Oh, an email!

You can watch the high-res version of this video on the official Dead Space page.

Important lessons to learn for game development (and many other walks of life).

Kotaku has the full story with additional commentary.

With this said, I won’t get into the habit of writing about every little future Dead Space 2 snippet (non-official, no less) that makes it onto the internet. But since it’s the first moving footage of the game, and a scene from one of the levels that I’m working on (I don’t deserve credit for the implementation of this particular sequence, though), and I’m happy to link to it. Hope it gets your imagination going, and thinking about the possibilities.

Tim Stellmach, veteran game designer of many esteemed titles, weighs in on the topic of environmental storytelling. Using our GDC session as a starting point, he digs deeper into the idea of systemic environmental storytelling:

“See, for me, the interesting thing about this so-called ‘Systemic Environmental Storytelling’ is that it transfers authorship from the designer to the player. In fact, it has the potential to do so via emergent gameplay behavior, which gives it far more potential for player agency and self-expression than the scripted moments of ‘regular’ Environmental Storytelling.”

It’s a good article, I suggest you go read for yourself! On a different, yet very related tangent, Fantasy Heartbreaker (a blog dedicated to playing D&D “right”) published an article which applies concepts from our talk to the world of pen & paper roleplaying. It’s called Dangerous Archeology:

Smith and Worch are, of course, addressing video games, but their analysis has a lot to offer classic dungeoneering. [...] Environmental story isn’t just the communication of information, it’s another way in which the imaginations of the players and the GM interact. The process is, fundamentally, archaeological: the players unearth the world piece by piece and invest it with meaning from their own speculations and experiences.

It’s great to see both articles expand on the foundation that we tried to lay at GDC. One of the reasons that Harvey and I wanted to do this talk was a feeling that this is a topic many people deeply care about, yet that had been overlooked at previous GDCs.

Not to be outdone, our GDC level design tutorial receives comprehensive coverage on the WorldOfLevelDesign page. Sylvain Douce is covering the entire tutorial in a series of articles, the second of which is a detailed writeup of my session on my session on “Core Space Creation”:

The role of a level designer is to create gameplay through environments and systems. But the task is quite demanding since the gameplay implemented must be meaningful. If it’s not, the game is boring. The play must not feel arbitrary! Try to get all of the game systems connected together: the player can influence more than one of them with a single ability (e.g. the water in Bioshock which can be electrified with the corresponding plasmid).

It’s a good writeup for everybody who wasn’t able to make the tutorial. Admittedly, my session was superficial on a bunch of topics, because I tried to lay the groundwork on (too?) many topic for the rest of the day. But I think it’s a good introduction to 3D action level design.

Amazing evocation of emotion in four simple panels. I’d love to attribute credit, but I don’t know where this fake strip originated from (I found out about via Harvey’s Twitter feed).

This is a great speech by Ken Miller about the dangers of the anti-evolution movement in America, and the very real danger that they pose to our education system. In the process, he presents conclusive proof of evolution (as if we needed any more) and rips apart the reasoning behind intelligent design. It’s almost two hours of video, but half of that is taken up by the QA session. Even that part is well worth watching all the way through.

It would be easy to react cynically to this historical parallel, to the effect of “oh boy, look how far we’ve come as an industry!” If a couple of pre-teens could come up with the mechanic in the 80s, shouldn’t today’s multi-million dollar games do better? But, if framed correctly, there’s meaningful gameplay in these button mashing minigames. That is true for three reasons:

Investment
Button mashing sequences are often connected to high-stakes, high-reward situations, with the player very interested in the result. In God of War, the player mashes a button to kill off various enemies (often by ripping them apart.) In Dead Space, the player mashes A to escape from grappling Necromorphs. Both situations are high impact; in the first the enemy gets back up and continues to attach the player if he fails, in the latter the attacking enemy quickly drains the player’s health which, if not shaken off, results in his eventual death. The player is heavily invested in the outcome of each situation, and this investment adds meaning to the mechanically simple action.

