Good cheer to you for the Winter Solstice!

Winter Solstice in Denmark, 2010. Photo courtesy of Ingrid0804 on Flickr, Fair Use only.

Hello again, family, friends and colleagues! Almost every religion on Earth celebrates a midwinter festival of some kind, and even for those of us with none at all, the turning of the year brings new light and new life. I wish you good cheer and health -- or as the Anglo-Saxons said, waes hael!

It has been a busy year for me (I say that every year, don't I?). I consulted for several different companies and did a bit of corporate training (none of which I'm allowed to talk about, of course). On the academic side, I wound up my five-year Royal Academy of Engineering grant to teach at the University of Ulster's School of Computing and Intelligent Systems in Northern Ireland, and increased my contribution at the University of Gotland in Sweden. I now fly there seven times a year to teach and mentor undergraduates, and the most enjoyable part is about to begin: They'll all form into teams and build games throughout the spring, and I get to offer sage wisdom. The University of Gotland has just agreed in principle to merge with the University of Uppsala, Sweden's oldest and most prestigious institution of higher education, so that's very exciting -- it's sort of the equivalent of a technical school merging with Harvard or Oxford.

I'm also working on a new book. In September of 2010, I met a young Dutchman named Joris Dormans at the G-Ameland festival. Joris has built a great simulation tool called Machinations that lets game designers diagram and simulate game mechanics symbolically, without doing any programming. I was so impressed with him and his work that I persuaded him to write a new textbook with me. We signed it with Peachpit Press a couple of months ago and hope to have it out for next fall. The title will be Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design.

I also updated my PhD thesis as requested, and sent it off to my advisers to look over. It will take a while longer before it goes to the examiners for their final verdict. Anyway, I'm hoping that it will be done and dusted sometime this spring. In the upcoming year I'll be attending the Global Game Jam for the first time, in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands, and of course I'm going to Game Developers' Conference as always (although I don't have a talk there this time -- first time in 21 years!).

All the best to you and yours for a happy Hanukkah, Christmas, Yule, or however you celebrate!

The Glouscestershire Wassail

Wassail! wassail! all over the town,
Our toast it is white and our ale it is brown;
Our bowl it is made of the white maple tree;
With the wassailing bowl, we'll drink to thee.


(Hear it sung)

Back to Portugal again!

Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon, Portugal

A few months back I got an invitation from Sharon Strover at the University of Texas at Austin to deliver a lecture in Portugal—UT has a collaborative arrangement with the Instituto Superior Técnico, where I taught in 2008. After some lobbying from Professor Rui Prada at the IST, the lecture turned into a lecture and two game design workshops. He invited me last time and liked it enough for me to do a little extra work on this visit as well.

My first event was a lecture on Monday evening, so I should have had most of the day free to sightsee. Unfortunately PowerPoint decided to corrupt my lecture slides that morning, so I spent most of the day in my hotel room fixing it, as well as updating my lecture a bit. Rui met me in the evening and we walked to the Ordem dos Engenheiros, the Portuguese Engineering Society. It's a little like the IEEE crossed with the Bar Association; you can't do civil engineering, or any other sort in which lives may be at stake, in Portugal unless you're a member. (Ordem dos Engenheiros literally means the Order of Engineers, which makes being an engineer sound like a title of nobility. And why not? Engineers have better qualifications for their work than hereditary nobles do, anyway.)

There I was introduced to Vasco Amaral, my host at the Ordem, and delivered "The Future of Computer Entertainment to 2050" to a crowd of about 50 people. There were cookies and coffee afterward, and the Order made me a gift of a particularly fine pen and pencil set.

That night I went to dinner at Brasserie Flo, a Paris-based chain of restaurants that I had discovered in Amsterdam and particularly enjoyed. Portugal is famous for its fish and Flo did not disappoint. In fact, I ate fish or shellfish at more than half the meals I had there.

The next day I took a taxi out to the beautiful IST campus in Porto Salvo, a big curving building that feels very new and high-tech. I met some old friends there and gave my Fundamental Principles of Game Design workshop to a crowd of about 50. Rui told me that 80 people had wanted to come, but he had to turn the extras away so that we wouldn't have too many teams. It's flattering to have my workshops so well-attended, but of course I'm sorry we didn't have room for any more. The ones who made it in seemed to have a good time...

They're seldom actually this funny...

Lunch was fish (of course) in a cafeteria that is either subsidized or the best deal in Portugal—a three-course meal and drink for €5.50. In the afternoon the participants presented their games, including a distinctly dark one about running the CIA. The player works his or her way up through the ranks and has to make choices along the way about whether to further their own career or the nation's interests, which don't always coincide. Opportunities for office politics abound, with potentially lethal results for some of the agents in the field. In the end the player discovers that the CIA is actually being run by a traitor, an idea that inevitably reminded me of Kim Philby et al.

Tuesday I gave my Character Design workshop. Normally I ask the participants to design an action/adventure avatar based on a fictitious name and job—Aristides Mykonos, sponge diver, for example. However, for one team I did something different.

Not far outside my hotel I discovered a war memorial commemorating Portugal's participation in the First World War. Unaware that Portugal had been in the First World War at all, I did some research online and discovered the amazing story of Aníbal Augusto Milhais, "Soldier Millions." He was a farmer drafted into the war, and at the Battle of La Lys, he covered a Portuguese and Scottish retreat all by himself with one machine gun until he ran out of bullets. The Germans assumed that his was a heavily defended position and went around it rather than trying to take it, leaving him behind their lines. He subsequently escaped, rescued a Scottish officer drowning in a swamp, and made it back to Allied territory, where he was made a national hero—but only after the Scottish officer had told his story for him; Milhais had not talked about his adventure.

I thought that Soldier Millions was a perfect candidate for an action/adventure character and told one team to look him up and build a game around him. No one on the team had heard of him, but by the end of the workshop, at least 50 people knew his name and story. The team designed a somewhat satirical shooter: the more people he shoots, the bigger his mustache gets.

That evening I went to dinner with some of the faculty and about 8 workshop participants in Bairro Alto, the restaurant district of Lisbon. Lisbon is a city of many steep hills and I took the funicular railway to ascend the 265 meters required. It was a great evening of wine and good conversation (and octopus), and I really hope to do it again sometime. At the end of the evening it started to rain hard, and a number of Indian umbrella-sellers mysteriously appeared out of nowhere. Entrepreneurship at its finest: find a need and fill it.

