Happion Labs GameDevBlog

Just finished Malcolm Gladwell's Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking- I was leery at first because it sounds like the sort of book that's going to sell because people want to believe they can trust their gut and they're just looking for a book to back them up.  And, to be fair, that's how it's marketed – and someone even wrote a reactionary book called Think dissing on it for that.

Also, I wasn't very fond of The Tipping Point – I thought his central thesis is just wrong – there is no point – in epidemics, isn't there just a steadily growing curve?  You can't put your finger on a single point and say, “that's where it tipped.”  Although, The Tipping Point was filled with interesting factoids which made it entertaining anyhow.

But, I'm happy to report, that Blink isn't really about that at all.  Although it is filled with anecdotes about people trusting their guts and coming to correct decisions in small amounts of time, these anecdotes are all about experts who have been working in their fields for many years.  So, yes, you can trust your gut, after you've got years of experience under your belt.  This should surprise nobody.  Kasparov can find the correct move on a chessboard in a second that would take me minutes or hours to analyze.

And I was glad to hear it, because I am a very not-trusting-my-gut sort of guy, even though I have fifteen years of experience making videogames.  I'm always second guessing myself. That's going to change.  Now I'll just second guess myself a little.

Also, a lot of Blink is about the times when your gut can fail you.  In fact, it seemed like more of the book was devoted to how split-second decisions can go wrong. 

One interesting kind of split-second decision that can go wrong is the Sip Test. Coke switched to New Coke in the late eighties because Pepsi supposedly was winning the flavor wars.  They were winning on the basis of sip tests – you did a blind sip of beverage A, a blind sip of beverage B, and which did you like better?  Pepsi, because it was sweeter and had a burst of citrus.

So Coke changed their formula – earned the hatred of millions – and then changed back and gained more market share than before, managing to blunder into a happy ending. 

Al Ries claims that Pepsi tastes better and it's all about marketing, but one of the marketers at Coke says the problem is sip tests suck and to really rate a product you need to give them a home use test:  you give them two cases of the two beverages and ask which they like better.  (I suppose you better make sure the cases are just generically labeled “Product A” and “Product B”...I wonder if they do that?) Because the sweetness of Pepsi gets cloying once you've had more than a few sips, and that hint of citrus you detect with your first sip is lost on the second.

How does that apply to videogames?

It's conventional wisdom that a videogame has to grab you in the first 30 seconds or it's doomed.  I'd like to challenge that conventional wisdom – look at Tony Hawk and Spider-Man 2.  If you can fail a kleenex test—the videogame industry equivalent of the 'sip test'--these games did.  It takes 15-30 minutes of playing before you start to feel even comfortable with these games, and it takes longer before you get good.  And yet they're both multi-million sellers, outselling a couple of games that no doubt aced their kleenex tests – God of War and Ninja Gaiden – games where you feel good in the first thirty seconds, mashing buttons and explosively killing guys.

Apples and oranges, I know – multiplatform vs. one platform, franchise title, different marketing, etcetra.  But, as NASA research shows, apples and oranges are really quite similar.

Also, this conventional wisdom seems to assume that players are playing demos when considering whether to buy, and the demo that catches their interest is the one they pick up.  Yes, that happens sometimes, but I think far more often they pick games because of the box, or because of word of mouth, or because they played it a friend's house.  (It's not reviews, unfortunately...)  In which case they get more than a sip before they make their buying decision.  Or they rent it, in which case they probably play at least a level before returning it, hopefully getting in that fifteen minutes.

What I'd like to see is videogame gameplay testing move closer to the world of home-use testing.  Since we can't send devkits home with our testers, maybe the solution is to create a comfortable, living room like atmosphere for the testing – sofas and large-screen TVs – minifridges with soda and food.  The testers are encouraged to play as long as they want – say, up to 10 hours if they want to – but they can also take breaks, whenever they want, and quit and go home whenever they want.  The researchers stay out of the way – I'm wont to hover over a tester's shoulder when watching them play, I'd need to force myself to step back behind the mirror.  Although sometimes you're doing gameplay testing – where does it get frustrating? -- in which case they're only given the one game, other times you're doing market testing, and then you'd give them a choice of games to play, only one of which is the game you're really interested in. (Although a publisher with multiple titles could put them all in the hopper to see which one the players like best and therefore is most deserving of marketing dollars.)  At the end you'd ask them how they liked it, and which parts they liked best, and it wouldn't be until they'd rated it that you'd ask them to get more analytical.  Because, as Blink mentioned, getting analytical about your opinions changes them.

Interactive Fiction

Took a break from Magic The Gathering: Online to try out "Vespers", the winner of the 2K5 interactive fiction awards, and was pleasantly pleased.

More Notes On Animal Crossing

I wrote a brief note on Animal Crossing in my first blog.  And it turns out that my first blog is no longer up.  Don't know what happened there.  All that wisdom lost to the ages.  (Actually, it's funny how many things I believed in 2002 that I no longer hold true.  If I extrapolate that means I'm probably still full of crap.)  If it weren't for the Google cache, that is.

Cathy, my wife, had a real Animal Crossing addiction - I thought it might be a problem.  It got its hooks in me for a while but I did lose interest after a while.  She kept going until she got the statue.  Then she put it down for years.  We pulled it out last New Year's, and now she's hooked again, even though she already has the statue.  She just likes the mechanics of playing, I guess, the act of walking around, digging, pulling weeds, doing jobs for people.

The interesting new development is that Sofi loves it.  Sofi's fifteen months old now, and will sit quietly and watch her mom play.  This morning, Sofi, whining, pulled mom into the living room and then pointed at the TV and didn't stop complaining until mom sat down and started playing Animal Crossing.  If we hand Sofi the controller she'll mash buttons - dig, not dig, whatever.

