Blog - On Constraints:

Sunday, April 13, 2008

Another thought that popped into my head during a lecture at GDX is on the subject of constraints.

Although, in retrospect, I think Brenda might have mentioned this observation I'm about to make in class before, and at the very least it is suggested in her article: "The Game Design Game".


The observation is this: game designers create mechanics, which are rules. These rules constrain the player, but it is those constraints which inspire creative, spontaneous play. They play within the rules and in reaction to them, exploring.
But the same is true of game development: all games have some kind of constraints on them during development: deadlines, budget, platform, etc.

As a game development student you are given even further constraints in order to experiment, and you begin to learn that the more constraints on you, the easier it becomes to design.
The constraints demand creativity and inspire.

If you look at some of the design challenges designers give themselves in order to stay sharp or experiment or learn, they often give themselves bizarre and arbitrary constraints, like randomly generating the subject matter for a game and giving themselves only 30 minutes to punch out a design. In Brenda's Game Criticism class we were given tons of these little design challenges, with all kinds of constraints:
-Make a game using 100 cards.
-Make a game with a random selection of items from a box of junk.
(Our group got a stopwatch, a toy train, a doll and a pen, and had 10 minutes to invent a game with them...)
-Make a game based on a randomly selected topic.
(Our group got Canada! We made a game about the lumber industry there...)
-Make a game that makes a player feel a specific emotion.
(How Rats came to be...)

etc.

It's telling that my weakest game project from that class (besides maybe Lumber Wars, our Canada game, only because it never actually got finished...)
was our final game project which had no constraints on it other than the deadline (and well, student projects inherently have a pretty restrictive budget as well.)
We were invited to create our own restraints.


And because I'm in my kick of analyzing improvisational games for theater in my game design studies, I can note a recent observation a member of my improv club made. He said our group was the strongest at the games that challenged us the most.
It was at those moments where we were most spontaneous and therefore the most funny.
Again, the constraints inspired creative, spontaneous play.

Some improv games have some real doozies when it comes to constraints:
-in "Two Line Vocabulary" some of the actors can only speak using a choice of one of two lines, forced to make those lines make sense in any given context.
-in "Number of Words" the actors are each assigned a number, and all of their lines must contain only that number of words. Again, you have to try to follow that while still making sense in context.
And perhaps the most insidious:
-"Three Rules", where the audience comes up with three rules the actors have to follow at all times during the scene. The audience is malicious, however, and occasionally comes up with some pretty diabolical rules...
not being able to use certain letters or the word "the" is pretty popular and particularly evil, for example.

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posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 12:06 PM  0 Comments Links to this post



Blog - Improv and Games: Scaling Issues

Wednesday, April 9, 2008

As I mentioned before, I like to think about how improvisational acting and games are related, as, well, I do both at school. I've been running SCAD's Improv Club for a couple years now and was involved with a touring improv troupe long before that.

In any case, I think improvisational performance is a good resource for people interested in game design. After all, it does deal with how participants, both actors and to a lesser degree the audience, can interact with a dynamic story.

Not to mention that improvisational performances are games in their own right, which is a topic I plan on discussing eventually.

In any case, given as I have a lot to say on improv and games, it will become another sort of series for this blog: 'Improv and Games' (just follow the label "improv").


This one is on what improvisational theater can teach about scaling.

You'll note I did talk about scaling issues involved with using improv in digital games in the blog post of mine I linked to above, and also in its follow-up post.

However, this post is more about the scaling issues in improv games themselves.

It was brought to light in my mind as today in my Digital Art and Culture class we had a discussion on an excerpt we had read from Brenda Laurel's Computers as Theatre. The discussion at one point lead to how, if audience is to interact with a story, to keep everything from falling apart (a question tackled by game writer/designers all the time). You know, with those damn players and their agency screwing up our beautiful works of art. ;)

I mentioned in the discussion my experience with improv and how improv handles such problems.
My professor made a very good point though in response where he said that he found when he has worked with actors or those in theater on a performance that involved improvisation, that the more people added into the mix, the more difficult it got to coordinate.

