The Collective Unconscious

From Blather, Rinse, Repeat.

Chaim Gingold had a presentation which was the closest thing to a Will Wright talk, both in terms of content and presentation. His discussion was looking at the "possibility space" of a tool (Maya has a huge space; it can model almost anything. Sim City has a smaller space; it can only model cities), the "probability space" of a particular user with that tool (put a random guy in front of Maya, he won't produce much, and it'll be a different set of stuff than a trained 3d artist would create), and the "desirable space" (harder to define, but if you can make a tool that makes it easy to create good stuff and hard to make bad stuff, you've won). The basic idea isn't hard to grasp, but I appreciated the vocabulary for the discussion, and the examples of how Maxis has struggled with the tools they'll be providing Spore players.

Gosh, this sounds familiar (I'll have to continue that article, but I'm playing catchup, it seems. Oh, and I'll have to conform to the new established terminology, rather than the stuff I pulled out of my bum).

It seems like every year there's a couple of opinions, methodologies, or concepts which I've had developing in my head, and regular as clockwork, GDC always brings someone along who introduces these to a wider populance's attention, as if they thought up the ideas all by themselves.

I'm not sure I believe in the idea of a Collective Unconscious in the magical spiritual sense, where new ideas crop up simultaneously in different people across the world due to some ethereal force. I think we just react to similar stimulous in similar ways, coming up with similar solutions to similar problems. In games design, I get this a lot. I'm sure a lot of designers do. We play the same games, and see the same flaws in implementations, and start to consider the same ways to fix them.

Surely, everyone at one time or another has said "Oh, man! I had that exact idea!" when something like Spore or Little Big World or Mercury Meltdown comes out, only to have someone immediately respond "So why didn't you do anything about it then?".

We gripe about it a bit. It feels like we're never in the right position to make "Awesome Game Paradigm X" or to solve world hunger, even though we all know how (feed people, obviously).

It gives me a bittersweet feeling: On the one hand, it makes your personal mental acrobatics feel completely futile. Why should you think these important matters through when someone else can get it done faster, and smarter than you? Think of all that synapse growth you wasted! You could have used that for remembering more Virtua Fighter button combinations!

At the same time, you do feel vindicated. You can't be that crazy if someone else has come to the same conclusion as you. You do start to think about claiming on your Tin Foil Hat's warranty though, which typically has just run out.

I guess the only answer to stop this simultaneous uncredited authorship happening is to widen your horizons, and start accepting a broader range of inspirations (as well as not thinking things through quite as logically?). Step outside the narrow back alley of culture which starts with Aliens and ends in Lord of the Rings.

Respect other people's creativity, and then move on: As much as one might love the combined legacy of the Looking Glass alumni (who have built up a good 40% of my all-time-top-ten-games), one can't keep praying to the Lord Satan for their demise just so that you can jump in and abhor the creative vaccuum, claiming your rightful place on the throne of their creative lot. You have to establish your own unique axis of creativity... but only if you want to. No-one has to have a chip on their shoulder about innovation in games, of course!

With such a young medium, there's so much obvious common ground to explore that maybe we forget to spread our wings, sometimes. Taking a step off the beaten path is currently not creatively difficult (just financially), and sometimes we pick pretty obvious un-beaten paths to surge along. It's not important to innovate for the sake of innovation, obviously, but considering how narrow our current game-space is, it's surprising we don't innovate more, just by mistake. Seriously, is law of averages on strike or something?

Oooh, I know! Let's blame the big evil faceless games industry's unwillingness to court new idea...*ZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzz*

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I've just cracked a big problem I was having with my zooming menu interface. It's something I've smashed my head against for a few weeks (on and off) so I'm rather chuffed with myself. When it's more complete, I may put a video up, with the game proper all blurred out, 'natch.

Game Design: Sculpting Possibility (Part 1)

I almost feel like after playing a game long enough, and grokking a system, I can "see" a possibility space in the form of a kind of cloud of fog, either bleeding out gradually at the edges, or being contained within strict glass walls. This shape, of course, depends entirely on the game. But in a way, I see game design as a kind of sculpture.

I love the concept of "possibility space", and the idea that designers create and tweak rules which "sculpt" and "erode" it into different forms. I love the idea that systems can be represented in some form, other than themselves, and that this form can make systemic elegance or ugliness more obvious to the casual viewer.

I’ve had stabs at explaining it before (there’s more than a few drafted in this blog, but which I haven’t dared publish).

JP just linked me to this site, and I think it might help me start to make a point. Take a look. I'll wait.

The image of a ball's path during a match illustrates the beginnings of how I see possibility space in my head.

Notice in the pictures how one corner of the pitch is fairly empty. What could that mean? Could it be that their forward attacker has a bad left footed cross? Or could it be that the right-back defender is especially good? But this is not a possibility space. This is One Path Through Possibility.

You can imagine what it might look like if millions of matches between the same two teams were over layed on top of each other. The ball paths themselves start to become unreadable scribbles, but all of a sudden, a meta-visualization emerges: a cloud. It would show how those two teams' strategies and abilities bounce off one another. It would show up their most well worn approaches, and show where one team is generally weak, and where the other team is generally strong.

If we're just using two specific teams, we're only concentrating on those teams' approaches to matches. The foggy diagram has more to say about two teams' subjective experience of the game qua system than it does about the game system overall.

Now imagine that we get every football match in history, and lay them on top of each other. All we've done is widen our sample range, but I'm sure you'll see a more generalized cloud. Now we get a better picture of how human beings have adopted the game, and how they end up using it.

Still, though, there are definite areas where the ball is not seen as consistently, even though none of the game's rules explicitly suggest this should be the case. Perhaps you'll see most of the ball's time spent in midfield. That's easily understandable, as a ball must cross the pitch to get from one goal to another, and also since penalty areas are generally well defended to stop opposing players meeting their incentive - the Goal.

Perhaps we'll still see that attacks up the left flank are less likely. But why? There are no rules in the game to suggest this... no slope at that corner of the pitch, rolling the ball back toward the center.

So consider who is playing. Maybe we see this artifact because of our species' predisposition toward right-handed/footed people. This means that there are less wingers who can use the left flank well, and so the tactic is not pursued as heavily. And this idea of exploiting the most effective strategy leads us to another idea: the goals of the game (or even minor incentives along the way) warp possibility space.

If there were no explicit goals (Agon), and no aim to football other than to explore the implicit joy of playing with the ball, there would be no choice but to explore the possibilities that exist (self created/implicit goals; Paedia). Perhaps you'd see a much more even distribution of the ball's possibility across the football field, bleeding at the edges (since people will want to avoid the disincentives of throw-ins). This "pure play" might give us a better idea of how the system distributes the ball's possibility naturally. When we take that image and compare it to the incentivized version of football, we see how the Agon changes possibility.

I guess I'm just trying to say that there's a big difference between "what is likely" and "what is possible", though the former always fits snug inside the latter. The difference between these two is purely human psychology - the drive that Agon and Paedia create for us not only to explore possibility, but to feel we achieve something during our travels.

Next post will be on methods used to sculpt possibility intentionally. But I'll leave you with a something to discuss - if an AI's possibility space for a game does not match a players' has it failed, or are we simply playing a different game, or an alien mentality?