I was fortunate enough to get a ticket to last night’s EA sponsored talk at BAFTA last night - the first in a series targeting not just the games industry but also professionals in other media. The EA representative was swift to indicate the presence of film industry members, despite the fact that it looked remarkably like a most game events in terms of demographic.

Anyway, the main event was a talk by Will Wright (the creator of such seminal games as Sim City, The Sims and the upcoming “sim of all sims” Spore) entitled “The Future of Gaming”. Obviously this is quite a daunting topic to tackle - but Will decided to broadside expectations by renaming it “Programming Next-Generation systems”. Will’s attempt to unnerve the audience with a suggestion of a hugely technical talk was quickly dismissed as he informed them that the next-generation systems he was referring to are the minds of children rather than the consoles about to battle it out for living rooms around the globe.

Will is a fantastic speaker. He exudes charm, passion and is obviously exceptionally bright. It is a pleasure to hear someone speak so freely - there was almost no mention of any specific products. It was quite clear that these were his personal views and there was (almost) no notion of promotion as part of the talk (except for the fact that his talk was sandwiched by EA showreels).

The talk kicked off describing the different world that children are growing up in, compared with the youth of twenty years ago. The enormous bandwidth of information available to them and the size of the repository of knowledge sitting the other side of their browser is phenomenal. Will gave the example of the library of congress as one of the biggest single repositories of information from the recent past, and how this amount of information can now be stored in a backpack full of hard drives. The power of computers has incrementally increased. Given these new opportunities, how can we use them to educate children, motivate them, encourage positive behaviour and ultimately change the world?

Will stated that one of the key changes that is needed to the games that are currently created is an increased social relevance. Most of the content in games today is particularly shallow, comparable to blockbuster action movies or worse. Compare this to the deep material in other art forms. Will suggested that too much influence on the games industry currently comes from cinema, while their are other relatively-untapped creative disciplines that have so much to offer, such as architecture and behavioral psychology.

The ability for interactive media to provide a filter on the information we receive, or a perspective on situations or events is breathtaking. Will gave an example of a 9-year old relative of his critisizing the industrial zoning plans of a town as they were driving through - an insight gained from playing Sim City. He suggested that interactive media has the ability to build world views for children (and perhaps renovate world-views that had already been built in the mind of adults). Another benefit is that children are learning to apply the scientific method to systems presented by interactive simulations and games in order to understand how they work.

Will touched on the (perhaps over-used) subject of memes, and their ability to change reality, particularly in the way that they can paint a vision of the future. He gave the example of Walt Disney’s futurist tendancies, including his vision for EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow) and the collaboration with Wernher von Braun resulting in a number of education films such as Mars and Beyond.

Touching on the subject of narrative, Will talked on the concept of possibility space, and the fact that exploring this possibility space is at the core of a game experience. You explore, maybe make a mistake and go back to your last successful exploration point, explore a new path… and so on. He compared linear narrative such as movies as a rollercoaster ride, while playing a game is more like driving a buggy over a possibility landscape. In the questions that followed, he was quite critical of games that pulled a player away from their explorations in order to force them onto a prescribed narrative arc through that possibility space.

The final section of Will’s talk concerned the creativity and imagination of the player. Obviously this has been a big component of all of his games, from Sim City right up to the most dramatic example in the form of his upcoming title, Spore. Comparing the computer to an amplifier of imagination, he elaborated on its ability to encourage self-expression and to build communities around shared expression. He talked of how his niece uses the Sims as others might play a musical instrument. A nice anecdote talked about the fact that many of us may have design aspirations but they are somehow beaten out of us in the transition to adulthood. He described how a lecturer went into a primary school and asked who could sing - most hands go up… who could dance - most hands go up….. how can draw - most hands go up…… but when he asked the same questions in college the situation was entirely reversed. As he said “Education teaches us what we can’t do!”. Games of the future have the ability to right this wrong, and produce an environment where players can be self expressive, amplified by the power of collective effort by the communities that form around such self-expression.

-I’ve got some notes from the questions, which I’ll post over the next few days-

Theres a more in-depth description of the components of Microsofts XNA Game Studio Express on the official development blog. It describes the different elements involved, what kind of features will be provided for you, and a code sample showing the simple initialisation of an application/game. I’m particularly interested in their Content Pipeline component - I’ve always found this to be the biggest pain for developing simple games/applications - apparently they have support for Autodesk’s FBX format, so I’m keen to see what features are imported from 3D scenes (animation, skinning etc). The beta is out in a few days (PC support only initially).

