 The Musqueam Slave with Tooth and Squamish Nations. Welcome. I'm going to introduce our guests in a second. But just so you know, this microphone is not intended to broadcast into this room, but it's actually part of our live feed to HowlRound TV. And if you want to, it will be available for viewing later. But if you feel free to participate via Twitter and the hashtag is New Plays, OK. So Playwrights Theatre Center is a theater company that finds, nurtures, and advances Canadian playwrights. And we're interested in asking questions about how to make theater in collaboration, in which there is a communication between the artist and the audience. And in most cases, no matter how the work is created, a writer is involved. So of course, playwrights are kind of interested. We know playwrights are interested in seeing where gaming can get them or whether there are jobs and what kind of work there is. And we're hoping that you who are in the gaming industry are interested in talking about story because that's what we like to talk about as much as possible. So the challenge is to expand the amount of interaction between the audience and the performance in theater. And that's partly, I'm sure, because of social media. It's partly because people believe it's more democratic. It's partly because it might make a more meaningful experience. So we thought we'd just get some experts in gaming to talk to us about this. And so we first approached A. Thomas Goldberg right over here. And he gave me a list of books to read. And when you see on my desk all the stickies that are in the corners, you'll know that I found it really stimulating. And I'm sure he's going to have lots to say about this. And then we talked to Alessandro Mandrica, who is primarily a game designer and a mandu d'oro, and the three of them agreed to join us for this conversation. So we'll get to that in a couple of minutes. This is what we're going to do. We'll start with each of the four of us talking about what interests us most about the topic of interactive storytelling. Then I'm going to ask a few questions. We'll have a little kind of four-way discussion. And then we'll take a little bio break. And then, and I mean a little one short. And then we'll come back and open the floor for your questions. Then after we've left a little time for us to fool around with some games that are outside and to have a little bit of refreshment and all that kind of stuff. So that's the plan for the evening. And OK, are we good? In the theater, we've been talking about how to tell stories for about 2,000 years. So we have quite a lot of conversation about it. And it wasn't until I talked to a Thomas that I had an idea that, in fact, the gamers have been talking about it, too. For how long did you say, 20, 30 years? Oh, it's people haven't talked about stories in regards to games for probably as long as there have been games. Probably. So most of the series of drama have been about explanations about what it takes to make a good drama, which, and in fact, the earliest theories about it didn't even actually mention story. But I'm taking Barry Boyd, I don't know if you've ever heard of him, he wrote a book called The Origin of Stories, and which he talks about story as being an evolutionary advantage. That this is how we learn how to be in the world. So rehearsals for life. And in theater, we talk about kind of the origins of story being either in children's play or in ritual. So in kids play, you throw a bunch of kids together with no props and no nothing in their hands, no cards, no nothing. They will invent a scenario and they'll all take on characters and they'll play it for hours until they usually end up like trashing somebody's fort, I think, is usually how it ends up in my recollection. But they are telling stories. So we're pretty sure that people find pleasure in the bits of agency that stories inside of stories, and that's where games come in. So that's kind of it. Now, we've been working in theater for a long time. For those of you who don't really go to plays, which might be some of you, the theater's really changed a lot in the last few years. And even in Vancouver, we've seen quite a few different kinds of work that have virtually no story. I mean, I'm thinking about 100% Vancouver. I don't know if you saw that, but it was a collection of 100 people who represented different parts of Vancouver trying to lay it out demographically and was actually, for the most part, a recitation of statistics. So they divide themselves up on stage, according to how many were male, how many were female, how many lived in this place and how many lived in the next. And it was a very emotional experience. I had a very emotional experience during the whole thing, but I don't think you could actually call it a story. There were stories involved. People came up and told little pieces of stories, but there were no real stories involved. But it was still a really great collection of stuff. So it's kind of a good question about what makes how much story is required in a piece. But when I started thinking about what games and theater had in common, I thought that the most basic, at the most basic level, theater and games requires somebody to be physically present and to do something, even if it's only to sit in the dark. If there's an old rock song, I think it's got a lyric that says, if there's no audience, there