The Nature of Order in Game Narrative

[Music] all right oh gee DC at the narrative summit is the best part of the GDC and the GDC is the best part of the year I'm so excited to be here my 23rd GDC okay so today I was going to give a talk about the nature of order in game narrative and to understand what that means I need to take you into the future five years forward ten years forward no to the year 2500 alright we're gonna go to the year 2500 and we're gonna look back we're gonna look way way back all the way to the 20th century and I'll ask you the question who will be remembered from the 20th century in the year 2500 I'm going to make the argument that the two people who will be most remembered from the 20th century in the year 2500 first will be Albert Einstein who redefined the way we think about the relationship between space and time and the second person will be most remembered will be Christopher Alexander who redefines how we think about the relationship between space and mind now I know a lot of people are thinking shel what are you talking about how can it be that's one of the most remembered people is someone who I've never even heard of and I say well it's not uncommon right like look at all of these people none of them were appreciated when they were alive all of them died in obscurity many of them in poverty so why would we think that there aren't people among us now who are going to be celebrated long after us because we're unable to appreciate the gifts that they brought us while they were here and I think that Christopher Alexander is of those people the first time I found out about Christopher Alexander was when I was working at Disney as you can imagine Disney Imagineering has a fabulous library called the IRC and I made it very much my habit to go to the IRC all the time every Monday I would go and take out a new book I would always just get some new book and one time I happened to see this weird little book on a shelf the timeless way of building and I thought I wonder what that means I don't understand what that is and I opened it up to a random page and I find these words each one of us has somewhere in his heart the dream to make a living world a universe and I thought yes yes yes yes yes exactly right yes this and nothing but this right and so I eagerly took this book home to see what it was and started reading it and so I'll read you from a little of it right now there is one timeless way of building it is thousands of years old and the same today as it has always been the great traditional buildings of the past the villages and tents and temples in which man feels at home have always been made by people who were very close to the center of this way it is not possible to make great buildings or great towns beautiful places places where you feel yourself places where you feel alive except by following this way and as you will see this way will lead anyone who looks for it to buildings which are themselves as ancient in their form as the trees and hills and as our faces are it is so powerful and fundamental that with its help you can make any building in the world as beautiful as any place that you have ever seen so that's a powerful claim and so how do we get there what is the timeless way of building well Alexander's idea is that the way that we look at space the wisest way to look at it is with our hearts and the idea being that things that are wonderful and beautiful be they places or spaces or objects or experiences they have certain wonderful feelings and he refers to the quality of these things that are good and right and just you know it this is how things should be he refers to this quality as the quality without a name now the quality may not have a name but it does have certain aspects so let's talk about the aspects that he that he says this quality has so he talks about things and places that feel right as feeling alive and having a living quality to them now I know I experienced this one I played Ultima Online I played that game quite a bit in the place I used to hang out was the town of you you was just kind of a small town kind of in the north and you see there's a map of the town there from above you can see up there there's a there's a castle up there and there's there's a town center and there's some things out on an island there's a bunch of things there but in truth there were only a small fraction of this place felt alive I'll show you where those yellow lines anything on those yellow lines felt alive everything else felt dead and useless okay now you see that part where there's sort of a little lumpy star at the top that was where the bank was that was where you stored all your objects you had to store your objects there and you see that big fan of yellow lines at the top that was where the monsters were you would go up and fight monsters and then you would return back to this little town and put things in the bank so there was this constant flow of people back and forth now what about those other two lines that ones to the right that went to a teleport gate which of course could take you anywhere in the world which was really useful and the line going down south was for people who wanted to take the long walk and go and visit other towns no one ever went anywhere else no one went to the town square no one went to the island no one went to the other places but those this little network of things felt totally alive and most particularly that Junction that kind of southern Junction when those lines came together if you wanted to just hang out and see people come and go and know what was going on you would hang out there and it felt wonderful and it felt alive so another property that he talks about is things feeling whole apologize for the scene down the middle here I scan this right out of the book places that's so there are sometimes places that feel whole they feel like they don't need anything else they have everything that they need other times things feel comfortable and I like the way Alexander talks about the the idea of comfort the word comfortable is more profound than people usually realize the mystery of genuine comfort goes far beyond the simple idea that the word first seems to mean places which are comfortable are comfortable because they have no inner contradictions because there is no little restlessness disturbing them imagine yourself on a winter afternoon with a pot of tea a book a reading lights and two or three large pillows to lean back against now make yourself comfortable not in some way which you can show to other people and say how much you like it I mean so that you really like it for yourself you put the tea where you can reach it but in a place where you can't possibly knock it over you pull the light down to shine on the book but not too brightly and so that you can't see the naked bulb you put the cushions behind you and place them carefully one by one just where you want them to support your back your neck your arm so that you are supported just comfortably just as you want to sip your tea and read and dream when you take the trouble to do all that and you do it carefully with much attention then it may begin to have the quality which has no name so he also talks about feeling free so that they could be anything that they wanted to but at the same time these things have a feeling of exactness that they are just so that if you change them even just a little bit that might ruin them they're also egoless they're not about someone showing off they're not about someone saying how look how amazing I am they just are for themselves and for the people who use them and then very importantly he talks about them having an eternal quality and I really liked the way that he describes this I once saw a simple fish pond in a Japanese village which was perhaps eternal a farmer made it for his farm the pond was a simple rectangle about six feet wide and 8 feet long opening off a little irrigation stream at the end a bush of flowers hung over the water at the other end under the water was a circle of wood it stopped perhaps 12 inches below the surface of the water in the pond were eight great ancient carp each maybe 18 inches long orange gold purple and black the oldest one had been there 80 years the eight fish swam slowly slowly in circles often within the wooden circle the whole world was within