Its great to see the Experimental Gameplay Project continue to evolve. Started by Kyle Gabler, Kyle Gray and others (probably also called Kyle, perhaps with a surname beginning with G), it was initially a student project while at Carnegie Mellon University. The idea was to encourage innovation and experimentation by imposing severe restrictions on game creation - games must be made in under one week, by one person.

The project has now evolved into an community site, allowing anyone to upload their own games and articles, and even featuring competitions. Its a great place to start for anyone who wants to make their own games and is seeking likeminded people for discussion and critique. Theres no snobbery - games can be made in pretty much anything, including Flash. Kyle Gabler has even released his own c++ game framework, including the source for a new dance-mat stomping game called Extermination Disco Nation!. Great fun.

The say no news is good news. I don’t know where this saying came from but its an utter lie. Anyone hoping for anything interesting coming out of Liepzig’s Game Convention has had their hopes dashed by what has effectively been a tedious echo of this years E3, with even the same trailer reels being carted out.

One of the only exceptions to this is the new team fortress trailer below (filmed with a shaky-cam). The character and environment design are particular strong (pure PIXAR), and it shaping up to be an exceptional online experience - it looks like the most fun online game I’ve seen. That said - To use another meaningless proverb, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. I don’t know who goes around proving puddings, but its a nice mental image.

Definitely makes a good soundbite, but the recent announcements from the Microsoft’s XNA team could have some interesting implications.

Microsoft’s announcements at GameFest centred around a new, free piece of software called XNA Game Studio Express. The next logical step in their XNA program, this offers developers a cut-down version of their development suite for hobbyist/educational use. Nothing THAT unusual there, but the newsworthy part is that as well as targeting windows platforms, you can also use the software to target a RETAIL Xbox 360 - allowing you to create and run your own software on the console, in a similar fashion to the Net Yaroze and PS2 Linux programs from SCE.

Initially the label of “YouTube for games” is entirely inappropriate, there are some severe restrictions - primarily that creators will only be able to share their work with other creators signed up to the “Creators club” - so bang goes to the hugely accessible nature of youtube. This sharing is done by email between PCs, not 360 to 360. Secondly, you will have to share your entire source code to allow someone else to play your game - there is no sharing of binaries. Thirdly, unlike youtube - where you can film something on your mobile phone and get it online in a few clicks - developing games requires a significant skillset and time investment. But, the fact is that if you start giving tools like this away, interesting things can and do happen - and I’m sure that this is a way of stimulating development amongst the indie-games and educational crowd rather than the mass market. Several Microsoft bloggers have also indicated that the first two barriers described above are likely to be removed over time, allowing the system to be truly viral with peer-to-peer forwarding of content.

Another interesting possibility would be if games created in XNA Game Studio Express can be published to run in a browser (IE on Vista/XP - bear in mind that as this is managed code, it could be made secure). That could allow very high-quality games or 3D applications to be run in-browser, again making them hugely viral as no installation would be needed.

More news is available from one of the XNA team at Lets Kill Dave (great name - very Royston).

While most hand-held games development targets the PSP and the DS, Nintendo have revived first-party GBA development (presumably due to the prolonged life of the Micro) with a number of new and unique titles. Heres a selection of titles to look out for. While they are only available in Japan at the moment (and its questionable if they will get a release), they’re all (relatively) import friendly.

Rhythm Tengoku
The latest from the Nintendo’s WarioWare team, this time around they’ve swapped the 3-second madness for more drawn-out rhythm-action sessions. As usual, its utterly weird but great fun.

Read more at GameSpy

Bit Generations Series

Following on from the “Touch Generations” on the DS, this range of games favours simple, compelling mechanics - and is geared for very casual play over short sessions. Heavily stylised, and featuring sound design and music from the likes of Cornelius, they are obviously aiming to attract a slightly older, lapsed gamer who might be slightly repelled by pixellated gaming cliche. The seven games cost about a tenner each and come in nicely designed, collectable cardboard. The line up is:

Dotstream - Ultra-minimalist top down racer
Boundish - Multiple variations on Pong (supposedly better than it sounds)
Dialhex - Puzzle game : Hexic meets tetris
Coloris - Puzzle game : Colour matching on a grid
Orbital - Guide your planet to scoop up smaller planets in order to grow
Digidrive - Anyone’s guess!
Soundvoyager - Puzzle game : Colour matching on a grid

Read more at Nintendo’s Bit Generations site or IGN’s coverage.

