A Geographer's Guide to Building Game Worlds

good afternoon everyone I'm going to start exactly on time because this is a long talk with a lot of slides and I'm going to be talking fast so as Captain Kirk sometimes says buckle up so I'm going to be talking about this subject of a geographers guide to building game worlds a lot of people know me as the executive director of the International Game Developers Association or it da actually in my career in the game industry I'm actually a geographer and cartographer who's worked in the industry for over 20 years when I was at Microsoft for 13 years I ran a team that I created called geopolitical strategy my job for this for the company was to protect them against political and cultural risks and in that process I became a creative partner with Microsoft and with the game developers to basically help them create worlds that are going to work in the different markets in which you want to make money now obviously I'm looking more from a reactive side and I've given talks before about this topic that I call culturalization mainly from the perspective of things that you should not do but what I wanted to do in this talk was be more prescriptive and talk about things you should do so when you're thinking about making a world here's I'm going to kind of touch on very high-level things that you should be thinking about and especially introducing a couple of concepts that may or may not be new to you but their concepts that we use in geography quite a bit one of the things I will preface this and say is that there there's no way I can get to a great deal of depth in this because is a massive subject as you all know building worlds is very complicated so this is going to be kind of an overview I will try and leave time for questions as well but like I said I'm going to kind of touch on the high-level issues but undoubtedly there's a lot of details in here so we're very familiar with a lot of game worlds you know we can how we define game world is is sometimes up to a subjective interpretation but there's a lot of different things that we've been exposed to in the game industry over the years amazing recreations of real world history real world locations amazing things that you can build and create on the fly and you know basically lose your kids in this you know a really cool visual lizz Asians of worlds that don't necessarily have to have all the level of detail the which we'll talk about here but they're still effective for what the world needs to accomplish and of course other worlds that are just completely otherworldly there they are ones that don't exist there exist in the imagination they exist in the science fiction universe or wherever but they also are interesting realized and of course even a lot of casual games something this is a world I'm using that term in a general sense of the the theater or the arena ormolu or whatever you want to call it in which our games are created in which the narrative takes place in which the action takes place in which the player engages with your creative vision and so this is just as valid as the other slides that I've showed this is a world that has a certain logic to it and of course something like this which is a pretty accurate representation of a Los Angeles like city and so there's a lot of different things we can look at now going back to this map I'm sure all of us know what this is every a lot of us this is probably one of the first things we've ever been exposed to and in terms of a created world in a created universe and something that felt incredibly real to us now this is actually tokens original drawing of middle-earth that he did and if you look in a little more detail and of course I mean a lot of us could probably draw this from memory that we've seen it so much whether you've read the books or you've watched the movies or whatever the case may be but there's a there's a reality here that he is built and of course it's not just the map alone that creates the reality of middle-earth it's also the narrative it's the characters it's the history it's the Lord's language it's all the other layers that Tolkien created to make this a very real feeling kind of place and so I will get back to this map a little bit later but I know for myself as a total geek and also as someone who's very interested in maps it was tokens map that actually led me to pursue cartography as a career because I just loved the fact that he made something completely unreal looked completely real by using a method of cartography and of course there's a lot of other story storytellers that have come along that have their own versions and a lot of fantasy worlds it's just how many fantasy worlds when you open up the first book of a series there's a map because it's like it's the writer is trying to show you that this is a realized version of my imagination I love this Google Maps version of Westeros it's really cool you know whatever it might be there's there's all of these fictional realms that people have created a lot of in literature and film or wherever wherever you want them to be and I could go on for days and days with examples but basically a lot in a lot of these cases the realism that they're trying to create in the world the kind to build for you to present their narrative present their story was to give a sense of authenticity it's almost like when they're showing you the map in their book or whatever it might be it's almost as like they're saying I was there I saw these things I made this map it's almost that's why one of the brilliance of Tolkien's vision is that Tolkien's map it's almost like it feels so real that he was there he actually did the cartography because he went there and so to be able to convey that sense because as cartographers that's exactly what we do we have surveying we have instruments that collect data we have satellites to do imagery of all these different methods now that collect the data and then the cartographer compiles them into a map that basically is a way to say hey look we know what's there or the cartographer themselves would say I was there although in these days it's not really the case anymore because so many things are automated with cartography and of course in being a geek of you know this is in Norway we also ascribe fictional place to real place as well because they become so ingrained in popular culture in the world that was realized on the screen is also world that is has been somewhat realized on the ground or like going to Tunisia and being there on Tatooine which I know Tunisian friends like no it's Tunisia it's not Tatooine stop calling us Tatooine but it's you know but it's just such a real place because of what was constructed in the narrative that was built around it one of the things I really want to emphasize about world building it is not about realism this it's really about realization over realism because I think a lot of times I when I've talked and worked with a lot of developers on many many franchises of over the past 20 years a lot of them tend to focus on the realism aspect that world building equals detail that's not the case at all detail is a function of what serves the narrative later on and we'll talk about detail later but it's really about the notion of realization what does the world need to be to serve the narrative that you want to create and what the experience you want to convey and so really it's a function of taking the narrative goals that you have because generally speaking there is a narrative even in a game something like Angry Birds there is a narrative in that game and you know maybe at first it really wasn't there it is but you can kind of kind of get some sense of it even in like you plays something like bejeweled blitz it's not necessarily meant to be a narrative driven game but there is a kind of underlying lore in that game like the different levels and the names of the levels and things like that you kind of makes you wonder what does this relate to it doesn't really matter because I'm gonna go play again but um so you take the narrative goals and you also take the goals of the experience because these are distinct things so for example I'm not going to go into this topic because there's no time for it but a lot of VR right now a lot of VR demonstrations that we've seen are to me are experiences they're not narratives there are things where you could have a certain feeling a certain experience within that space but it's not really conveying a narrative a plot or some kind of you know we're getting there we are getting there slowly but in a lot of games that we make though it is a combination of this notion