that pond every day the farmer sat by it for a few minutes I was there only one day and I sat by it all afternoon even now I cannot think of it without tears those ancient fish had been swimming slowly in that pond for 80 years it was so true to the nature of the fish and the flowers and the water and the farmers that it had sustained itself for all that time endlessly repeating always different there is no degree of wholeness or reality which can be reached beyond that simple pond and of course we all want to make things that last things that last are the things that are good and have the right qualities so how do we get to all of these qualities and that's what the timeless way book is about and the timeless way is a simple idea already all you do is you do what feels right and you test it and you change it until all imperfection is gone so here's an example where he talks about building a lab suppose you have built a small laboratory building it has a kitchen a library for labs and a main entrance you want to add a fifth laboratory to it because you need more space don't look for the best place right away first look at the existing building and see what's wrong with it there is a path where tin cans collect a tree which is a beautiful tree but somehow no one uses it one of the four labs is always empty there's nothing obviously wrong with it but somehow no one ever goes there the main entrance has no places to sit comfortably the earth around one corner of the building is being eroded now look at all these things which are wrong and build the fifth lab in such a way that it takes care of all these problems and also does for itself what it will have to do right so what he's really seeing here the fundamental idea is this is playtesting and agile development one of the things Alexander's famous for he often builds campuses college campuses and the thing and we've all seen situations like this on campuses right the architect did not understand where people really wanted to go when they built this and so Alexander's method was now I'm not going to lay down sidewalks I'm just going to leave it all grass and I will see I'll come back two years later I'll see where everyone did walk and then I'll pave that right and that's the notion of the timeless way of building you you come up with an idea for what feels right you see how people use it and then you would just and you make it you make it work part of what he recommends for example it sounds sort of crazy but building buildings out of cardboard doesn't sound crazy to Sean Patton but building actual buildings out of cardboard so partly so that you can see where the Sun is going to fall into the buildings and then once you feel good about card Berg one then only then build a real building so there's a companion volume with the timeless way of building which is much better known it's a book called the pattern language because after having established the right process for creating living places Alexander got together with a bunch of people and said all right let's talk about let's see if we can enumerate the architectural patterns that actually feel alive and feel like they have these qualities so how many of these are there there 10 are there 15 know there's 253 and I've enumerated them all here for you we won't have time to go through them all but we'll talk about some of them so he starts out with big patterns like pattern 4 is agricultural valleys right that we need those in order to live in a healthy society a mosaic of subcultures so talking about the way different things interconnect within a city neighborhoods having boundaries being an important pattern that neighborhoods that just blend flow into each other with no boundary or they have that's a certain problem then the patterns start to get a little more intimate pattern 68 connected play there needs to be way for kids to get together to play I like his comment here if children don't play enough with other children during the first five years of life there was a great chance that they will have some kind of mental illness later in their lives and what better cure for that than pattern 73 adventure playground yes that's a good one he talks about he starts talking about buildings I like this idea courtyards which live and I love his counter example here the courtyards built in modern buildings are very often dead they are intended to be private open spaces for people to use but they end up unused full of gravel and abstract sculptures but then he gives examples of courtyards that feel really alive and he doesn't analysis of what is it and he points out it's not money it's not that these are expensive places but it has to do with the way people flow through them the views in and out of them is it comfortable to to sit there and to be there is this a nexus of where there are things to are their natural elements as well as man-made elements here here's a pattern that should be near and dear to the heart of any a game designer paths and goals and you'll you'll see he has this little fountain when you're talking about paths that seems strange but what he points out is that it is a bad path that doesn't give you a goal that you're moving toward and that good path design has a series of little landmarks where you're looking forward to getting to this one and then getting to that one and getting to the next one because that's the nature of walking as he says the process of walking is far more subtle then one might imagine and of course we do this in games all the time but why not do this in the real world light on two sides of every room it's just something that we feel better about another one ceiling height variety when all ceilings are the same height it has a bad feeling for us when they change it has a good feeling and then finally he wraps it up on page 1064 with pattern 253 the most infinite the most intimate of all things from your life so this book was very influential it caused a big stir in the architecture world some people like that some people didn't like it but many people outside the architectural world were influenced by it if you've ever heard of the idea of software design patterns the people who started that movement were very much influenced by Alexander's book a pattern language and I have to say I don't think I would have ridden art of game design with my lenses approach of a hundred lenses if I had not read pattern language it definitely showed me that that was a good way to do it in fact I got double benefit because at the time I was reading pattern language I was wrestling with how to layout the map for toontown online and after I read it I'm like oh okay paths neighborhoods with boundaries central hubs and like I just understood how you make a good neighborhood and I wasn't the only one will write read pattern language and he made Sim City very much he talks about how he was inspired by pattern language to make Sim City and if you play the Sims and you use patterns from the book if you put lights on two sides of a room the characters are happier he like programmed the patterns right into the game now a lot of people have thread in no pattern language and that's usually all most people know about Christopher Alexander but I contend that that was far from his greatest work so he did that stuff back in the 70s and he was not satisfied with what he found there he he felt good about these patterns but he wanted to break it down and get to something more fundamental and so later he wrote these other books this series of four books which are called the nature of order he wanted to break things down into more fundamental components and he wanted to truly understand the quality that has no name and in these later books he gets bolder and he gives it a name and he says that quality is life and he argues that life isn't what we think it is we think of just living things organic things as as what life is and he argues that life is something more fundamental to the universe than that life as we know it has those properties that's why it persists that why is why it stays but that's not the only kind of life in the universe his big revelation is that what makes things stay are things that have centers and that anything that has structure and persists and stays is a series of overlapping centers now that's a deep idea and kind of hard to grasp and what