Thanks, all!

Elevador Glória, one of three funicular railways in Lisbon.

Animex and a New Workshop for Animex Pro!

Middlesbrough and Newcastle, UK

My friend and colleague Gabby Kent invited me to come speak at the Animex animation festival again this year, as I have several times in the past. Animex takes place at the University of Teesside in Middlesbrough, UK, where I'm a visiting fellow and PhD candidate. She warned us that the budget had been cut back sharply thanks to the recession, and we speakers wouldn't be staying in the sumptuous hotel that we've enjoyed in the past. It didn't matter, though -- in my opinion the event was better than ever.

Gabby is responsible for Animex Game, the video-game-oriented first two days of the event. I could only stay for the first day, but I learned a lot. I heard a great talk from Florian Zender of Spec Ops:The Line about the challenges of implementing a simulated sand avalanche in a game. Very small solid particles are still a problem for us, because they don't just flow to the lowest point like liquid -- a large sand dune slumps down and stops as a lower, more spread-out dune. Sometimes it looked a bit too much like Silly Putty or pancake batter.

Ken Tateishi of LucasArts gave an enlightening talk on how level design has changed from the days of Dark Forces (1995) to The Force Unleashed (2008). (He's not allowed to talk about anything more recent.) Ken said that the traditional approach of thinking up a series of levels and then writing a story to link them together is no longer used at LucasArts; they write a story that contains opportunities for activity and then create those opportunities as levels.

On Tuesday I left Middlesbrough and traveled up to Newcastle at the invitation of Christine Wilson, who runs an offshoot of Animex aimed at the business community, called Animex Pro. Christine asked me to create a new game design workshop specifically for this group, about casual free-to-play games. I did some research and wrote a lecture that discusses how various game business models compare to each other, and how casual free-to-play games monetize their gameplay. Then I created a worksheet that challenges the participants to devise a game based on a theme that I give them, creating an internal economy that should produce a revenue flow for the publisher. In addition I asked them to consider what kinds of real-world companies might be interested in advertising or co-branding with the game.

One of the participants explains his game idea at Animex Pro.
Photo courtesy of the Institute of Digital Innovation.

I was a little concerned about exactly who was going to turn up to this workshop, because the event was aimed at executives and I didn't know if they would want to do game design. However, as it happened most of the attendees were in-the-trenches developers, so it went well. I divided them into teams of two or three and gave each team a different theme: beauty salon, airline, trucking company, etc. and for spice a few strange ones: game developer, oil sheik, California 49er (gold miners, not football players), and wolf pack. It seemed to go very well -- there was some great imagination shown.

G-Ameland nearly triples in size!

Ameland, The Netherlands

This was the third G-Ameland game development festival for Dutch and Belgian students (and more countries next year, we hope). The last couple of years there were 70 to 80 participants; this year there were 237. Starting on Monday, we all get together for a week of lectures, workshops, and above all game jamming to produce a Flash game by Thursday night. The festival now has its own independent foundation, so it's on a more solid footing this year. It worked just like it did the two previous years, with students coming over to the island of Ameland on the ferry, and occupying bungalows in teams of 4 or 6. I originally had a bungalow to myself, but I had to move out and into a smaller shared one to make room.

The whole crowd, and more pouring in.

Day 2: The development theme was sustainability again, although as usual many teams interpreted that very broadly. I gave my GDC lecture, "Single-player, Multiplayer, MMOG: Design Psychologies for Different Social Contexts," then began visiting the teams that I was assigned to mentor. Fortunately they weren't overambitious, unlike many in the past. Unfortunately, the Internet arrangements failed and the students were howling about it. I say it's character-building. Shigeru Miyamoto didn't have any Internet when he conceived of Mario.

Day 3: I gave a game design workshop for a special group of students visiting for one day from a college in Amsterdam. The results were rather odd. We got a female WWII Dutch Resistance ninja (?!) and a genetically-modified laser-toting whale. Among my G-Ameland teams, one (Ice Puzzles) was actually ahead of schedule. I spent some time this evening playing a board game with Joris Dormans, a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam, and looking at his incredibly cool Machinations project, which enables game designers to diagram and prototype their game mechanics. I'll be writing a Designer's Notebook column about Machinations soon.

Day 4: Crunch time. The students had to get their games in by 3:30 in the afternoon. The press and various VIPs also came to visit in the afternoon, although I didn't meet many of them as I was too busy with my teams. Then, working with my fellow judges, we had to examine 41 games. The organizers also asked me to host the awards ceremony, which was a big, and loud, success.

The Winners
Honorable Mention for the Best Paper Prototype: Team 20, Think Twice.
Unfortunately I don't remember much about this game, but the judges were all impressed by how well planned it was. It was completely playable on paper; the team just wasn't able to write the code.

Third Place: Team 35, Microbe Prime
This was a very clever and simple game that incorporated a rock-paper-scissors style of gameplay among three species of microbes -- each was prey for another. The player could control one individual, and all the others were managed by AI. Because of the rock-paper-scissors nature, to keep the entire population alive and growing, it was essential not to let any one dominate too much. More often what happened was that the player foolishly ran around eating as many of his prey as he could, which meant that they were not available to keep his predators in check, and the populations became unbalanced and eventually died out.
You can see it here (without sound):

G-ameland 2010 entry from martijn on Vimeo.

Second Place: Team 17, unnamed game
This was a simple educational game for young children made entirely with images photographed on the island of Ameland itself. The player could elect to buy certain things to place on the island, but making the wrong choices would pollute it. The graphic style was very distinctive:

lucdehaan gameland HKU team 17 from luc de haan on Vimeo.

First Place: Team 31, BeeCo

The winner was BeeCo, a real-time strategy game about sustainably building and defending a beehive. The graphics were good, almost everything worked, it addressed the theme of the event, and it had a surprisingly rich internal economy. It was based somewhat upon tower defense principles (wax moths attack the hive, and you have to defend it with bumblebees), but was more sophisticated. As your hive grows, you get more land to search for nectar. However, the flowers don't have an unlimited supply, so if you grow too quickly you'll run out of food for your bees. It's a familiar mechanic applied to a new situation, and very well-executed... especially considering how little time the team had to build it. Here's the video (without sound):

The afterparty went far into the night. A little too far into the night, to be honest, and some people celebrated rather more than was good for them.

