GDC11

On Monday morning I got up early and washed my face, took a shower, and got ready for work. The night before I didn’t get much sleep. I dropped my daughter off at her preschool at 8:30 and then quickly made my way to work, where I had an appointment with a game designer I really respect: Swery. He was in town for GDC, and wanted to visit the office. We drank some coffee and walked around, and then around 11 we said goodbye and separately made the drive up to San Francisco.

If you’ve ever visited San Francisco before you have probably seen the Moscone Center. It spans an entire block between 3rd and 4th street, and takes up both sides of Howard street, which cuts the building down the center. Though built in the early 80’s, the Center has the feel of one of those weird ’70s office buildings: squat and wide and built of swaths of bare concrete, the building’s low ceilings and dark interior remind me of some sort of secret bunker. It’s a little out of place in the middle of San Francisco, with the Museum of Modern Art on one side and the Yerba Buena Gardens resting on its back. Upon entering the Center one is immediately directed down a long escalator, and the majority of the venue’s floor space is actually located under ground.

I arrived in San Francisco around noon and proceeded directly into the depths of the Moscone. This is where I would spend most of the week going to meetings, attending lectures, and this year, giving a few lectures of my own. GDC is the kind of conference that might lead to vitamin D deficiency, as there’s almost no opportunity to experience natural light (not that it matters much to the pasty-white complexions of the overwhelmingly male audience, a group within I can safely include myself). On the other hand, so much walking is involved that it can’t be too unhealthy.

My first order of business was to give my a lecture, a talk about my indie game Replica Island. That seemed to go well, and drew a couple hundred people. I went to a bunch of meetings, went home, worked on my slides for the second talk (this one a sponsored session about Android compatibility), and was out like a light at 10 PM. GDC was officially in full swing.

I arrived Tuesday morning and ran smack into a long queue of people that extended from some lecture room all the way out into the main Moscone hall. Following the line, I was surprised to find that it terminated at the entrance to my own talk; all these people were waiting to hear about Android, and I was the first to speak to them. After giving my second lecture (using hand-drawn slides which contained, as I discovered to my horror in the midst of a point about managing screen sizes, at least one spelling error), I answered a few questions and then dodged out to my next appointment, noting that the length of the line had not been significantly reduced even though the room had been filled for my talk. The rest of the week was a blur of meetings, punctuated by a few key sessions that I made it a point to attend.

This was, overall, the best GDC I’ve been to in some years. The industry is in the midst of a giant change, and the sessions this year reflected that change. David Cage and Swery both gave outspoken, absolutely convincing lectures on why they had bucked so many industry norms while designing their games. Cage described how the lack of expressive verbs in video games led him to the context-sensitive quick timer-like interface in Heavy Rain. “You can’t tell a story with an interesting character if the only way that character can express himself is with five actions mapped to buttons on a control pad,” he ranted (this reminded me of the way that verbs have decreased in Adventure games over time, which I’ve written about before). He also touched on the difference between asking the player what to do next, and asking him how to actually do this, which is also a favorite gem of mine (Cage called this “Journey vs Mechanics,” which might be a better title than my “cognitive vs mechanical” description). Swery presented seven key game design rules that helped him make Deadly Premonition memorable (GameSetWatch has a nice write up). One point that was interesting to me was the idea that players who mimic normal actions within games will be reminded of the game when they are not playing (which is why York smokes, shaves, sleeps, and changes his clothing). Another was Swery’s command that we use our ideas immediately rather than writing them down and saving them for later. Whatever you think of these guys’ respective games, nobody can accuse them of naiveness; they both have put serious thought into the problems they are attempting to solve.

I also took in an interesting talk about Dead Space 2’s art direction (hint: they thought really hard about it), which made me want to play that game. And Eric Chahi’s retro postmortem of Another World, one of my favorite games of all time, was one of the highlights of the show for me. Sadly I missed several other lectures that I wanted to see: Jordan Mechner talking about the original Prince of Persia, Daisuke “Pixel” Amaya talking about the development of Cave Story, and Matthias Wortch talking about narrative design in Dead Space 2.

Half way through the show my feet began to take their revenge for subjecting them to two weeks of conferences in new shoes (I spent part of February in Barcelona for Mobile World Congress), and now my heels have large gashes in them. I walked a loop between the two Moscone buildings, sometimes at ground level and sometimes through connecting tunnel-like passages, with an occasional excursion to the perpetually deserted Metreon building, over and over again. My work took me to meetings with a wide range of developers, so many that I ran through two boxes of business cards in the first few days.

But even as rushed and busy as I was, I can tell you that this year was a fantastic GDC. The shift from consoles towards new markets, like social games and mobile games, has become so strong that the console developers are beginning to sit up and take notice. Hardware in the mobile sector is improving at a much faster rate than many expected, and it’s unclear if we’ll really need to have dedicated consoles ever again. Game design is changing; the rise of the indie game, as well as the arrival of new audiences pioneered by Nintendo and others has caused developers to step back and reassess their assumptions (Cage even called the industry out for failing to significantly innovate in terms of player expression in thirty years). Change is in the air, and it is exciting. For me personally, this was a rather inspiring week.

Friday evening I ate dinner with Swery and some other Access Games folk. Today I had lunch with Pixel and his producer from Nicalis. Tonight I shall sleep, tomorrow I pack, and then Monday I am off to Japan for a brief vacation. It’s hard not to be excited. 2011 is going to be a good year for video games.

Two Factor vs Game Developer!

The latest issue of Game Developer magazine has an article I wrote called Pressed By The Dark, which is an expansion of the last two posts here on this site about the Two Factor Theory as it might be applicable to game design. The best part about it is that it’s paired with weirdo, crazy awesome “pixel art” by crazy Russian artist UNOMORALEZ.

Oh yeah, and I’m speaking at GDC again this year, so if you’re planning on attending let me know!

Ingredients of Horror: Two-Factor and Horror Game Design

Dead Space: Not very hard.

In my last post I discussed the research that lead to the creation of the Two-Factor Theory of Emotion. tl;dr: It says that if your body feels excited and you don’t know why, your brain can be tricked into believing that excitement is caused by some external stimulus. Thus you can get people to believe that they are feeling something when really it’s just their brains trying to figure out why the body is aroused.

