding modes for those with varying eyesight levels colorblindness and other customization options largely as a result of player feedback what's the most common complaint you hear from the public regarding game design regarding a design is you know this thing about is this thing about buttons bears and tutorials it's very easy in the old days of academies to pick up again and start playing and you can be bad you can be good you can be

in the middle but you can start to play and for many of these people that i'm you know talking all the time because this is really worries me is it possible just to play resident evil 7 this was the example i use i use resident evil 7 and for my friend that is a horror writer as i told you he's a fan of the genre it was impossible too much going on and he became frustrated and i proved that with my father also that was amazing playing as i said gengi or sonic and made one million points and i tried to get him on to play a little bit of redder redemption too it was completely impossible uh to just move and interact with the scenarios so we have a problem there and it's a big one i think yeah well one uh so we have time for just a quick answer on this last question so we can get all the questions so uh do you think there's any point where

a non-gamers input should not be considered like how do you separate the good ideas from the bad ideas i'm concerned that some non-gamers might start considering themselves experts and provide not so helpful feedback that will happen always when you ask feedback i remember brandon sanderson the the great writer telling that you must focus on the feeling side and not on the thought side so i think that you know if a non-gamer tried to do a lesson of how to integrate triggers a narrative triggering single level we are in trouble or how to design a mechanic we are in travel but if it tells you it feels clunky go for that you know it's all about the feelings and the feelings are very clear and extract you know very clear conclusions like you know we have too many buttons and that's something very clear and we have to solve that that's great well thank you so much that was a

fascinating topic and i think for a lot of us um we need to learn to listen to non-gamers a bit more uh it's hard when we're kind of in our game development bubbles and you know we're also game players so um so that was great thank you again