Day 5: Homeward bound by bus, ferry, car, train, plane, and taxi. It was a lot of fun as always, and tiring as always. There were a few growing pains (at first the students weren't very good about leaving enough food for others), but I'm looking forward to next year already.

I've Submitted My PhD Thesis

Back in 2003 I was invited to deliver a keynote address at a conference at the University of Teesside in Middlesbrough, England. It was called COSIGN, for Computational Semiotics on Games and New Media. While I was there I met one of the organizers, Dr. Clive Fencott, at the School of Computing and Mathematics. He invited me to become a Visiting Fellow at Teesside and to study for a special degree they have there called a PhD by Completed Work. The degree is specifically intended for people who have spent many years in industry, and have done enough work there to merit a PhD. I gratefully took him up on it, although it has taken me several more years to get around to writing up my thesis.

I finally started working seriously on it this spring, and I have just formally submitted it for consideration. The title is Resolutions to Some Problems in Interactive Storytelling, and it addresses some issues that I first brought up at the Computer Game Developers' Conference all the way back in 1995: the Problem of Amnesia, the Problem of Internal Consistency, and the Problem of Narrative Flow. At the time I thought that these problems might be insoluble, that they just had to be lived with. However, I went on thinking about them, and discussing them and other problems of interactive storytelling from time to time at the Game Developers' Conference. Eventually I came to the realization that our expectations about the ideal interactive storytelling experience were based on a set of unrealistic assumptions, and that as game designers we were actually setting ourselves up to fail. By abandoning those assumptions, I found a new way of thinking about the respective roles of the player and the designer that resolves the Problems of Internal Consistency and Narrative Flow. I explained my new perspective at GDC 2006, in a lecture called "A New Vision for Interactive Stories."

The thesis itself explains the new schema, compares it with the work of others in the field, and critques my older works. At the heart of it lies a realization that the player in an avatar-based interactive story is in part an actor, and so takes joint responsibility for the quality of the experience that he has. This flies in the face of conventional game industry wisdom, which places all the responsibility on the shoulders of the designer, and assumes that the player should be able to do whatever he wants.

My thesis also discusses a few other contributions I have made over the years, mostly in my Designer's Notebook columns at Gamasutra. Among them are the distinction between dramatic tension and gameplay tension and the idea that an automated story-generation system might keep a credibility budget to be sure that it didn't generate stories that were too outrageous to be believed.

Anyway, I've turned it in, and I'm now waiting for my supervisor to name a committee of examiners to read and pass judgment on it. I expect to conduct my defense (which in England they still call by the Latin name viva voce) sometime in October or November.

European Odyssey

Visby - Stockholm - Tidaholm - Copenhagen - Bremen - Leeuwarden - Amsterdam - Brussels - London

It began with a trip to Visby, the largest town on the island of Gotland, off the Swedish coast in the Baltic. I'm now on the faculty at the University of Gotland, and I go there about five times a year. These trips have become so routine that I've stopped recording them in my News pages.

This one wasn't routine. I got trapped on the island by the Icelandic Eyjafjallajokull volcano ash cloud that shut down European air travel, and it took me seven extra days to get home again. In the course of the trip I passed through five capital cities in five days.

On April 11 I flew from London to Stockholm and changed to a small propellor plane that flies to Gotland. Monday the 12th I had no direct teaching duties and did some work on other projects. On Tuesday I gave my Mechanics workshop to a room full of students. I need to come up with a slightly more numbers-oriented game to use in the workshop, but it went OK.

Wednesday was spent working with first-year student teams all day. I'll be a judge at the Gotland Game Awards next month, so I shouldn't show any favoritism by saying which ones I liked best... besides, everybody still has a lot of work to do.

That afternoon the volcano started producing enough ash to become a hazard to airplanes. I didn't think much of it, though; Gotland is a long way from Iceland, right?

Thursday I spent working with second-year teams. The weather was clear and cold, with no sign of any ash in the sky. Little did I know that British airspace was being closed entirely, and that night, Sweden's airspace closed too. I figured it would literally blow over after a while, but on Friday it became clear that I wouldn't be going home on Saturday. I called my airline and rebooked my flight for the first thing they could give me, which was the following Wednesday.

The weekend was a waiting game. I worked on other things and wandered around Visby a little bit, wishing I had brought a better camera. Meanwhile, all of Europe was in an uproar -- trains and ferries were jammed, as travelers tried to get home. I was on an island, Gotland, trying to get to another island, Britain, which made it doubly difficult for me.

On Sunday my wife managed by a miracle to reserve me a ticket on the Eurostar (the Channel Tunnel train) from Brussels to London on Saturday the 24th... a week away. It didn't take long to decide that I should buy it. There was no sign of the volcano letting up, and people were predicting that it might go on for months. Lovely as Visby is, I couldn't stay there indefinitely. The trick was to find a way from Visby to Brussels.

Monday morning I went in to the department office to talk to Don Geyer, director of the game program, about what we should do. The trains were so full that I wasn't sure I could count on them. Don kindly offered to put me on a ferry to the mainland and rent a car for me in Stockholm, which I would drive to Brussels. The drop-off charge would be horrendous, but it seemed like the best way. A travel agent made the arrangements, and I spent the rest of the afternoon getting driving directions from Google and printing out road maps of the journey.

One of the nice things about teaching all over Europe is that I have clients in a lot of places. Before I left I sent a message to everyone who was along my route, offering them a special VOLCANO DISCOUNT good for ONE WEEK ONLY. I knew it was a long shot on such short notice, but two people actually took me up on it, as you'll see.

Tuesday April 20: Visby to Stockholm

The ferry left at 7 AM on Tuesday morning. In order to pack, have a shower, and walk to the ferry port in time, I had to get up at 4. So began the odyssey.



View Larger Map

This map shows my actual trip from the Visby Ferry Terminal to the Brussels Airport. I turned in the car there and made the rest of the journey by train, which Google Maps can't show.

