Coworking is an awesome concept and I love working here.  A cool benefit of coworking is the ability to collaborate on projects, and that’s what is happening with Neil and I.  A couple weeks later after I saw his simple Flash game, he showed me a prototype of it working on the iPhone, and before I knew it, it was completely ported and more fleshed out.  The game is nearly complete in functionality and design, but he wanted better art for it and help smoothing out a couple kinks.  So I decided to help him out with the art and a little design.

This as-of-yet unnamed iPhone game is an economic strategy game where you must make the most money you can in 30 days fishing for crawfish (slang for spiny lobsters) in the Bahamas.  The game has a couple other modes, including one where you try to make $1 billion as soon as you can and a “daily game” mode where you get the same seeded random events as other players and you see how well your strategy compares with others.  In the game, you place traps in either shallow or deep water, buy more traps, move traps around, and a couple other more minor things.  It’s a pretty fun and simple game.  The part I like the best about it is that random things happen to you while you’re crawfishing, and that combined with the play-through-the-menu style of gameplay really reminds me of playing Oregon Trail.

I’ve heard that Oregon Trail is coming out for the iPhone, but after checking it out online, I was a little disappointed.  The art seems great, but the mini-games seem to take a little too much away from the original feel of Oregon Trail, which was more about using your imagination given suggestive text with simple, low-res illustrations and also about the hunting game of course.  I can’t think of any other way to say it right now other than the fact that the design seemed pure.  There was a purity to it.  The new Oregon Trail seems to have the more recent flavor of casual game-style rewards.  Another way to put that is that it has a lot of extrinsic rewards systems, and fewer intrinsic reward systems.  I might be wrong, and I’m sure the game will still be good, but it’s just plain different from what I remember about Oregon Trail.

And that’s what excites me about Neil’s game – it will focus more on the suggestive text and simple illustrations to create a world that lies within the player’s head.  I don’t know enough about psychology to know what that kind of experience that is called, but I think this game tries to achieve that.  And I’m not saying that games shouldn’t explicitly provide a rich world because it takes away from the one in the imagination, but I’m saying it’s nice to have a simple experience like the one you get from the original Oregon Trail every now and then.  And besides, it’s just plain nostalgic.

So for the past couple weeks, I’ve been creating art for it in a pixel art style.  I’ve had a little taste of making pixel art before, but this project has allowed me to get a lot more familiar with the style, and I’m having a lot of fun.  When will the game be released?  I’m not sure; I suppose part of that will depend on how soon Intuition gets approved as an iPhone developer.  Yep, this collab of God at play and Neil Roberts will likely be Intuition’s first iPhone game.  Woot!

They discussed their stories on developing Aquaria and Goo!, emphasizing how much work development takes, and how it can often be depressing.  Both of them were in a situation where it seemed like the project would never end, and they had to persevere in order to finish.  The whole talk was very candid.  I really admire their boldness to speak on such personal things.

We have a very similar story for the development of Dinowaurs, so I was relieved to know we weren’t the only ones who had gone through this.  It got me thinking that talks like the one they gave provide a very therapeutic benefit to all game developers.  I would imagine it is like the same benefit people get from Alcoholics Anonymous.  I feel we were created to be in community, so it seems natural that sharing our troubles helps us to realize that we’re not alone.  On the outside, everyone else seems so successful, but we all struggle with things on the inside.  It’s comforting to know that.

Ron Carmel (World of Goo) put it best when he said “Alec and Tommy deliver what in my mind (and heart) was the most important and honest talk of the IGS.”  I couldn’t agree more.

The Game Industry of the Early 80s

During the early 80s, we had Atari raking it in with lots of consoles in homes, although they were totally screwing over developers by doing so.  Developers basically didn’t get any of the money, and they certainly weren’t getting the credit they deserved.  As a revolt, some of them formed Activision, with similar goals as EA.  In fact, both companies shipped their games with tasteful album covers to draw the parallel to being an independent music label.

So you have Activision and Electronic Arts both trying to support devs who were doing good things for games.  And then the Great Crash of 1984, caused largely by actions of publisher/manufacturers like Atari, Mattel, Coleco, and Commodore, left the industry in shambles.  As a result, EA resorted to actions that became increasingly different from their manifesto in order to gain the success they desired.

From Software Artists to Engineers

It started out innocently enough.  EA switched its marketing style to promote the game as a brand, and its genre, moreso than the “software artists.”  This apparently made more sense to the customer, who didn’t care as much about individual developers as EA thought.  But of course that was the case because gaming was new and customers didn’t really understand it completely.  Not only that, but the developers themselves hadn’t made too many games yet, so there wasn’t much to care about or relate to at this point.

Therefore, EA “adapted” to focus less on the developer as an artist.  Activision had the same trend, too.  And what happened when they focused less on the developers as artists over time?  They published fewer artistic games.

For EA, this meant continuing to publish more games like One on One, which was a basketball title.  Marketing One on One was easier when it featured people who were already celebrities, like Larry Bird and Julius Erving.  After the crash, EA pursued this direction by publishing several licensed basketball, racing, and baseball games.

This was working out so well, that a few years later EA decided to develop a game in-house – Skate or Die.  No longer would they focus completely on indie developers; they had their own developers to worry about now, too.  Right after this, EA developed John Madden Football, based on founder Trip Hawkins’ passion for football simulation.  The combination of first and third-party titles led to enough success that EA had room to expand.

The obvious next step for expansion was to consoles, like the upcoming Sega Genesis.  By then, EA – or more accurately, its founder Hawkins – had quite a different focus.  Hawkins had to convince the rest of his company, who had up to this point believed in his vision, to go the other direction.  Gamasutra’s History of EA article quotes him as saying,

The goal was to stop making esoteric products for an elite customer base, and go make it in the big-time with mainstream gamers.  Several employees were outraged and quit, but I convinced the team that if the public chose to buy consoles like the Genesis, then to satisfy our customers we had to make the best games possible on the platforms chosen by the public, not the ones our engineers wished they could afford.

