Fireside Chat with Jonathan Blow

[Applause] [Music] today we're going to have different format we're going with a Q&A session and it's my pleasure to introduce Jonathan Blow Jonathan Blow is an American video game designer and programmer who is best known as the creator of the independent video games braid of 2008 and the witness of 2016 both of which have received critical acclaim from 2001 to 2004 Blow wrote the inner product column for game developer magazine he was the primary host for the experimental gameplay workshop at the Game Developers Conference which has become a premier showcase for new ideas in video games in addition blow was a regular participant in the indie game jam and blow is also a founding partner of the indie fund an angel investor fund for independent game projects please join me in welcoming Jonathan Blow so Jon studied computer science pretty close and Berkeley what was it like with a passion for game development studying in University not that good actually I it was a different time so there was I was just saying this over in the corner there was nothing in school were almost almost nothing remotely applicable to game development right there was one computer graphics class and that was it right everything else was computer science this was you know nineteen 89 to 93 or 94 so it's probably before most people's birthdays here I guess and were you building video games at that time or did that come later I did I mean you know I started programming when I was a kid like around 10 years old maybe 11 something like that and then I started by making little hobby games and then they got more sophisticated over time and then there was a maybe a break from that when I was in college for the first couple years when I was like being all serious about school and then eventually I switched back just spending a lot of my time on my own projects yeah what kind of tools were you using at that time so we have a lot of first-time game developers in our class and we're introducing them to unity which is a bit more higher level than I guess the C architecture used to what was it like I guess trying to use these more let's say rudimentary tools I mean there was no such a thing as a tool to make games with at that time really nothing so you were just programming in C or some other language like back then everybody like making domain-specific languages so you might like make a programming language that you thought was better to make games in and then make the game using that and I think ultimately that's been shown to be a misguided approach but that was what people did so in learning your fundamentals at university is there anything you wish perhaps a mentor at the time had told you knowing that you would be pursuing games or even maybe some advice which you wish you hadn't taken I'm sure there are many things the problem is coming up with something coherent because you know what happened so you're in you're in school you're learned a bunch of stuff and you probably brought some computer knowledge in with you beforehand and by the time you're toward the end of school you're like yeah I know a lot right I'm really good at this or something and now I'm gonna go do stuff in the real world and the actual thing is like you know here's here's nothing on some graph and here's here's kind of how much you are able to learn within a four year time span at school even if you work really hard and like here is what is actually required to be competent at this domain right so it's like a huge leap that you have to go from here to there right and it's not a leap that is makeable instantly right it requires more years of hard work and something about seeing that clearly would have been helpful I think yeah it would it would have helped me attack that in a more orderly fashion and make less of a mess when you talk about maybe the Delta between what you've learned in school and what you're going to need to succeed in the games industry what are the resources where you see people picking up that information I don't know that there's an organized resource I mean on the internet today there's just tons of information right the problem is 97% of it is bad advice and 3% of it is like really good advice and I don't necessarily know how you're supposed to know which 3% is the right 3% I certainly it's true that anyone like writing a column on the internet about how to make games the right way probably isn't quite the right person to listen to right they're not the worst person to listen to but they're the person who has enough time to write a column on the internet about why how you should make games which by definition you know all the people who are at the edge of the envelope of a high skill and and all this stuff are busy they're all they've all got more to do than they can possibly do right and so they might kick out a little thing once in a while like maybe I made a little blog post today for the first time in three years about this thing that I did write but they're not going to be writing organized advice and that's a little bit of a problem I think but I don't know how to solve that so one of the resources we're using our YouTube tutorials and kind of online resources to learn how to build our early prototypes and you're speaking on behalf we you helped to found right the experimental game workshop at GDC sewers GDC you think may be fulfilling that gap and providing that kind of intermarry intermediary resource I think it's super good yeah for for people starting out because you just go there and you get a lot of context about what's happening you see all the things that people are working on you see in the in the talks how they think about the problem they're working on right oftentimes you may not think much of the way they're approaching the problem even sometimes that will be because you don't have enough experience yet to know why but sometimes it'll be because they just really aren't approaching it well I mean the funny thing about games and not just games but I'm going to extend this to the technology industry broadly is that there's this very weird phenomenon that happens like if you think about how capitalism is supposed to work then if someone's very successful in making a lot of money it should be because they're good at what they do right and and they succeed and so forth right that's true in getting some over some initial hump of starting a bunny but after that there's this inverse process that happens where the bigger a company is the more money they have to spend on their projects and the more money they have to spend on their projects the more they can afford to screw up and do things badly and still drag themselves over whatever the minimum bar is to release something right and so I'm not going to mention any companies like Facebook or Twitter or anybody like that but I mean you look at all these companies and that's literally what's happening right they yeah twitter is the most canonical example of that because they hardly do anything and they spent so much money hardly doing anything so gee but Thursday and that's not just to I'm not I don't wish to say that just to bash on individual companies because I've observed it as a general technology phenomenon and so if you look at a bigger game company and you think oh you know Electronic Arts or Activision or somebody like that is very successful and therefore that's the model that I should follow really within that company there's like a small percentage of people who are the most talented and know how to do everything and those people are putting out fires all the time they're not responsible for most of what is produced by that company because I can't be by sheer numbers right and so most of what the larger companies produce is not that well produced and so therefore if you go to a conference and many you know that the speeches that you see are going to be random samples that