of we have a narrative for the space and we have a space in which we want certain things to be experienced by the player those those things may not always relate to the core narrative sometimes they will and sometimes they won't but ultimately it kind of helps shape what does the world need to be how what does it have to be realized in order for this world to work for your vision so there's a quick recipe for realizing world so we're going to talk it in some detail about some of these so and this is I'm M presenting this like a recipe so first you start with a suggestion of familiarity so you know going back to tokens map as an example his map looks like it could be something real it's not completely fantastical like dr. Seuss I mean it's it looks like something that could be familiar to us because we're used to seeing maps that are drawn like that or used to seeing mountain ranges like that we also take a hint of complex systems so a lot of worlds the we know that our world is incredibly complex there are so many interrelated systems and complexity out there we cannot represent all of those in a game but we kind of hint at those by different things there's all kinds of techniques that we do that by artifacts that are in the environment by think by hints that are dropped in the narrative by characters that show up and maybe the characters reveal a certain aspect of that world that the player had no idea existed we also have a - a cultural evidence so oftentimes because a lot of games do involve some kind of culture whether it actually involves people whether it involves aliens or animals or whatever it might be there's a sense of culture that there's a Benin inhabitants there has been some kind of presence in this game it's not just an open biosphere of animals and plants there's something else there that kind of makes it evidence I mean I think like the halo games were in my opinion were very cool in this way because they were the forerunner artifacts that were stewing around the halo ring that kind of gave evidence that something had happened here but we never really got to know at least in the initial games what was going on and we need a big chunk of logical consistency in the recipe and I will talk more specifically about law I'm going to talk more specifically about cultural evidence logical consistency and the other one which is a pinch of topology topology it means connectedness and if you've heard the term topology oftentimes we hear in the in network topology where network engineers talk about the connecting of a connectedness of devices in geography we use topology as a sense of connectedness of things of attributes of places and again I'll talk about that in more now cultural evidence so basically what this means is taking the minimal amount of content you need to convey the presence of an in-game culture so this is really key to setting the context of the game so I'll give an example in a minute this requires logical consistency be logical consistency to be effective and so you're going to need to know what that is we'll talk about that in a minute the highest works activity in game development today in my opinion doing this kind of work is this notion of building cultural evidence to the game so let me explain a little bit more let's say for example the writers the narrative designers wrote the script so you've got the script you know what the characters are going to do you know what they're going to say you know basic plot maybe you know what vehicles are going to be needed or weapons or whatever it might be artifacts all that kind of stuff but then you kind of let loose the designers and artists and say okay make this world feel real make it feel realized make it feel like it actually exists in something you know that's not just you know some lying John's on pickup lines drawn on paper without much detail in there so we kind of backfill this notion of backfilling so for example like if you have like a medially medieval environment you don't just have the buildings you might have like stacks of hay you might have some barrels you might have some other stuff you might have some banners hanging from buildings and flags you might have little animals running around all of this kind of detail that fills in the world and kind of gives it a sense of actuality that's what I call backfilling and this is a very high-risk activity because oftentimes it's not checked by the main designers of the game and so a lot of times game developers are there's so much time pressure to do this activity that they just start throwing stuff in there as much as they can of course this depends on the game if the game is going to be hyper detailed they're going to be under incredible pressure to fill in the game think of a game like Skyrim and the amount of stuff that is in Skyrim pots and papers and books with text in them and all that kind of stuff all of that has to be realized in the process of building the cultural evidence for that world because that's what helps Skyrim feels like an actual realized place and so this can be a risky activity because people just kind of randomly create things there's two key tips for creating evidence it'll pass along right away one is you don't be lazy and I'm sorry but that's the only word for it so and I'll give you an example in just a minute about being lazy so you need to create everything with a purpose it's not just we'll just throw some barrels in there like why why are the barrels there which leads to the second point ask questions so it's really important and I know it's very difficult in the game industry to ask an artist for examples like why did you draw the character that way I don't understand that because we have a mutual respect for creative vision but at the same time there are certain as certain points at which it's completely valid to ask why does it look that way what does that symbol mean what is that flag being why is that faction green I mean questions like that just because you have an understanding to basically understand the the your own complexity and not just make it a random act then will it all kind of get into a little bit later why random acts of creation can be dangerous so here's here's a cultural evidence piece so this is a screenshot from Jade Empire and Jade Empire was a pan-asian world that had what supposedly had nothing to do with our world other than kind of felt like it was Asian and I won't go into all the complexity of making this game but it was a real challenge you can see these glowing blue cylinders on the side there well this was an aspect the back filling of the game so what they did is because they it was a pan-asian environment they threw prayer wheels from boot from Tibetan Buddhism into this Inn but into this hallway well there wasn't Buddhism in this game okay this is not the real world so they threw these artifacts into the environment just to make kind of flush it out and add something there and yet that was not part of this world it's not it's not valid and so you know this is what the actual prayer wheels look like and so the previous ones they actually did look like prayer wheels but then they kind of fixed it and made this blue weird glow so it looks or like this energy thing going on but this is an example of an artist kind of throwing something they're saying well this whole environment looks kind of like Tibetan Buddhism so I'm going to put prayer wheels in there but those prayer wheels have a specific meaning in the real world and they probably don't belong in a game it has a more fantasy setting logical consistency this is incredibly important if there is one thing that I see game designers and artists and writers do wrong more than anything else when they're creating a world is they don't build in logical consistency so this is basically the notion that rules exist and are applied to the space-time and all elements within that world this is something Tolkien did really well even though yeah there's some exceptions there and I'm going point went out a little bit but there is a sense that the world works that there is a system that works just like the way our world we know certain things work in certain ways we know how plate tectonics works more or less we know kind of how the weather is sort of works we know how transportation systems seem to go right or wrong we know all that kind of stuff and so that helps a world feel real by building in ecological consistency there's a lack of contradiction in the system so it's like you're not going to come across something that just makes no sense at all in the world it's like the things that are in the world feel like they're supposed