he does is he breaks it down to a series of fifteen patterns that create these centers so he breaks it down to these fifteen properties and he argues that anything in the universe that stays and persists has these fifteen properties every building every tool we create but also things in nature living things have these properties but also other things atoms and molecules all have these properties the structure of galaxies and the structure of star systems has these properties everything everything everything has these properties and not to get too weird about it but he kind of starts to come to this conclusion that these properties are more fundamental than the universe itself because no universe can exist that doesn't have these properties so this is a deep idea but we're not going to dwell on that deep idea what we're going to do today is we're going to go through the 15 properties and we're going to look at the question of how can these properties help us when we're trying to construct game narratives all right so the first one is this idea of levels of scale and what he's talking about is that great things are not just great at a single level they're usually great at multiple levels they have multiple things interacting like this interesting kind of architectural porch here that has beautiful big elements beautiful medium-sized elements and beautiful tiny elements and of course levels of scale like that goes all through nature right look at lightning bolts they're incredibly fractal they have the same structure at the top and then they have tiny ones and tiny and tiny and tiny and that's how so many things in nature work they work nature works at levels of scale and in terms of creating beautiful things I often think about what John hench said he was one of the old Imagineers and old Disney animators and he would talk about how anyone can make something that's beautiful from far away that's easy to do you can make a big castle or something that looks beautiful from far away but so often you get close and you're like oh is that what it is and that's part of the reason if you go to Cinderella Castle at Disney World and you go as close as you can you will find there are these beautiful mosaics that are inlaid over many of the interior surfaces and no matter how close you get you see how gorgeous and beautiful they are and in fact if you look even at the top a little the little points of the towers are actually made out of solid gold because they really were committed to this notion of making things beautiful close up and far away now in games we use levels of scale all the time because it feels good it feels good to kind of move from big and into small and sometimes we use it in ways that are very very powerful this idea of kind of comparing levels of scale the game spore was a symphony of levels of scale and it was one of the things that was so exciting and so appealing about it but you don't need to get into these giant universe size levels of scale to do interesting things part of the reason pac-man worked so well is because it had good levels of scale you your immediate goal is get the dots and the dots are little and then you have this other goal sometimes to get ghosts and ghosts are kind of a big deal and eating a ghost is kind of a big thing and then your bigger goal is clear a board and that's like a big part of it if the game didn't have all three of these levels of scale it would feel sort of dull if you were just doing one of those things it would feel sort of dull but the fact that you have these goals at three levels makes it much more interesting and when it comes to story of course we have some of the same thing you you have plot and plot is like a big structure and that's your big structure for any story you put together and then medium you have characters right characters are kind of at the medium level of narrative design and then at the small level of of narrative design you have your fabulous dialogue right and if all three of these things are not excellent if like john hence was talking about you have a beautiful plot but boring characters and dull dialogue everything stinks right but if you're great at all three of these levels you have something that's really solid and really wonderful so the second pattern is the idea of strong centers now that seems a little self referential because of the whole idea is we're defining what centers are then how is strong Center as a pattern and what he's just talking about is that the stronger the centers are the better things get and I'd like this example of a plaza here imagine the plaza without that upmost tower there like the north atop tower there it would not be as strong it would not be as interesting there are different things that like multiply the the multiple patterns come together and make centers much stronger than they then they would be on their own and of course we see this all through nature right we see it on star systems are all about strong centers you've got these Suns at the center if you look at you look down at the microscopic level at the way atoms are formed like and then the way molecules come together you'll see again these really strong centers the nucleus of each atom we see it in video games all the time yeah star castle those are some strong centers right there that dude does not want you knocking on his door man he doesn't but if you're good you can kind of get in there get in there get up no come on get in there yes all right strong centers that's part of what makes pub G work right if pub G was just an island and you ran around like who would care but what happens is there is a secret centre and you don't know where it is and the whole world is shrinking down to the secret centre and if you're done near the centre you're gonna die it's gonna kill you and where is the centre where is the centre and that's what everybody wants to know when people get very emotional about that they end up having very strong feelings about the centres and in in pub G but we won't we won't dwell on that one thing off and think about is choose-your-own-adventure type stories and how as a genre of writing it never really sticks that well in the literary world every few years someone will say hey here's some new choose your own adventures and look how to be for the thing for kids but if you like go to Barnes & Noble there's not like a choose-your-own-adventure section because it's just not a genre that stays and I think part of the problem is where are the strong centers they're just not here choose-your-own-adventure structure is a big gangly floppy thing with no real strong center and that makes it hard to enjoy so I found again and again the idea of finding out what are the centres of my game because now you have to ask the question if strong centres are important what are the centres of my game so we're working on a game at Shell Games right now all about a virtual chemistry lab and originally it was called super common and we started trying to figure out all right what are the centres of this we knew that our central mechanic was realistic manipulation of laboratory equipment we knew that that was that was central if we didn't get that right we were in trouble this is meant to be an educational game so it has a transformational goal of teaching real lab skills so if we don't get that right that's a problem so these two things we know are centres but then this could be boring right this could end up being like a really boring thing if we don't do it right so we knew a central aspect was that we needed a strong fantasy and we knew that a lot of people have a fantasy of I'm the lab genius I'm the mad scientist in the lab so we changed it from super chem - now it's called hollow lab champions right and it's all about being the greatest lab worker in the world and we found that these three things together by focusing on these is the center and things are starting to come together with that game so another pattern pattern number three property number three is boundaries boundaries as alexander puts it they draw attention to the center boundaries creates sensors and right here you see a map of a cathedral here and you see how important the boundaries are in terms of creating centers here's some boundaries in nature look at the the here's a cutaway of us some some wood cells right nature is all