The ferry was large and fancy, much nicer than some of the ones I've taken across the English Channel. At that hour of the day, there was almost nobody on it. They got me a first-class ticket, which meant that I had a big assigned seat in the forward part of the ship, with an airplane-style sound system and a movie. Alas, I was too sleepy to enjoy it. I slept most of the 3-hour ride to Nynäshamn, which is where the ferry makes landfall on the Swedish mainland. The ferry connects with a bus to the Stockholm Central Bus Station, and the Hertz Rent-a-Car offices were just outside. I got there at just about noon.

Tuesday April 20: Stockholm to Tidaholm

My car proved to be a Ford Converse station wagon (estate car). It was pretty big, but it was comfortable and had lots of power. It didn't take me long to get out of Stockholm. From then on it was high speed freeway all the way to Jonköping. Swedish freeways are smooth and not too crowded -- in a nation of only 9 million people, that's not a surprise. Unfortunately, the airwaves were equally uncrowded... out in the country, there was very little on the radio.

My friend Ulf Wilhelmsson at the University of Skövde was one of the ones who responded to my Volcano Discount offer. He couldn't hire me, but he did offer to put me up for the night. It was great to see him again, and well worth the brief detour to his house in Tidaholm. I got there just in time for dinner. Thanks, Ulf!

Wednesday April 21: Tidaholm to Copenhagen to Bremen

This was the longest and certainly the dullest day. Ulf and his wife had to get up early, but I took it a bit easy -- since the previous day began at 4 AM, I needed the sleep. Back down to the E4 at Jonköping and on down to Malmö. The landscape didn't change much: rolling hills, lakes, and trees, trees, trees. It flattened out a bit as I got to Helsingborg and started following the coast. There's a ferry from Helsingborg across to Helsingør in Denmark (the home of Hamlet's castle, Elsinore, which Mary Ellen and I visited many years ago), but I decided to take the toll bridge from Malmö to Copenhagen.

That's quite some toll. The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco is up to $6, I believe; this was 395 Swedish crowns, which is $54 or £35.

There weren't any customs formalities at the border with Denmark -- indeed, none at all until I went to board the Eurostar for Britain. Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Holland, and Belgium, plus many other European countries, are part of the Schengen Agreement, a treaty that allows free movement across most intra-European borders -- an idea that would horrify most Americans, I'm sure. Britain, being an island and the target of a certain amount of terrorism, is not in the Schengen Agreement. However, Britain has free movement (they call it a "common travel area") with the Republic of Ireland. In fact, there aren't even any signs to indicate when you're entering the Republic from the North. They would probably get torn down.

I skirted the edge of my second capital city, Copenhagen, and drove on down to Rødby, where you catch the ferry to Germany. There was quite a lot of traffic heading south out of the city, but the farther I went the more it thinned out.

The British are forever moaning about how wind turbines spoil the landscape (I don't agree); they should see southern Sweden and Denmark. I don't know how much Scandinavian electricity actually comes from these turbines, but it's not for want of trying -- they were all turning steadily, and I must have passed close to a hundred of them.

The ferry to Germany only took 45 minutes, but was even more expensive than the bridge from Sweden: 499 Danish crowns, which is $89 (£58). I grabbed a quick dinner aboard, but it seemed like I had hardly wolfed it down before we were pulling into Puttgarden and I had to get back in my car.

If there's one thing every red-blooded male in the Western world knows about German roads, it's that there's no speed limit on the autobahn. That's true in some places, but not everywhere. On most of my route the speed limits were as low as anywhere else -- 110 or 120 kph -- and there were road works every 10 kilometers or so. I did try pushing the car a bit in an unlimited section, but a Ford Converse is not a Mercedes S-class and I backed off after a few seconds. It got a little twitchy at high speeds.

On I went, across northern Germany, past Hamburg towards Bremen. At this point I diverted from my direct route to Brussels, because I was going to stop off in Leeuwarden in the Netherlands. Outside Bremen I found a roadside hotel that was comfortable and surprisingly inexpensive.

Thursday, April 22: Bremen to Leeuwarden

The next client along my way was the Northern College of Leeuwarden, for whom I've done a lot of work in the last couple of years. As it happened, Thursday was the birthday, and also the graduation date, of my friend Jonathan van Woudenberg, who has worked with me a lot there. It only took me a couple of hours to drive to Leeuwarden. I checked into a hotel and then went to the university to see his graduation presentation and have a celebratory dinner with his friends.

Friday, April 23: Leeuwarden to Amsterdam

I spent all day Friday working with students in the Communication and Multimedia Design department, which I've done several times before. At the end of the day I was off again, to a hotel Mary Ellen found for me near the Amsterdam airport (at one point we thought I might fly home from Amsterdam). This took me along the magnificent Afsluitdijk, which means "Enclosure Dike" in English. I stopped to take a few pictures at the Art Deco monument that commemorates its completion.

The Afsluitdijk, looking north: a nice illustration of the concept of the vanishing point. On the left is the Waddenzee (an intertidal zone of the North Sea); on the right is the Ijsselmeer.The figure in the middle distance is a sculpture.

This brings up a story. A little learning is a dangerous thing, as I found out on one of my first visits to the the Netherlands as an adult.

When I was a kid my family had a number of long-playing records with dramatizations of various kinds made by the Walt Disney Company. One of these was an adaptation of the book Hans Brinker; or, The Silver Skates. The story took place in the Netherlands and involved an ice skating race on the Zuider Zee. Unfortunately, the American actors who played the parts pronounced this term "ZY-der Zee," and I didn't know any better. (It should really be pronounced "ZOW-der Zay," and simply means Southern Sea.)

When I knew I was going to Holland I looked on a map and was surprised to find that there was no sign of the Zuider Zee anywhere. Once I got there I asked several people, all of them young, where it was. None of them had any idea what I was talking about. (This was not helped by my mispronunciation of the name.) I explained about the record and the book. They had never heard of either.

Some later research revealed the explanation. Hans Brinker was written in the 19th century by an American woman who had never been to the Netherlands -- it was very popular in the US, but is unknown in Holland. The Zuider Zee does not exist and has not existed since May 28, 1932. It was there when she wrote the book, but it's gone now.

