January 16. Tools for a History of Computer Game Design

1. Announcements

- Official syllabus is online: check it for changes.

- Discussion forum. Ask Casey to talk about how to long on to Panfora. We'll use it for posting questions for speakers, signing up for reading reports, etc. Post references to related readings; example on Friday: Roy Simkhay sent me reference to article in New York Times, "Men are from Quake, Women are from Ultima" (Jan. 11, 2001): http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/11/technology/11ROLE.html. So post references like that to Forum. -> Casey

- This week: Fundamentals. Next week: Interactive Fiction.

- For Thursday: Poole reports. Reports will concentrate on some issues brought up last week in questions (relationship to film, multimedia, etc.)

-- (1) Chapter 4. "Electric Sheep." Relationships between games and film.

-- (2) Chapter 6. "Solid Geometry." Perspective in video games.

-- (3) Chapter 9. "Signs of Life." Semiotics of computer/video games.

2. Fundamentals: Genres

genre: Merriam-Webster OnLine: Date: 1770 1 : a category of artistic, musical, or literary composition characterized by a particular style, form, or content.

genre fiction: Works of fiction that can be described or recognized with reference to their genre: mysteries, science fiction, romance ... Implies constraints that are put upon the author in order to meet expectations of readers.

Not simply that these are categories for eBay or PC Gamer reviews, but rather that notions of genre define conventions, expectations. We describe a game in terms of these genres before entering into particulars. Example: Deus Ex.

Good idea to review genres, because the terms will frequently be used as short-hand to describe games.

Genres can also give us historical categories to work with as lineages, genealogy. This tends to reduce the number of categories initially, then to look at new categories arising out of old ones in a branching pattern. Like Jones in the article we read ("strategy" and "twitch" games) and Crawford ("strategy" and "skill-and-

Adventure/Interactive Fiction. Later branch: RPG.

Original game: Will Crowther's Adventure (1972). Based on spelunking in Mammoth Cave (Kentucky), knowledge of D&D, and his own desire to make a relatively easy game that did not require much fussing with computer interfaces. Used a text interface to navigate and interactively tell a story. Related to programs like Terry Winograd's SHRDLU and others concerned with parsers as interface with interactors. Ties to artificial intelligence and basic metaphors of computer input (the caret prompt). Reached highest initial point with Infocom (MIT) and its interactive fiction series: Zork and other games. Roberta Williams and Sierra/Lord British and Ultima moved genre more in a graphical direction during the 1980s. Like D&D, series quite common.

Adventure and Zork

Main characteristics of genre: (1) emphasis on story-telling, character and story development; (2) main goal is completion of story, secondary goals marked by a score measuring character's achievements (items collected, victories along the way, quests, etc.); (3) graphics seconary, indeed for quite some time non-existent (even maps kept on paper); (4) technical development focused on conversing, gathering information and items--language parsers or menus.

Graphical Action Games and Shooters

Spacewar. First computer game? Developed by Stephen Russell and Alan Kotok on the PDP-1 at MIT (1961-1962). First adaptation of joystick for computer interface. Wired together with CRT in Electrical Engineering Department. An early arcade version was set up at Stanford. The main center for research on computer graphics funded by the Defence Dept's Advanced Research Projects Administration (ARPA) was the University of Utah (Ivan Sutherland & Dave Evans), esp. after Sutherland left Harvard for Utah in 1968. One graduate of Utah in 1969 was Nolan Bushnell, who went on develop Pong and found Atari, which became one of the leading publisher of graphics-based games for arcade machines and offered the leading home platform, the Atari 2600 by 1977.

While Spacewar and Pong are quite different in game-play, these early graphics-based games have a number of similarities: (1) story is secondary to manipulation via joystick or other controller of simple graphic elements; (2) success is based on very specific skills, often repeated and intensified as the game proceeds; (3) the game almost always ends with defeat at some level, so achievement is largely determined by score; (4) conducive to multiplayer competition, either direct opposition or rotation of rounds to compare scores; (5) technology is largely based on graphics and audio effects

Other categories as spinoffs

Puzzles, Mazes, "Platform" and simple Arcade Games -- graphics-based games based on different design principles. Lead to innovations such as side-scrollers (the Mario games) and other formats more conducive to linear development and story-telling on video platforms.

Strategy/Wargames/RTS/"God" Games -- key early titles include Hammurabi (resource-management simulation), Tanktics (military simulation), and M.U.L.E./Seven Cities of Gold by Dan Bunten (resource management, negotiation, exploration). Intersections of military simulations, resource management, and graphics games in the mid- to late 1980s lead to Realtime Strategy (RTS) genre with games like Dune and eventually Command & Conquer, Warcraft, etc.

Simulations (incl. Sports/Fighting) -- Graphics games introduce elements such as first-person perspective, "realism" in effort to immerse the player in an environment or activity, but also borrows from strategy genres that emphasized resource management. Includes "God games" such as the Maxis line of Sims, sports games, tank and aircraft simulators, etc. An important sub-category are business and scientific simulations, esp. John Conway's "Game of Life," a 2-d simulation of cellular automata invented by Conway and popularized in Martin Gardner's Scientific American column in 1970.

Other (Educational, cardgame conversions, trivia games), etc.

3. Readings

Zoiner Tejada & Dale Neal -- Crawford

John Tannaci and Ryan Barrett -- Postmortem

Matt Waddell -- Jones

Some random quotes for discussion:

Crawford

The computer game has emerged as the prime vehicle for this medium. The computer game is an art form because it presents its audience with fantasy experiences that stimulate emotion.

A game creates a fantasy representation. not a scientific model.

Pace and cognitive effort combine to yield game play.

As I mentioned earlier, the computer's ability to calculate is a strength, but it's I/0 is a weakness.

The opposite direction of development (from programmer to designer) will not work, for programmers are made but artists are born.

The I/O structure is the most important of the three structures in a computer game, for it is the face of file game that the player sees.

Artistic maturation will be the dynamo that drives the computer games industry.

<genres: skill & action vs. strategy>

AOE Postmortem

Since its release two years ago in the great real-time strategy (RTS) wars of 1997,

It didn't matter that other popular RTS games had pathfinding that was just as bad, or that our AIs didn't cheat and theirs did - we weren't going be judged against them, but rather against ourselves.

The computer-player AI from AOE was thrown out, and a new, expert-system, script-based Al was developed.

the need to make transition tiles by hand limited the game to four terrain textures.

1.We still don't have a patch process

Jones, Learning

Strategy games are ones in which the user must employ higher order thinking skills and problem solving skills to continue playing and win the game.

Twitch Manes are games in which the user must react quickly to circumstances, usually by killing someone, to continue playing and win the game.