The implications for horror games, I think, are that games might be better at scaring you if they also involve game play elements that cause a physical reaction, like an elevated heart rate. If a game can get your blood pumping by being difficult and high-stakes, the Two-Factor Theory suggests that your brain may mistake that rush of adrenaline as a reaction to the scary images on the screen, and generate feelings of fear, even if the game content alone isn’t very scary. From here on out this post is entirely conjecture, but bear with me.

I can’t count the number of times users have told me that a not-very-scary game is better “on hard mode.” Many of the games that I’ve complained about on this site have been defended by users claiming that hard mode is where the game design really works. Dead Space, Cold Fear, Silent Hill: Homecoming, and even Resident Evil: Dead Aim have all been credited as being better games when the difficulty is increased. This seems like evidence that supports the “harder is scarier” idea. In my review of Dead Space, for example, I spend most of the words praising the game and then trying to figure out why I didn’t enjoy it very much. I ended the review with the conclusion that Dead Space doesn’t require any critical thinking, and is altogether too “straightforward.” Another way to say the same thing might be to say it was too easy; I walked through the game and never really had to put any real effort into it. Per the Two-Factor Theory, my brain never got a chance to mislabel my body’s reaction because my body never reacted.

And the more I think about it, the more it seems that the best horror games are those that raise the stakes on the player. Think about check points, for example. Traditional horror games like Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and Fatal Frame haven’t really had any check points. You have save points, but when you die you go all the way back to wherever it was you last saved. Save points also mean that you can’t save anywhere–you have to find these specific spots before you can save your game. In classic Resident Evil design, you also had to worry about running out of save games, as they were items that were rationed to you carefully.

This is all very much against modern game design trends. Modern game design is about “respecting the player,” and allowing them to progress through the content regardless of their skill level. Halo is designed to make the player

Fatal Frame 2: Not hard, but higher stakes.

feel like a “kick-ass space ninja,” and pulls all kinds of tricks to make even novice players feel skilled, like increasing the precision of the targeting reticle when it passes over an enemy. Crash Bandicoot is famous for secretly adjusting the difficulty down behind the scenes when the game notices that the player is dying a lot. Modern game design dictates that save points are sort of arrogant; if the player gets a phone call in the middle of play, designs that do not allow him to stop playing and then pick up where he left off are regarded as too self-important. The idea is that the player wants to have fun, not be frustrated, so the game should go out of its way to remove any potential frustration points. This doesn’t always mean making the game super easy, but it often means trying to design a challenge that at least seems fair to the user.

But lots of great horror games are designed as if the intent is to knock the player down and then kick him in the shins. I mean, everybody I know who played Resident Evil had to start that game over at least one time because they didn’t understand how aggressively they had to ration ammunition at first and got to a point where they simply could not progress. Silent Hill‘s combat mechanics are much more forgiving than Resident Evil, but on the other hand, getting the good ending in that game requires that you do a number of optional, non-obvious things. If you screw it up and don’t have a save to fall back on, too bad. Time to start over. Combat in Fatal Frame comes down to precision timing and aiming. If you don’t take a picture of the ghost at the exact second that the Zero Shot light pops up, you take a hit. No aim assist in this game. And Siren, my favorite game to reference when talking about good old Two-Factor is a game basically designed to continuously increase the level of stress that the player must endure. I mean, we’re talking about a game that has an escort mission with involving a blind girl.

Even games with simple mechanics seem to be scarier when they include game play related stress. Hell Night is a great example: in this game your only choice is to run away from a monster that you rarely see but often hear. If the monster gets too close you’ll take a hit. But you don’t die; your partner dies, and after that you are on your own. One more hit and it’s game over. Once a partner is dead you can never revive them–new partners show up later in the game, but most of the time, the partner character represents your one health point of life (they also have special abilities that it’s hard to live without). So losing that partner is a big deal. When the monster shows up, you run because you’re going to have to start over and redo a bunch of work if you die. Hell Night is a mechanically simple game, but it’s incredibly effective as horror. Part of

Siren: We’re talking double down on 15 here.

that might be because it’s really stressful!

Though not nearly as good of a game, Nanashi no Geemu and its sequel work the same way; failure is a one-hit-kill affair, and sends you back a significant distance. Stress comes not from mechanical difficulty as much as the desire not to have to repeat sections of game play.

Consider the differences between Dead Space and Resident Evil 4. These two are very similar games, but they differ in a couple of key respects. One of the big ones is moving and shooting; you can do it in Dead Space but not in RE4, which lead to a lot of criticism of the latter from Modern Game Designers (Dead Space is very much a product of the “respect the player” trend; just look at the automatic path-to-next-important-area power!). Not being able to move and shoot makes Resident Evil 4 a harder game–much harder, I think. I remember dying many many times in RE4 but pretty much gliding through Dead Space. And while the Resident Evil series can be sort of ridiculous, I thought RE4 was scarier than the ultra-serious Dead Space (though neither game does well in the fear department, to be honest). Resident Evil 5 is (very) ridiculous and also not very hard at all (that item management screen is all about player respect), and it left a bland taste in my mouth.

Game designers often talk about difficulty being a key ingredient to fun because of the feeling of accomplishment that it rewards. If you don’t believe me, try Super Meat Boy, and then go look at all of the awards it has (quite rightfully) won. But for horror, I’m going to propose an alternative idea: per the Two-Factor Theory, high-stakes game play is a way to cause the player physical stress, which, when combined with scary images, sound, and backstory pumping out of your TV, is more likely to cause you to feel fear. High-stakes game play doesn’t necessarily mean moment-to-moment difficulty (and it certainly doesn’t imply crappy game play mechanics), it just means that the cost of failure is high and the threat of failure is imminent. I’m suggesting that stress, that which is usually considered to be the opposite of fun, is the key to fun in horror games. Not frustration, mind you, just stress (although separating the two is a mighty challenge).

Give this one some thought next time you are playing a horror game. Is it scary? Is it hard? How is your body reacting? Fair warning: the Two-Factor Theory stipulates that it only works when you are not cognizant of why your body is excited; if you think about this during game play, it may ruin the fear factor for you. But generally, any time your heart rate is up and your blood is pumping, and you’re not really thinking about why, the Theory states that you’re in a prime state to be fed emotional cues. Maybe a Wii Fit balance board horror game makes sense after all.