It used to be an enormous inlet of the North Sea, but on that day, the Zuider Zee was completely enclosed by the Afsluitdijk, and was renamed the Ijsselmeer. With time, fresh water from the river IJssel pushed out the salt water, and now it's a vast lake. In addition, the Dutch reclaimed quite a lot of it and created a completely new province, Flevoland, which is actually below sea level.

From there I went on to my hotel near the airport, an easy drive.



Saturday, April 24: Amsterdam to Brussels to London and home

The last day of the journey was a long one, but not particularly arduous. I got up and drove from the Amsterdam airport to the Brussels airport, a matter of about three hours. Here I encountered the heaviest traffic along the route, but it was never really bad. I had to get the car to the Hertz facility by 1:30, and I made it with about half an hour to spare.

From the airport -- which was now open and busy -- I took a train to Brussels-Midi, the station that the Eurostar departs from. Unfortunately, my train wasn't until 8 PM and the automated left-luggage lockers weren't working, so I couldn't go anywhere. There was nothing to do but hang around with my suitcase. Fortunately I keep a lot of free E-books on my PDA (mostly old ones thanks to the wonderful Project Gutenberg), so I didn't get bored.

To my surprise, the Eurostar wasn't jammed -- it wasn't even full. It's fast, though. Brussels to London is only two hours. With the time change to the UK, I got in to St. Pancras station at 9 PM, took a taxi across London to Waterloo station (I hate hauling luggage through the Underground), and was home by 10:30.

Parts of the trip were fun; parts were tedious; parts were interesting and unusual. It was certainly expensive, and would have been a great deal more so if the University of Gotland hadn't kindly paid for the car and the ferry from Gotland to the mainland. I owe a lot to Mary Ellen Foley, my tireless Ground Support Team, who researched cars and trains and ferries and hotels, and got me the Eurostar ticket and the Amsterdam hotel.

Unfortunately, it also cost me a week's work on my PhD thesis, which I can ill afford. I have to go back in a month for the Gotland Game Awards, and I'm really hoping it doesn't happen again.

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The Great Indian Game Design Workshop Tour

Mumbai, Bangalore, and Chennai, India

Everyone in the entertainment business has, or should have, heard of Bollywood—the great Indian film industry located in and around Mumbai, or Bombay as it was formerly known. Bollywood turns out dozens of films for every one that Hollywood does—not blockbusters like Avatar to be sure, but movies made by Indians, for Indians. When Mr. Anirban Chatterjee of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) wrote inviting me to deliver a game design workshop at Bollywood's big annual Frames conference, I couldn't possibly refuse.

The only difficulty was that FICCI Frames, as it is universally known, takes place in Mumbai immediately after the Game Developers' Conference, which was in San Francisco—and my talk was on the last day of GDC. To get to India I would have to fly back to London and then directly on to Mumbai, or go on around the world and travel via someplace in the Far East. Nobody offers a flight directly from San Francisco to Mumbai, I discovered—maybe the planes don't have the range. I consulted flight timetables and found that if I left right after GDC, I would miss the first day of Frames but I could still get there in time to deliver a workshop.

Once I knew I was going to India, I wanted to take as much advantage as I could of being there. With a lot of back-and-forth E-mail, I was able to set up additional events at Dhruva Interactive in Bangalore and at the Image College of Arts, Animation, and Technology on their campuses in Bangalore and Chennai. This is the tale of the tour.

Sunday, March 14 – Tuesday, March 16

The day after the Game Developers' Conference ended, I flew overnight from San Francisco to London. My wife met me at Heathrow airport, and traded the suitcase full of cool-weather clothes for use in San Francisco for another suitcase of hot-weather clothes appropriate for India. She and I had lunch together, and then I got on another plane to Mumbai, also overnight. I arrived at about 9 in the morning on Tuesday the 16th, pretty wrecked after two back-to-back overnight flights.

The Renaissance Hotel in Powai plays host to the Frames conference. Powai isn't the real Mumbai—it's a large, seemingly affluent suburb to the north, centered around a large lake. Of course, a suburb in Mumbai is a major city anywhere else—something like 20 million people live in the Mumbai metropolitan area, more than than several European countries put together. When I got to the hotel, I went straight to bed and slept all the rest of the day and all that night as well. By Wednesday morning I was feeling at least partially human.

Wednesday, March 17: FICCI Frames

Frames is primarily a conference, not a trade show, and a conference for suits, mostly: suits from film, television, music, animation, visual effects, and games. They lump games in with visual effects and animation because the majority of India's work in these areas consists of providing outsource services to Western companies. Autodesk sponsored several of the events at the conference; they provide a lot of the tools that these industries use. As India begins to develop more games locally, I hope that the game industry will move out from under the shadow of animation.

Mr. Chatterjee asked me to sit on a panel on the afternoon of the 17th, called “Is Gaming the Third Pillar of Mass Entertainment?” I wasn't sure what the first two pillars were, but I agreed to do it. They're film and music, it turned out. It was the usual sort of rambling panel discussion, concentrating mostly on the market, and I suspect I gained more knowledge than I imparted. One of the things I learned is that Indian film studios don't bother to release films during the cricket season—nobody would go, because they're all glued to the TV or radio. Another useful fact is that India has an installed base of 8 million PCs (I would have guessed it was ten times that, in a country with over a billion people), only one million consoles, and over 400 million mobile phones—more mobile phones than the entire population of the USA. Many of them aren't yet smartphones, but that will change. I have said for a long time that I thought video games would come to India via mobiles; it's nice to see my prediction vindicated.

While I was sitting on the panel I made the acquaintance of Vishal Gondal, the CEO of Indiagames. I had already met one or two people from Indiagames at the NASSCOM Games Summit last November, but not the man himself. Indiagames is located in Mumbai, and on the spot we arranged for me to give a game design workshop to his employees on Friday the 19th. Vishal is a proper game developer—he may be a suit, but he doesn't look like one, and he turned up for than panel in a T-shirt and jeans. I'm beginning to learn that I don't have to wear a tie at Indian events. It's too hot and even a lot of Indian bigwigs don't wear them.

Dinner that night was a huge buffet on the lawn of the hotel, accompanied by fireworks and an awards ceremony, mostly for achievements in animation and visual effects, but also for games. Indiagames won one of them, though I can't remember which award it was, unfortunately.