to be in that world there's also a lack of conflict between the content elements that comprise the world so you know if you're not going to have something where it's it feels completely incongruous that you'd have a culture you know you'd have like a culture that represents it that is like from the Nordic areas from a old area living in a complete hot desert area is something like I mean maybe there's a reason for it but that's what I'm saying where's the logic so if you're going to do something like that make sure there's a logic for doing it because that kind of stuff you know does tend to kick the player out of the experience and they kind of step back and say WTF I don't understand this this doesn't make any sense to me it doesn't really have a sense of realness which in that sense of realness and the realization helps draw players into the game we also want to talk about the fidelity relationships between whoa slow down there Tex sorry I don't know what just happened there so yeah that's unfortunate so anyways so we also want to talk about topology but here's an example of logical consistency so it's kind of like the example from Jade Empire so this is from cameo which was on the original Xbox you can see here there this and now this is another world that had absolutely nothing to do with our world it's complete fantasy world and so is it logical that you would have grave markers that are wooden crosses in this world maybe maybe there's a good reason why there's wooden crosses being used in this particular universe but I can tell you the answer was is that this was a case of creative laziness the artist when I pointed this out saying what are those supposed to be and they said well of course they're grave markers I said what do you mean of course there's no Christianity in this universe so how would I know that and their answer to me was what else would I use I'm like I don't know you're the artist maybe you draw something different so that's one of those things where this is not logically consistent with the universe it has no place there it's a Content element that really should not be there and of course topology so this is essential this is kind of a more subtle point to world-building where it there's a sense that things relate to one another it's not like you just have all these random content elements random cultures random objects in the world that don't really seem to fit together and so um I know I've heard some people accuse Tolkien and I'm going to keep you know using tokens example because he is a good example I've heard some people accuse token of doing of having a topology that sometime feels weird cuz like why are there dwarves and elves and humans and all these things living in this it doesn't seem to make sense but he if you read The Silmarillion he kind of explains all of that so he does have a whole back story that explains why it's all there so part of it is that the people who say that it's like well you didn't get the full story you need to go back and read but topology is important because it gives us a sense of that interconnectedness of different things like a culture like the people to the land how do the part of the people in the game if there is a people culture how do they relate to the environment or are they just there without any kind of you know seeming connection and we know that you know they're there that helps build a sense of realness to the game and it applies to everything it's not just about the relationship of places either I'm not just talking about the actual distance between a place that really doesn't matter because topology is is is agnostic of distance it's all about the actual connection what is connected to what and how is it connected to it and so that's that's really important to kind of flush that out and it does help to convey a sense of a much broader universe so even if you hint that there is a connection by dropping a line from a non-player character or by finding an artifact that seems to be that might relate to different in the game that kind of helps build the sense of lure helps build a sense that this universe is a lot bigger than the player might initially imagined so there's three pakore steps to world building that I want to cover one is to set the context so I'm actually going to spend a good deal of time on this issue of real world versus fictional world because this tends to be one of the theories where I see a lot of designers get hung up in terms of what they what they do next in terms of how they build out their content the second one is determine the level of complexity so again this is not about realism it's about realization how much is needed to actually make the world serve the narrative and serve the experience goals and then lastly is about creating with intent so then we talk about at what you actually do building the world layers I'm not going to spend as much time on that part because that can go on for weeks we don't have time for that so let's talk about this notion in about real world and fictional world now I realize this is a very strong dichotomy I'm I'm putting here but I do fully realize that this is a broad zone of overlap it's very much the same way people are arguing about VR versus AR and blah blah blah it's like it's a spectrum there's there's certain degrees of overlap I mean you can have things that take place in the real world like a lot of games do but there's a very fantastical fantastical fictional things that happen on top of that real world but my reason for making this dichotomy that was really important because if you base things in the real world in our world I keep saying real world I don't want to get into some kind of metaphysical argument about that term today but when you base things in our known world it does have an effect on the content and a perception of the content and a lot of other things that we'll talk about the fictional world you have a lot more freedom but it could also be dangerous because you'd also don't have boundaries so you can basically kind of go off on a tangent create something that might be completely problematic for people who are playing the game in our world I was confusing really fast anyway in the world of cartography we know this very well this whole fictional versus real world setting so you know this these are two versions of Google Maps and I Google was one of my clients and I was there we were perfecting what we call domain tailoring so you can see here in the US locale when you go to Google Maps and for most of the world you see the northern area of India Jammu and Kashmir's disputed you can see the dashed lines around the disputed territories up there because it's disputed between Pakistan India and China well in India by law you must show Jammu and Kashmir as Indian Territory this is non-negotiable you must do this or else your your product will not sell in India the government will ban it and so what I call this this is what I call a geopolitical imagination this doesn't exist it exists in the political world of an Indian government but it does not exist on the ground and so this is in a way this is kind of a fictional world this doesn't really exist so it might be almost as fictional as tokens map so there's some differences between real world and fictional world and creation that I'm going to touch on and I again I for the sake of time this is highly generalized so that's another thing cartographers do is we generalize a lot because you can't show everything on a map so I'm generalizing my own talk a little bit so anyway differences in world creation between doing real world and fictional world creations so with the real world the primary emphasis is often on replication and often authenticity so you want it to feel like it's a real place there was a game like six days in Fallujah which you may have heard about which never got released because it perfectly recreated the Battle of Fallujah in 2004 and Iraq and it was controversial because of it because that was a controversial battle and they the publisher was just like I'm not touching this we're not going to release this and so it was very authentic and it replicated the city exactly and yet you know that was a problem for it them in the fictional world the primary emphasis tends to be more on the imagination in distinction so we want new things we don't necessarily want stuff that we've already seen in the real world we want to see things that have never existed before that's where we would kind of crank on our imagination we want these things to be distinct from what we know in the real world because that distinction actually makes them you know stand out