Ingredients of Horror: More About the Two-Factor Theory of Emotion


Stanley Schachter

I’ve written before about the Two Factor Theory of Emotion and how it relates to game design. Last year (almost two years ago–crap, I’m asleep at the wheel here) I wrote that the Theory seems directly related to good horror games because it suggests that developers can trick you into feeling stressed about the images on the screen when you’re actually stressed over extremely difficult game mechanics. This idea has been bouncing around in the back of my mind for some time, and I’m increasingly interested by it, so I thought I’d expand on it here.

In the 1940s and ’50s there were a series of experiments performed by psychologists that attempted to establish a link between aggression and sexual arousal. In 1965 an experiment by Barclay and Haber showed that students in a classroom that were verbally abused by their teacher (and thus became angry) showed significantly higher levels of sexual arousal than students in a classroom with a calm teacher. The conclusion of this study and several others was that there was some sort of link between aggression and feelings of arousal.

In 1962, Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer performed an experiment to see how emotions and physiological reactions might be related. Perhaps, they postulated, it’s not anger that causes an increase in arousal but rather the physiological effects of anger (increased heart rate, release of adrenaline, etc) that influenced the subjects. To test this theory, they gave two groups of college students injections: half received a shot of adrenaline and the other half received a placebo. Then they put the students into rooms in pairs of two: one real subject and one confederate that had been instructed to act a certain way. In some cases they told subjects what they had been injected with, and in some cases they did not. In some cases they told the subject to expect physiological change that is substantially different from what adrenaline actually causes (e.g. dullness, head aches). Generally, the subjects were led to believe that they were testing a new drug.

Once paired with a confederate, the subjects were placed in a room and their behavior was observed. The confederate was instructed to act either angry or high. Schachter and Singer were interested in how the subjects would respond. The three factors here (psychologists call them “dependent variables”) were whether or not they received adrenaline, what they were told about the shot they received, and how the confederate acted.

The results are fascinating. First of all, subjects who received a placebo didn’t show any dramatic increase in emotion. Those that were given adrenaline and told the truth about it also exhibited no dramatic emotional elevation. However, subjects that were not told that they had received adrenaline, and those that were told that they had received something else, both showed higher levels of emotional response. Those subjects reported feeling significantly increased levels of anger (if the confederate acted angry) or euphoria (if the confederate acted high). The misinformed group in particular exhibited an increase in emotion.

This experiment led Schachter and Singer to an idea they called the Two-Factor Theory of Emotion. The theory suggests that emotion synthesis is the result of two “factors”: physiological reaction and cognitive context. In cases when the body becomes aroused and the brain has no obvious way to explain that arousal, it will look for external context in order to find a label for an emotion to explain change. What Schachter and Singer demonstrated was that by causing an unexpected physiological arousal (by injecting adrenaline), and then pairing the subject with some external emotional context (a confederate that displayed emotion), they could cause test subjects to mistake their body’s reaction as an emotional response. In short, they were able to trick the brain into creating an emotion in a situation where it would not have normally occurred.

This theory might also explain the results of the earlier tests between aggression and sexual arousal. Per Schachter and Singer’s theory, the verbally abusive teacher may cause his students to become angry, leading to an elevated physiological state. Some students may misread their body’s reaction as sexual arousal rather than rage, and thus report higher levels of interest in their classmates than normal.

But this theory gets really interesting when we consider Donald Dutton and Arthur Aron’s follow-up experiment in 1974 involving fear and sexual arousal. Dutton and Aron arranged an experiment where they interviewed males between the age of 18 and 35 on a high, wobbly bridge in Canada. The subjects were people visiting the Capilano Suspension Bridge, which is apparently a pretty scary bridge (it wobbles, has low hand rails, and spans a 70-foot drop). They placed an interviewer on the bridge and asked subjects to answer a short form. At the end of the survey, the interviewer gave the subject their personal phone number in case they had any questions about the experiment later. They repeated this experiment on another bridge that wasn’t scary: it had a solid construction, high hand rails, and was only about ten feet up.

Here’s the key to Dutton and Aron’s experiment: they used two different interviewers, one male and one attractive female. The theory was that if the Two Factor Theory holds, the fear that the subjects felt by being on a high bridge might be misinterpreted as sexual arousal by their brain when it is juxtaposed with the appearance of an attractive woman. The dependent variables included whether or not the men accepted the woman’s phone number, whether or not they called her back later (indicating that they were interested in further liaison), and the sexual content of their answers to the survey (which involved writing a short story).

The subjects who were approached by a male interviewer scored low on sexual content in their survey answers. Very few called the interviewer back for more information. Most didn’t even accept the call back phone number. This result was the same regardless of whether the subject was approached on the wobbly bridge or the safe bridge.

Subjects approached by the female interviewer scored higher on sexual content. But on the safe bridge, the value was still fairly low, and only two subjects bothered to call her back. On the wobbly bridge, sexual content scores dramatically increased, almost every subject accepted the interviewer’s phone number, and 50% of them called back. There seemed to be a strong link between the scary bridge and feelings of sexual arousal in the subjects.

Dutton and Aron had some concerns about flaws with the study, so they did two other experiments. In one, they moved the control group off the bridge to ensure that the same group of people (e.g. people visiting


Capilano Suspension Bridge

the Capilano river, probably tourists) were used for the experiment and for control. The results were similar to the original test, showing that population differences were not a factor in the test results.

The final experiment took place in a lab. Dutton and Aron wondered if sexual arousal might have been increased by the “lady in distress” environment of the first experiment; it might be possible to explain the rise in arousal on the scary bridge by considering that the interviewer herself may have appeared to be in a dangerous or helpless situation. So for the third experiment, they carefully controlled the situation in a lab. This time, they brought in college students and told them that they would be receiving shock treatment. The subjects were again all men and were again paired with an attractive female confederate, whom they believed to be a fellow subject who would also be receiving the shocks. In some cases, the subjects were told that they would receive a “quite painful” shock. In others, they were told it would be merely a tingle. Before the shocks were administered, the subjects were separated from the female confederate and asked to answer questions privately about their level of sexual arousal and feelings towards the confederate. They were also asked about their level of anxiety about the shocks themselves.