about the boundaries all living things are made out of cells and cells have boundaries all over the place check out this door it's kind of a cool door looks pretty cool I'd be like yes I might go in that door how about now Yeah right look at all those boundaries boundaries make things important boundary boundary boundary boundary you'll find the fancier any picture is the more boundaries it has on the frame going around it because there's something about boundaries that create strong centers makes things important now in game design we know all about boundaries so many games are all about boundaries and boundary lines and cross this line and cross that line and and complete this goal and complete that goal we're all about boundaries in game design but what about in our narrative design are there boundaries there well they show up in surprising places if you talk about the hero's journey the obvious place to show up there is with thresholds right those moments where you cross and you can't come back that's really important if you don't have good thresholds in your story design then you don't have good story you've got to have those clear boundaries and the most interesting stories are usually the ones that pit two systems against each other with conflicting boundaries and you have to make a choice about which boundaries you're going to respect and which boundaries are going to violate because that ends up being exciting this was part of the idea and Bioshock with the little sisters right you've got one system that says you want to get as many points as possible well guess what in order to get as many points as possible you're going to need to murder of little girls or you can rescued little girls but you only get half as many points so now your normal sense of decency and its boundaries are put up against the boundaries of meaning at the game similarly papers please is a game that establishes all these rules here's your job this is what you do you need to obey the rules in a certain way and then it puts you in situations where you yours again your sense of human decency is like maybe violating the rules is the right thing in this case so the system of rules and the system of what's right come into conflict so I often find that creating the best most interesting stories is about boundaries in conflict with each other so now a surprising pattern alternating repetition and you can see it illustrated here in the classical egg dark pattern which you can see in buildings all over the place outside this is a patterns been around thousands of years will not go away because we like alternating repetitions so much but wait ripple isn't repetition boring well repetition can be boring when it's just straight repetition it's boring and bad and has a bad feeling but when it's alternating repetition we love it so consider the checkerboard we don't have to make checker boards like this we could have made it a piece of graph paper but we don't like a piece of graph paper we like alternating repetition we could have made it a rainbow of squares a bunch of different colors all different colors no no no alternating repetition is what we like as humans and we see this everywhere everybody knows you know and it when here is going to know about the flow channel keeping your game kind of on that on that wonderful place between boredom and anxiety in that wonderful state of flow and you increase your flow over time but of course we all know that's not really the right way to do it that's the right way to do it right you get a little bored because it's a little too easy and oh my god it got so hard and now who I get a little bit of a break you get a tension and then a release attention and then a release that's the pattern that we like and of course you see this in games like flaming the flood right you have these horrible intense experiences on the islands and now I'm back on the river and it's a and I can relax and alright I'm getting ready I'm relaxed enough it's actually getting a little boring here on the river I'm going to go back on the island and it's going to get exciting again and even in one of the most classic patterns of game narrative the string of pearls or the rivers and lakes approach where you have a cutscene and a level and a cutscene and a level and as much as people sometimes deride that pattern the reason the pattern doesn't go away is because it's wonderful alternating repetition we like to kind of take a break and sort of see what's going on and get set up for the next thing and then get all active and then take a break right so it's alternating repetition it feels feels really good the fifth pattern took me a while to understand the pattern he calls positive space and what's weird about it is what he's saying is that things that are well designed don't just have a good shape unto themselves like this here's this ancient bowl that has kind of a cool shape but also the negative space around them also has a good shape so if you look at the shape around the bowl it actually is kind of a cool pleasing shape as a counterexample here's a here's a sculpture that's just kind of you know modern sculpture right there and it's kind of a cool shape by itself but the space around it doesn't really have much of a shape and as a result the thing is just kind of a little bit blad so we see this spatial in games all the time right there's a Monument Valley level right there and you see it's got a cool shape all by itself but also look at the negative space around it those are good interesting shapes but what does this mean in the world of narrative what is positive and negative space mean in narrative and I think I'll sometimes think it the right way to think about it is positive space can be dialogue is the kind of positive space so what is that negative space then well it's either silence or someone else's dialogue right and this is illustrated incredibly well in oxen-free if people have played this is is so masterfully created because like a lot of games you make these little choices here your different text choices and lots of games have this but what's so artfully done in oxen-free is you don't have to pick one of the choice silence is an option and then something else will happen and so if you want to you can be silent and then more than just silence being an option when you pick these is up to you it's not like someone talks and then they wait like normal games in oxen-free that the dialogue options come up while someone else is talking and you can interrupt them at any time and sometimes the interrupting them is fine and the right thing to do sometimes it's incredibly insulting and other times saying anything at all is a bad idea because someone is saying something very important and you want to say something but actually restraining yourself and letting the other person talk is the better choice so it's more natural it's more like things are in the real world and again it has this idea of positive and negative space in dialogue another patterns the idea of good shape he makes the simple observation that things that are well constructed and meet their own purposes and do so well and and help everyone out they tend to take on shapes that are just beautiful by themselves and so in some ways good shape is kind of a signifier that yeah you probably did this right like look at this boat sail right man that just looks so strong and so powerful and of course it wasn't designed to be beautiful it was designed to maximize its ability to move the boat now we have good shapes and games all the time all right there's a little it's a little bit of Legend of Zelda shape right there here's one I like your classic Phoenix right that's kind of a cool shape on that big boss monster this I believe is the first boss monster in the history of gaming is that guy in Phoenix but sort of what's so cool about this as a shape it's not just designed to be pretty it's functional the whole idea is you're gonna shoot holes and all that orange mass underneath because you've got to shoot that purple guy in the middle and of course he's really hard to shoot because there's all that you've got to clear this big tunnel because there's so much stuff around him but the secret strategy is that purple ribbon under him is a rotating ribbon and you need to shoot holes in that but what you can do is move over to