more and in the consumption basically on the player side so the differences in the world consumption is when you're playing the game there on the real when you're playing a real world game it's basically the focus is on realism and experience it feels genuine like wow I'm really driving this tank I'm really snapping that person's head off you know that kind of thing I should use nicer examples but um and what's wrong with me so and in the fictional world it's off and on it's focused on discovery and escapism so like of course we all know that no man's sky just was released and a lot of the both praise and criticism of the game is focused on that issue that it's like too much discovery and too much escapism but some people love that and some people don't so then that's you know a whole different issue but that tends to be what a lot of fictional worlds are more focused on because that's one of the values of it discoverability let me just touch on that issue really quick so what I mean by discoverability which is another critical issue when we're creating content is when you have a Content element in the game let's say it's something that could be potentially offensive to a certain culture or maybe it just does not in the right place maybe it shouldn't be there but this in this was a game in Tekken fighter where they had the the inscriptions the Arabic script for Allah on the floor and so you know now how discoverable is it though that's the issue here because if you look at these tiles when you're up here your eyes are up here fighting are you going to notice it in the tiles and that that is a that's open to interpretation some people might notice as some people did and some people may not and so depending sometimes you'll put content elements into the your environment that might be controversial or they might be yueji or something but sometimes you're not going to see them and this is actually one of the things I do a lot when I do my consulting work in this area is I look for things that most people are never going to see and the only way I can do that is because I've got like God Mode tools when I'm actually in the environment during one of the game builds so I can like turn around and look at places that no one's ever going to see or probably will never going to see so let's talk a little more about real-world context because I again I want to make this distinction so setting games in our world so the primary issues that we have with the real world when it comes to content what number one is augmentation and I'm going to give an example of all these things so augmentation is like taking something that actually exists and adding to it like adding some fictional elements to it accuracy of course is what it says like is this is the character accurate is that building accurate is that event accurate the historical event interpretation so how we how different cultures interpret a real-world thing whether it's a you know a gesture you know like this gesture means different things in different countries or appropriateness as well like is this subject matter actually appropriate to have in the game so like here's one from Ninja Gaiden 2 where it was interesting because in this game was sort of a hyper hyper real world it was supposed to be the real world but kind of I call it hyper real because a lot of the buildings were not not they way they really are so like this is a part of the Kremlin that was enhanced it was like given extra layers and so it's like if you this is you know so you would maybe recognize it as the Kremlin but maybe not because it's been enhanced some in some way and you know this this can be dangerous because if you take the wrong object and enhance it or augment it in a certain way that might not work especially if it's a sacred site if it's a church or a mosque or a synagogue or someplace like that or if say a burial site or something like that you have to be really careful about what you do to actual locations because it can be very sensitive accuracy to does anyone know who this is or who it looks like so basically they were modeling it after so now the funny thing is though is that when the developers made this model I said that's Bill Clinton and they said who they said what because the team there was a Japanese team who made this character and so they weren't as familiar with the US president so but I'm like I'm like I was like I know he's not exactly the same but it's just like but he also had a Southern drawl when the character talked so I'm just like this is like really similar so you could and so part of the problem too though now if someone was to perceive that this is Bill Clinton one of the things that we had to take out of the game is that this present in the game use the term the final solution we all know the historical problem with that term and so that was a huge issue so you could be saying that well actually President Bill Clinton is in favor of this term which of course is not true so it's that kind of thing that people might perceive interpretation so here's a really interesting example of history so in Age of Empires what this is what history really showed what happened is that the Amato's in blue in Japan they invaded the Korean Peninsula over there and they took over the Cho's on Empire in red that's what that's what really happened so when Age of Empires released in Korea the Korean Ministry Ministry of Information said that never happened so then what are you supposed to do so basically what we ended up doing eventually was creating a patch only for Korea that showed the opposite to the Chosun are actually invading Japan instead and so this is a matter of interpretation a lot of people would say well that's completely erroneous it's like they should not do that in a historical game yeah but guess what Age of Empires also had tanks in the Aztec empire Aztecs never had tanks the Aztec tanks for cool but that doesn't mean you know there are inaccuracies in Age of Empires it was not meant to be exactly precise history but this is this is obviously a huge issue when we basically have to turn around and say okay well they have a completely different interpretation of history or appropriateness this is pretty straightforward you killing Sikhs inside the golden temple and Emirates are which is the most sacred site to the Sikh faith that's pretty controversial so that's like you know gunning down Catholics and Saint Peter's in Rome or you know gunning down Muslims in in Mecca it's like you just don't do it that's a that's a sacred site and so that's probably not going to be appropriate the other thing that's interesting is that these are not just by these are not just you know single variable things a lot of these examples can be like both inaccurate or inappropriate like this one was interesting where they were striving for accuracy in this in the simulator where you try and kill John F Kennedy in Dallas so you try and assassinate him like the late like from the Book Depository and so the guys who made this game said well it's just a historical simulation it's like but it also kept score and it was wanted you to like try and do a better job and it's like well that's a game but so a lot of people felt this is highly inappropriate but it's also highly accurate they did an incredible job of recreating Dealey Plaza in Dallas and recreating the whole scenario well if you watch the Oliver Stone movie though then it's all baloney right so let's talk about fictional world context now so the primary issues that happen in the fictional world is sometimes we have generalization that happens where the developers kind of lump everything together where it's like well all these cultures are the same which kind of started happening in Jade Empire when we are creating that game is that the idea that it was going to be a pan-asian culture and yet within the initial form it was like 80% Chinese about 5% Japanese 5% Korean and the rest was Indy Indian scuse me Hindu and so it was kind of a weird mishmash of stuff but it was heavily dominant in Chinese and so but the way that they originally created it was sort of generalizing all those cultures as if to say they're all equivalent and they're all the same which was would be incredibly offensive emulation is so this is a probably the biggest issue in fictional worlds and I'll give an example in a minute but emulation is basically where you create something in your fictional universe that feels very much like something that exists here probably the number one thing I've seen in all my years is when they have a desert culture in a fantasy game that my goodness they look awfully Arab to me they like every