 Hi, good morning everybody. I should warn you. I'm originally from New York. I have four shots of espresso every morning So I try to speak slow. Yay for espresso. All right. I would have clapped if I hadn't had that too But I anyway, I tend to speak fast. I'll try to slow down, but the espresso will kick in so my apologies in advance So as they said I'm a game designer And I currently live in Galway, Ireland and that's where our company is And I've been in the game industry since I was 15 unbelievably. I've never had a real job And I've been there 38 years now and during that time I've worked on a lot of cool cool games, especially for me Dungeons and Dragons, which has a lot of my heart At this point in time I am working on an unannounced project that I can't talk about which does feel embarrassing at the open-source summit And it's currently planning a simultaneous ship for the ps4 Xbox one Steam and switch, which will tell you I'm not the smartest speaker here today And I'm gonna also tell you a story which seems at first to have very little to do with open-source But it absolutely changed how I viewed everything about game design And it comes pretty late in my career when you consider that I get started in 81 So this is me. I have still not mastered sitting like a lady At this particular age. I'm I think I'm four or five there What a silly photo. Anyway, I'm four or five there and for those for those Americans in the audience You might be familiar with a scene like this on the weekends for reasons I'm still not clear on we throw our stuff out on the lawn and we charge money for it It's kind of like a boot sale So we didn't have a lot of money at the time Some of my mother would take me to these events and while we have offense My mother would take me to these yard sales and she would give me a dime and with a dime You couldn't buy a whole hell of a lot So what I would get our board games that didn't have all their parts and I am asked quite a collection of these So when I was really young and at this point in time we're talking maybe six or seven I would make my own pieces. I would get my own pieces and I would make my own games And I remember I remember when I was maybe nine or ten getting a brand new monopoly game for my birthday and being So excited that I have this fresh board and so I took it out I immediately flipped the board over and started drawing on the back of it Which is I'm fairly certain not what they expected me to do And then when my when I turned 11 my mother got me this gem I still have no idea why my Irish Catholic mother got me Dungeons and Dragons, but she did and it is Impossible to understate the effect that D&D had on me. It changed everything I could go anywhere I wanted to go and I think that's why when I saw stranger things I was so enamored with it because these kids were me Absolutely every part of them they were geeky and they were awkward and they liked things that not everybody liked When I was 14 I upgraded to this system, which was rolemaster And it was a sign of my geekery to come I guess and I didn't like the rules for encumbrance. So So in games encumbrance basically means I'm trying to go kill the podium or something This is obviously a very bad game. Don't don't judge me by this, but I'm trying to go kill the podium But I'm carrying a lot of stuff some kind of way down And I hated the rules for encumbrance So I rewrote those and if any of you all of you are coders You know that when you write one thing and change it it breaks everything else And so I broke most of the system and ended up having to rewrite it and we called it Brenda law Humbly so and we played it for a couple years. I wish I still had it. I don't I'm sure it would be a great laugh Now if I could look at it And in 1981 I got my first job in the computer industry And I just happened to be at the right place at the right time, which I'll tell you about in a second This picture here was taken just before I joined the company and this is where I had my interview For those of you if your heads in the gutter, please bring your head out of the gutter I grew up a group in Northern New York, which is largely a snow bank during certain times of the year and Also, because I wasn't oh who knows I was smoking at the time as don't smoke. It's not a good way to get it It's not it's not good for you. So I'm not advocating that and it's also very unlikely to get you a job Also going in the bathroom very unlikely But here this girl walked in and she was looking for a cigarette and we struck up a conversation And she said do you have a job and I said no and she said Have you ever heard of Sir Tech? No, had I ever heard of Wizardry? No Had I ever heard of Dungeons and Dragons and I had and that was my interview and I got my job. So I Mean it really is that pathetic right right place right time silly interview So this was the first game that I ever worked on It was called proving grounds of the mad overlord and at the time it was state of the art. I fell Absolutely head over heels in love with code And as I mentioned my family didn't have a lot of money right so to be in a game company where they had computers Was just the coolest thing if I had to do something twice. I would code it instead And I convinced my high school to please offer classes in basic and later Pascal because that's what I thought I needed to learn and so much knowledge at this time was freely shared with me Mind you this concept of freely sharing knowledge goes flying over my heads Head heads, maybe I have to this is what espresso does to you Goes flying over my head is I end of the game industry and I stayed with Sir Tech till 2001 and during this entire time. I am still in this box I'm in this box because I don't know that you can get out of this box I really have no concept of sharing the things that we create with other people except in a box for money and Always protecting our secrets no matter what because God forbid someone else would know And so we go many years forward and all this changes for me in 2009 and It changes because of it because when my daughter comes home from school This is her at about that time and I asked her as I did every day. What did she do in school today? And so her answer Surprises me and she says We talked about the middle passage So my daughter's father is half black and half Irish And so I expected that we were gonna have this conversation at some point in time, obviously So I stopped what I'm doing and I sit down with her and I say So do you want to talk about that in her answer is? Her answer is yes. She does miss. Well, what did they what did you go over and so she said well in Parents in the room will appreciate the that she got all the key learning points She says some boats came down from England and they went to the coast of Africa And then they got the slaves and then they went across that's the middle passage mommy They go across to America and then they were put into slavery But Abraham Lincoln was elected president and then he passed the Emancipation Proclamation and everybody was free Can I play a