Thursday, March 18: FICCI Frames Workshop

When I went to set up my workshop on Thursday morning, I was startled to discover that it was in a nightclub at the hotel—the “Velvet Lounge.” I think it's the only time I've given a workshop in a place with mirrored walls and a dance floor. Everything worked out just fine, though, and the workshop drew attendees from all over India—some had gotten up in the middle of the night to drive from Pune, and others had flown in from Hyderabad and Bangalore to be there. I was really pleased at the turnout. I think my event assembled the largest group of game designers ever gathered under one roof in India.

I normally randomize the teams when I do my workshops, to break up existing hierarchies and encourage people to get to know each other. I had initially been concerned that this might violate some subtle social code that I, as a westerner, was unaware of. In the end I need not have worried. Hindu, Muslim, Jain, Sikh, or Buddhist, we were all game developers and that was what mattered.

I tried a couple of new game ideas at this event. Knowing that Indian weddings—Hindu ones, at least—tend to be long, complex affairs, I decided to ask one team to design a wedding planning game. This isn't as outlandish as you might think (Ubisoft already has one), but the team sort of got the wrong idea and turned it into a minigame-driven dating sim, Japanese style, with the wedding as the end of the game. Generally, though, the workshop went off well and we took a lot of pictures to commemorate the event.

That evening there was another big buffet on the lawn, more fireworks, and more awards, this time including the glamorous stars of Bollywood—the press was out in force. I had no idea who any of them were. There was also a band, singing in what I guessed was Marathi, the local language.

Friday, March 19: Indiagames Workshop

Friday was my hastily-arranged workshop at Indiagames. I didn't go to their offices because they didn't have a suitable space, but they had managed to rent classrooms at a nearby training center. It was a pretty big crowd, about 40 people, and warm but tolerable. Even Vishal Gondal and his senior executives participated. One of the attendees was Purnima Iyer, who had paid her own way to the FICCI Frames workshop the previous day but enjoyed it sufficiently to attend a second time. I had already met her in November, when she gave a talk at the NASSCOM conference. Purnima has her own blog about game design in India, and is beginning to make a name for herself.

One thing I noticed at the Indian workshops was a tendency to think small. Many of their ideas consisted of Web-based or mobile phone games rather than the large console or PC games that participants in the West usually specify. It doesn't really matter one way or another—the workshop is technology-agnostic—but I suspect this reflects the kinds of games that the attendees grew up playing. It's probably good that Indian game designers do think small for the moment, since their own markets won't support large games yet, and there isn't the funding to develop them in any case. Students in the West often specify games that are impractically large. I don't discourage this in an introductory workshop, but sooner or later they do have to realize that game features have a price.

One of the game ideas I gave them to work on was “Secret Service Agent”—the goal is to protect the President. Most people design this as a 3D shooter, but not the Indiagames team. They defined it as a sort of reverse tower defense game, in which the presidential motorcade moves through a maze of streets and the player must set up snipers and other agents to defend the motorcade from attack by people in the crowd. It was a 2D game and would actually be quite easy to build.

Indians serve water everywhere, at all times. If you're lucky, it will be chilled. The tap water isn't always safe, so it's usually bottled water. Even the classroom chairs have special water-bottle holders, something I've never seen in an any Western classroom. What they did before plastic bottles I don't know—glass ones, I suppose—and it must create an absolute mountain of waste.

Saturday, March 20

I had originally planned to spend Saturday being a tourist in Mumbai—perhaps taking a boat to visit the famous caves on Elephanta Island, or doing something that might involve being indoors and cool, such as a museum. However, when the time came I was pretty tired, between the jet lag, the hot weather, and the two back-to-back workshops. I just stayed in my room and caught up on E-mail.

Sunday, March 21

Sunday I was off by plane to Bengaluru, or Bangalore—another first for me. Like many other airports in India, Bangalore's is brand new, very shiny and attractive. It's also a long, long way from the middle of town, and on the taxi ride I had a chance to look at a bit of the countryside. The state of Karnataka seems to be hot and dry – drier, at least, than Mumbai was, and the heat was less oppressive. Dhruva Interactive, my hosts, put me in a very nice service flat, which is kind of like a hotel with a kitchenette in every room, but no restaurant. The room was spotless, the air conditioning worked well, and best of all, there was a high speed Ethernet connection.

Many of the service flats in Bangalore advertise that they have emergency power generation, and on the day I checked out, I found out why. Bangalore's power isn't very reliable, and it cut out briefly twice in the space of half an hour. But the generator kicked in within 10 seconds each time.

Monday, March 22 – Tuesday, March 23: Dhruva Interactive

Dhruva is the Indian name for the North Star. Dhruva Interactive is the oldest game company in India, providing services to Western companies as well as creating original titles of their own. Their work has appeared in titles such as Asterix at the Olympic Games, Forza 2 Motorsport, and Battlefield 2: Modern Combat. The company is located in a residential district—dotted with businesses here and there—located right off Hundred Foot Road, an upmarket shopping district full of designer boutiques.

I can't really talk about my work for Dhruva; suffice to say that it consisted of a mixture of game design training and some consulting on forthcoming titles. The CEO, Rajesh Rao, had also invited a few others to visit, including the irrepressible Anand Ramachandran, a journalist I had met at NASSCOM, who has enough energy and opinions for any three other people. He actually lives in Mumbai, and flew down to take part.

Each night we went out to dinner, and of course it was all wonderful. There's a chain called Barbecue Nation where they put a box of hot coals into a recess on your table, and waiters keep coming around bringing different things on skewers for you to cook for yourself. They only stop when you put up a little flag to indicate that you've had enough.

Dhruva made me particularly welcome, and I owe special thanks to Raju Patil, the Director of Operations, who took care of all the local arrangements.

Wednesday, March 24: ICAT Bangalore

On Wednesday morning I checked out of my flat and went to give a half-day workshop at the Bangalore campus of the Image College of Art, Animation, and Technology. Like many Indian technical schools, ICAT is affiliated with a company, Image Infotainment Ltd., which uses the school as a way to spot and train new talent—at their expense rather than its own. ICAT is unique in that it awards full degrees, not just certificates, through an arrangement with the University of Wales in the UK.

