Spore Hates your Macbook

I was just talking with a friend of mine, who was really, really excited about spore.  He even got a new computer to play it, just a year ago.

The thing is, my friend got a macbook, and if you have a macbook made earlier than late 2007, no Spore for you.

The problem is that until late 2007, Apple was making Macbooks with the GMA 950 graphics card embedded, after which it was upgraded to the GMA X3100.  Spore explicitly does not support the GMA 950.  I told you that you should have bought a PC.  None of the Macbook Pro line have this issue.

That said, I think this is more a Maxis fail than an Apple fail.  They’ve got like, 4 video cards guys, you couldn’t support one that was brand new in the system less than a year ago?  Fail, and fail hard.

[Update] If you run Windows XP in Boot Camp, however, it runs fine.  This seems to just be an issue with the GMA 950 on OS X.  Isn’t that interesting.

[Update]: xkcd brings up a solution for Mac Owners:

Spore

Just a little note to all my friends who don’t read gaming literature every moment of their life, Spore comes out today.  You might want to go get it.  That is all.

The Electronic Arts Revival

Once upon a time, I was a wee lad in college applying for internships.  I had an interview with EA over the phone, at the end of which they asked me if I had any questions.  I asked them what they thought they were doing to advance the medium of Video Games.

They didn’t like that so much.

See, inherent in a question like that is the implication that I don’t really think you ARE doing anything to advance the medium, because if I did, I wouldn’t have needed to ask.  The interviewers mumbled something about graphics, and we ended the interview there, neither of us being particularly impressed with the other.  I went to go work for Microsoft instead, which eventually resulted in my position with Xbox now.

EA has in the past decade purchased and then eviscerated some of the most best and most promising studios the world had to offer.  In addition to this lovely practice, they had the unfortunate habit of working their employees to death and discarding their burnt out husks, primarily on insipid franchises which change only incrementally from year to year, and yet are released for full price.

John Riccitiello said he was going to turn this around.  Apparently I’ve assumed that CEOs and Politicians seems to share the trait of spewing whatever bullshit the public wants to hear, but it seems EA has actually gone and done it.

Dead Space, above, looks scary and fucking awesome.  Do you know that this game is banned in three countries?  That’s a far cry from the policies of the old EA.  Spore (say no more) comes out on Sunday.  Mirror’s Edge, a critically acclaimed first person runner, is a game that does not contain the color green.  BattleForge is an RTS that uses a collectible card game mechanic to drive gameplay (through micro-transactions even).

EA, you’ve either totally lost your shit, or you’re starting a Renaissance.  Either way, I forgive your past sins, and I look forward to what you’ve got to say for yourself in the future.

Spore Release Date Announced

September 7, 2008.  Mark your calendars.

Exclusive: Will Wright on Emergent Game Design (Part 1)

This is a multi-part post.  Jump to:

Part 2

One of the lovely things about working for Microsoft is that really cool people show up from time to time. Last week Microsoft Research brought Will Wright in to talk about Emergence, Dynamics, and Design. Unfortunately the talk is Microsoft internal, so I can’t post the slides or any video clips. I did however obtain Will’s permission to write whatever I like about his talk and to use “head shots” from the video, so without further ado…

There was an article put on Gamasutra a few weeks ago on Design Cognition, and on the concept of bottom-up vs. top-down design cognition. While Gilliard and Rafael are trying to touch on things on the meta-design level - how we think about game design - it’s interesting to note that few are the number of games actually produced in a bottom up manner. While the example of Doom is cognitively bottom up in the sense that the entire game exists as an exhibition for the features, I highly doubt it was actually designed in a bottom-up manner.

In fact, I doubt there are very many games designed in a bottom-up manner, Will Wright really being the only designer that comes to mind who does this on a regular basis. Will’s design philosophy stems greatly from emergence - a concept he claimed to learn primarily from playing Go, playing with cellular automata, and ants. This really struck a chord with me, being something of an Evolutionary Biology fan myself.

The concept behind emergence is that by creating some very simple rules and letting them interact with each other, you can get very complex pheonmena to emerge from this.