The result was a correlation between the level of anxiety and the level of sexual arousal felt by the subject. When the subject expressed higher anxiety about receiving a strong shock, he was also likely to report high level of sexual attraction to the confederate. It didn’t seem to matter if the candidate believed the confederate to be about to receive a strong or weak shock herself, thus the “lady in distress” variable was not a factor (although interestingly, there was some increase in sexual imagery in survey questions when both the subject and the confederate were about to receive strong shocks). When subjects were told that they were going to receive a strong shock and were then paired with an attractive woman, their levels of attraction to that woman increased significantly. Dutton and Aron saw this as further evidence of the Two Factor Theory: the anxiety caused by the threat of a shock lead to a rise physiological state, which was then mislabeled as sexual arousal by the brain when it encountered the context of an attractive test partner.

The implications for game design seem clear. Games can obviously cause a physiological reaction; I know that personally my heart rate goes up and I start to increase the strength of my grip on the controller when playing a particularly difficult game. If context (that is, the images on the screen) can then be used to influence my emotional state, that seems like a strong case for making horror games (or, really, any kind of game that is designed to elicit an emotional response) really hard. I wonder if, for example, the trite sexual content in God Hand is more influential than it should be because God Hand’s game mechanics are incredibly punishing. Or if, as I’ve mentioned here before, the incredible level of stress that Siren is able to induce is a function of it’s extremely difficult combat and sneaking mechanics.

But this post is too long as it is, so I’ll save further game design discussion for the next one. Stay tuned.

The West Needs More Directors

How many Japanese game designers can you name off the top of your head? There’s Shigeru Miyamoto, sure. Readers of this site probably know about Suda51, SWERY, and Akira Yamaoka. Hideo Kojima. Yu “Shenmue” Suzuki and Tomonobu “Dead or Alive” Itagaki. Shinji Mikami. Fumito “Ico” Ueda. If you’ve been around a bit you probably know who Yuji Naka is, and if you follow the scene you might have heard of Pixel. Yoot “Seaman” Saito. Gunpei “I invented your childhood” Yokoi. If you are a little more hard core about video games then you might know who Atsushi Inaba is. Yuji Horii. Hironobu Sakaguchi. Toru Iwatani. Keita Takahashi.

These folks make the (game-centric) news, even in the US, all the time. They have worked, usually in a design or “director” role, on hugely popular and influential games. They are key figures in the game industry, and that’s why you know their names. Many of them are interesting characters; Itagaki, for example, has never been photographed without his signature sun glasses and cowboy hat, at least as far as I can tell. Keita Takahashi gives talks at video game conferences about how games are not very important and playing outside is better for kids (and, good on his word, he’s quit Namco and is now designing a park). Sometimes these folks are in the news because they make cool games, but often it’s also because they have interesting opinions and ideas.

Now, how many famous Western game designers can you name? There’s folks like John Carmack. John Romero is pretty famous. Cliff Bleszinski. Sid Meier and Will Wright draw crowds when they speak. Peter Molyneux. Richard Garriott seems to be in the news pretty frequently, as is David Jaffe. You might know who American McGee is because there are games with his name in the title. Tim Schafer. Jon Blow. I’m starting to get to names that you probably won’t recognize unless you work in the game industry or are really paying attention. Doug Church. Chris Crawford. Dino Dini. Ron Gilbert. Clint Hocking.

There are a few, to be sure, but I think most Western game designers are anonymous to the public. Do you know who Jason Jones is? Do you know who designed Portal? Or Half-Life 2, for that matter? How about Condemned? Or Uncharted? Everybody knows that Metal Gear Solid is directed by Hideo Kojima, but how many people know who designed the last couple of Splinter Cell games? Do you know the names of the designers for Grand Theft Auto 3 or World of Warcraft? Who is Mark Healey?

Part of the reason for this is that Western game designers who are famous tend to be famous for things other than their games. Carmack is famous for DOOM, but more generally for bleeding-edge 3D technology. Romero for DOOM, but also for Daikatana and the various scandals surrounding that project. Peter Molyneux tends to overstate his projects when they are still in primordial forms. Garriott went into space. Jaffe is a active blogger with strong opinions and a willingness to call people out. These people are in the news because they make cool games, but also because they are particularly outspoken. Everybody knows David Jaffe designed God of War, which is undeniably an awesome game. But that was like five years ago; any idea what he’s worked on since then? He’s still a known entity because he speaks his mind a lot.

Dave Jaffe has close to 7000 followers on Twitter. Suda51 is about 8000. You know God of War is a much more well-known franchise than No More Heros or Killer7, and compared to Jaffe, Suda51 is a pretty quiet guy (as far as I can tell, he’s mostly interested in Japanese pro wrestling). Yet somehow Mr. 51 has amassed more followers. I’ve seen Fumito Ueda speak once at GDC, but the guy isn’t a media darling or anything; he’s still managed to collect 6000 followers. Tim Schafer is a popular guy–26k followers–which beats Peter Molyneux’s 18k. John Carmack is one of the most famous Western game developers ever and his feed is followed by about 15k people. Did you know that the guy who made D2 has more followers than John Carmack? Cliff Bleszinski is the most popular contemporary English-speaking designer I could find–48k followers. But Hideo Kojima has 60,000 followers!! And that’s his Japanese-only feed; the English one has 30,000 followers itself.

Why don’t we know the names of more Western designers? This isn’t a new phenomenon; Jason Rubin (do you know who he is? you should.) made waves back in 2005 with a speech at DICE about how game developers don’t receive public credit for their work. I suspect that there are a lot of factors, not the least of which is the way that the relationship between publishers and developers differs between Japan and the US (which is pretty much the point Rubin made).

I think another factor may be that Japanese game teams and Western game teams are run differently. SWERY’s title at Access Games is “Director,” which implies that he is the vision holder for the project, the person with his fingerprints on every little detail, the guy who takes the credit when the game succeeds and takes the fall if it fails. Certainly there are many other people in design (“planning” in Japanese) roles working on these games as well; Kojima may be the “director” of the Metal Gear series but there are hundreds of other people working on the project too. But by putting one person in charge, management is trusting that person to lead the team, to be the creative source for the game’s complete vision, and to ensure consistency and quality across all of the development disciplines.