Compare this to EA’s manifesto previously advertised:

Why do we cry? Why do we laugh, or love, or smile? What are the touchstones of our emotions?

Until now, the people who asked such questions tended not to be the same people who ran software companies. Instead, they were writers, filmmakers, painters, musicians. They were, in the traditional sense, artists.

Since when did the “touchstones of our emotions” become esoteric?  Isn’t that why books and film are so popular?  And since when did “software artists” become engineers?  It seems that somewhere along the line, Trip Hawkins became one of the “people who ran software companies” that EA’s original manifesto was reacting against.

Was it the crash that caused him to change views?  Was it based on his new experience from leading game development with Madden?  Just simply greed?  What happened?  Maybe someday I’ll really get to the bottom of it.  Until then, I’m left wondering what the world would have been like had Electronic Arts stuck to its original vision.

Pertinent Links:
Part 1 of What Happened to EA?
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20070216/fleming_01.shtml
http://www.edge-online.com/features/a-short-history-of-activision
http://www.edge-online.com/features/a-short-history-electronic-arts

Butterflies & Hurricanes Lyrics

I’ve always enjoyed Butterflies & Hurricanes because of its inspirational mood and appealing mix of rock and classical style.  I could never fully understand the lyrics, and for some reason, I was moved to look them up today.  They are excerpted below:

Change everything you are

And everything you were

Your number has been called

 

Fights and battles have begun

Revenge will surely come

Your hard times are ahead

 

Best, you’ve got to be the best

You’ve got to change the world

And use this chance to be heard

Your time is now

 

Don’t let yourself down

And don’t let yourself go

Your last chance has arrived

 

Best, you’ve got to be the best

You’ve got to change the world

And use this chance to be heard

Your time is now

I’m no musical expert, but to me Muse is creating a metaphor based on chaos theory.  Among other things, the song is drawing a parallel between the ability of a butterfly to change weather patterns and the ability of a human to change the world.  Let me explain.

What is Chaos Theory?

Chaos theory is a field of scientific study dedicated to studying the behavior of complex and dynamical (i.e. chaotic) systems.  It’s absolutely crucial to realize that the word chaos used in this context refers to a deterministic system.  In other words, given the right formulas, one could determine how the system will behave over time.  However, the system is complex enough that its outputs appear to be random over time – even though it isn’t purely random – hence the term deterministic chaos, or just chaos.

The Butterfly Effect

One of three core properties of a chaotic system is that it is sensitive to initial conditions.  This means, roughly speaking, that the points that are close to each other at the initial stages of a system will be greatly different in the future.  This implies that small changes in the points early on will result in very large changes later.  In 1952, Ray Bradbury illustrated the concept in a book about time travel, where he explained that the death of a butterfly during prehistoric times could lead to a much different reality in the future.

Edward Lorenz later reported scientific evidence of this concept while running a weather simulation.  To make things easier for himself, he shortened the decimal .506127 to .506 while inputting values into the simulation, which resulted in a much different output in the weather system.  After doing further study, he reported his findings in a talk Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?, choosing a butterfly as a nod to Bardbury’s book.  Ever since, the butterfly effect has been used to illustrate a core component of chaotic systems.

Using the Butterfly Effect in Game Design

The basic concept behind the butterfly effect is that a very small change early on can have a large impact later.  Because the changes made early on have a large impact, they are meaningful.  However, because the changes made early on are small, they seem meaningless.  This creates a dichotomy where the changes made to the system seem to have much less meaning than they actually do.  In addition, the difference between the perceived meaning and actual meaning is not realized until later.

The game designer can use this dichotomy as a tool in several ways.  If the player makes a wrong choice early on, the player could feel regret later.  If play continued after that regret, the player would be more careful about his decisions the next time around.  This tool is used in the game Jumpman to good effect.  The avatar in Jumpman has little friction, so a small movement causes the player to slide easily.  This is like creating a miniature butterfly effect every time the avatar moves.  As the player progresses through the game, he learns to be very careful about his movements, because one small error could lead the avatar to instant death.

Another way the designer could use this dichotomy is as a way to create hope.  If the player knew the meaning of the actions he made early on, he could gain hope that later those actions would have a large impact that would give him an advantage.  Chess is a good example of this.  Players must move the pawns first in order to free up the more powerful pieces.  This makes the first few moves in a Chess game pretty important.  In fact, expert players will be able to recognize a particular play style by watching the first several moves in a Chess game.  Being able to see the pattern early will help them to understand meaningful moves that could be made later.  This gives the player hope that he can overcome his opponent successfully.

A designer can also use the butterfly effect in the story of a game.  The most obvious way would be force the player to make decisions at certain points in the game, branching the story into alternate versions.  This was made popular by the Choose Your Own Adventure books.  Lately, Daniel Benmergui and Gregory Weir have used this technique in their games I Wish I Were the Moon and (I Fell In Love With) The Majesty of Colors.  Each game gives the player the freedom to explore the consequences of his actions made to the characters and the environment.  Those consequences are played out in short animations as endings to the game.  The final goal of the game is to experience all of the endings.  Both games are pretty small in scope, so the designers have not created a lot of room for the early actions in the game to branch very far and therefore to cause much impact.  The Majesty of Colors takes the concept a little further, and after playing it, one can see how this concept could be extended so that the stories become even more different over time.

I’m sure the best way to create meaning with the butterfly effect is yet to come.  Until then, these directions should be explored further in games.  Doing so just might change the world. . .