single one of these cultures every scene one of these games have the same Arabic Bedouins looking feeling to them and it's like they just can't seem to depart that allegory is another big one as well we're basically you're suggesting something through the fictional universe and I'll explain that in a minute and then the use of artifacts to this is this is a huge problem this kind of relates to the backfilling and cultural evidence I mentioned before we're basically you're just throwing stuff in the environment to kind flesh out the environment but you're throwing putting things in there that may or may not actually be useful in the fictional world or might not fit with the logical consistency so a generalization so this game got a lot of bad press because basically what they did is they took these different sets of deities like the Norse gods the Egyptian gods but they also put in the Hindu gods now yes the Norse gods and Egyptian gods are they are still worshiped by very very small minority of human beings whereas the Hindu faith is you know like about a billion people so you know basically doing this equivalents and saying that well the Hindu gods are just the same as these other antiquated gods we're just going to throw them in a mix and have them fight each other that's a level of generalization that's not very acceptable so and so it's it that can be potentially problematic making that assumption or emulation again not picking on the Hindu phase but this is a good example where this this creature this elephant demon originally looked a lot like the god Ganesha and of course in the in this game the elephant demon was an evil character that tried to kill you whereas Ganesh in the Hindu faith is a very benevolent very much a loved figure in their pantheon and so to create a character that emulates this now the one you're seeing here is near the final form whereas in its original form it looked a lot more like this including another set of arms which was I think a kind of an obvious thing that had to be lost but emulation happens a great deal when creating fantasy games and allegory as well so if you don't know the story about the dervish and the arbiter character if you if you have not played halo just to set this up really quick this character he serves a group called the Covenant which is a a kind of quasi religious alien group they worship the halo rings that can destroy the galaxy the Master Chief main character the game is trying to stop them and so you know that's basically the really really short story so this character that was originally called the dervish dervishes a title from Sufi Islam the specific title not very much the same way that Pope is a very specific title from Roman Catholicism and so the original name of this character was dervish he serves one of three leaders of the Covenant one of whom is called the prophet of truth which is an often used synonym for Muhammad and so you've got ma the dervish serving the prophet of truth and you've got the Master Chief who is basically this quasi American figure I know it says UN Space Command on a shoulder but come on he's got an American accent and all that so um you know so he's trying to destroy the Covenant and stop them and where the allegory starts getting built up here is that this was the first major game being released by Microsoft after 9/11 it was going to be one of the biggest games of the year so it was very easy at least for me to see how people could perceive this as being an answer to 9/11 whereas like oh so the Master Chief is going to destroy Islam because you've got the prophet of truth and the Dervish helping the prophet of truth and all this kind of stuff and so that builds up a sense of allegory that you are basically passing a message to this story now there's a lot of great ways to do allegory and fiction we see it all the time like the original Star Trek series was masterful at doing allegory where they were dealing with racial issues and gender issues but they did it in such a way in the science fiction realm that made it okay made it more palatable for the late 60s so we have to be really careful about the messages that we're sending I'm not saying you can't put a message into your game into your fictional universe we see it all the time and you look at stuff like Dragon Age there's all kinds of stuff and Dragon Age about racial relations between the elves and humans and all that and I think it's great that they do it we just have to be really careful about what that allegory is saying and how it might relate to something in the real world and then of course artifacts too so here's a great example in this game pocket God where this artifact here now the developer they got pushed back from the Polynesian community because a lot of Polynesian people were upset because of the way these little natives look because the very antiquated version of an indigenous person with a bone in their hair and a grass skirt and all that stuff but the real issue here is that the developer said well this is no specific culture at all it's like really well you know that thing right there is a moai that only exists on Easter Island so by putting a moai on the island you've instantly made this the Easter Island Island culture so that artifact pegged this particular game to his specific culture now in later versions of the game they actually changed it so that it's a different statue it's up the actual moai so just simple things like that now there are a lot of shared issues between the real world and fictional world so logical consistency again I'm going to keep mentioning that because it's such an important issue in world creation it's always an issue whether you're dealing with real world or fictional world fictional world it tends to be a bigger problem because you're creating things from scratch and so you have more effort to actually make that world feel real as opposed to actually starting with a real world environment managing the creation of cultural evidence which I've mentioned now project product product versioning by language and locale is also very important so the Age of Empires example I gave you about Korea by having to make that fix you now have two versions of the game you've got the world version you've got the Korean version and so now you have to manage all of these versions like these different perceptions of your content different you know so you that's something that gets really complicated very quickly and then of course the discoverability of issues which I already mentioned so talking about degree of complexity so what level of detail is required to realize the game's world for the intent of experience it's really the question you have to ask yourself and again I'm going to keep harping on the notion it's not about realism it's about realization you may not have to do much of anything to make that world work for what you intend for your game and so you really have to step back and think about it what's the most minimal amount I need to do to make the game work and then you can think about maybe embellishing a little bit if necessary so one of the things geographers are really good at is we are very good at the realization of worlds because we spent all this time deconstructing this one and we deconstruct like no other that's what we do as we tear this world apart at least in our heads and we try and figure out what's where why are things there and all that kind of stuff now cartography has always done this cartography is about Bill it's about rebuilding the world because all Cartel all cartography is subjective if you look at a map and you think it's an accurate document you're fooling yourself because every single map is gone it goes through a subjective process through cartographers who make decisions about what's going to show up on the map now you cartographers are committed to showing ground truth to make sure that what you see on the map is actually there but you're not going to see everything that's there because you can't put everything on the map that's there and so what we do is we conveniently divide the world up into layers we've done this in our heads for four centuries as cartographers but now with geographic information systems it's made it very explicit because this is how geographic information systems work the world is divided up into layers they have a base layer that is quote real-world it has the the geoid and all the other stuff that it's built on and they just have every kind of layer you can imagine on there and in the same way when we build worlds we kind of do the same thing now maybe we don't think about it this way but that's one of the things