In many American studios, a “director” position is harder to find. Though there are often “lead designers” or even “creative directors,” it’s rare that a single person be the key vision-holder for an entire game. The overarching design of many Western games isn’t even decided upon by a designer–it’s often the result of some marketing research about what types of games are expected to sell in the next year or two. That’s not to say that lead designers don’t take charge and lead the team in the same way that their Japanese counterparts do, just that their perceived role within the company is considerably more dilute. There’s an implicit lack of trust; if management is to put a single person in the “make everything awesome” role, that single person is a potential point of failure. Instead, teams are generally organized into groups by discipline, with leads from each discipline forming a sort of elite clique that meets to negotiate changes and service management requests. This sort of decentralized organization is more robust–any single team member can quit without bringing down the entire project–but it also means that no single person on the team has the final say about anything. Sometimes there’s no single person on the team who is even aware of every detail of the project.

When a Japanese developer that has a clear vision holder needs a spokesperson, the choice is clear: get the guy who ran the whole project up on stage. But in a Western company, it’s not clear who that person should be. You could have the designer talk if he’s outgoing and photogenic (remember CliffyB’s 48k followers?), but on the other hand he might be a bit bitter that a lot of his ideas got vetoed by the programming team or the schedule. You could have the project manager get up and talk, but these folks are often just schedule-keepers, with little insight into the key artistic vision of the game. You could get a marketing person up there–they’ll certainly be able to speak clearly and avoid any potentially controversial topics. But marketing is even further removed from the core vision than the project manager, and often can only regurgitate details that came from the team.

I also think that the decentralized structure of many Western developers makes some designers shy away from the spotlight. After all, the game is a team effort; if they get up there and take all the credit, how will the rest of their coworkers feel? Valve, for example, doesn’t even put titles in its credits roll; everybody on the team is listed in alphabetical order, indicating that regardless of role, everybody deserves equal recognition. When there’s no clear vision holder on the team, it probably feels pretty arrogant to declare yourself the singular source of all that is interesting in the game.

I think that there might be an argument for putting one person in a highly-visible role and making them responsible for the overall quality of the game. I mean, it certainly seems to work in other sectors–you can take your pick of Harsh Taskmasters Who Are Hard to Work With but Ship Amazing Products, from Steve Jobs to George Lucas. Creating a “director” position, modeled after the role defined by the film industry, gives a team a chance to ship something that has real personality. When one person owns the vision and acts as the ultimate tie breaker for any given argument, that person’s choices and ideas and personality shine through the final product. That’s not to say that the value of the rest of the team is diminished, just that they are operating under somebody who is in a key creative role, rather than a key managerial role.

When a person in that sort of directorial position ships a good game, and they have a chance to talk about it to the media, it’s natural that they attract attention. When you play something like Deadly Premonition, and you see that it was directed by a single guy (who’s a bit of a character and has a weird pseudonym), then you will probably be interested in what SWERY has to say. And you might want to buy SWERY’s next game, because you enjoyed the first title and you think he’s an interesting guy and you’d like to see what else he’s done. The distance between you and the developer has been shortened dramatically, and the game you are playing is now a much more personal experience. Plus, that persons feels responsible for the entire project; even if it didn’t turn out the way that they had intended, they are still going to be great a great spokesman for the game because it’s really their baby.

I think that the relative anonymity of Western developers has a lot to do with this lack of directorial role. And while the West still ships great games, I think they might be made more interesting and diverse if more companies were willing to put one person in the position of absolute creative authority. If that happened, I think we’d know the names of a lot more Western game designers.

When Silent Hill isn’t really about Silent Hill


A good character for a good game. But not the best.

As you might have been able to tell from my last post, I recently finished Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, and it was fantastic. It was fantastic even though it features some of the must frustrating sequences ever in a Silent Hill game, namely the Otherworld chases. But the rest of the game works so well that I’m willing to forgive Shattered Memories and declare it one of the best Silent Hill games ever.

Reactions to this opinion ranged from enthusiastic consent to incredulity. I don’t want to write a full review of the game; my friend Casey has already provided a great review, which I am happy to endorse. I have, however, spent some time thinking about why Shattered Memories is such a good Silent Hill game. It’s certainly not an orthodox game from the series; if alignment to the precedent was the requirement for greatness, Climax’s earlier attempt, Silent Hill: 0rigins should have been a masterpiece (it’s not). Mechanically speaking, Shattered Memories is really different than anything else in the canon; if anything, the mechanics it has are closest to Silent Hill 4, which is clearly the biggest departure from the norms established by earlier games.

No, even though Shattered Memories is mechanically very different than its cousins, there has to be a reason that it feels more like a Silent Hill game than any other attempt in recent memory. In fact, it feels more like Silent Hill 2 than any other game in the series. I pondered this for a while. What makes a Silent Hill game feel like a Silent Hill game? Part of it is certainly visual cues, but all of the Silent Hill games share those (and in fact, Shattered Memories joins Silent Hill Homecoming in eschewing the camera system that defined the look of earlier games). It clearly doesn’t have anything to do with combat, or item collection, or the sometimes-relevant plot elements involving The Order and their cultist activities in the region–those things are all thrown out by Shattered Memories. There’s the town of Silent Hill itself, but that too differs from game to game; in Shattered Memories, it’s large snow drifts that block streets rather than the series’ signature roads that end in gaping abyss. So no, “Silent Hill-ness” isn’t necessarily structural, or visual, or mechanical; those are just the “parts” of Silent Hill games, and they revolve around a central core. Some sort of key DNA that identifies the experience.