were chosen from the conference mostly based on like oh that's an interesting game that people want to hear about and so this person worked on a piece of it and therefore etc right and so it meets some minimum bar of pay the game existed and it came out and and people liked it so so there is some amount of reality that the approach that person took was good but beyond that you can't infer much like it could be I don't know I hopefully this makes enough sense sure so on the topic of prototyping you mentioned how perhaps some companies start going in the wrong direction and then eventually get dragged that way what can even our student teams do to evaluate what feature is what design decisions might need changing how do we determine what's going to be a prototype turned into a feature and then what maybe is going to die as a prototype we need a pivot it's it's a little bit hard to make generalizations that are accurate everywhere but I can make some right the thing that I would say that's the biggest mistake that people tend to make early on is you know they come up with some idea about how a games going to work or some piece of it and why it's going to be interesting and they'll build these elaborate theories about why it's interesting right because oh the player has to think about this and then that and then that's what makes this interesting or whatever and then you get it running and it's not interesting and in fact your whole when the player has to do this and that and that and all these elaborate theories that you had that ends up just being a big drag that nobody really wants to play very common right now at that point you have a choice of removing the thing changing it fundamentally or proceeding onward and hoping it gets better right or there's a middle one in between those last cue of giving lip service to the fact that you're going to change this thing and make it better but then you change it in tiny incremental ways that don't really matter and don't solve the real problem right because people don't people just don't fundamentally want to face reality they don't want to admit that their elaborate theory about why this thing was going to be good they don't want to admit that that may be wrong because what is that then there's whole personality judgments that can land on them as a result of that oh maybe I wasn't as smart of a designer as I thought it was or something right so the the main advice that I can say is don't do that third thing right don't ignore the fact that something doesn't work and just say oh you know we'll make the graphics better it'll it'll work later or you know the frame rates a little bit low but we'll do something to make it run faster and then it'll be fine it's like not not really if it's not good to start with it probably won't magically get good could you break down for us what your process is what is prototyping ethic la look like and then at what we do we don't do that I mean so the thing you have to understand about it's not completely true but okay the thing about my current company is we're small we're about 10 people and we work on big difficult projects so our last game took six years it's not a lot of prototyping going on when it takes you six years to finish something right I mean we started with something that you know I put together by myself it was a very simple like oh you walk around and you can do this and do that and then we just sort of built that up the same thing there's a game we haven't announced that I did we'll release it eventually but I started on it a few years ago and you could say it was prototyped but but actually the sense in which it was a prototype is just that that you know the graphics were super ugly and they're just 2d sprites and I didn't care that much about that but I started building the real gameplay from day one right and tried to build it into a real game along all the other axes from day one so I don't know I almost would say this is a weird thing that my opinion has changed on over the years like I've given speeches about prototyping and how to do it well that was a long time ago these days I don't I don't really prototype I follow some path that leads incrementally toward a complete game you know what does I feel like prototype is more a thought experiment and then maybe we build this into something or I don't know so I do a different thing but I think when you're at the student stage prototyping is actually probably a good thing because it gives you experience fast so I don't want to discourage that I just want to say though the long-term career arc maybe involves you getting skilled enough that you don't really need to prototype a bunch of random ideas to to get started on something that'll really work but that's t plus 12 to 14 years you know that's not when you start because it's hard design is hard and programming is hard and yeah so the witness is a game based around a pretty simple core mechanic of drawing lines between things and we recently completed an assignment which was just completely based around juicing one core mechanic it's interesting though because that mechanic looks eerily similar to one in a previous prototype the game with the spells and I'm interested in how maybe your process allows for those kind of core ideas to bubble up and maybe move to the side ideas that aren't you know pivotal to the success of the game so and there's something a little bit misleading there right so the core activity that you do in the witness the core the verb that the game is based around I don't usually talk in this language but it's I think necessary to clarify this the verb in the game the thing that you choose to do as a player is to draw lines in puzzles and stuff but that's not the core mechanic right the core mechanic is that you're stuck on something it's much more abstract it's that you're stuck on something that you don't understand and your lack of understanding is happening because you're assuming more things than you needed to and then you have a sudden stroke of insight out of some magical place that tells you the answer or gives you an exciting thing to try and then you execute that attempted solution with with that verb right so if it was actually just a game about drawing lines I don't think it would be that interesting right so in designing the game it's like okay this line drawing thing is how we make this other thing happen but it's only in service of the other thing and so most of the thought that goes into this is at a more abstract level right so the thing is if you were to approach try to prototype a game like the witness by sitting down and saying I'm gonna make a cool game where you draw lines and puzzles and if that's what you prototype then you're not going to get anything that interesting so it's a subtle business but you need to program the thing about drawing the lines or something like that in order to build the scaffolding for this actual interesting thing to be able to happen but but that scaffolding doesn't succeed if the interesting subtle thing doesn't happen or isn't interesting or subtle right so the problem with this is that I can't necessarily map it on to anyone's individual project right because hopefully you know like hey I want to make a game about a guy that jumps and he can grab balloons sometimes and float for a while right okay that's that's fine but like why right there's got to be a y or it's just a very empty exercise right and so the thing that keeps your idea about I mean this I don't use this term game mechanic very often even cuz I don't I don't like the popular understanding of mechanic that has arisen but I'm gonna use it anyway here but I don't I don't ever think about mechanics when I design or not usually but if you call this jumping and grabbing balloons thing a mechanic there's ways there's many ways for that prototype to fail right the most obvious way is like well we just never