I'm help I would hope people do think about it this way because they really should start thinking about the kind of the layers of the world that they're creating and you may or may not need some of the world excuse me some of the layers so I'm just going to talk about a few of these potential layers well I'm not going to really go into in detail I'm just going to list them so you can see some of the potential layers and I mean this is just scratching the surface I can go down this list it's going to go to the Center of the Earth it's like there's so many things you could potentially represent in your world and you may not need all of these you may need only one of these maybe none of these depending on what kind of world you're creating and so looks like of course they're sub layers for all this kind of stuff you take demographics alone and you think about the level of demographics in terms of genders and age ethnicities all of that kind of stuff so it's very complicated gets very complicated very quickly but in my experience I mean this see this is a natural thing for cartographers to think this way but in my experience in working with game designers and a lot of the the people who do flush out the world I don't encounter them thinking like this maybe it's not useful for them I don't know I've often found that when I kind of talk through with them when I give them my feedback I sort of break it down this way and say well I want to understand the way your world is built because it's going to help me do my job better when I'm actually looking at your content later so if I can understand it in a way that kind of breaks it down like this and a lot of times they found this more helpful because then they realize that maybe maybe in the way of the narrative unfolds in their world maybe that climate actually has makes a difference in their game they weren't really thinking about the climate necessarily but all of a sudden they're like wait a minute there's all kinds of cool stuff we could do with weather that we weren't thinking about and of course back to something like this just to use this example again so I'm talking about geomorphology as an example so geomorphology landforms and how they get made and plate tectonics and all that now as a kid when I first read Tolkien I thought this is a wonderful map and I still do I love this map but now is a trained geographer I look at this map and I say those mountains around Mordor are are ridiculous they were not formed this way now of course then the geek in me see I have this inner battle between the geographer and the geek because the geek is saying yeah but what about maybe maybe Morgoth went there and Morgoth like mate used his magic and he made the mountains go up is like a giant wall around Mordor or something that could happen right and so you know it's just like I'm not going to second-guess Tolkien why it looks that way but it's kind of when I look at the map of middle-earth it's one of those things where I'm like that doesn't feel real to me but then again it's like it's so engrained in my psyche at this point so I don't have a ton of time left I'm going to talk about these last few problematic layers really quickly so these tend to be the layers that can be the most problem for you now I've touched on some of this stuff already that's why I'm going to go through it fairly quickly but these are the ones that consistently time after time after time have tripped up game developers when they've been building their worlds so history of course is one of the biggest ones when you're dealing with real world history I already gave you an example with Age of Empires when you're dealing with fictional world history it's about emulating I'm going to keep saying emulating because again I mentioned earlier it's one of the biggest problems with fictional worlds where you're trying to emulate a certain thing like if you're going to do like the Battle of Pearl Harbor but you're going to do it in a fictional setting maybe you can get away with it but if you cut it depends what level of of connection you want the player to have to that event so if you have like some invasion in space that kind of emulates the Battle of Pearl Harbor it's like how obvious you're going to make it I'm you know so it depends oh we already talked about that sorry so um with something like this this is for real-world example like this Dean came out or they want it to come out recently about the Revolution Iran of course the Iranian government does not like this at all they don't want to relive this history they don't they don't want to see this as a game by any means I've actually played it I thought it was pretty cool I thought it was it gave a lot of insight into the into what was going on and the attitudes that were on the street and how it kind of fomented and grew faith of course that might be a no-brainer that's one of the areas where with real world obviously you steer clear or be very careful with real world religions as much as you possibly can extremely careful but one of the things I see a lot in fantasy games are fictional games is they want the player to sense that there is a belief system and so they often mimic a belief system that exists already and the most often mimicked is Roman Catholicism I've seen it time and again replicated in all kinds of different forms because I get it you want to convey the notion of Orthodox you want to convey the notion of of ritual in faith and all that and the Catholic Church is a very good example of that but sometimes that can be overdone and so you have to you have to decide you know how much you want to infuse your game with that I'm going to skip this example I will use this example so this is where they recreated the manchester cathedral in the UK and resistance fall oh man you know of course this is a real-world example they want this took place in the real world but the problem was is that this being the Church of England's Church the church was not very happy with their Church being destroyed in the game and so now the Church of England actually has something they call sacred digital guidelines that if you're going to use any facility of the Church of England you have to get their approval even if it's going to be in digital form or something like this where this this fighter in this game if you may have heard about this example we said this fighter is a Muslim but the when they hat when a fighter wins a win a match in this game they have random actions that the fighter does well in his case the random action was he was doing this he is that he would not do that and he made them he made sure that they are aware that he would not do that a cultural identities of course this is where we have all kinds of issues around how gender is represented how nationalities are represented how ethnicities are represented the use of stereotypes is very much overdone still in this industry we can do a lot better than stereotypes stereotypes to me are basically lazy creation it's when people can't figure out some other way to draw a character or to put a different kind of character they just take a stereotype off the shelf and throw them into the game because it's easy and it's quick but all it takes a little more thought to put you know to put in there and then also the whole idea when we create cultures in a fictional world we want to we want them to feel plausible so that means you kind of have to fly you have to spend the time flushing them out which again is something Tolkien did extremely well and one of the ways he did it was through language because language and culture are so intertwined he did an amazing job because you know he was a language professor who used his strengths and he developed all these languages for the elves and the dwarves and everything and that made them feel much more real and plausible in Resident Evil 5 this is a case where the the stark imagery of having this Caucasian male gun down sub-saharan African villagers was really problematic in the United States because we are have a lot of racial issues in the United States now of course the developer was saying what's the big deal they're zombies they're supposed to be killed but the developer didn't really realize because the developer is in Japan and they have you know in Japan it's 98% ethnic Japanese so you're not as aware of the diversity and racial issues there and so this whole notion of the Dark Continent the great white hunter that are very controversial in the Western world is just not something they've been exposed to and of course like Lara Croft I think she's a great example of how she went from being sort of the poster child