I met Mrs. Varsha Shelar, the academic head, and several other faculty before starting the workshop for about 70 students and other visitors from nearby companies. I was curious to see what Indian game students would be like, since their educational system is pretty different from the West's. A local acquaintance described it as “Victorian,” and said that it concentrated on rote learning, which is not satisfactory in a creative field.

The only real difference that I could see, however, is that they're a bit quieter—less inclined to stand out. The sex ratio was actually a little better than it usually is in Europe, maybe 80% male rather than 95% male. It was a pretty good workshop. One team got a little lost, but I think if we had had more time and fewer people, I could have prevented that. A four-hour workshop for 70 people means that I'm spread pretty thin.

While I was there they brought me a treat: a whole coconut, carved open with a straw stuck inside to drink the milk. Once you've done that you're supposed to cut it open the rest of the way and eat the meat, too, but I didn't have time.

After the workshop I hurried off to the airport for my flight to Chennai (the former Madras). I got in quite late.

Wednesday, March 25: ICAT Chennai

Chennai is hot and humid—everybody warned me that when they found out I was going there. They weren't kidding. It's on the east coast of India at about the same latitude as Bangalore, but very different. Unfortunately, I didn't see much of it. I arrived late at night, slept in the next morning, and gave my workshop in the afternoon. The ICAT Chennai campus turned out to be about 50 yards from my service flat, so I didn't get any time to look around.

The Chennai workshop produced some of the best results I got in India. The room was long and narrow, not ideal for lecturing in, but the students were very energetic and imaginative. One of the game ideas I handed out was “to be a real cowboy (not a gunslinger).” The team chose to interpret this role as an Indian cowherd and not a cowboy in the Western sense at all. Indians keep cows for milk but not meat, and they treat them rather better than we do, so it was a very different take on the idea.

I also made a change to the workshop, which I think improved it considerably. Many participants start to present the game they've been designing by telling a long, rambling back story about their main character, and describe the game itself as a sequence of events rather than an opportunity for the player to do interesting things. In the course of the workshop they have worked out the gameplay, an internal economy, and a user interface for their game, but it's easier and more familiar to tell a story, so that's what they do. This time I explicitly forbade them to tell the story and required them to concentrate on gameplay. As a result we got much more interesting presentations and I think they did better work overall, too.

That evening Mr. Natrajan, the Chief Academic Officer of ICAT, took me to dinner at a fancy tandoori restaurant on a rooftop terrace—a popular thing in India; several of my dinners there were on rooftop terraces. We were ten stories up and could see all the lights of Chennai. The city also boasts a very long beach and a lighthouse on the Bay of Bengal, but I couldn't see much of them in the dark. Two ladies from the college administration came along, and in the course of chatting with them I learned how you put on a sari. (It takes a while.)

Thursday, March 26

I had to fly from Chennai to Mumbai in order to catch my flight home, and unfortunately this meant getting up at four in the morning. Everything went smoothly, although it was a bumpy ride to the airport, and there was more traffic than you would expect at that hour of the morning. The British Airways cabin crew went on strike the very next day, but fortunately it didn't affect me and I got home on time and luggage intact.

All in all it was a great trip. The only thing I would do differently is to come at a cooler time of the year. I had several requests to come back, and I probably will do next winter if there's still enough interest.

GDC 2010!

San Francisco, California, USA

This was my 21st Game Developers' Conference. I started going in 1990, and I've been to every one since.

It was a bit of a blur this year, combining social, networking, attending, and presenting into one big busy furball of activity. The first order of business, on Tuesday, was to get to the Serious Games Summit and see my friend Tim Laning of Grendel Games present his amazing new laparoscopic surgery training game. The game doesn't simulate laparoscopic surgery itself -- there are loads of trainers for that and the surgeons are bored stiff with them. Instead, it offers an action-puzzle game that the player has to play by performing laparoscopy movements using a pair of specially modified Wii controllers. It teaches the same hand-eye coordination skills, and uses the same restricted lighting conditions, as real surgery, but the game itself is about managing a bunch of destructive little robots. It was a hit with the audience and will soon be demonstrated at the new Games for Health conference in May.

The Wii surgery input device. They had some trouble getting it through Customs.
I snitched this picture from Jason Della Rocca's Reality Panic blog.

I also ran into Judy Perry of Norco College again, and stopped into the orientation meeting for new IGDA board members. The main point I made there was to keep their internal board squabbles internal, lest their disagreements hurt the organization as a whole.

That evening I took my Dutch friends, who have been incredibly hospitable whenever I have visited them in Leeuwarden, out for dinner. We started with a trip across the Golden Gate Bridge to see San Francisco from Battery Spencer on the Marin headlands, a longtime favorite of mine. After that we went to Greens Restaurant in the Fort Mason center for some of the best vegetarian food anywhere, and then over to the Marina Safeway (famous to fans of Tales of the City) for It's-Its. The It's-Its were not as good as I had remembered and something of a comedown after the food at Greens, but I explained that this was a San Francisco Thing which they Must Not Miss.

Nadia Columbo, Jonathan van Woudenberg, me, Gerdien Dijkstra and Tim Laning at Battery Spencer.

I spent most of the next day locked in my hotel room working on my lecture, which wasn't yet finished. In the evening, Dorothy Phoenix, a very promising student I met a couple of years back when I was doing a recruiting gig at DeVry University in Arlington, took me out for Korean barbecue. She's now with IBM and will be someone to watch if she ever goes into games. I'm so fond of the bridge view that I took her there too, and we also did Lombard Street and Telegraph Hill in the evening. We were planning to go to the Women in Games International party afterwards, but by that time it was so late that we missed it, unfortunately.

Thursday was the first day of the main conference, which, after more work on my lecture, began with the IGDA VIP lunch. I had no idea the IGDA had so many VIPs. I was expecting a couple of dozen and there were well over a hundred. We got a look at Joshua Caulfield, the new executive director now that Jason Della Rocca has stepped down, and awarded plaques to various IGDA overachievers. I was especially pleased to see Wendy Despain get one -- she has been instrumental in getting books published with the IGDA logo on them (thanks to the Writers' SIG), which helps to raise the organization's profile.

