The concept of the digital divide reminds us that most of the people on this planet still have no access to the society-reshaping technologies that we take for granted. Many noble efforts have taken aim at this problem.
I couldn’t help but think about our slice of that much larger challenge. Specifically:
How do we significantly increase the percentage of earth’s population that makes games?
I’ll explain later why I think this issue is of critical importance to the future of games, but first here are some ideas.
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Mildly surprising fact: I’m quite content with the low frequency of posts on this blog, and I realized the explanation was non-obvious. I’ve actually had this post in the works for months now, but as usual something random comes along that brings things into sharp focus. A theme is brewing, dear readers.
Fellow 2K Marin designer Steve Gaynor wrote recently about getting his work out into the world, and how it seems like an endpoint of sorts for all the things he’s written on his blog. A quick aside: the Minerva’s Den DLC for Bioshock 2 was led by Steve, and features many excellent contributions from my wife. Everyone involved with that project has a lot to be proud of. I wasn’t directly involved, so it’s the first piece of Bioshock I’ve ever been able to play unspoiled.
I find it interesting where the ideas in Minerva’s Den overlap (or don’t) with Steve’s writing. I’ve worked with him for a few years now, but when I played the DLC and especially the level he was the primary implementor on, I felt like I finally understood deeply what makes him tick as a designer.
Thus, my main point: I grow increasingly convinced that game designers who blog have an obligation to validate their theory with practice.
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This post is intended as a companion piece for the release of Arcadia Demade.
A high-minded goal like “expand the boundaries of the medium” doesn’t always mean forging ahead in crazy new unknown directions. Sometimes it means examining lost evolutionary lines in game design – picking up ideas that were abandoned long ago and seeing if there’s any new life in them. The game I keep coming back to in this regard is Doom. Not the 2004 reboot, but “Classic Doom”: Doom 1 and 2, Final Doom, the Master Levels – and its vast universe of user-made content. What can it teach us today?
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Typically when you ship a big game you get some time off to relax, take a step back and enjoy life.
Of course, I had to do something very silly with some of this time. So I did a remake of a BioShock level for… wait for it… Doom 2.
Inspired partly by TIGSource’s amazing Bootleg Demakes Competition, I used a modern Doom level editor called SLADE to recreate Arcadia and the Farmer’s Market, the sections of BioShock on which I was the primary designer. It’s a monster of a level, crammed full of weird little BioShock-to-Doom transmutations and symbolism. If you’re a fan of either game, I hope you enjoy it.
Download the map from here. Inside the ZIP are a standard format Doom WAD readme, instructions on how to get it running on modern systems, and some designer commentary on both the construction of the original map and the Doom demake.
To complement this release, I’ve also posted a design analysis of classic Doom, just as I threatened to a while back. Read it here:
Coelacanth: Lessons from Doom
So, we shipped Bioshock 2. That’s good. Next month, the world will finally tell us whether we did a good job.
Now: resting up, rolling on to a cool new project. Making a DOOM map on the weekends.
Stay tuned. In the meantime, read some words Bruce Sterling spoke almost 20 years ago:
The Wonderful Power of Storytelling
Do you remember this place?
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1]
This isn’t a standard “old fogey remembers classic game fondly” post though. Ultima IV’s tremendous influence and importance aside, I think for players looking back on it from today, it now exemplifies a value that is quite rare in most modern games: encouragement of the player to engage by using their imagination.
What does this mean though? What does a game that fosters “imaginative engagement” look, sound and play like in 2009?
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As of 2009, the game industry seems to want two fairly contradictory [1] things:
- Make games, using proven mechanics from the last 20 years, that sell millions of copies.
- Give people a broad range of experiences that affect them as powerfully as those found in other forms of art.
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A co-worker recently sent along an email from a friend asking an age old question, “How do I get a job doing level design?” I’ve been picking away at a response to this for a few weeks now, and weirdly enough Steve just put up a similar post addressing the same question on his blog. His has more specific “get your first industry job” advice, mine is maybe more “how to learn to think like a designer”… for whatever that’s worth. Here’s what I wrote.
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I was on another one of those “MP3 recordings of radio-format shows” recently:
http://www.idlethumbs.net/
Lots of boisterous nerdiness and interrupting of each other to talk about progressively more obscure old game music. If I meet any of you in real life, I promise not to interrupt you in the middle of a sentence. If I do, I am the ultimate jerk of the planet.
Maybe another new post coming soon.
Hey neat, a mention on GameSetWatch and IGN. Welcome, new visitors!
Anyways, small is beautiful because lately it’s all I have time for. I’ve set up a project at Google Code to house some of the little prototypes I’ve been messing with during the past month… simple, 2D things where I get to dig around for interesting mechanics. It’s very gratifying to be able to get something new and potentially cool on-screen after only a few hours of work, and I recommend it. I’ll put up builds for download here for anything that pans out.
My current projects use PyGame, which integrates the Python language with SDL for graphics, sound and input – quite capable for this sort of work. There’s also LÖVE which does a similar thing with LUA, and of course the cool kids seem to be using GameMaker these days. Flash is as vibrant and viable as ever, and XNA seems to be getting good if you don’t mind being locked into certain platforms.
Hope everyone’s had a good 2008, and congrats to all the IGF finalists!
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