Ants are an excellent example of this, and much of the first half of Will’s talk focused on some of the particulars of the way ants behave, and how each individual ant obeys very stupid, simple rules, but these rules cause the colony as a whole to act in an intelligent manner. An example of this Will used was that ant larva need to be fed different things at different stages of their growth. To do this efficiently, they need to be sorted. Sorting is a rather advanced concept, but an emergent sorting algorithm occurs in ant colonies by the following mechanism. At the different stages, larva produce a different smell. When an ant comes upon a larvae, if the smell it emits is different than the surrounding area, the ant will pick the larva up. The ant will then wander around essentially randomly until it comes upon an area that smells the same as that larvae, where it will drop it. This simple rule applied across each individual ant in the colony will result in the larva being sorted into like piles.

This is just one example of an emergent phenomenon of several he gave (and if you’re interested in more, you should certainly read up on the fascinating little creatures). The question then is how does this come into play in game design. If you view a game as a possibility space, the act of playing the game is centered on the exploration of this space. Once the space has been explored to the extent the player is willing to spend their time on, they will burn-out on the game and cease to play. It has been incumbent upon designers over time to enlarge the possibility space as much as possible while retaining a high quality experience. This drive for high quality content has ballooned development budgets and staff requirements by orders of magnitude over the last several years causing relatively little increase in the size of that possibility space, and in many cases a shrinkage. Will views what I’ll refer to as Emergent Design as a method for creating extremely large possibility spaces without a comparable development cost.

The major problem with emergence is that it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to design for with any accuracy. The designer brings to bear several game mechanics and allows them to interact in various ways. For example, in conway’s game of life, there are only four rules:

1. Any cell with less than 2 neighbours alive dies
2. Any cell with more than 3 neighbours alive dies
3. Any living cell with 2 or 3 neighbours stays alive
4. Any dead cell with exactly 3 neighbours comes to life

From just looking at these rulesets, it’s nearly impossible to tell whether this game will be fun, what the emergent strategies or phenomena will be, or anything else about it. It behooves us to find a mechanism to determine this. In nature, successful genes are those that are able to maintain their existence in a competitive environment. There are no rules that apply to genetics to determine fitness, no fitness function. The only way to determine fitness in life is by allowing it to occur.

The hard part then becomes what the best way is to go about doing this. Upon asking him about this, Will said there were two key components: Smart Interns, and creating many prototypes. The interns create and playtest many, many prototypes in the possibility space of the games they could make. When making Spore, approximately 200 prototypes were made, 60% of which were complete garbage.

Even if it’s not possible to determine the end result in an emergent system, throwing darts at the wall randomly is not an incredibly efficient system. In his many years of experience, Will has noticed certain patterns that he’s adapted into a toolkit to refine the ’search space’ of possible games he wants to make, thus making the likelihood of any given prototype revealing fun gameplay more likely. I’ll share some of these insights in part two.

Tarot

When most people think of SPORE, they think of the character builder.  This is something which instantly jumps to mind, putting the power of Maya in the hands of the multitudes.  When I think of SPORE (and I suspect anyone who works in the industry), I think of procedural interaction.  There is some concern that many of the best and brightest new talent are being pulled into the vortex of Will Wright’s project, and that they will remain forever guarded within the boundaries of EA, shackled to a project which will be ultimately anti-climatic from a sales perspective.  I must admit, considering the continual delays SPORE has being enduring, much of the excitement it once evoked has somewhat worn away.

What I would like to see is the tools that make the procedural interaction of player-generated content possible be made available to the public, although I know coming from EA this is probably a pipe-dream.  Perhaps if sales are not what they would like them to be, EA would at least consider licensing the technology out.  To me, SPORE is a tech-demo (an impressive one) of that technology, and I think they’ve done a disservice to themselves by announcing it so far before it was released (and giving away much of the structure of the gameplay as well).  I feel like I’ve seen the game played in demos so many times now that it’s not fresh and exciting.  What I do think is exciting is the possibilities for the technology if it ever gets out into the world.