managed to do the programming well enough that he could grab the balloon or something right but that's a relatively pedestrian and uninteresting way to fail that you should be able to get past before too long but then the real way to fail is just like well I grabbed the balloon and then I let go and I don't know what this is about or how to make it bet I don't know how to make it better because I don't know what it's for because I don't know why people would play it right so so to go beyond the very basic you need to know where to aim and to know where to aim you need to know why that's a thing and very often now the thing is almost everybody who has some idea like that has a little bit of a grip on why and they don't even know it right like there's something you know if that really excited you like the idea of grabbing on a balloon and floating up or something there's something about that there's something about the way that that makes you feel or something that it reminds you of that made you have that idea in the first place probably unless you play this game of like throwing pieces of paper and a hat and pulling them out which people do sometimes but you know so so then the job is just understanding why you were interested in that in the first place and that's it's actually not very easy but none of this is easy so so you might then describe this kind of jumping to grab the balloons as the mechanic but it's not the subtle purpose it's not the higher purpose if you don't find that purpose through prototyping what inspired you to make these games how did you find what you might call the abstract mechanic well so that happened in different ways on the previous few games maybe you could speak to York so so for the witness it actually that whole thing about having a sudden realization about what was important came from that previous spell-casting game and it was a it was like while I was designing the spell-casting game that I thought was about navigating a multi-parameter space in your head - like concoct the right magic spell or whatever and it was too hard to play you know I had this idea about something in the game that's gonna be really cool about you realize the significance of something and I just felt really big to realize that right and the for various reasons of unplayable 'ti I never took that game very far but that one piece really stuck with me and so I said well I'm gonna build a game around that right previous game braid we is really a little different there was an initial exploration on that game that was something like what people do when they prototype I said well you know I'm going to make a platformer and it's gonna be about taking these ideas that happen in quantum mechanics that are weird like you know about things being in superposition or about you know the arrow of time actually being bi-directional and and unit and forward time being some kind of a mirage or something and it was going to be about illustrating all those things and then what happened was I started doing like one of them and realized that was an I just started messing with time and realized that was enough to build a whole game around right and then I just dropped everything else not not totally because the ending of the game brings back the bi-directional arrow of time thing and stuff but so that was more like prototyping but then interestingly there the function of the prototyping was just to get into a space where I could find something that was different from the idea that I started with and then could could run with you know so that's the thing is is you know you're actually successful in that kind of endeavor when you get something that's better than the idea that you started with and you get to drop that idea in favor of this thing that's even more exciting right because if you don't ever get to do that if it's like oh I had this idea and I'm just I'm scraping by just trying to make this thing that implements it and it doesn't implement it very well and but someday it'll get as good as the vision in my head that's kind of a slog right you know you're in good territory when you exceed the original idea and you can drop the original idea which actually happened for the witness to at a slightly different magnitude now I don't know if that can happen in a semester class but because it's not it's not quite long enough but just to keep your eyes open and like it's there's a skill of noticing what is really good about the thing that you're making I'm just beating on this theme again from different directions but like everybody's super attached to their thing right and if you can if you can really see be honest to yourself about what's good about it and what's not good about it that that skill develops over time and and you get better at it and that's one of the most important skills you could have actually when through your work for the Indy fund you're looking at some games which are really successful and others which don't quite make it there what's kind of the big thing in the way of preventing these games from succeeding do you notice a pattern what kind of success do you mean financial success or creative success or where we because it can be very different answers sure I mean I'm interested in both so when it comes to let's say creative success yeah is it is it does it vary by how the creator defines it or how would how would you explore that yeah I mean I I do think I do think that creative success is highly subjective but I can draw a somewhat objective distinction of there's some kinds of projects that people come on and we give them money to make them and and they never really congeal into a thing that makes sense and I think I can tie that back to my original or not my original point but the thing I was saying about knowing why your game idea is that game idea and what it's trying to be because I think it's not that uncommon that people don't really know the answer to that or they can give you some answer but it's a very surface answer and those projects often tend to derail because either things don't quite go as they expected and then they don't know how to course-correct because they don't know where they're going so how can you course correct or even if things don't explicitly derail they just get hard like it's it's a really large amount of work to make a full game like really large and it's just there's some point where you just end up in the middle of the desert and you can't remember what life was like back when you started you can't see the end of it because there's just more things on your to-do list your to-do list grows everyday right it doesn't ever shrink so you can't plot some date in the future when the to-do list will be gone because it monotonically increases right so there's this point where you're just stuck you're not stuck because you're making progress every day but the progress doesn't appear to be going anywhere and at that point you need to know why you're making this thing or stuff falls apart and and that's that's really common and so among among projects that have problems if they can't see ahead is that sort of your role to go in and and help identify those problems where do you do that I mean we try to do that but the problem is nobody ever listens like seriously nobody even on more trivial advice so let's take the most rudimentary piece of advice ever like people are about to launch their game they have their launch plan it's like alright we're gonna launch in one month and I say to them you know nobody's heard of your game if you launch it right now nobody's gonna buy it and then you'll be broke and you'll have to go get a job rather than continuing on as an independent developer I have said in in very clear terms to teams on at least six occasions you cannot follow this plan because it will have the following result you must take more time and do something out of the box to publicize your game right