of sexism and ridiculous proportions to being an amazingly well fleshed out female character in a game and a lot of this is due to the vision of the later versions that we've had and like the writing of Rhianna Pratchett who's given her a whole emotional depth that did not exist before and she's a very cool character and cultural assistance as well so there's the general tension that exists between cultures in the real world and again emulation in the fictional world things like gestures I mentioned before gestures are so culturally specific so even if you have gestures in a game it can be problematic so again like I said this one you know in the United States or a lot of people know that is rock on you know from rock and roll in in the state of Texas it means hook'em horns for the University of Texas and I was told by my Italian friends that it means I'm sleeping with your wife in Italy so you know and then of but of course like here's an image from Dragon Age where it's like they're flipping the bird so like okay well would they would they do that and drag an agent's world I don't know why wouldn't they do this instead or this or this or this they're all valid so and then of course geopolitics is another air we have to be very careful about especially for using maps in your game or you're dealing with territories and all that kind of stuff and in the fictional world it's basically again if you're augmenting an existing geopolitical scenario or you're enhancing it in some way you got to be so careful with this because there are some governments that watch this very carefully so one example of course is you might suspect as China where they banned hearts of iron because Tibet and Taiwan we're not being shown as part of Chinese territory now if you've played this game it's basically like the board game risk and so you just try and take over the world but they were mostly concerned with just those two areas and the interesting thing though is that these games take place in World War two and the People's Republic of China did not exist until 1949 so the government is actually reinforcing their perception of their sovereignty before they existed so which is kind of what they're doing right now in the South China Sea if you've been following the news so finally I am finishing here so a couple of notes about creative freedom and world building and again I apologize this going so fast because there's a lot a lot to cover here and I'm barely scratching the surface but I want to emphasize it's really important that you exercise your creative vision but you cannot expect that vision to align with other cultures and so whether it's a real world you're creating whether it's a fictional world you're creating you have to be really careful about the you're building or at least be conscious of the choices that you're making and so when you're doing the the decisions about setting the context is it real world or fictional world where you're figuring out what complexity so what degree of realization do I need in order to make this this world work for the purpose of my game for the narrative purpose and the experience purpose and of course the creative process as well so watching how you backfill the game and doing all the cultural evidence you have to just they have to be a very conscious a certain stream of consciousness goes into that creative process and finally I'll mention this as well because we are a game industry and I think most everyone who's in this room if you're in the game industry you're in it because you want to make a living off it right you're not just a pure artist you don't live in your parents loft or basement you don't just make games and put them out in the world as pieces of art some people do that and I think it's fantastic and I'm hoping to see more and more of that happen however most of us are here because we are making a living off games and so when we are in the creation process we have to weigh this dilemma between pure artistic freedom doing anything we want which is perfectly valid I don't care what you make I really don't I'm not the political correctness police I don't care what you make so I'm not going to be the one who says well that's bad you can't do that but if you want to make money off it especially in certain markets around the world I will be the one who says well that's not going to work here and it's not going to work there and it's not work there and so you have to decide what your goals are in terms of actually releasing this content into the world if you want to be artistic be artistic but you may not get as much money as you want or if you if you want to actually maximize your revenue you then you might have to make decisions that not always agree with your original creative vision and it's a struggle it's a struggle that a lot of game developers deal with and so being conscious of that struggle and kind of thinking it through is really important because if you're gay if you do release a game and it does get in trouble in a certain market because of something that you you know mistakenly put in your game some kind of artifact or character or something it helps to have some conscious decision making around it so you can explain why you did it you didn't you didn't you know you can't you could just say well I don't know I didn't had no idea what I was doing but it's like no I did that because that artifact has a reason for being there in my world and here's the reasons that back up you know they fit the logical consistency and everything else that you developed so there you go that's it are there any questions we have about 5 6 or 7 minutes for questions hello I wanted to ask about your opinion when someone is creating a fantasy world examples world of warcraft that they're actually in mixing elements or switching elements what I mean by that is if you look at the elf civilization we have mix for example ancient Greece putting into jungle instead and some in the poor the houses they have mixed some Asian culture and mixing those together they create like a fantasy culture and architecture how do you think of that way of creating something fantasy I you know I think when when that kind of approach is taken I don't think that's necessarily a problem I think a lot of it is in the execution exactly like I think a lot of times or something like that you have to have an underlying understanding of why that would happen now I'm not saying you have to explain that why to the audience I but I'm saying you need to think through like why would that happen I mean other than just saying well I'm just going to throw that culture with this culture and they're going to be like in some you know fictional place you know dealing with each other or something that to me kind of starts feeling like it breaks the sense of logical consistency but I'm not you know that can be ok but as long as there's some kind of reason for it I think you know some kind of rationale for why why am I seeing like Greeks in some other culture together you know in a way that noir is just not normal not something that you would expect because those are those are cultures that are specifically attached to the real world and we know what their context was we know exactly what their context was and so it's like you have to kind of help explain why why is why are they now in a different context and so that to me is kind of part of working through the logical consistency argument it's kind of thinking okay just you know think of the route the reasons why thank you I so very interesting session my name is Francesca we work for one sky our company localized gains for developers studios and we on a daily basis have this kind of of quest versus these kind of questions about cultural relations making suitable for that particular market or not but what would be in general like your advice for an you know like developers or a studios that they are entering like new markets what what their going to be like a best practice practices that they should follow before deciding if entering that market with their game or not because this is also something that I came to discuss with one of our customer in Hong Kong he was asking me if this guy's game was suitable for a market like Turkey and I told him be careful because in Turkey the culture is likely different from the culture here in Hong Kong so they they are people that they follow like up particular religion and they are quite attached to some science or to some you know values so that was my overall my my advice cream do you have like some best practices something to follow some suggestions that we can also give to our developers when they have