They key, I think, is the focus of the narrative: what is each Silent Hill game about? Let’s consider the series (spoilers ahead, beware):

  • The original Silent Hill is about how Alessa, a girl with supernatural powers, is tortured by a cult in order to summon a demon to Earth. In the process, Alessa separates Silent Hill from the rest of the world. The protagonist, Harry, must make his way through this confused realm to find his daughter, who is actually part of Alessa herself.
  • In Silent Hill 2, James searches a similarly separated world to find his deceased wife. Along the way we realize that James’ experience in Silent Hill is a reflection of his own psyche, and his journey through the town is a journey through his own guilt related to his wife’s death. The town acts as a manifestation of his personal problems.
  • In Silent Hill 3, Heather (eventually revealed to be Cheryl from SH1) attempts to escape The Order and finds herself mired in the nightmare world. The properties of Silent Hill in this game seem to be erosive; to escape from its hellish pull, Heather rejects the cultist’s wishes and destroys the monster that they create.
  • In Silent Hill 4, Henry finds himself trapped in his apartment, able to leave only through a large hole that appears in his bathroom. Using the hole he visits various nether worlds and eventually learns that his apartment is some sort of maternal symbol for a crazy serial killer. His only hope for escape is to use the hole to delve deeper and deeper into the dead killer’s mind. Oh, and there’s some throw-away sub-plot about The Order and drugs.
  • In Silent Hill: 0rigins, we’re once again trapped in a version of Silent Hill that has been separated from reality. This time, the protagonist Travis follows breadcrumbs through the town to learn what happened to Alessa and also some nonsense involving his father or something.
  • In Silent Hill: Homecoming, Alex, a war veteran, returns from service to find his home town covered in gloom and full of missing people. His brother is one of the missing, so he sets out to find him, with fairly predictable results. Along


    “…myself.”

    the way we learn that there’s an evil cult involved, and as part of sealing the evil of all eternity or something, the founding families of Silent Hill have to keep killing their children. So each descent into the Otherworld is a visit to a little corner of hell controlled by a dead child. And, we finally learn, Alex’s brother being missing is a serious problem.

  • In Shattered Memories, Harry awakes from a car crash and can’t seem to fully recover. He can’t remember where he lives, can’t contact his family, and is worried that his daughter isn’t safe. He searches all over for her as an increasingly powerful snow storm threatens to completely immobilize the town. And eventually, we realize, his forays into the netherworld are prompted by his own amnesia; whenever he’s about to learn some crucial piece if information about himself, the world ices over and he’s back in hell, as if something is taking steps to prevent him from coming around. Escape, such as it is, eventually involves accepting the truth.

Of all of these games, Silent Hill 2 and Shattered Memories share a key trait: they are about their protagonists. The other games in the series are about Silent Hill itself–its history, its cults, various horrible things that have happened there. But Silent Hill 2 and Shattered Memories use the town as a backdrop for a character study. As In my article about the utility of the Otherworld, I suggested that we might interpret the town from the second game as a place that draws troubled people to it and manifests their problems physically. But even so, the point of that game is to show James’ progression through the town, not to teach us about what the town is or why it is the way it is. In Shattered Memories, there’s nothing particularly significant about Silent Hill itself, except that it’s being bombarded by a blizzard and most people have evacuated. The focus is on Harry, and his travel through his memory and the memories of his daughter. Shattered Memories and Silent Hill 2 stand apart from the rest of the series because they are primarily concerned with character.

On the other hand, the first Silent Hill game is about the town itself. We can see post-Silent Hill 2 games struggling to choose between focusing on a character or the town. Silent Hill 3 chooses the town, but still puts a huge emphasis on developing Heather’s character: not only does she comment on everything she sees, the plot tries to eventually loop her history back into the history of the town. Silent Hill 4 is all about the character of the serial killer, Walter Sullivan. But this is not a character we empathize with–in fact, he’s the main antagonist and generally a lunatic, which might be why this game feels so disjoint. Homecoming also tries to make the story personal by interweaving Alex’s family history with the history of the town, and giving him a little bit of amnesia, but the game is certainly about the town and its (remaining) inhabitants. Origins is the game to most obviously fail in this balance; it tries to tack some half-hearted plot about Travis on top of the main narrative about the town and Alessa, and it just doesn’t work (doesn’t help that Travis is about as stoic as they come).

In all of these games the characters are passive observers, or at best minor participants, in the events unfolding around them. But in Silent Hill 2 and Shattered Memories, the events are unfolding precisely because of the protagonist’s personalities, memories, and sins. This difference in focus is what sets these two games apart from the rest. Making the entire game intensely personal amplifies the other main theme of the Silent Hill games: isolation. It’s so much more scary to be alone in your life as well as physically alone; there’s really nobody who can help you. This is where many of the more recent games (and the movie, for that matter) have gone astray; Silent Hill is an interesting idea in-and-of-itself, but using it as a way to explore a single character is much more interesting.

I’m not claiming that the more traditional, town-focused Silent Hill games are bad. On the contrary, I think this series is probably the single best horror game series in existence. But I also think that, given that all of these games are pretty high caliber, Shattered Memories and (especially) Silent Hill 2 belong at the top of the pile because they execute their brand of personalized horror much better than the rest of the series. They feel like Silent Hill games in a way that most of the other games in the series can’t quite pull off; it’s that feeling of absolute isolation, even when not confined to one of the narrow halls of the Otherworld, that makes these games awesome. And that feeling, I think, is a direct result of their focus on the character of their protagonists rather than the history of their set pieces.

Frozen Silent

Happy Halloween, everybody. As I mentioned last year, Halloween in Japan just isn’t the same. This year we (and by ‘we’, I mostly mean my three year old daughter) have spent most of the time listening to Disney’s 19-minute “Halloween Street” parade song, which we were unfortunately exposed to at Disneyland a few weeks back. It’s actually only about 4 (contrived) verses which are repeated over and over, but every other repetition is a chance for another Disney character to sing along as he or she rolls by on a float. It’s difficult to get a proper pumpkin here so we didn’t even make a jack-o-lantern (though my daughter did attend a costume party or two, which is at least close in spirit).

So to get in the Halloween mood, I booted up Silent Hill: Shattered Memories this evening. My good friend Casey already reviewed this game for me, but his review was pretty fascinating and I’ve wanted to play for quite a while. You might remember that I played this game at TGS in 2009 and was a bit disappointed. The bit I played last year was a “run away from flesh monsters” segment, which is how Shattered Memories deals with its frozen, icy version of the Otherworld. It was super frustrating because I had no idea where I was going and couldn’t seem to shake the Wiimote the right way to get the monsters off when they grabbed me. I figured it was an early build.