so purely business advice about a factual thing nothing subjective about what you're making the people might have issue with or anything not a single time has that advice been heated at all never nobody listens to it and then the games come out and they fall on the floor right so if people won't even take advice about things that are that simple they really won't take advice about difficult stuff like you know what's your game about or something right so I don't know so maybe as game developers we're a little resistant to people coming in at you geez I don't even think it's game developers as human beings the the problem is I don't yeah I don't know what to do about that it's like yeah what would be your advice I guess to students who might receive let's say critique or feedback for the first time is there any way to kind of take what John blow is saying to you and take it to heart a little you know without getting direct feedback about a game yeah if I sat down and played the game and I said something I think again the keep in mind that you're working on your long-term skill in InDesign in observing your game in programming right and whatever and you know stuff that you do right now is is probably mainly practice and because the goal is to get better then if you identify something that's wrong that's good because it moved you a little bit further toward the goal right you may still disagree with somebody's feedback right but you don't have to take it super emotionally like that because it's it's useful and that doesn't mean you shouldn't care about what you made you should care about what you made but again you say it's it's come the the dynamic range of how high your skill can get compared to where it is right now is very high and you should be trying to get up there and to get up there well I don't know I mean if you're already good enough then which I don't want to presuppose that nobody is but I doubt it because it's so hard right if you were hypothetically already at top skill level then well then you'll still find plenty of people who tell you they don't like your thing anyway so that's and they'll tell you all these specific problems with it that that you will disagree with right I do that all the time the problem is when you're not that experienced you'll have the same kind of reasons but they won't be as well founded so you want to you want to develop your skill in creation faster than your skill and argumentation because if you become a better arguer then you become it making games then you'll always argue your way out of it and then never I don't know rambling doesn't matter all right so we're gonna go to student questions in let's have if anybody has a question please raise the hand and I'll just repeat it you have a way of thinking about not only the player experience but how the game encourages people to just repeat them okay so the question is how can we proactively make our games work well from multiple players or social experiences so it's a very different thing for a multiplayer game than a single-player game right as you sort of said in the question and that's important to keep in mind right like you can say that there's a thing called video game design but there's a whole lot of different compartments in that space or something right and many of the techniques that I thought or that I used when building the witness would not apply at all to a multiplayer game because there well I mean the special case of two people playing it in front of one screen is still like a single-player game and that there's one thing happening in the world right whereas if you're talking about an asynchronous multiplayer thing we're like people are just running around and they each have their own view it's a very different thing to design for but if you're going to design that kind of game yes I agree that that the or I agree with what you implied which is that the answer that people have to that question of like I don't know they're gonna do whatever they do is not a good answer right you you have to know that an analogy would come from architecture right if you are going to be a professional architect and you start to design a building and then somebody asks you well what are people going to do in the building and you say I don't know right it's not going to be a very good building because you know and and a good architect cannot just answer that at a high level they won't just say you know it's the classroom building with a lecture hall in it they'll say things like well it's going to be common for people to come from the central rear thing down the hallway and so out the front door on the opposite end of the building we want this view framed right and we want to think about what direction the lights coming and during what seasons and like they think about that super intensely and and a lot of that is not things that are guaranteed going to happen it's just like well when people are going through the space in certain ways we want to think about that we want to accommodate what's going to happen there and we want to make the result good yeah I mean who will drop that there but we'll just say that should be all you're thinking about if you're making a multiplayer game right so if someone can't talk to you okay the other thing about a multiplayer game is they're generally designed for people to play for a long time right so generally designed for more hours of play than a single-player game and so you have to have that much more of an idea about what's gonna happen you have to have enough more of an idea to provide 200 or a thousand hours of play or something I mean unless it's a museum game or something like that and so if somebody can't talk to you for at least eight hours straight about what would happen in their game when players interact they don't have enough of an idea for someone to play something for a thousand hours like it's just not there so so on your on your current project in creating a new language a lot of the work is just going into building out the infrastructure to support it for example you built a like a sort of PowerPoint and etc other programs like that do you feel like the onus is on us as developers to create all the tools with which to let's say experience the game because I see a lot of developers now who are developing let's say social features like trying to integrate with twitch and things like that I mean again it's easy to spend a lot of time doing that kind of stuff if if you don't have something better to do right which is not it's not a complete negative like okay hey we integrated with twitch and that helps in some way probably it probably doesn't help the gameplay that much it might help get you more people or something like something pragmatic like that but yeah there's this thing I mean people get into this cycle of like making a game means building a thing that looks like what I understand a game to look like so they like mimic the outer shell of a game and and that's where where you start getting too much of that kind of thing you know like oh we did we did twitch integration and like we I don't know like hey I'm building a multiplayer game so I have a lobby and a chat system and an away button and spectating and all these things and then it's like well you ask them what's the actual game and it's like well you play tic-tac-toe or something and it's like not you know it's not there so it's very common again and because especially in a class like this the amount of time you have to work on things is not very long my school year might seem long right or semester might seem long but your relative to the scale of a game that you might make it's it's a short time so you want to be careful about that and put effort where it's going to actually be useful know the question being do you see triple-a studios in the future making what we've known to call an indie title I mean it depends a little bit on