Approximation
Most avatar actions are mapped to controllers in a necessarily arbitrary and optimized fashion. To make the avatar run, the player isn’t required to engage in a similarly taxing activity; instead, he simply pushes the stick forward. But button mashing, when mapped to acts of physical strength as in the games above, is a good player approximation of the avatar’s physical exertion. For the player, it’s an intense burst of physical interaction with the controller that, much like the avatar’s action, requires physical commitment as well as a change in posture – buttons cannot be pressed quickly enough with the thumb, so the player usually shifts his hand to use the index finger. In this context, button mashing gains meaning by modeling the game action on the controller, bridging the gap between player and avatar.

Evaluation
One element of engaging gameplay is the player’s constant (re)assessment of his interactions with the game. This evaluation also happens during button mashing. Because the sequences are limited to a short duration (allowing the player to mentally time these sequences), and because the stakes are so high, the player is intensely focused on the action. Is my mashing affecting something? Am I pressing quickly enough? Can I let up a tiny bit because my fingers are starting to hurt? Is it over yet? Or did I stop too soon? This constant evaluation deeply involves the player, adding additional meaning to the sequence.

Different designers might present more (or different) reasons, but this list seems comprehensive to me. In 2008, Kent Hudson presented a GDC lecture on minigames, measuring several titles, from Oblivion to Splinter Cell, by five criteria: Ease of Understanding, Ease of Use, Immersion, Rewarding of Player Skill and Meaningful Consequences. Kent’s lecture focused on lock-picking minigames, and we might argue that, compared to the examples he used, button mashing lacks a sufficiently broad set of rules and possible player actions to even qualify as a minigame. But if we do measure the Dead Space and God of War examples by Kent’s criteria, the button mashing sequences evaluate surprisingly well:

• Ease of Understanding – High (Pressing a single button in rapid succession, as made very clear by the HUD.)
• Ease of Use – Medium High (Hammering a simple button is a very accessible mechanic, if straining to some.)
• Immersion – High (Player and avatar are locked in the same physical battle, the player is heavily invested in the outcome.)
• Rewarding of Player Skill – Low (This is where the extremely simple mechanic of the minigame reveals itself.)
• Meaningful Consequences – High (The outcome of the sequence has immediate, fundamental effects on the game at large.)

As we can see, even a game that little kids played on their calculator 25 years ago is still a valid design element today, as long as we understand the player psychology behind it. The lessons to take away from this are two-fold:

The context of button-mashing gameplay greatly matters. Only use this mechanic for situations that model the avatar’s physical actions to the controller, and that have an outcome in which the player is heavily invested in. Mapping button mashing to trivial avatar actions of small consequence quickly exposes the mechanic’s shortcomings.
We also see that button mashing sequences need to be limited to a short, predictable number of presses; not only by necessity (the inherent physical strain), but because the restriction provides a clearly defined window that allows the player to anticipate the end of the sequence and evaluate his speed/performance (which builds investment). Sequences of variable duration eliminate the player’s ability to internalize the gameplay action, and anticipate future sequences accordingly.

as a result of the manufacturing process for high-fructose corn syrup, the fructose molecules in the sweetener are free and unbound, ready for absorption and utilization. In contrast, every fructose molecule in sucrose that comes from cane sugar or beet sugar is bound to a corresponding glucose molecule and must go through an extra metabolic step before it can be utilized.

The researchers go on to show that “rats with access to high-fructose corn syrup gained significantly more weight than those with access to table sugar, even when their overall caloric intake was the same”, and conclude that even though

“some people have claimed that high-fructose corn syrup is no different than other sweeteners when it comes to weight gain and obesity, [...] our results make it clear that this just isn’t true, at least under the conditions of our tests”. [...] “When rats are drinking high-fructose corn syrup at levels well below those in soda pop, they’re becoming obese — every single one, across the board. Even when rats are fed a high-fat diet, you don’t see this; they don’t all gain extra weight.”

I’m not on a holy crusade against America’s corn industry, but that pokes conclusive holes into their propaganda and proves something that a lot of us have known intuitively for a while. I used to drink one Coke per day, thinking that by closely monitoring my sugar calorie intake and treating the soda for what it was, candy, I was still maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Maybe I was, but HFCS is ubiquitous. With the evidence mounting, we’ll hopefully return to a life where consumer goods like simple bread aren’t “enriched” with sugars anymore.