So I put a few hours in this evening and made it to that same spot. The bad news is, that build I played wasn’t as early as I suspected; the bare-bones menus are part of the whole menu style, and the throw-off controls are still pretty hard to do. Actually, there’s only two that are hard to do: getting grabbed on the left side or the right side. I’ve played a couple of different Otherworld sections at this point and it’s unclear to me if they want me to move both the Wiimote and the nunchuck, or just the nunchuck. Sometimes the nunchuck seems to work alone, but for those side-grabbing dudes, I am often entirely unable to get them off. Swinging the wiimote is a problem because it causes the camera to swing out of whack, which is exactly what you don’t want when trying to run through a disorienting frozen maze.

Let me back up for a second. Everything else about Shattered Memories is pretty great. I dig the control scheme, the over-the-shoulder camera works pretty well (although I still weep for the death of the Silent Hill 2 / 3 camera system; ah well, times have changed), the graphics are slick and the game design seems to be really awesome. Most importantly, it feels more like a Silent Hill game than anything I’ve played recently. Even though a whole lot has changed, the feeling of isolation and slowly increasing stress that is the series’ signature is here in force, and I’m pretty impressed with it already.

It’s just that, the whole thing is horribly marred by the run-away sections. I played through the intro all dazzle-eyed and then got to that first running otherworld section and died about 20 times. I couldn’t find the exit, couldn’t figure out how to shake dudes off, and couldn’t properly knock things down behind me to slow them down. The game is like, “oh, just use your GPS to figure out where you are going,” but there’s no time for that. Stopping or even slowing down to pull out the map results in flesh monsters jumping you, and should you be so unlucky as to get grabbed on the left or right side, it’s probably game over right there.

We’ll see how it works out. I have high hopes for this one, as Casey liked it so much and the other parts of the game seem so well done. Maybe I’m just doing something wrong. But in the worst case, this could turn out to be like Cursed Mountain, in which one of the key Wiimote gestures just doesn’t register 60% of the time, thus almost ruining the game.

What Disneyland can Teach us about Horror Games

My daughter turns three this week, so we celebrated by visiting Tokyo Disneyland (which, like Tokyo Game Show and the Tokyo International Airport, is not actually in Tokyo). The place was packed with families and couples (the latter of which take total control of the park after nightfall), but otherwise strongly resembled my blurry memories of the Disneyland in LA that I visited as a kid. The number of rides that are enjoyable by an almost-three-year-old are a bit limited, and the line for Dumbo rarely fell below 50 minutes, so we visited a random selection of attractions. Most of the rides amounted to a tour of a particular brand, rendered in black light, animatronics, and luminescent paint.

In my memory of Disney LA, the best attractions were the roller coasters and the rides that weren’t tied to movie brands. Pirates of the Caribbean, for example, was fun to my 12-year-old self because it had clunky robot pirates with squirt guns. My favorite, of course, was The Haunted Mansion, which dumbfound me with its 1960s plate glass projection and rubber door technology. What impressed me most about that initial visit was how well-realized the various worlds in Disneyland are; though it’s obviously all sets and props, there’s a level of internal consistency that is extremely high quality, and lends an aura of convincingness to the whole affair. Many years later I read an essay about the rise of GUI operating systems by Neal Stephenson entitled In the Beginning was the Command Line, and I was struck by a passage about this very consistency.

Americans’ preference for mediated experiences is obvious enough, and … it clearly relates to the colossal success of GUIs and so I have to talk about it some. Disney does mediated experiences better than anyone. If they understood what OSes are, and why people use them, they could crush Microsoft in a year or two.

(Read the whole essay online).

What Stephenson is talking about is something he calls the “Sensorial Interface”–Disneyland as a user interface that serves to simplify complicated concepts and topics into easy-to-consume packages, just as graphical user interfaces on computers hide the complexity of running an operating system from the user. When I first read this passage it made a lot of sense: if you buy into the Disney version of the world, you can enjoy an afternoon in a simplified version of reality–a fantasy place where “dreams come true.” Not unlike a good video game, really; it occurred to me during one of the many rides we went on that there’s not so much difference between a Disney attraction and say, a rail shooter (and actually, some of the new rides are rail shooters). Consider the intro to Half-Life. Or any game that is intent on giving you a convincing looking but ultimately thin backdrop upon which to build its game play, which describes most games nowadays.

But after this last visit, I’m not so sure that Disney is firing on all cylinders anymore. Yes, all the pieces are there: Tokyo Disneyland is still a carefully constructed exercise in world building on a massive scale. But something has changed since I was 12, or perhaps it’s just that I’ve grown up enough to notice the seams in the carefully-constructed faux stone walls that border the property. But like a terrible script can mar a game with the greatest of graphics, something


Not charming.

is rotten in the land of Disney, despite its impeccable construction.

The marketing of creative works seems to follow a predictable spiral; when a creative work becomes popular, it becomes a vehicle for monetization, usually via advertising, merchandising, and cross branding. Successful creative works have a tendency to attract complicated marketing apparatuses, which in turn require more creative work–or at least something resembling creative work–to continue to operate. Often, the marketing itself becomes the main vector of effort, until the core of the idea that originally made it popular–that spark that made it resonate with audiences to begin with–is lost. All that remains is a self-perpetuating marketing machine that operates on nothing but the lifeless husk that is the brand. The internet has provided a fantastic term for this transition: Jumping the Shark. I have discovered through my daughter that many famous films and books for children jumped the shark long ago: witness the series of Curious George books that were not actually authored by H.A. Ray, or the Miffy book that my daughter, at age two, correctly identified as a copy-paste job from several different stories by Dick Bruna. Absent any new content, the marketing machine can only press forward until it finally drives the brand into the ground.

I’m not suggesting that Disneyland itself has jumped the shark; as I wrote above, it’s still a marvel of engineering, and a lot of fun for kids. But certain aspects of the park have definitely sailed over that fanged fish and are now beyond recovery. That Dumbo ride with the 50 minute wait? It’s just your standard spinning rocket ride, available at any local carnival. It doesn’t even have a single black light.

Pirates of the Caribbean is a fascinating example: here we have the marketing machine spinning as it does, attempting to generate content from a thin but well-known brand (the original Disneyland ride), and against all odds the result is actually well received by critics. When handed this ultra-rare success, what does the marketing machine do? It replaces the old brand with the new one defined by the film, re-themes the original ride to make it look like the movie, and then goes about its merry way trying to drive this new film-based Pirates of the Caribbean into oblivion. The clunky pirate robots from my childhood have been replaced by ultra realistic Jack Sparrow clones that are incredibly articulate and yet lack all of the charm of their predecessors. The original ride survived unmodified for 40 years; will the Johnny Depp movies still resonate with audiences 40 years from now?