what is you know what is the feature that you're identifying of those games right but given that I assume I can broadly presume what you mean without us blabbing for 10 minutes to try and nail it down the problem is just it's not what most people want quite quite plain-spoken ly right it's the same you know what movies have the high eight budgets it's like transformers 4 5 which one is it 5 that just came out I don't even know right Pacific room 2 or whatever like it's it's things that are not exactly the movies made by people who are thinking deeply about what it means to be a human being or something like that and you see this pattern in most places it's a little bit different in books simply because writing a book doesn't require a high budget usually so you can get books by individuals that are Megan may get hits but but most of these other forms are are not like that and so you know Electronic Arts being a large company they don't care about a game you know with the budget of the witness' they would never make that because the return on that is not ever going to be high enough to move their stock price right so they just they're making transformers 6 7 8 9 10 or the game equivalent of that which is not - actually it's not really true because the average triple-a game right now is still way more interesting than the average transformer style movie right we may get there eventually where things for that vapid but we're not there today you know like so Call of Duty is one of the most mainstream of things and like oh I'm just it's the army guy fantasy of running around but you still do make some interesting choices in that game right you still do you know they're not choices that are about anything other than like abstract choices about like what gun do I pick up or something but they're there and there is a little bit of a thing so so if you look at the if you look at the success of a game like pub G right now you could look at that as not just people are tired of Call of Duty but like they're sensing that Call of Duty is a little bit vacuous and they're looking for something a little bit less vacuous but that still fits well within that container of I get to be dude running around with guns right but it actually it disposes with a very important part of the Call of Duty fantasy which is that I'm the most important person in the world and I can shoot 300,000 people and I'm better than all of them put together right which some years ago people some years ago people might have told you yeah that's just what makes games mainstream and now apparently maybe it isn't I mean we'll see if pub gee I mean hopefully everybody's familiar with this game it's one of the biggest games right now but it's it's a multiplayer game where everybody's on an even footing and so you probably get killed very quickly especially if you start playing right so and being good at that game is very difficult right so I still have some hope that we're not trending eternally downward right that's that appears to be like a local increase in how good things are in terms of the game being interesting but but no I mean so I just saw Blade Runner 2049 right high-budget movie very visually stylish right that's something that that movie people are good at when they want to be right and they they put way more effort than most movies do into like framing shots and coming up with pallets and all these things generating mood but it really wasn't about anything right all it was about was being Blade Runner too and I don't think most people have noticed that so or most people are not wired to notice that maybe but it also does a pretty good job a good job of camouflaging that but you put it next to the original movie which was actually kind of about something sort of at least probably and that's a downhill trend and and and that's you know people had 30 years or whatever to think about what that sequel would be and this was the best that came up with so I think we're doing good compared to movies but but don't expect ei to ever do or Activision or any of those Kappa theta to do what the smaller developers are doing that was too long an answer o to explore that point that you mentioned how books maybe can explore these kind of deeper topics because there they are less costly to put out yes do you feel like maybe some topics are being explored in books or other forms of media that are just not being touched in games that we haven't gotten to explore yet so to make sure I understand the question it's do you think do I think there are things in other media do I think that there are things that other media can do that we can't do is that the question or that we haven't done what what are where are there things from other media we can import yeah the latter so basic what it our books exploring that videogames have not touched you where you talk about maybe how the first-person shooter is slowly moving into maybe let's say less vacuous territory as you described how can we force ebook games to move into territory that has not yet been touched by games is there anything that maybe books have done that we haven't explored yeah I mean it's a whole genre that has thousands of years of development like of course right but it's hard to say that there's a specific thing that we can pick because I mean thousands of years of demean if you go back to you know oral tradition stories I mean maybe maybe you could draw the line at at written books but you're still going back yeah you're going back pretty far it depends what depends whether you say like printing press or just like dudes riding on scrolls is fine I don't know so when you go deep enough into something so even with games right even with one paltry measly little game like my last game the witness right most of what I thought and it's very tiny compared to games as a whole even even compared to all the games that came out in 2016 in one year it's the almost microscopic there's so many things produced and within that one game most of the things that we thought about when making it and most of the nuances that like we worked hard on to make sure we're right nobody really notices at least not consciously or verbally or when when reviewers write about the game the things that they think were important about it were not at all or bore only tangential resemblance to what we thought were important about it right and that's that's within one game that granted we spent like six years thinking about but you know there's a whole art of how to make stuff in the witness both visually and design wise and whatever that we will never come back to you again we built it and we left it if we were to make more stuff in the world we would proceed according to this art but we developed it as far as we needed to and now we're leaving that and we're going to something else right so you extrapolate that to every game or every book or whatever there's just tons and tons of stuff but most of it most of it is kind of encapsulated away in a place that's hard to get and so I mean you could you could go to books and try to bring things out of there and bring it in but there's just so much already just just by diving more into what you already have in front of you I think that I think that something like a book or a film that you loved or something like that can it can provide background influence like oh I became a little bit of a different person because I read or saw that thing and and that influence that made me interested in certain kinds of things maybe and then I bring that here but I think it's a very indirect indirect connections are best direct connections don't work that well so if you try to do something that a book did and try to do it in game you get the kind of thing that doesn't play well you know if you try to do something from a movie in a game you're kind of making a bad movie so yeah I don't know I mean a further answer to that would take like an