Great Talks About Games

Some great talks about games that I've seen. Curated by me, Zach Gage (@helvetica). I've given some talks too, but it seems unethical and self-involved to post them on here. If you're interested in my own talks, they're linked from my site: http://www.stfj.net/text/ Header art by Matt Cusick - http://www.mattcusick.com

[talksaboutgames]

Designing Procedural Stealth for Invisible Inc. - James Lantz - GDC2015

I have to admit, as much as I love this talk, I wasn’t initially sure about posting it here. One of my core requirements for this tumblr is that the talks should be timeless, and those are big shoes for a postmortem to fill. But as I was typing out my 140 characters to post this on my Twitter I realized maybe this talk is timeless. Not because of the game it’s about, or because of the very nice soliloquy James offers at the start on the nature of a post-mortem. It’s timeless because what they attempted with Invisible Inc. is one of the most unbelievably ambitious and terrifying design challenges I’ve seen in a long time, especially for a mid-budget game.

This talk is timeless because it’s a manual for how to proceed when you’re back is up against the wall — when all you have is an impossible problem and a team of geniuses. Essentially it’s a talk about how to solve problems like a spy — or an indie.

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Scroll Back: The Theory and Practice of Cameras in Side-Scrollers - Itay Keren - GDC2015

wow, if you were looking for the comprehensive talk on 2d camera design this is the talk for you. Itay does an amazing job going through the entire history of 2d game cameras, accompanied by beautiful annotated animated screenshots.

Oh also GDC posted it for free. I can’t say enough good things about this talk

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EVO 2014 - Counting Frames - Frank Lantz

At the risk of becoming a Frank Lantz fanboy blog, I am posting Frank's most recent talk from EVO. The thing about frank's talks is that they're simultaneously deep, accessible, enjoyable, and broad, yet somehow tightly thematic. How could I resist?

While this recent talk veers a smidge early on to promote NYU GameCenter and EVO itself (which is super appropriate for the venue but not so exciting for the context of this blog), it contains many little perfect gems of information to make up for it. So stick with it.

I'm a little shocked that I've never seen a talk weave actual real-life-fighting-sports in with the context of digital esports. From the very first video (which is insanely perfect), Frank weaves these two topics deftly, getting down to the fundamental truths of fighting games, fighting sports,  fighting culture... and really just, culture.

For a long time when I first started making videogames I made action games. Some of them were straight action like Bit Pilot, and some of them were action puzzle like Unify. After seeing Area Code/Frank's Drop7, I got this idea that timing was sort of a cheat. That I could design these moderately involved systems, and then instead of perfecting them, I could just put them on a timer, and that would fix whatever was broken. Drop7 seemed so extraordinarily elegant precisely because it didn't do that. Its turn-based nature made it a "more elegant" design.

So I made that kind of game for a while. SpellTower, Guts of Glory, etc. I'm still in that phase with a card game roguelike i'm working on and a billiards game. Both turn-based, both heavy on the systemic elegance.

This talk makes me want to take what I've learned and make an action/systems game again. Maybe that'll be next.

One last thought. One other thing that this talk reminded me of that Frank didn't reference is OODA loops. I was originally introduced to the concept by my friend Amit Pitaru. Just learning about them made me better at both Poker and Starcraft 2, although admittedly, I'm still not great at either.

The thing that OODA loops point out is that it's more important to be able to make faster decisions than your opponent than it is to make better decisions than them. This is because fast "decent" decisions are based off more up-to-date information than your opponents "great" slow decisions. Your fast decisions can actually ruin their slow ones. OODA loops are why Street Fighter players do that little dance of ducks and tiny steps. They're also why APM (actions per minute) actually matter for players of starcraft 2. It's a cool practice that worked great for the US Air Force, and worked okay for me.

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While I generally avoid talks that open with videos, this talk is very solid, and definitely worth sticking with.

One of the things that i think is most interesting about this talk is the last question Frank receives and his answer to it, where he talks about how he wants game designers to be public intellectuals in the same way that artists and filmmakers are.

Which makes me wonder why game developers aren’t public intellectuals. It think maybe, weirdly, it’s because of the rationalist part of game design. I find most truly public intellectuals are the artists, despite the suggestion of rationality that intellectual implies. It seems like the broad public isn’t interested in vocation specific insights, and instead prefers the fascination with the emotional unknown that they get from film, music, and art. In fact, I often feel like the role of emotional creativity in our society is often one of being interrogated, and that is what makes it compelling in broader conversation. We’re always after what the true meaning of songs or movies is, when instead I think we should be discussing the motivations of the artists were in creating them — what questions they were trying to ask.