I can't even remember what I did Thursday afternoon or evening. Friday morning I had to run to Palo Alto on some personal business, but I was back in time to meet Linda Breitlauch of the Mediadesign Hochschule in Dusseldorf and learn about their program. I also sat and talked over some free-to-play game design issues with the sage and insightful Martha Sapeta, formerly of Zynga and now of Playdom, which I worked into my lecture. That night was both the IGDA party and the Level 99 speakers' party. The IGDA party was so full that I, the founder, was not allowed in. I ended up sitting at a table inside the Metreon and learning all about Pokemon from Eve Eschenbacher, who is one of their translators from Japanese into English. Then off to the Level 99 party, at which, for the Nth year in a row, the music was too loud to talk to anybody. They never, ever, seem to learn. I gave it an hour and then ducked out -- I needed to save my voice for my lecture on Saturday afternoon.

Saturday itself was jammed -- meetings with Albert Sikkema of Gameship in the Netherlands, Sheryl Flynn who works on games for rehabilitation at the Blue Marble Game Company, lunch with an old friend from college, and then the Developers' Rant session. Jason Della Rocca had invited me to give a two-minute cameo rant, and I gave an excerpted version of a longer rant that appeared in my lecture, which I rather sneakily used as an opportunity to plug the lecture.

Finally, the last session on the last day, it was time for my own talk, "Single-Player, Multiplayer, MMOG: Design Psychologies for Different Social Contexts." I don't have it on the web in any form yet, but I'm working on it. In the meantime, someone named Ben Zeigler has posted a surprisingly complete and accurate summary (barring some minor quibbles) on his blog, and you can read it here. The essence of the talk was that game design, as a discipline, is fragmenting. The craft is really very different between player-versus-environment, player-versus-player, massively-multiplayer, and the new "free to play" games. Towards the end I condemned "social" games that make money by creating incentives to tribalism and hatred, and that promote emotional instability, as just plain evil. I got a lot of laughs during my extensive quotations from an important lecture by Zhan Ye -- he actually talked about how profitable it was to sell people tools for humiliating others. One of my key points: there's no such thing as artificial hatred. All hate is real.

After the talk I answered questions for a while, then hurried off to the GDC bookstore, where I had set up a book signing. Unfortunately, they had already sold out of all my books! I'll arrange it better next year.

And that was the end of GDC. The next day I flew back to London, then immediately caught another plane to India, which is where I am now.

Faculty Training at Norco College

Norco, California, USA

A few months ago I got a message from Judy Perry, who's head of the new game program at the Norco campus of Riverside Community College in southern California. RCC was about to set up a game development program, grant funding pending, and would I come and help to train the faculty? Of course I would. In order to save them the airfare from Britain, we scheduled it for right before the Game Developers' Conference this year.

I’ve had the opportunity to teach university faculty on a number of occasions, and it’s always fun and different from teaching students. They don’t come in with as many preconceived notions, for one thing. Students tend to feel that they already know everything there is to know about games, based on what they’ve seen in the shops. (I quickly disabuse them of this idea.) Faculty usually aren’t hardcore gamers, so they’re more open to new ideas. They sometimes come up with very unusual ideas. Unfortunately, their lack of experience also means that they occasionally reinvent the wheel, but I can usually nip that in the bud before it wastes too much time.

A few weeks back Judy wrote to me with the good news that their grant had come through, and in addition their college now had its own identity – not merely the Norco campus of Riverside Community College, but Norco College, an independent entity. We planned an intensive three day visit, with events scheduled throughout the day and in the evenings as well.

Judy met me at the Ontario, California airport and took me to dinner at the Mission Inn in Riverside – a lovely historic hotel that the college very kindly put me up in. The next day the fun began. It was a relatively small group, which made it possible to have a lot of discussion. We started with my fundamentals workshop in the morning, and moved on to interactive storytelling in the afternoon. That evening I went and hung out with a bunch of students for a while, telling scurrilous stories about industry luminaries and giving ad hoc design and career advice.

Judy Perry (top left) and team at work on their game idea.

The next day we were hard at work again. I began with an unscripted discussion of how the industry works as a business, and the careers available within it. In the afternoon we did my character design workshop. The faculty was a bit of a mixed bag, and included both former game industry professionals and complete newcomers – professors of computer science who had never even played a game. They had some fun designing the look and animation move set for Emily Vista, field zoologist, and Aristides Mykonos, sponge diver, among others.

In the evening there was a gala dinner at the Eagle Glen Golf Club, with over 100 people. It included faculty, university administrators, a few students, and some parents. Every single person who turned up got one of my books as a gift -- generously provided by the college -- and I signed them all. The dinner was lovely, and I gave my lecture “The Future of Interactive Entertainment to 2050,” which was pretty well-received although my laptop was a long way from the podium and I could barely see my slides. Afterward Judy Perry told me she was surprised that I was able to make the subject of procedural content generation both accessible and funny to non-technical people, which I take as high praise.

After all the excitement the previous night, we took it a bit easy on the last day. I gave a lecture on mechanics design, and then gave the participants a challenge to find the flaws in a game and make suggestions how to fix it. Mechanics design is always the hardest thing to teach, because it’s rather dry. I didn’t want them working with spreadsheets, so I invented an asymmetric card game for two players and had them play through it a few times to find out what was wrong with it. I’ve only done this once before and I wasn’t sure how it would be received, but people seemed to get into it and there were a lot of good suggestions. It was particularly interesting to see how different players adopted different styles of play – the strategists spent a long time figuring out how to lay out their cards, while the more casual players dived right in (and actually seemed to enjoy themselves more).

A room full of people trying to fix the flaws in my castle siege card game.

After it was all over Judy and I enjoyed a quiet chat before I headed off to my hotel. It was a long and busy three days, with almost every moment taken up with activities of one kind and another. I even got to play a student-built survival horror board game during one of the lunch breaks (five players, one of whom is the mad killer, but only he knows it). I was impressed with the students and faculty, and I hope the opportunity arises to go back some day. Special thanks to Judy above all, and to Annebelle Nery, the Grant Director; Dr. Diane Dieckmeyer, the Dean of Instruction; and Dr. Brenda Davis, President, who all supported my visit and worked hard to make it happen.