hour it's a really so as part of the GDC the Game Developers Conference you were on this board for the experimental game play workshop I'm sure you saw a lot of crazy ideas are there any that you feel haven't reached fruition yet any ideas that you feel Oh have not yet been fully explored in games that maybe look forward to seeing one day basically every game is not fully explored so you could pick any single thing even a game I mean you could pick I don't know I like Call of Duty is not fully explored even though they've done like 35 games of it right they sort of probably ended up in a rut because they mostly do the same things over and over again but if you just freshly took to that and said I'm gonna dig into some piece of this and get really interested in it you could make a game that was substantially different and had had its own reason to exist that's you know that becomes its own thing and that's in some of the most tread out space so if you then talk about Oh some prototype that somebody made that didn't really work or whatever yeah of course there's you could dive into that it's fractal you can just dive infinitely into it and find things it's just not easy because that thing that I mentioned before about being attuned to what's interesting and not interesting or what's working or not working has to be very sensitive in some cases to really see the potential in something which is why most of this potential does not get explored let's take another question so the question is how can we stay nimble and flexible in an industry that moves so fast it doesn't move that fast compared to when I started actually when I started we pretty much had to buy a new computer every four to six months because that's how fast CPUs were getting faster whereas now I mean I I buy a desktop machine like once every few years which is and even that is a little bit excessive probably you know things are so much slower even you know GPUs they're not getting I mean the whole Moore's Law petering out thing is a thing right I mean in the technical sense Moore's Law is still going because we put more transistors on chips but like we're not able to use them very well now so the actual benefit that you get is you know it looks like a I mean it it looks like it's asymptotic to some line that's not quite horizontal but it has a little bit of a positive slope maybe so it may seem fast right if you weren't around like 20 years ago or something but the the current pace of change is actually not that difficult once you once you get established in what you're doing still though on longer project timeframes there are dangers there so when we started the witness well we didn't think it was gonna be as long as it was but we also we were just like yeah I don't exactly know what game consoles are gonna be relevant when we finish this we were thinking about PlayStation 3 when we started because that's what existed but you know when that was supplanted by PlayStation 4 we were not surprised and in fact that was a relief because then we didn't have to work as hard to target that platform and really all of these platforms are converging in a sense right so the consoles are a lot more like a PC now in terms of how you program them than they've ever been really the biggest problem actually is software though because software has an inertia right the which i think is also a little bit part of the question but it's it's also a little bit the answer in a way that's a little bit sad which is this the more code that you have the more of a problem you have because the code can't really change right and on the one hand you think oh well how do you deal with that right how do you adapt into the future with that but then the answer to that is like actually that's part of what's thought slowing things down and making it manageable right is that everybody has all this code that they can't change that quickly anymore so you don't have to compete with anybody who's able to very rapidly evolve because you know speaking of triple-a companies they all have you know code bases between I'm going to pull numbers out of my pocket I'll say like between 3 and 10 million lines of code 10 is on the high side but there's probably some games that are higher than that that's a lot and it's it's hard to adapt it and so when I when I make a new programming language for example one of the things I'm trying to do is remove a lot of the stupid frictions that you get in something like C++ that are unnecessarily preventing you from adapting but then even then there it's still just going to be this issue that code bases are big so I don't know I mean my approach is that I just try to type fast and and try to think of new ways to do things but it's it's really it really is much easier than it was so I I wouldn't be worried about that if I were you you you mentioned that the witness took six years but it wasn't as long it was longer than you anticipated how long did you originally scope that project was going 18 months 18 months 18 months Wow yeah so but the thing that I thought we were gonna make in 18 months was like a shadow of what we actually made he was gonna have horrible programmer graphics because I had no no reason to believe that I could get a team together that would be able to build a nice three do you think cuz the previous game was 2d and 2d is a totally different thing right and then I just didn't know how big it was going to be and I didn't know how good I was gonna think the puzzles were and and how its addled they were going to be in how much I was going to get into it so you know there's that I mean it also took longer to do individual things than we thought which is pretty much universally true almost nobody comes in under schedule but part of it was so this is a thing that happens all the time it probably will have happened in this class too is like you get all all your ideas together and you're like okay this is what we're doing and you start building it you're like oh this is way too much for us to actually do in the time that we have so you have to like scope the game which is what you call it like cutting out a lot of the things that you wanted to do so that you can save the parts that you can actually do and we didn't have to do that in fact I've never done that and the only way to avoid doing that is just take more time so okay rather than scoping the game we took more time so in this class students will not have more time yes the midterm is basically a prototype for a game they're making yeah and then within a period of about five weeks they'll be mapping out milestones and slowly building up to their final project which will be you know something like a small app or game which they could share with the other students yeah what what is your advice towards planning a project on that scale what are some one maybe the common pitfalls which you've seen teams run into and how student teams could avoid that well so as I've already said it's it's a lot harder to do things than you think even if you already think that right so keep that in mind when you're making your schedule second part some things are way more time-consuming than others and don't really need to be done so much so I don't know why there needs to be like a scientific team studying this but one of the most time-consuming things in all game development is like lining up the little UI elements in the right place on the screen and having the right number of pixels between them and something and like you know this bitmap doesn't quite look right or something that will easily take half the time or more if you let it and so don't let it just like let that let that stuff I don't know if you're being graded on that but if it were up to me I would say let that stuff be ugly because once you communicate the information to the player you probably have enough work to do in other departments like actually you know if it's a 3d game