This should not be a foreign concept to anyone in game development, as it is not only true for the development team itself, but in game design there is the concept of scaling: How well the game can support different numbers of players.

It is a phenomenon I experience in many of my games, during testing, but has been most powerfully true with Project Loyola, being as that one is massively multiplayer. That's a whole different and rather scary animal.



Now, most game designers know that games can teach.
Improv games are indeed used as teaching tools (if not directly constructed for that purpose, although I'd assume they are), so the participants can learn the craft of acting (often just to learn to become better at improv itself, ironically.)

One game that it interesting to look at in regards to scaling is the improv game "Superheroes", which is a great tool for teaching improv performers how to deal with keeping control, especially in the face of scaling issues.
I've picked that game to discuss here, as many of you might already be familiar with that one as it is often used in the popular show Whose Line is it Anyway?.

For those unfamiliar: One actor starts, and the audience provides the fictional superhero identity for that actor (let's say Cheese Man for our example) as well as the crisis that Cheese Man and the other heroes will have to solve. The scene begins and the actor will first improvise a bit to introduce the audience to his own personal clever interpretation of what a superhero called Cheese Man might be, and then quickly discovers the crisis (the inciting incident, so to speak.)

At that point, another actor will jump into the scene. Actor 1 (Cheese Man, in our example) will announce some variation of "Thank God you're here ___!" with the blank being filled by a spontaneous superhero identity for actor 2 (like "Sir Cries-a-lot", or something). This pattern is followed for a while, where the previous actor gives a spontaneous new identity to each new actor as they join the scene, until the last actor's spontaneously generated superhero character (traditionally) devises a solution to the problem (that often involves all the bizarre characters in the scene.)
With crisis solved, one by one all the actors make their exit, in the reverse-order by which they appeared, until the original actor (Cheese Man, in our example) wraps up the scene.

Now, having run this game enough times as the host of a club of amateur improv enthusiasts, it is interesting to see what happens with the final actor who enters the scene.
This is, although few people realize it until they have plenty of experience with the game, because that actor is the central peg upon which the game succeeds or fails -not the first actor.
(Ironically, it is usually the least experienced player who gets the part of this critical final actor, because they're less confident about their abilities so they wait to jump into the scene until they're the only one left...)

The reason the last player in this game is critical is, as you may have guessed, a matter of scaling. They not only have to fight more for their audience attention amidst the chaos of all the other actors in the scene, but also have to coordinate all those other actors towards a solution, advancing the story, allowing the scene to end.
Time and time again, I've seen this actor fail at herding the other actors to a solution, making for a game which drags on at this point, and falls apart.

It is also telling just see the dynamics of how improv games succeed and fail (and where they succeeded or failed) compared to how many players play in that particular game. Games with two actors "play" differently than those with three, four, etc. More than four and less than two (solo/monologue scenes) actors are the most difficult scenes to maintain.

That, however, is why "Superheroes" is interesting as it is one of the few games (although not the only one) that runs the entire range of scaling. It starts as the ever difficult one-actor scene, adds another actor for a "two player" scene, then three, then four, then up to the again difficult five, etc. Then, it works its way one by one back down into a one-actor scene. All the while, the dynamics of scaling are shifting, throbbing and changing.
As an outside observer or participant you can witness how these dynamics effect the game for better (for example at two/three actors how they play off one another to build the scene or comedy) or for the worse (the struggle for the final actor to tug the scene towards its conclusion).

"Superheroes" and the nature of the final actor in the scene may even present a kind of law: the more players in the game, the more powerful a facilitator is needed to manage those players.
The final actor in a game of "Superheroes" is intended to be the facilitator, although if ineffective, another actor must step up and take on the role.

Most improv games, however, don't have any one facilitator, and ask all players to collaboratively manage the game. (Coincidentally, that is what a game like "Superheroes" is used to teach: how to bring or maintain order in a scene)
For one other great example, look at the improv game "Entrances and Exits", which I choose as a specific example here because the entire core of that game is about how players enter and leave the game, shifting the dynamics as they shift the number of players in the game.
The players themselves are in charge of how many players are in the game at any one point, particularly when an actor chooses to leave the game on their own. (Interestingly, the mechanics of the game dictate that an actor can't return to the game on their own: another actor has to bring them in. This causes some of the weirder dynamics of that particular game.)