Which brings us, finally, to The Haunted Mansion (you knew I would end up here, didn’t you?). Apart from my obvious soft spot for things with horror themes, I particularly enjoyed The Haunted Mansion when I was a kid because it is rare to find so much energy put into something that is rather sinister. Stephenson’s point about Disney being experts at interface is strong here: the original Haunted Mansion carefully hits all the right thematic notes, while surprising and entertaining its attendees without actually being very scary. Nobody else knows how to make a sinister-yet-fun-and-not-scary theme


Thin ice.

park ride; hitting that balance without scaring all the kids or coming off as corny is incredibly difficult. The consistency of theme and execution of the ride are top notch.

Or at least, I remember it being top notch. This time around The Haunted Mansion was easily the most disappointing ride that I tried (thankfully I spared my daughter; she was freaked out as it was by the Winnie the Pooh and Who Framed Roger Rabbit rides). In a blatant attempt at cross-branding, The Haunted Mansion is re-themed every fall to be a Nightmare Before Christmas ride. The Disney marketing machine initially attempted to recreate its Pirates of the Caribbean success, but when that failed they turned to the quirky (and generally fantastic) 1993 stop-motion animated film for branding backup (a cynic would note that Disney had no hand in the original production, which is perhaps why the movie was good in the first place). Anyway, despite being based on a pretty good movie, the Nightmare Before Christmas / Haunted Mansion mashup is a total failure because the combination of the two brands serves no purpose. The Nightmare Before Christmas characters appear instead of regular ghosts, snowy christmas trees are inserted into already existing scenes, and around every corner is a Jack Skellington auto-animatronic; clearly the goal here is to service the Nightmare brand. The Haunted Mansion isn’t improved–to the contrary, its careful balance of theme consistency and entertaining spooks is completely destroyed by the injection of this foreign brand. The result is a mess–it’s not very fun, it’s not very spooky or sinister, and it’s not even a very good vehicle for the Nightmare characters because it doesn’t play to any of the strengths of that brand. It’s a combination borne, I think, of convenience; there are no other Disney rides that have sinister themes, and thus no other place that the marketing machine could conceivably plaster the Nightmare brand.

If there’s a point to all this, it’s not just that marketing often serves an anti-creative purpose. It’s that horror in particular, being a genre defined by theme rather than by content or presentation, is vulnerable to this kind of careless brand pollution. Disneyland works very hard to present to you a believable world, but its work is sabotaged by its need to somehow integrate modern brands into existing attractions. Nowhere is this more evident than The Haunted Mansion, and I think the horror theme of the ride itself relies on a carefully calculated, easily disrupted combination of elements. The insertion of an unrelated brand destroys this balance, and renders the entire ride pointless.

The takeaway implications for horror games are that world consistency is key to believability. When the seams start to show, be they jarring juxtaposition of brands or, say, bugs with collision detection, they instantly render the fiction of the game moot. Other types of games can get away with a few flaws; some might even benefit from a little real-world branding (Wipeout XL?). But horror games rely on world believability above all else, and often trade other important elements (such as tight player controls and complex combat systems) in order to increase that believability. Just as The Haunted Mansion is rendered impotent by the grafting of the Nightmare Before Christmas, when a horror game suffers damage to its fiction, there’s no reason to keep playing.

Corpse Party

The other day I was in my local BOOKOFF and I ran across a copy of a PSP game called Corpse Party. Actually, the full title per the official site is Corpse Party – Blood Covered… Repeated Fear, which is pretty awkward. But it looked like horror material, and the back of the box made the game appear to be a 2D JRPG-style adventure, which sounds interesting enough (anything but a visual novel). So I put it back on the shelf and wrote it down in my mental list of games to research for the Quest.

Later that day I was talking to Pixel (see previous post) and he brought the game up. Apparently, he told me, Corpse Party is the work of a single developer. It was originally built using RPG Maker for the PC, and the PSP release is a recent console translation. Pixel himself has gone through something similar; his excellent Cave Story game is now available for Wii via WiiWare.

I have a thing for lone developers. Not only are people who are talented enough to put together an entire game from beginning to end totally awesome and amazing, I find that such games are often extremely focused. Some of my favorite PC games came from lone developers: Jordan Mechner and Eric Chahi, known respectively for Prince of Persia and Another World / Out of This World, are totally my heros. Pixel ranks up there too; Cave Story is the best side-scroller I’ve played in years. These games stand out because they do things that other games do not. Prince of Persia had amazing animation, innovative combat, and careful, paced platforming game play. Another World, another animation powerhouse for its time, remains today an example of how traditional game mechanics can be used as visual storytelling. And Cave Story manages to feel like a retro game in


ow! ow! ow! ow! ow!

all the ways that are good without feeling dated and clumsy, as most retro games actually are. It reminds you of how games used to be without actually throwing away the twenty subsequent years of game design.

I have a sneaking suspicion that these games are as good as they are because they were made by a single person, a single holder of the vision who was also capable of rendering their vision to code, art, level design, and sound. These games are also labors of love; in each of the cases I’ve mentioned, the developers toiled away for years on their projects, spending much longer than a traditional game team would have on the same project. I think spending time on game development is a good thing; it takes a while for games to bake and for the real stars of the experience to become evident. Few teams can afford to spend five years on a side scroller, but Pixel did just that. Most developers don’t have what it takes to work without pay upfront for three years to produce a next generation game for a dying platform, but that’s what Mechner did when he built Prince of Persia. These works are special because the people who created them are crazy awesome, and also because the circumstances of development were special themselves.

I have no idea if Corpse Party is any good. The fact that somebody took an RPG Maker game and turned it into a PSP release means that somebody, somewhere thought that it was really good. The fact that it’s been developed by a single person increases my interest in it ten fold.

If you’re interested in Corpse Party, siliconera has some info about it. I’ll probably pick it up when I return to Japan in a few weeks. Gotta finally buy a PSP first, I guess.