or something like making navigation through the world work better or something it's probably more important than like oh this thing is five pixels too far from this other thing that it should be yeah that stuff takes forever and I every time it happens to me I don't know why it's happening but every time let's answer another student question what was it like to weave narrative into your pasta I can't I am not necessarily a narrative focused desire although it's very different from every for every game and I'm tossing around a game idea that's very narrative heavy right but we haven't done that yet so for these past two it's just that every game is different and each one wants a different thing so for braid I wanted story elements like I felt like they were very important but they're also not linear narrative in any way right and that's just what that game really wanted to be it was part of the very first idea for the rig for a second so it's not like I worked on weaving narrative in it was like the idea was this for the witness I actually the original idea had a much stronger narrative element than the final game ended up having so there was going to be there's already audio logs in the game audio recordings that you find in play but there were going to be two sets of them one was going to be what's there now and then the other set was going to be things that were easy to find placed out like milestones that had like your standard radio play kind of you know dramatic dialogue it was gonna be a little more nonlinear but it was gonna be that kind of thing but then I eventually realized that a that was in conflict with the other parts of the game which and I wanted the game to be quieter and to talk less because if you're talking a lot it becomes harder for subtlety things that require subtlety to rise up and happen because you're you're putting stuff in the players head all the time they can't realize things themselves but also I realized that this is where searching your own psychology becomes very important I realized that the real reason why I had started down the road of putting that narrative in that game was because I didn't have enough faith in the rest of the game to stand without the narrative right and then of course I really once I saw that that I was able to reevaluate it and say no really I want this game without the narrative and so there's there's a little there's like a tiny sprinkle of actual narrative in the game almost none and that's what was right for that game but like I said there's another game I'm thinking about now that is full on all narrative all the time so I think you just have to pay attention to what your particular thing really needs and that's a bit of a bottom-up approach so a lot of people maybe most people design games in this top-down way where they say what makes my game interesting is that it's going to have narrative and gameplay and they're gonna do some kind of shape like this and that's gonna be cool and it's like okay that's a good high level idea to start with but reality kind of has to exist at the low level like however that's actually implemented is what matters that's not the right way to say it but like the idea in your head is not ever what somebody's going to play right so often what will happen is you get this idea of how the narrative and the gameplay are supposed to happen and then you try to jam that into the reality of programming and level design and whatever tools you have and stuff and it doesn't really fit right you know it kind of gets broken and bent and whatever and it becomes an uglier thing than the idea in your head and so at that point you have to reassess and say what's good about this what's bad about it can I restart with what's good and take that to plant a new seed and grow that into something that's different from my original idea but better right and can it be informed by the original idea so you know like I said before if you had an original idea of having a narrative and gameplay in some way even if you don't totally know it there's a Y there there's like that idea interested you for some reason and often it doesn't have to take that exact shape that you thought of in order to produce that same Y later on and so you maybe have to find a different shape for it but it very much depends on the specific game and I I wish I could give a formula but I don't know when yet let's jump to a new question what elements compose an experimental game I mean you know if you're experimenting or not right I mean I do I mean if you don't know the answer yet you're probably experimenting right I mean if you have the blueprint of what you're trying to make then you're probably not experimenting and part of not knowing where you're going is you don't know how good it's going to be right and then all these previous discussions about reassessing and stuff come in because exploring new territory it puts you in really interesting places but usually not exactly where you thought you were going yeah I don't know is there more I don't know what else I can say to that question let's say let's jump to the next one all right what are your favorite games and how do they inspire you well I'm going to think of like my three or four favorite games of all time there was an old old is from the 80s it's certainly old for you all a text adventure game called Trinity that was sort of one of my formative formative influences I'm fortunate enough to know the author of that game now Brian Moriarty he's a professor at a university in Massachusetts and that was the first game that was clearly an art game to me I mean there was all sorts of crazy wacky stuff in the 80s but this was the first game I played that was trying to be art in the same way that classic art is acknowledged as art like you know there's like contemporary and modern and postmodern art and all this stuff where like there's some kind of modern idea that we've devalued art to the level of junk or we've elevated junk to the level of art and so you can just make John can call it art and that's awesome right and anybody can do it and there's something true about that but we've taken it really way too far right and so so this game back then was you know it was art in the way that a painting hanging in the Louvre is art or something you know not not to make a quality comparison between those two things because they're very different genres but it was like oh you can do this right and so people look at braids and sort of see it is the same kind of thing like oh this was a game that is clearly you know you can argue about how successful or unsuccessful it is but oh it's clearly made in that mindset but you know I got that mindset much earlier and then when I was in college and I should have been working there was a game called NAT track made by some other students that probably none of you have ever heard of it was one of the first real multiplayer games it was like it was like a Star Trek game they would totally get sued now he was like a multiplayer Star Trek game wherever you fly as a spaceship and it just I don't think it necessarily has anything in it that modern games that are well crafted don't necessarily have so you could think about something like you know you know dota 2 or League of Legends or something but it was a it was a space combat team game I played a lot of counter-strike as well that game taught me a lot of things I can't say what they are because they're all really subtle okay the big thing about counter-strike actually that I think it's become very common in games now but it's it's worth at least pointing it out is that some people feel like exploring a design space is about big moves right I remember reading some blog post about someone making a first-person shooter I don't remember when it was I thought it was John Carmack but he denies remembering this so maybe it was someone else they were saying they were developing