game? So basically as far as I got it some black people won on a cruise And I I think to her I just don't even know I don't even know how to handle this situation, but like a good game designer parent. I've lots prototype pieces around And so when she says can I play a game? I say yes And I give her a bunch of pieces and I ask her to paint them and to make me different families So these are the families that she created for me and and I grabbed a boat This is what I had at the time it worked So this was a boat and I grab at random just a bunch of pieces and I put them on the boat And she keeps trying to get the families back together She's like you're forgetting the blue baby you're forgetting the pink daddy You're forgetting you know the families aren't coming together the way she wants and she says you're doing it wrong And I said I'm not doing it wrong She says but they want to go and I said nobody wants to go this is the middle passage And so I made up these rules on the spot. It's going to take us 10 turns to cross the ocean We have 30 units of food each turn we roll a die and we use that amount of food And so when we're about halfway across she says this We're not going to make it and she's right odds are we will run out of food and she asked me What are we going to do and I mind you she's seven at the time, right? So so I say to her well we can we can put some people in the water or We can keep going and hope that they make it and so she turns to me and mind you This is after a whole month on this subject, right? This is after talking about it at school in movies and everything She turns to me and she says mommy this really happened and I was blown away I would normally just add a swear word in the middle of that but I was blown away and the questions started to come So she's asking me so if if I was taken to America as a slave Donovan and Avalon that's her brother and sister pictured here They would be with me right and I said not necessarily but but if they got daddy like daddy could come right and I said well No, and she said but we're a family and I said you're not a family your property and She understood it and she's crying and I'm crying and her father walks into the door to the middle passage clearly not expecting to hear this And now he's crying right and so I so this is this is the end piece that I ended up making called the New World And it was Transformational for me absolutely blew me away. And so I immediately decided to make a sequel About my family's history. And so this is my great-grandfather Patty Donovan. I bet you can guess where we come from So we come from West Cork in Ireland and this was the very first prototype I made of this game and this game now The first game the New World was made like that But this game I actually was very was more open source with it I took pictures of every single bit of the process and I shared what I was doing I shared all the different paint colors that I went through And these are these are members of Cromwell's army These are Irish families that were buried in the soil. This is the soil that I made This is the first time knitting has ever been a requirement for a game. I'm pretty sure And this is the final piece. It's called she a con lot. It means peace be with you And so I make these two games And I it's during this time also that I'm fortunate enough to have dinner with a photographer called zig Jackson And he's much lauded. He's a Native American and these are a few of his pieces here and At this dinner What comes up is that there had been a shooting and I'm happened to be with zig and a couple other photographers and this Question arises. Do you take the photo or not? And if you think about the most famous photographs, you've ever seen many of them are about difficult situations in every other medium captures and expresses those emotions except for mine Because mine needs to be fun. It needs to be playable by all kids and And I started thinking like isn't that amazing that every other medium does it except for ours And I really felt like we were leaving something tremendous on the table And so I decide to make six games About this and I go to a conference It happens to be just as I've made this decision to make six games about the most difficult moments in human history that I go to a Conference called project horseshoe, which is in the middle of nowhere, Texas In fact, I don't even know where it was So I just put a picture of it on top of Texas and figured it was good And at this conference it is about as close as we get now to open source game design So game designers come together they spend a whole weekend together focusing on what what are what they label game designs toughest problems Everything that comes out of there is freely available to anybody who wants it But they hopefully solve these problems and share them with everybody So while I was there over breakfast, I told this guy Steve Moretsky What I was doing because most game designers. It's what are you working on can't say what about you? Yeah, same here What are you working on? Yep, can't say but I could because I was working on this series of six games So when Steve hears about it He says in a booming voice that only Steve he speaks at this font level And he says you have to talk about it. So he elicits a promise for me and I do And I agreed to speak out about it at this very small con well then very small conference in North Carolina And there were maybe 20 people in the room and I talked about the new world and she a con lot I talked about the things that are inside Like my mother's rosary that are inside the earth in the game I talked about my game train, which is about complicity And following rules blindly no matter the outcome and this is by far the most difficult piece. I've made I Talked about a game that's in development city. Soleil Which is about day and night violence and poverty in Port-au-Prince Haiti It's a game that I'm making entirely out of garbage by hand And I talked about Mexican kitchen workers Which is a game about the appropriation of culture through its food And I also talked about a game called one falls for each of us. This is something I recommend nobody does It's a game about the Trail of Tears and it contains 50,000 pieces each one handmade. I'm at 35,000 now Again, just letting you know that I'm not all there upstairs. So while there's 20 people may be listening There is one person in the back of the room who's with the escapist and they write an article and They write an article about the games and when I'm done talking about these games because these tragic moments in human history affect all of us and affect some of us far more than others there were people crying and With that article as soon as it went out the idea was free And I'd like to say that I planned it, but I didn't in fact when the article came out I was actually scared as hell because I was making games about things that that people said oh man You shouldn't be making a game about that, but I considered them documentary games like you might consider something documentary film In the