the side shoot along the side and like get holes in the ribbon and then get the ribbon sit up and then go back to the middle because the middle is dangerous because that dude is dropping all these things on you so because everything is functional in the game like this just this good shape naturally emerges from it and shapes can be spatial but when again when you get into the world of narrative like what is what are the shapes what do we mean by good shaped I think sometimes we need to think of good shape in terms of time having the right shape of interaction over time is important one of the things I I was blown away when I first played the interactive Walking Dead by a few different things so traditionally when we've had an interactive dialogue moments we put them at important moment times now of course that means you're respecting the story first of all Walking Dead didn't do that Walking Dead said no the most important thing is rhythm of interaction is most important there's a shape of interaction that we like and we're going to give you dialogue interactions at that rhythm so it feels good so it feels natural but you know like ooh but what if some of those one of those dialogue things don't mean anything that's okay a lot of things we say don't mean anything and that's okay now the problem is that creates a bad ambiguity how do I know if something I said was helpful or not helpful and these guys had the insight so when you do something that really makes a difference this little thing pops up that so-and-so will remember that right and personally I feel like that was a really good shape that kind of came out of thoughtful design so here's the surprising pattern local symmetries this is not an obvious idea at first we all are always told that symmetrical things are beautiful and beauty is symmetry etc etc but look at this building that's not a very symmetrical building but then you notice you know this is this is the Alhambra here it is full of small symmetries little symmetrical rectangular spaces symmetrical rotational spaces it's a bunch of local symmetries all glued together and this was I'd never heard anyone make this observation before that many great wonderful persistent things our local symmetries all glued together the human body is certainly this way our hands are a local symmetry with each other but they're not symmetrical with our feet and it wouldn't be better if they were right that wouldn't necessarily be a good thing and certainly look at our organs inside the body some of them are symmetrical with each other others are not and then they're all kind of glued together these very different things with each one having its own symmetry all kind of stuck together where do we see this in games well here's a map of the original Zelda I mean look at that it's like the map of the Alhambra like it's there's no overall symmetry because overall symmetry isn't helpful but look at all the local symmetries look in all the little local symmetries all glued together now when it comes to stories I am less clear at what relevance this has I'm a little stumped by this honestly I have an instinct that it has something to do with characters when I see a bunch of characters that are all different from each other and they're all kind of brought together like this feels like local symmetries to me but I feel like there's something deeper with local symmetries in narrative that I don't understand yet but let's press on pattern eight deep interlock and actually as the way Alexander puts it ambiguity and deep interlock and normally we think of ambiguity as bad but what he's talking about is an ambiguity where you have two things interacting with each other in such a powerful way that it's hard to give attribution to either one of them so here's some Inca stone carving where these stones just fit together perfectly and beautifully and which one defines the space over the other I mean this is the idea of the dovetail joint right neither one is in charge it's only because they are both perfectly deeply interlocked that you have something that's strong and solid we see this in games certainly the game of Go is all about deep interlock there's nothing to push against in the game except the other player and everything that one player does is defined by pushing against the other player and each game ends up being its own kind of identity the way things are pushed together Terrence Lee talks about the idea of two kinds of stories in every game that there is the explicit story which is the one the designers trying to tell but then there is the player story the story of like what the player is experiencing the story that's happening to them and when those line up it feels great and when those don't line up gets super bad like maybe you've got a situation where the you as the designer you gave a sidekick to the character and you're like yeah I've got this awesome sidekick and I think it's great and I think it's funny and the players like I hate this guy I totally hate this sidekick and then you create a situation where oh no the sidekick fell in a well you've got to help out the sidekick and the player might be like no screw that right I'm so glad that guy fell in a well do I really have to rescue that guy I really don't want to that's terrible that means everything's falling apart in your story because you don't have good deep interlock between the players story and the explicit story and this is one of the one of the first games I experienced it did this really well was planetfall you know the old Steve maretskiy game here he creates this beautiful sidekick this this character named Floyd who's funny and cute and he just can't help but be super entertained by by Floyd and so as a result when horrible things happen to Floyd you're like no he's like it's a big deal and I've talked to many people where this was the first time they cried during a game was in planetfall because these things were just so well aligned yes so there's your DP under Loxy between yeah okay you got it all right next pattern is contrast okay I love this this bowl and Alexander has a picture of this bowl in his book and he he points out how like the two opposites really make this one unity they really bring things together and contrast course does make things stronger but often in surprising ways zippy the pinhead via bill Griffith once had a long expostulation about the sure of comedy where he points out that all comedy is the unity of opposites I'll let you think about that for a minute right there the unity of opposites but it's true all comedy is the unity of opposites like this sign right it's funny because these two things should not be together or I saw this sign in Newcastle right and that's how Comedy Works and comedy is really important in our stories right and so understanding how to get that contrast how to get the two opposites together and bring them together in a surprising way is important and this brings me to undertale which of course has a lot of really wonderful funny moments in it but at the same time it has a lot of really serious moments in it so it's a weird game because it's very silly and very serious but now I ask you the question would undertale be more serious if you took the funny parts out and would it be funnier if you took the serious parts out the answer in both cases I think is a no the serious parts make the funny parts funny and the funny parts make the serious parts more serious that is the magic of contrast it requires a certain bravery to use it but when you do it can be used to really really great effect so the next one is gradients or graded variation and this is just an observation that when things change gradually that is sometimes beautiful we talked about boundaries when things change suddenly but also a gradual change can be a beautiful thing and I had to wrack my brain a bit to think about gradual changes in games because we often have very punctuated changes in games gradually gradual changes are often more hidden and subtle but one that I thought of that I'm a recent game Jason rorrer's new game one our one life I know if people are familiar with this game but the idea is that you log into this world and you are a baby you come into the world as a baby and you're going to live one hour but in that one hour you're gonna go from a baby to a very old person and