Gamasutra has a postmortem on Stubbs the Zombie online that also details the the inception of Wideload games, a company founder by Alex Seropian (ex-bungie founder) as an attempt to build a company with a significant emphasis on outsourcing. Wideload have a core team of twelve, split between designers, artists, and engineers, and opted to license the Halo engine rather than develop one themselves. The significant difference in their development process is that a large amount of their concept art and game assets were built externally.

I really wanted to love Stubbs the Zombie. The premise is wonderful, a lot of the core ideas are really solid and original, and the setting and art direction (40s-50s retro-futurism) sit in a field on their own, without danger of walking the mine-field of cliche that many games have to. But when it came down to it, it was really lacking something, and after playing the first few levels I completely lost interest. While the opening was fantastic, so much of the game felt like filler - with extremely repetitive level design, bad pacing and a real lack of polish. It felt like a prototype for a great game concept that had been padded up to be released as a retail title.

It’s difficult to say whether the quality of the game is a reflection of the abilities of core team, the external production staff or the model itself. As more creative industries are turning to outsourcing to improve efficiency this is an issue that is going to become prevalent over the coming few years. While it may look good on paper, its hard to predict the more subtle effects of moving to this model. My biggest concerns are a loss of culture, cross-communication and cross-pollination of ideas. There is the risk that the overall sense of team unity can be dissolved as blame can be shifted to those outside the company, and there is the potential for quality to drop as the external the production staff do not have the sense of ownership and there are fewer incentives to produce exceptional work.

I was poking around some of the OGRE examples to play with some Dynamic texture stuff and came across a great demo created by Wumpus of the Ogre team to demonstrate how this is done. It turns out though that he has made an wonderful interactive implementation of the Grey-Scott diffusion reaction to demonstrate this.

Reaction-diffusion systems exhibit phenomena that are wonderful examples of emergence as when certain parameters are used, some amazing structures and patterns form out of nowhere. These patterns are sometimes called Turing patterns, after Alan Turing, the absurdly intelligent polymath, inventor of the digital computer, pioneer in A.I and before he died one of the first people to look into mathematical biology. The area of mathematical biology goes some way to explain how the changing balance of elements in chemical reactions can lead to the creation of the complex structures found in nature, such as how the embro develops. Have a play with this simulation and you’ll see how unbelievably lifelike the results are (and bear in mind that these patterns are not being authored by a high level “pattern generator”, they are just the phenomena of a handful of simple rules).

I’ve uploaded a stripped-down self-contained version of Wumpus’s demo for Windows here. Download and have a play - just unzip and run “Diffusion-reaction.exe”, use Quake WASD controls and mouse to move around (or download the source from the OGRE sdk. Use the number 1-8 keys to change the parameters and “0″ to restart the simulation (1-2 make a huge impact on the types of shapes being created, from individual blobs, through to lines and eventually cells, the lower the value). If you find any interesting settings, do post them as comments below.

DOWNLOAD BIOPATTERNS SIM.

Its definitely Steven Johnson season at handcircus at the moment. Having read Emergence a couple of weeks ago, I picked up his latest, “Everything Bad is Good for you” - a book discussing the relative merits of modern pop-culture.

The main proposition of the book is a straightforward argument: that todays popular culture, much maligned as meritless and mindless, is in fact challenging and enriching our minds and those of younger generations MORE than it ever has. The book attempts to seperate content from complexity within media, much as you might seperate curds and whey, and explains the necessity to shift focus from content to the complexity of the media in order to measure these cognitive benefits. While most critics of today’s media complain of the immorality of the content of the Sopranos (sex, violence, antiheroes) or the horribly cliche and vacuous plotlines of many videogames, Steven argues that this is missing the point.

By analysing annual IQ test figures and by demonstrating the increasing narrative complexity of shows like “24″ and “The Sopranos”, he suggests that these games and TV shows have given birth to a generation of talented problem-solvers, able to nimbly analyse complex systems and relationships. He suggests that the much-maligned content of reality TV (or at least most of it) is in fact enhancing the viewers emotional intelligence. He also shows the financial reasons why networks are commissioning these brain-teasing series’. Very convincing, and once again highly recommended.

One of my favourite aspects of the web is its ability to nurture the extensive portfolio of people doing unusual things. Once such example is the work of Andrew Davidhazy, a Professor of Imaging and Photographic Technology. As part of his work, he gets to take photos that can help us understand phenomena and behaviour that are usually imperceptible to the human senses and mind.

His varied work including his High Speed and Photoinstrumentation Photographs, Scientific and Technical Photographs and photographs of Vibrations and spectral dispersion. I find it fascinating how much amazing stuff goes on beyond the realm of our senses and how similar patterns exist on different timescales and in completely different systems.

via Hi-Res blog.