So yeah, there's some food for thought for you, fellow game designers.
Just one of many examples to come where I'll talk about what improvisational theater can teach about designing games.

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posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 5:24 PM  0 Comments Links to this post



Blog - More on live teams...

Friday, February 8, 2008

As an addendum to my entry from early this morning:

Checking back on the Writer's SIG's mailing list, the discussion on live teams in MMOs rages on. Not only has someone who has written for The Matrix Online's live team posted on the email thread, but now someone who was part of Shadowbane's live team as well (also since disbanded.) That person then mentioned that live teams who run events in such a way are an expensive cost that's hard to justify if they're worth it.

And for MMOs, maybe it is. It requires your MMO stay small, and even a small MMO is too big for it to be practical, as is perhaps indicated with the fact that the Matrix Online and Shadowbane's live teams didn't last. (Although as to the note of if it's worth justifying the cost, it was when the Matrix Online was bought out when the live team was disbanded, and coincidentally the same time most of their player base dropped out, from what I understand...)

However, I'd be interested to see the type of game Urban Interactive runs put into virtual 3d space, rather than MMOs. Their game worlds are not persistent, but rather run large amounts of smaller player groups through a smaller game experience. When I did my gig with Urban Interactive, I only saw groups of maybe up to 10 players at a time, but If I remember correctly I saw 400 players overall over the course of that one day. Again, this is still a tiny player base compared to, say, WoW. But Urban Interactive seems to be doing pretty well with the player base they get for their games... games don't all have to be WoW-huge.

In any case, the use of trained improv actors to help players control an interactive story is one that interests me. It allows for a tabletop RPG kind of experience where a real person can help work with the players to control the flow of a game and its story. That which is often lacking in digital games. The main problem really is those major scaling issues...

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posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 10:58 AM  0 Comments Links to this post



Blog - Improv Acting in Games


I happen to run my school's improvisational comedy club.
I used to be in a touring improv troupe many years ago, and when I got to this school was glad to find a student group for that. I worked my way up and got promoted to president of the club eventually.

In any case, I've been thinking about this recently because on the IGDA Writer's SIG mailing list, someone mentioned machinima, which I can at least claim to be knowledgeable about, so I piped up with a discussion on that.
I mentioned that although machinima is not interactive in its usual form, hypothetically speaking one could combine the machinima live-actor-controls-avatar aesthetic using a trained improv actor in order to run interactive stories in a virtual world.

This lead to a discussion on live teams in smaller MMORPGs doing just that, which I was not aware was done (admittedly, I'm rather behind in trying MMOs...) In most MMORPGs, it would be wildly impractical. WoW is just too huge to afford enough actors per server to cover all the users. Apparently the Matrix Online used the technique, however, to great success until they were bought out and apparently the practice was no longer continued at the new company. It's especially interesting as one of the team members was there to give first hand experience on writing for the actors. Neat!

Admittedly, even I have had the opportunity to use my improv acting skills in game development. Because of my role as head of the improv club, I was contacted by Urban Interactive and did an acting gig for one of their games they happened to do down here in Savannah (I was a pirate who gave players riddles to solve.) It was likely a great connection for the future, particularly as they're based out of Boston, where I have some ties to now thanks to my work with Emagination. Particularly as now thanks to Project Loyola, I'll have ARG experience which is sort of like what they do... and hey, they do hire game designers!

In any case, I find it interesting that having a background in improv is a skill that is actually applicable to game development, despite what one might first think. And admittedly, until AI vastly improves, improv actors are likely the only way to get true interactive storytelling in games. So there's potential there, although it does require the game to have a rather small user-base.

Coincidentally, as I'm also interested in narrative design, having a background in improv helps immensely, as in improv one of the best skills you can adopt is the ability to tell a story on the fly. Doing so requires you internalize story structure in your head in order to actually, completely off-the-cuff with other people, take the audience through a complete (if very brief) 3-act story.

Expect more from me on the topic of where improv and game development coincide. I think about it often.

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posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 3:15 AM  0 Comments Links to this post