at the end of that hour you're going to die but it's a persistent world and so the changes that you make will be permanent and when you log in in the future as a new person generations down the road you will have a mother and father in the game and the the world will be persistent and part of the power of the game is that gradual change over the course of of an hour so finding those right gradual changes can be important pattern 11 is very counter intuitive the idea of roughness now normally we think of roughness as a bad thing we want to smooth things out we want to sand things we want to polish things we want to take away all roughness but what he points out is that roughness often is part of what makes things great and real I loved his picture of this house which in a lot of ways seems kind of like an atrocity right the the lines don't line up right it's very inconsistent but there's a very human peaceful quality about it one example I think about a lot is pure vanilla extract if you go to the grocery store you have a choice you can buy pure vanilla extract or for a dollar less imitation vanilla flavor now what's the difference between these things you think oh well one comes from real vanilla the other I don't know comes from some lab whatever it's something that that smells like vanilla but is in no way vanilla and that is completely wrong in truth both of them contain the same thing a bunch of vanillin molecule c8 h 803 suspended in an alcohol solution that's what both of these are the only difference is where it comes from the pure vanilla extract comes from the vanilla plant the imitation vanilla flavor comes from a process of pouring acid on paper pulp that just happens to create this same molecule but you're getting exactly the same thing well not exactly the same thing because the imitation stuff is actually pure it's nothing but alcohol and vanilla molecule whereas the pure vanilla extract is not pure it is all this extra junk that is not vanilla that comes from the vanilla plant but is not the thing that smells like vanilla but the reason we favor that one is because of all that junk we like all that weird rough junk it makes everything feel broader and more interesting and more complex right so this is a case where purity actually gets you in trouble purity isn't as good roughness ends up being better who for example would pay to go and see the perfectly straight Tower of Pisa nobody would do that right it's it's the roughness that makes it interesting I once heard Peter Milano talk about the idea that the greatest difficulty for game artists is dirt that getting things to look dirty is so hard and and it's true and it's important to make things look dirty because they give things a roughness in in sports any ball that you have in a sporting game they're not perfectly smooth if they're ever touched by human hands they're not perfectly smooth it's the roughness that defines them the roughness is how we interact with them think of a game like monopoly what is monopoly it's a landlord simulator you're gonna be a landlord and do Landlord things okay awesome what are the avatars gonna be alright they're gonna be this what should shouldn't they be that little monopoly dude with the mustache in six different colors nope there's gonna be a hat and a battleship and a shoe and what are you doing what kind of screwed up game design is this right and I often think of what Goethe said all miracle work must as a whole be perfectly intelligible but in some particulars a little unintelligible right I'm sure he was thinking about monopoly when he wrote that if minecraft was all beautiful polished environments would it be better no no the roughness is important okay pattern twelve echoes echoes is an interesting idea I love this little this little Hut I think it's in Turkey here this little house and you see these sort of echoes of design look at how the roof caps echo each other even though they're a little different from each other and then even the doorway has a very similar shape and angle to the roof peaks and it kind of connects everything together so Alexander often talked about making sure the angles of different things are connected and that helps bring an overall connectedness his counterexample is this interesting building actually created by Michelangelo but when you look at this building it's not really great like nothing connects to anything else very well the angles are all different the shapes are all different it's a little bit of a hodgepodge there's a big overall symmetry for no good reason and then there's these local symmetries but nothing connects and it just doesn't it doesn't feel so great so in games we do this all the time we did this in our water bears VR game we'd had this initial tablet based game called water bears which was all about bringing colored water to these cute little water bears and we've made a VR version and we said wow this is so relaxing to play this let's since it's a relaxing game let's put it in a relaxing setting so we put it in this this kind of Caribbean setting I was very relaxing it kind of echoes the nature of the game play a less relaxing game night in the woods right is also full of echoes this is a game that is all about growing up moving from the world of childhood to the world of adulthood and how you have to give things up in order to do that and so in in doing so they made the characters all very cartoony childlike characters but they put them in very adult situations thus kind of echoing the whole theme and sort of playing up that contrast another great example of echoes I like is cup head cup head even though it's you know maybe not the deepest game narrative and world it has a really nice connection between what you do in the game and the overall story so really what's cuphead about this is a game about jumping into danger right so our story is that these two cup headed brothers they were gambling with the devil they knew it was dangerous right but they jumped right in and they gambled with the devil they lost so they lost their souls so what's the solution the devil says well I've got a bunch of people I need you to collect contracts from it's gonna be super dangerous and they're like alright let's go do it and so they go and jump into danger here's here's an example of some danger jumping here right so this game is so freaking hard you see that little pink thing that's actually kind of important boink jumping on those pink things so those pink things are what's in the game it's called a peri move those pink things will kill you if you just jump on them they'll and you'll just die but if you time it just right right here you can take a look here some more of them if you time it just right and you hit the jump button a second time while you're in the air your character spins a little bit turns pink and then we'll hit the pink thing in and like build up all these bonus attacks that you can use later if this was me doing this scene I would have died six times by now because I would have I would hit the parry button at the wrong time and hit the ghosts and I'd be dead so you got a story all about characters who jump into danger and then you have a central mechanic that is about literally jumping into danger and you can argue that these guys took this nature of echoes a little too far because you know there they are the moldenhauer brothers you know two brothers who who were kind of the who initiated this game here and there's there's Maya their cousin kind of talking about it they jumped in on a thing they did not know what they were doing right I mean here's the initial frame from the cuphead trailer you'll notice coming 2015 right you had a game I mean and this is the second one the original trailer said coming 2014 right so this game was three years late and they never would have been able to do it if they hadn't done it deal with Microsoft's right in order to do it and I don't want to say Microsoft's like the devil but like it's possible to take the Ecco thing a little too far it's all I'm saying right there all right three more patterns here one of them is the void and this is a little bit of a strange pattern a void where nothing is there this picture is a picture actually from my house when my wife and I moved into the house we live in about 15 years ago we picked it up but I don't know target or