So we rented the DS version from GameFly - seemed like a no-brainer.  But Cathy's not playing it.  She prefers the big-screen Gamecube version.  To try and pique her interest I read her this review from The Escapist:  http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/32/7
"I don't want to play with other people," she said.  "And I've got a lot invested in THIS game," she said, pointing to the Gamecube.

So there it is.

Don't Like The Idea of "Creative Director"

This is a post I've been formulating in my head for a while.  We're seeing a growing number of "creative directors" in this industry - and while I don't have anything against any given "crative director", I don't think the position makes sense for game development.

Why do I think this?  I can't help but notice that lots of creative directors either quit or don't get invited back to do it again.  Harvey Smith;  Randy Smith;  Chris Soares;  Tomo Moriwaki;  David Jaffe went from being an internal CD to an external one...  All of these directors worked on games that were either hits (millions of sales) or critically acclaimed (80+ on gamerankings) or both.  And I quit as CD before I even finished a single title, deciding I'd rather help start a company than continue what I was doing.

So what's going on here?  It seems like in a sane world, these succesful directors would get invited back to do it again, paid whatever they want, etcetera.

Here's my theory.  The "creative director" title arose because of the whole games-want-to-be-like-movies thing.  We look to the movies, see that they have a "director" position, a guy who supposedly owns the vision for the thing, and say, "We need a guy like that."  So we made the "creative director" title, put either a lead artist, animator, designer, or coder into the position, and tell them, "It's your game now.  Make it good."

Here's the thing.  In movies, the director has a fairly clear, well-defined job to do.  He's on the set every day, directing.  "Let's do another take."  "Let's do it this way."  "You stand here."  Maybe he draws the storyboards like Ridley Scott used to, maybe he blocks the shot by eyeballing it, David Cronenberg style.  Maybe he lays down track for the cameras like Spielberg used to. 

And the director wasn't always considered the owner of the vision.  Remember back when it was George Lucas's *Empire Strikes Back* and Steven Spielberg's *Poltergeist*?  Thanks to the work of the Director's Guild, directors are now considered the auteurs behind films, but it wasn't always necessarily that way.  It used to be that producers could be the auteurs.  And that's the way it still is, in television:  it's J. J. Abrams *Lost* and it's Joss Whedon's *Buffy*.

So suddenly we find ourselves in this "creative director" position.  But we're not given a folding chair and a bullhorn.  We don't block scenes.  And here's where things fall apart - we don't do what we used to do either:  we hire a new guy to take our place, because we're going to be so busy "creative directing" that we won't have time to be designer, coder, or artist.  This was my experience - I was creative director, but I wasn't supposed to actually create anything.  Level design was to be done by the designers;  writing was to be done by the writer;  coding was to be done by the coders;  scheduling by the producer;  etc. 

The one thing creative directors are expected to do is set priorities - much like the "project owner" from Scrum - we decide which features to do first and which to never do.  And as the project goes along we make course corrections, decide we want this and this and this and reprioritize.  That's an important job.  Somebody has to do it.

But it is not a full-time job.  If you do Scrum you know that being "project owner" is part time at best.

So you've got a choice - you can pitch and do work - in which case you run the risk of stepping on toes:  "Why is he designing?  I'm the lead designer."  Or you can do nothing but prioritize, in which case you run the risk of looking like you're coasting:  "What does that guy DO, anyway, other than take the credit?" 

EA has the same problem with a different name.  They call their creative directors "producers" and they call their producers "development directors."  And I've heard much badmouthing of producers at EA just as I've heard badmouthing of creative directors at other companies.  The problem is the same - the producers don't have a full-time job to do but they've got a whole work-day to do it.

You also run the risk of the "rock star" phenomenon.

So what's the answer?  Eliminate the "creative director" position, and assign "vision" or "project ownership" to someone else on the team.  It can be like TV - the producer (and I mean a real producer, one who schedules and manages, rather than the kind of producer they have at EA) can do it, a sort of "creative producer".  Or it could be the lead designer (think Eric Holmes).  Or it could be the art or animation director (Fumito Ueda or Toby Gard).  Or it could be a programmer (Will Wright, Sid Meier.)  It could be the writer (Tim Schafer).  You can still call them "creative director", if you must, but you DON'T replace their old position.  (And I realize the temptation to do this is huge - you probably have a pool of talented, experienced guys who want a promotion and a cooler title, but I think the project will suffer for it.)  These new 'creative directors' do what they used to do.  And, on top of that, they're the ones who set priorities; they're the ones that choose what features and content actually go into the game; they're the ones who decide if you reiterate on existing content or add more.  Depending on their style, they may be auters (we're doing this feature first because I said), collaborators (what do you guys think we should do next?), market driven (market reserach says this is the key feature), or a mix.  But whatever they are, they're not just directing, they're also creating.

I Can't Write Off Shit

Addendum to my previous post on being able to write off my memory stick;  my new tax accountant informed me yesterday that I can't, thanks to the "alternative minimum tax".  In fact, looking back at previous returns, it seems like my previous TWO tax accountants were just humoring me when I handed them my painstakingly constructed lists of write-offable-stuff when they agreed to put that information in the 1040.  So, props to Karen Block, my new accountant, for actually being honest...and this isn't exactly a sob story, because I guess the 'alternative minimum tax' is a mechanism targeted to prevent the wealthy from diving through loopholes, so that must mean I've been doing pretty well.

Anybody going to DICE?

Want to meet / hang out?  Send me an e-mail.  jdfristrom@gmail.com.

I'm A Guitar Hero

Beat it on Hard today.  And discovered that playing some of the songs on Expert gives me the same rush as when I first tried out the game.  Mmmm...White Zombie.