most amazing series of things happen because of this free idea The Wall Street Journal called and wired called I got invited to give talks and I started getting lots of emails So how can I buy your games and and I there was only one of them as you can see like you can't I suppose you could buy a 50,000-piece game, but it felt awkward to me to now make this game about Tragedy and profit from it like that just absolutely didn't feel right So when I got letters like this I would respond with you can't buy them But I'll show you exactly how to make it and I would teach them how to make it for free And then other people started hearing about these games and this is a the designer of this game came to one of my talks on train in in 28 years of Making games I had never experienced anything like this just giving away the design patterns And just saying here take it do whatever you want to do with it and somehow Unbelievably and I still feel like this is a lie except there's a picture I want to baff to because of this which is which still feels surreal frankly in the experience of creating something so that every the tide could rise all ships was incredibly unique to me especially back in this world and The philosophy goes contrary to many things we think about in game development Where we try to be so secret because we risk losing our competitive edge and just this month So the first of October I got this text from a friend When did you start feeling like you have the vocabulary to converse with other designers? And I said they're wondering what the hell to type for a while And I realized I didn't even have an answer to the question But so what I did answer is I'm not sure most designers talk about games using other games And we still struggle for a formal shared language And while I do feel confident discussing games The fact is that we as an industry have kept our ideas largely to ourselves and has it held us back I absolutely think so Because we have ideas and patterns and processes and tools that we can share like my level curve in my game Like people know you gain experience levels if I give away my level curve It's not going to make or break my next game. But yeah, we keep these things to ourselves and Greg Kasticki and actually gave a talk on this at GDC in 2002 So this issue goes back quite a ways and where I really have an issue with it is that in the game industry We are not just reinventing the wheel We are reinventing the need for the wheel and we are reinventing it again and again and again And as I mentioned level or loot level curves, but there's loot drops progression all of these things are standard There's not even a book on game balance today in an industry that is 60 years old And when I asked working game designers working lead game designers What they thought of open source game design? Here's the answers I got Excuse me What do you mean? Are you talking about code or something else? And I'm so no no no I mean actually giving away your design so that others can use it and the answer across the board that I got Was this? Oh, I can't do that in a way. I'd get fired So I decided to go to the font of knowledge Twitter And I asked what do you think about open source game design? And these are the answers I got And far and away the winner was what? But I deeply believe that sharing and collaborating and giving ideas to the community is the right thing to do And it's essential if our medium is to grow I think about open source tools like twine where people not just shared the tool But shared how to make stories and it's because of twine. I can directly trace twine to life is strange And also with open source both in design and encoded something embedded in our company My co-founder John Romero is a long history of opening things up to the community including this picture He's not here so I can do what I want Anyway, he openly shared their command line tools like the binary space partitioner You might know better just as the BSP and their file file format so that modders could create tools And rather than protecting their design games like doom were open to the modding community and people had actually take the data And sell the levels that they created I know that this is part of the reason that there's such a massive community for doom today and Some of you are probably thinking yeah, but it's doom Well fair enough, but there's a massive player community for dyke's ton of two So it can't be the only one And along with John our chief architect Chris Griggin created something called fungus which is an open source storytelling plug-in for unity and Many people told him he was nuts to give it away and he said he totally disagrees with that and says I believe That doing cool things that help other people is the best thing that he can do with his skills And it's led him to lots of great opportunities. It's not just him It's students and teachers that have that as well At our company we work with our publisher to establish parts of our project that we can open source and I should say that I am well aware that open source code is not open source design Like you can't take the world of Warcraft item lists and just drop those into my game or the to hit things from the to hit Things the to hit formulas from Red Dead Redemption and This brings me back to the question of precisely. What is open source game design? It's sharing what I said before freely ideas and patterns and processes and Tools so that we can all get better at what we do It's opening things like level curves and loot drops and item tables So that we're not redoing the obvious thing It's sharing what we do so that other people can learn from our work and one of the ways we are doing that now Is we actually put on workshops for kids to show them how to how game design works? What are the patterns? What are the processes and you can see the the peppery marshmallow cartel? Is going to be a major hit. We also talked to them about we talked to teens about the math That's commonly used in video games so that they can get a head start on that and we even work with really young kids In all of this is voluntary and free and we're hoping they carry those patterns forward We also invite high school students college students college lecturers in to do internships with us And we give away material art the current group that we work with is in none of it Through their teach program and we give away game design and code materials to First Nations people for their programs and I don't want you to think In everything I've said like all of those different things that we're doing that this was some idea We had like yes, let's open this up to everybody because I I while I believe that I also believe that most of our efforts are One-off and they're not nearly as good as they could be and there's a lot more than we can do And I believe as a company is an industry and as game designers It's the best thing that we can do for the discipline because I've seen the cool things that happen when people tell other people Secrets and it can make big changes in big ways. Thank you