to enter like markets it's a great point because I mean there's there's so much that has to go into sort of the intelligence gathering of when you're going into a new market you know it's it's I hate to put it I hate to draw the analogy but it's it's very similar to a military operation and what I keep going on about tanks and guns and stuff today but it is it's intelligence gathering so that's what market research is market research is meant to help you understand what's going on in the market and of course market research as we know it is typically focus on consumer behavior which is fine you need to know that too so it's helpful to know what kind of games that they play you know for you so for example the exam the the illustration I gave about Age of Empires in Korea the decision to make that patch was driven a lot by by the knowledge of the market research knowing that the Korean players liked real-time strategy games which a year later Starcraft came out we all know what happened with Starcraft in Korea became a national phenomenon and so that market research showed that we really should release the RTS gaming in Korea and so it's you know for business reasons we should make that patch and do it and so that was informing our decision-making around that so part of it - I think you also have to look at the kinds of games that are being made locally and so this is one of the things where I think is a huge distinction with companies that are having so much trouble getting into China yeah some games are very successful but look at a lot of the most popular games in China they're based on Chinese mythology in Chinese history you know you've got a lot of they're drawing upon their own culture to cultivate an interest in the games and so it's really important to understand what kinds of games are going to be you know people are going to find interesting there now a lot of times you'll find - is that you'll see you know like players they want to play like the big triple-a game being released in the Western countries but their government will allow it for some reason like one of these cultural or political reasons there might be a way to make a game that kind of does the same thing so you're kind of emulating that game style but doing it a local way using a local theme and there's a lot of different ways around it there's a lot of it but you have to think about the political climate so like look at some of the games like do the research say what kind of games were banned there what are they what are they looking for that they don't like or what games are doing really well as you know so what games are they allowing and are actually doing very well game type game content all of that kind of stuff and so it really kind of mixed it together into understanding what is the expectation that we need to serve and that's really what I focus on I mean well like when my consulting is usually because they want me to find stuff that's bad but there's a big part one of the things I didn't even talk about the whole field of culturalization but one of the things I often talk about is there's reactive culturalization which is basically excuse me removing things that can be potentially problematic but there's proactive culturalization to in which you're actively trying to make content that's going to be more appealing to a specific market fewer companies are doing that now but I think more and more companies are going to be doing that I mean even like when we did Fortson Motorsports way back when the first version the different language versions had different car sets in them because we understood that like the Italian version that a lot of the players there wanted to play well mostly Italian cars and like in the US version you had muscle cars Mustangs Corvette that kind of stuff you know any player could go get any car from the DLC store but still you wanted to serve up sort of what the local expectation was and again that was just a lot of research and so I mean I can go on and on that's all I could say about this but that's my short answer thanks hi so first of all thanks again for lots of information very short time very useful and I have a practical question so when imagining like different settings different cultures and not based on Western culture which is more or less known to some extent to most Western developers I will be a quick fix for research because some things maybe have the budget to go and fly to other countries to Timbuktu or Cambodia and do research but many don't have this possibility so what would be a suggestion like to go on the internet look for books practically well I think there's a lot of different things you can do I mean one of the things that I do is I often I mean I've been doing this long enough I've made contacts like all over the place so it helps to have have the local voice or find some local voice that you trust people who are well informed you know they could get different opinions as well so like for example one of the things I used to do when I was at Microsoft to help gather opinions is what I would reach out to academics so I but I'm not just one I would like talk to a political science professor in that particular country and get their viewpoint on the politics then I would talk to like professor of media our professor of sociology or something in geography of course and just kind of get a sense of kind of give my kind of build up for myself understanding of what is going on there and what the representation might be you know but ultimately though yeah the academic stuff that's great that it's informative and it helps going to build your your knowledge base but what really matters is how consumers are going to react and what are they going to like and what are they going to dislike and a lot of that is just finding people whose opinion you can trust now sometimes you can do it through the internet but we all know what happens on the Internet so but one of the things you could do like I've actually done this sometimes like you're like there's some of the things like Google Answers or whatever it is we can like throw out a question to the world and say hey I'm thinking of making a game that does this and this would people in Thailand like this and see what people say now obviously you're gonna have to do a lot of work to separate the signal from the noise there because you're gonna go a lot of noise but sometimes you actually get a nugget or two that helps you it helps inform you to like maybe I'll go down that research path because they may have said something that said I never heard that before they said well yeah right now a lot of our players are really into this type of game or into this type of content like maybe they're into historical games right now and so that's something you could pursue and so you kind of have to just kind of throw a very wide net that way obviously market research is helpful because but it also costs money so that's that's the only problem with it not that market research is bad it's just that a lot of us can't afford it so but it's good I mean a lot of you can do a lot of I find a lot of market research out there there's a lot of stuff that's out there on the internet you know just kind of assess what you're finding and be really acting for lack of better comparison it's really like writing a PhD unfortunately because it's like you have to take in all of these different source kind of sift through it and kind of yeah that's actually why I love this work so much because in a lot of ways it's kind of like a crime scene investigation I've actually used the term cultural forensics before to talk about like you're sifting through all of this evidence and all of these signs that there's something going on but it's not quite you're not quite sure exactly what it is you're not being able to find it out there through market research or whatnot so you can have to figure out for yourself and then you have just like some times just throw out our proposal like I'm thinking about it creating a game that does blah blah blah for this market and then kind of see how people react to it so I don't know if that's helpful or not but yeah very much thank you you're welcome I think we're about done we're 5 minutes late okay great thank you very much

Channel: GDC

Views: 153,340

Keywords: gdc, talk, panel, game, games, gaming, development, hd, design

Id: EVGonAUUQ8c

Length: 65min 23sec (3923 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 23 2016

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God damn it, guys. If you're going to be an ignorant jackass, at least do it here so the video's creator doesn't have to see it.