Marshalls or something or like oh this looks kind of cool and my fascination with this picture is just never-ending even though what is it it's just some leaves but what gets me is that black square right close one eye and put a finger up and cover the black square and you'll see this is a completely unremarkable picture and then you take that finger away and you're like black square what are you doing there why are you there and this void pattern shows up in lots of places every Church has the void pattern inside it because that's where important things happen the human heart what does it have a lot of complex structure in there no empty it's empty inside there right the most important things are empty inside and part of the reason that's important is because when you answer an empty space suddenly you become very important and everything you do becomes very important we see this in the hero's journey there's always that moment of entering the cave right the cave is this kind of empty space or something very important is going to happen we see in video games all the time like a boss monster battle never happens in a linen closet it always happens when you come into a big empty space and you're like oh I think things are going to happen right now I see a bunch of local symmetries in an empty space and I think oh yeah oh yeah something's going to happen right now so the void is very important and of course think about the void in terms of storytelling if we talk about positive and negative space being dialogue and silence the use of silence is often very very powerful that way and and there many games I think undertale is a great example it off has have found clever ways to sort of use silence in order to deliver the power the fourteenth pattern is simplicity and inner calm the idea being that when everything unassessed away and you only have what's needed there is a certain calm quiet quality because nothing else is needed everything is here as simple as it can be and there's a perfect quality about it these these pillars holding up a shrine in a Japanese shrine or one of Alexander's examples and he points out that these things are not trying to be what they are they're just usually serving an unusual purpose in the simplest way possible and that often gives them a sort of strength and inner calm now simplicity and complexity we talk about all the time in games and it's tricky right because you hear people say oh I hate that game it's too complex and you heard people say I hate that game it's too simple well well what does that mean somewhere in the middle is right no we know simple games are better except when it's the bad kind of simple what what does that mean well part of the idea is there are two kinds of complexity one of them is innate complexity believe it or not what you're looking at right there is a single board game experience someone took all these board games they made one set of rules for how you play all of them in a big connected sequence there is a lot of innate complexity learning the rules takes quite some time there as opposed to a game like go which is a very complex game but not innately the complexity is emergent because of the clever way that the center's and the patterns push up against each other one of the best ways to build towards that kind of simplicity is to give things multiple purposes again going back to pac-man because I just love pac-man so much the dots in pac-man they seem so simple they just like they're just dots who cares but when you count up their purposes there's many of them first they're your goal eat all the dots on the level so now my game for they've established my goal for the game they give me points and points are my judgment of how good I am at the game they create a pleasing sound of progress Wacka Wacka Wacka every time I eat a dot no Wacka Wacka when I don't eat dots so you get this kind of nice feedback loop of progress this is how I get extra lives I've got to eat dots to get points points get me extra lives too so in order to survive in the game the dots make me survive and where's the progress meter I don't need a progress meter the dots simply at a glance show me my progress I don't I don't need it they solved that purpose and then they have a secret purpose very few people know about every time you eat a dot in pac-man it slows you down just a little bit it kicks you back just a little bit and that's enough and to make you go just a little slower down a dot hallway than an empty hallway and guess what what speeds of the ghosts go the ghosts go a little slower than you in an empty hallway and a little faster than you in a dot hallway so suddenly you had this very interesting strategic decision to make the final pattern is not separateness okay what does that mean well he's talking about things being connected to each other in a fundamental way I love this picture this picture he has of a path made of these stones connected together and of course so many of the patterns are seen here you see the stones are connected to the earth but all the stones are actually the same they're not different stones they're just turned at an angle they're all the same square so you have this perfect echo along them and then you have alternating repetition and then you have a gradient you have everything here everything is connected and one of my one of my favorite games in this regard is brothers a tale of two sons this is just a gorgeous beautiful game and it's so clever the idea of it is these two brothers going into adventure and you're going to control both of them and you do one with each one of your hands one hand controls one brother one hand controls the other brother and you solve a lot of interesting by moving these two brothers together now of course this works with the human neurology because one hand is controlled by one half the brain the other hand is controlled by the other half of the brain and the only way they communicate is up the middle of the little go up the corpus callosum there and so it's almost like the two halves of the brain which sort of behave like siblings now actually get to be siblings in the game and then now I'm going to give a spoiler cover your ears and sing if you if you really don't want to know something bad happens to one of the brothers and you'll never feel so alone in your life when suddenly that brother is gone because half of your brain is now unable to participate in the game and then cleverly what happens next in the game is so beautiful that I think it will make anyone cry and so it's a great example of deep interlock between the player story and the game store story but it takes it farther it's not just the the explicit story and the game's story but it goes actually into the psychology and even the neurology of the player and there's this beautiful connectedness and non-separateness that happens between all three of these things and for me this is why games that aren't just fun but games that actually change us as people games that educate games that transform are so important because great games they change us and they make us better at connecting with each other and they make us better connect and connecting with the entire world which is kind of the ultimate in non-separateness so there's the patterns there's a fifteen patterns we've only really scratched the surface talking about them I hope you find some utility in thinking about them I hope you find them useful and of course we've only scratched the surface of the works of Christopher Alexander so I hope you'll check out some of his works there's so much to learn about there and now at the beginning I said that even though Alexander's obscure now that he would be famous in the future I'd like to make a prediction about how that will happen I think the way it will happen is through AI because a eyes are designed to make the world a better place and a is love of patterns now very soon all of you will be working closely with a is because a is are going to be such an important part of game narrative in the near future and so don't be too surprised when a few years from now when you're training up some AI to kind of be a character in one of your games the ki it's like hey human have you noticed these 15 patterns that make everything better and you can be like yeah robot I know that's how we made you thanks [Applause]