Maybe if games were seen as predominantly emotional we’d have our public intellectuals.

This seems to come up for me over and over again as I look back the last few years. I remember in 2012 being excited to hear that the MoMA was collecting games, but then saddened to hear that the games would be housed in the Design collection, and not the Art one. I’ve always thought that while the actual work of making games is often design,  the framing of games, the inspiration, is all art. To put it another way, making a game is both the delineation of a space, and the refinement of the rules within that space. The refinement is mostly rationalist, but the delineation, that’s all emotional. It’s always sort of bugged me that when the outside world looks in at games they just see the design part. 

Anyway, Frank does a really good job saying this better than I do, so you should probably just watch the talk.

[talksaboutgames]

Luck In Games - Richard Garfield (skip to the 3minute mark)

Very few people have quite the handle on how luck works in games as Richard Garfield (designer of Magic the Gathering, Netrunner, The Great Dalmuti, etc).

I was lucky enough to be in the audience for this talk, and it's definitely one of my favorites. My favorite thing about his talk is how Richard peppers it  with "toy games" — games that he's created as examples to illustrate his points. These "toy games" provide little mental exercises for you to imagine while he speaks. If you go with him on this little journey you won't regret it.

Probably my biggest takeaway from this talk was the role of luck in determining the accessibility of a game, and I applied many of these lessons directly when i was designing my own card game Guts of Glory.

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GDC 2007 - Building The Future of Indie Games Panel

This is a great historical look at what the world looked like to indie developers in 2007, 2 years after steam opened up to (a very limited selection of) non-valve games, 3 months before the first iPhone was released, and 5 months before the Steam community was launched.

My favorite part comes early on in the panel when Derek pushes back on the future of games being on consoles, instead proposing that games will be everywhere in the future, and indie games fit better everywhere. Then he drops this bomb: "you can't put gears of war on a cellphone, but you can put a small independently developed game on a cellphone." ... months before anyone even knew about the iPhone, and years before Android. When you're right, you're right.

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Stop Drawing Dead Fish - Bret Victor

Bret Victor once again shows a tool he made that I wish he would release, that gets to the bottom of what games are as a medium.

(submitted by @saiacide)

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David Crane describes developing games for the Atari 2600, specifically Pitfall. The technical constraints of the machine require many clever hacks and content reuse in order to cram code and art into 128 bytes and still produce a fun game.

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Juice it or lose it - Martin Jonasson & Petri Purho

(submitted by @saiacide)

Martin and Petri deliver a hilarious and poignant talk about the importance and power of "juicy" interactions in games

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GDC 2013 - John Romeros wives by Cara Ellison read by Anna Anthropy

This was a seminal moment at GDC 2013. There's more info about the reading here on Anna's site. Thanks to Daphny for the incredibly powerful video recording

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(Submitted by salty-horse)

Rob Daviau describes his game design history, the process of designing the ground-breaking Risk: Legacy - a Risk game that evolves and changes permanently over the course of several play sessions - and his future design SeaFall, that takes those ideas and applies them to an original 4X system.

(ed. note- also as a bonus, Rob is absolutely hilarious. Any way you look at it, this is an incredibly enjoyable talk)

[talksaboutgames]

Players are Artists Too - Henry Lowood

Doug Wilson sent me this totally amazing talk where Lowood makes a rare plea to investigate the performative artistry of the players of games, in addition to the artistry of game designers. Even though this talk is from 2010, it seems like right now, as we embark on the golden age of twitch.tv, this talk has never been more relevant.

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This is maybe the most amazing art piece Jason Rohrer ever made. It's worth checking out the wikipedia as well. Feel free to bail on the video after he finishes talking. 

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the amount of innovation and talent it took to make Prince of Persia is mind-blowing.

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Myst is one of the most important games ever made. This is a great postmortem. I especially love that the only game Robyn Miller played before designing Myst was Zork 2. Amazing and demonstrative that Myst, game by non-gamers for non-gamers, managed to change gaming forever.

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Given the recent news that they are no longer updating freeindiegam.es, it seems appropriate to post this video where Terry and Porpentine give a great overview of why the  games they hi-light are important and transgressive.

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The #1ReasonToBe panel was amazing this year. Everyone needs to watch this video. Every single talk was amazing.