a game and they were saying okay we want a lot of interesting weapons in this game so we're gonna write out all the properties a weapon can have so it could be like hit scan right it could be instantaneous and happen with a ray cast or it could be a projectile or it could be you know like a grenade right or it could just be a droppable thing so you have a row of all those possibilities and then you have a column of like it could do direct damage or damage over time or like whatever right and then you just see which boxes in there aren't ticked and you like design weapons by ticking out those boxes right and those are all big moves like shoot through walls is one of them or something right and so counter-strike thinking about it from that perspective all of our almost all of counter-strike is in one of those boxes there's also grenades so there's like a second box right but you play that game and the different guns matter super much tremendously much and shape the whole thing and so is really a lesson in subtlety actually and it's not a surprise I mean there's so many you know army man have real gun games now that that at least you can see that example over and over but then actually pub G is even more that way so there's all these guns in pub key that are like the same thing with minor tweaks up or down but they it matters and you get a feel for how it matters and and that's important let's take another question as VR the future and can that help us push past hardware limitations hard we like the cpu limitation no yeah well so what I was talking about there was that was more of a technical only thing not a design thing so technically speaking we're just running out of ideas for how to make software run faster or do more things that's just how it is so that aside that I don't think has very much to do with VR talking about design I think VR is very interesting simply because it brings in a whole level of nuance that wasn't there before you know if you look at a standard non VR computer game right now you have a very low bandwidth of communication to the game right the game can give you all this information right with visuals and sounds and all that but for you telling the game what you want to do you know you have like a couple of sticks and a couple of buttons right or a mouse it's like literally you know a couple of scalars and a couple of boolean's that change over time it's a very small amount of information right whereas with VR all of a sudden okay I've got live tracking of several things I've got at least the headset and the handsets and stuff and you can do really interesting subtle things with that suddenly you can communicate a lot more effectively with the game that's kind of stunted right now by the fact that the tracking really isn't that good and all that but that'll get better obviously I don't know I I'm interested enough that I have several ideas for games that I would want to make in VR it's just not it's not financially feasible right now to do that but maybe someday when you think about all the game ideas you have do you kind of have some sort of secret playbook or repository where you're dropping all these game ideas or what do you do with all the game I don't used to I I had a file with like 120 game ideas in it but a lot of them a lot of them are not really good ideas as the foundation of a game because they don't answer all the important questions or whatever you know a lot of them would be good ideas for something that happens in a game or or maybe like if I was making if I were making like an RPG that's a lot like other people's RPG then it would be cool to have this one thing be different but I don't want to do that anyway so it's hard they're the real big ideas are more rare and I don't tend to need to store those anywhere because I only have like a couple more that I haven't done right now and maybe by the time I do those I'll have more after that but I could yeah okay we have time for perhaps one or two more questions do you see pitfalls that may impede someone from creating games for social change yeah well it's a lot like educational games actually in that they're hard to make and they usually come out badly because you know there's something about having that specific agenda that overrides all this other stuff I've been talking about a that that you need in order to make the game good so I don't think that it's impossible to do however there may be a basic I haven't thought enough about this but there may be a basic mathematical problem right let's say you're dating right and you want to date someone who's really tall and who's good-looking right it's a lot easier to find someone who's independently only tall or someone who's independently the only good-looking right if you want to date someone who's tall and good-looking then that's a square you know it's a squared problem right where you're squaring some number less than one those numbers get small fast right so so if you say I want to make an educational game and it's a good I want to make something that conveys a very specific social message that I decided aa priori successfully and it's a good game right it's the same thing it's like you've got two objectives and each one is already hard each one is already probability less than one right and now you're multiplying them together and so it becomes small now you can do it you just have to be good and and I you know my attitude toward that is I try to I try to get an inkling of what what the big idea is from within the game and then see what it can be rather than trying to force it down from above because that then can reduce those factors that multiply down so small right because one of them is already there to some extent okay let's keep moving yeah what's the point of games I mean I think you have to answer that individually right I mean what it's so so what's the point of life right that is well you laugh and it's because in part we're in a society where people are taught not to take that question very seriously this is also the source of a lot of our problems okay it's it's actually if you're at the Stanford University and not thinking about that question when will you ever be thinking about it later in life right so it's notoriously difficult for people to agree on an answer to that but I think it's very important to find an answer to that as an individual and part of my answer for a long time especially when I was in school was I don't know yet but I want to be on a course to where later I will be in a position to know better right and so then I at least had a mission of like going in a certain way so I think that as and that's just for me right as a designer then for games to be important to you they have to they bind Destinee have to operate with whatever operate successfully with whatever your picture is of what life's about or they're going to be meaningless or just the thing that you don't care that much about so you got a you got to find that answer and it may be it's too difficult of a thing for many people at this stage of life to know but like I was saying before if the guy want if you had some idea for a game where a guy wants up to jump up and grab a balloon and something about that picture captivated you in some way the reasons for that captivation actually run very very deep right and if you're able to figure out why you wanted to make that thing that could help you help tell you what the point of games is for you which may also give you answers to some other questions that you can answer yet okay that's all the time we have today thank you let's all thank John for coming to campus [Music] you

Channel: mediaXstanford

Views: 28,582

Keywords: Stanford University, GAIMS, Interactive, Media, Games, Technology, Game Play, Video Games, Design, Braid, The Witness, Jonathan Blow

Id: wQJ8iPSO0jE

Length: 74min 28sec (4468 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 19 2017