Channel: GDC

Views: 16,237

Rating: 4.9559231 out of 5

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

Id: E-qnXNUSUMA

Length: 62min 43sec (3763 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 04 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Random]

Timeless way of building and A Pattern Language are both fabulous books, I'd agree with Jesse that Christopher Alexander will be an icon in the future, certainly at some level.

If only for the fact that he wrote a book on architecture that turned out to be hugely relevant in software architecture, one can argue to the generality of his message.

My local bookstore has had APL on the shelf for decades. And it sells.

I refer to it more than any other book. I hand it to people more than any other book. I have written grant applications based on it.

So yeah, cool stuff.

[u/AutoModerator]

This post appears to be a direct link to a video.

As a reminder, please note that posting footage of a game in a standalone thread to request feedback or show off your work is against the rules of /r/gamedev. That content would be more appropriate as a comment in the next Screenshot Saturday (or a more fitting weekly thread), where you'll have the opportunity to share 2-way feedback with others.

/r/gamedev puts an emphasis on knowledge sharing. If you want to make a standalone post about your game, make sure it's informative and geared specifically towards other developers.

Please check out the following resources for more information:

Weekly Threads 101: Making Good Use of /r/gamedev

Posting about your projects on /r/gamedev (Guide)

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[u/SimilarDimension]

Great video! If we use the Nature of Order principles in VR setting design we can give people an escape from the uninspired architecture of the modern world.