I’ve been playing the wonderful GROW series of games by Japanese Game Designer ON.  In these Flash-based games, the player chooses from a list of items (shapes, objects, elements) and places them into a world.  The longer each item exists on the world (in terms of turns), the more that item will grow.  The trick is that elements also interact with each other, sometimes in a positive, and sometimes in a negative way.  The purpose of the game is to place the items in such an order that they all grow to their maximum potential.  What is interesting about it is that significantly different things may occur to a given item depending on the presence and state of other objects at any given time.  While GROW is, I’m relatively sure, scripted with case statements, I wonder about the possibilities for the procedural technology behind SPORE if mixed up with Mr. ON.

Which brings me to an idea I tentatively refer to as Tarot.  Tarot Cards have long enchanted me (from a symbolic, not divinitory standpoint).  I suspect the presence of such items as Tarot cards, tea leaf reading, the I Ching, etc. in nearly every culture since the dawn of time speaks to a certain presence of the desire for symbolic interpretation in humanity.  This suggests to me that the symbols present in these mediums represent what Daniel Dennett would refer to as a “Good Trick”, although I’m not sure I understand exactly what the trick is.  What I do understand, however, is that Good Tricks can be exploited if you know how to hook into them.  Games are a fundamental part of the human condition for this precise reason, as they exploit evolutionary responses which have become prevelant everywhere in our species.

Tarot Cards are a method by which some game designers create free-association in order to generate story.  What Tarot would do is combine near ubiquitous symbols such as those found in Tarot or Jungian Psychology, and allow the player to apply them in a more direct way.  At the beginning of the game, the player would choose cards from a Tarot-like deck, either at random or by choice, and a game experience would then be proceedurally generated from those choices.  Content would have to be built in such a way that it was aware of possible interactions with other content, depending on the role it was to play.  Gameplay would still be built in a structured way,  so that the game would always be, say, an RPG, but the particulars would change with every game.  The challenge would be in building it in such a way that the particulars were always compelling, or even better, that one game would build on another.  It would be imporant that the game was not always the same, with the roles substituted, but the presence of one card versus another would radically shift an element of the game world.  The most correct selection of type of world would seem to be an open format, such as Oblivion, only more tightly constrained.  Elements of the game world would persist from story to story, but be gilded or tainted by the choice of cards in the initial sequence.

An additional difficulty would by in marketing this work.  Even if one could create proceedurally generated and compelling gameplay, it would be difficult to know what marketing approach would be best, other than perhaps the standard Peter Molyneux technique of “This is the best RPG ever made”.  Diverging too strongly from an established medium is generally not a good sales technique, but then if a medium is truely to be an artform, sometimes you need to put that on the back burner.

Design Concepts

A few days ago, Gamasutra put out the eight edition of the annual classic, Bad Designer, No Twinkie.

There is much that is good in that article, and a quick perusal will have you nodding your head at half the games you’ve played.  I particularly like the segment on Failure to provide short-term goals.  This particular problem is one which has caused much frustration in and about my person, and has been the single cause of my inability to complete several games.  Part of a game is guiding the player through an experience - Not spoon feeding it to her - but some direction is expected.  There are games (mostly orbiting the celestial entity that is Will Wright) which set out specifically to allow the player as much freedom and to deny specific goals at all.  This is a somewhat different matter, as the gripes entailed by the above refer specifically to scenarios under which a specific goal exists, but the goal is not adequately presented to the player.  Nevertheless, it’s a dangerous game to play (although one Will plays very well), because there is a difference between allowing the player to define their own goals, and providing no direction on goals whatsoever.   This is something I’ve wondered about with Spore (Remember Spore?).  I’ve just watched the video from the 2007 Leipzig Game Conference, and the game certainly looks more visually polished than it did a year ago, but there’s no new magical reveals on content or gameplay.  Spore is an interesting beast because it’s less a game and more a toy.  The difference between the two really are that toys are something you play with, to explore the possibility space of your imagination.  Even so, this possibility space is limited by the structure of the software, and if no hints or direction are given as to the ways in which you can explore that space, one can get frustrated easily (not that I anticipate that will happen in this case).

I’m not sure I entirely agree with the argument for Amnesia though.  This can, if done properly and occasionally be a powerful technique (a film example would be in Memento, a game example would be Bioforge), but it needs to be the focus of the work, and it’s difficult to pull off.  This is at odds with the number of games which employ the technique.

Eight years of Twinkie Denial can be found at Ernest Adams’ No Twinkie Database.