ain't no show. And that's pretty much true. I mean, if there is no one to laugh, there is no comedy. And it requires the audience. Even if an audience seems to be doing nothing, they are participating. They're creating. They're participating in a story. And there are all kinds of stories that are being seen in the same theater piece. There's a story that we're watching. There's the story that we're creating in our own heads. There may be a story that we're participating in making. And there's a story that we tell each other after we go home or in the bar after. This is what I saw. And they're not the same, necessarily, as the order of incidents in the plot. So it's interesting what makes a story. So the big question we ask ourselves when we're making a theater piece is how to provide a mental and emotional journey for the audience. And I'm sure that's the same question that gets asked when you're creating a game. So I just thought I'd invite someone else to talk to you about a case study of something that I'm working on. I'm working on a piece called Foreign Radical, with theater conspiracy. And I've got Tim Carlson here who can tell you more about it. It's about cyber surveillance. And we're trying to create a combination of fiction and documentary and game to express this story. So I'm going to get Tim to replace me for a minute and he can tell you about it. We're probably maybe halfway through developing this piece. So there's a lot that we're still learning about it and just experimenting with at this point. Right now, it looks like we're going to be making a show for an audience of up to 30 who will be some walls and curtains that move, that at times will divide the audience depending on whether they are more concerned about their privacy in a certain situation or in being secure. So as Kathleen said, it's a mix of documentary and dramatic scenes dealing with cyber surveillance, internet censorship and issues of that kind. It started about two years ago when I met a really interesting guy named Ron Debert. He's a world renowned expert in this area who runs the Citizen Lab at the UNT. And we worked on developing something together. And this was in the nine months before the Snowden revelations, which kind of blew the doors wide open into a larger and deeper investigation of the area. But one critical thing that we were talking about right from the beginning is what should the audience experience of this place, of these issues be? How can we connect them really in an interesting personal way to things that are all about pretty heady into technology, legal policy, geopolitics, I guess. And what we hit on was that, well, when people are online, what are they doing? They're offering opinions. They're going exploring. They're kind of blazing their own trail through material. So we wanted to bring that concept to the audience, the audience into the space, which is cyberspace largely, and get them to interact through applying some gaming elements. Kathleen, in her monumental research project for this piece, came across a really interesting little bit of history in the development of the internet, which was cryptographers in the US in the late 80s, 90s, pretty radical bunch overall. We're figuring out onion-rooting, torrents, those kind of things, and as a way to keep secrets from the government, from corporations. And they made this game with envelopes, which was an encryption game. And it was basically a party game where they were passing envelopes and trying to snoop on each other or maintain each other's secrets. And the more we talked about that, the more interesting we thought that would be within a theater environment because rather than doing something on iPhones or on headphones, that kind of thing, people are actually have something tactile in their hands, handling each other's secrets, and noticing things about each other. This is one reason why it made sense to have a small audience, so they would get to know each other and see if they make any effort to maintain each other's secrets or just steal each other's secrets. So that's where we're at right now is trying to develop this encryption game as part of the playmaking. And we're going to have a week at the University of Toronto next week to work on it. And in July, we'll do a trial of workshop presentation in Richmond at the York Continent Festival. We'll need lots of people to test this with because it doesn't work without an audience. So we're open to having lots of volunteers to help us out. Great. So the biggest thing, the challenge that we found in trying to make this happen, and that's why I asked Tim to talk about it, is that it became clear to us that there was no really good way to have the audience affect the fictional elements of the play and still maintain any artistic control. So it's the question of how to integrate those two elements and whether they were even compatible in any way what they shape or form. And so anybody who's got any ideas about that, Tim and I want to hear from you. So just let us know. But that's kind of the kind of thing that's happening in theatre, that we're trying to make it a real experience and not just a really authentic experience, an experience where people actually do make decisions that have consequences. Because the biggest thing about theatre is, of course, like play, all the decisions have no real consequences, except in your mind. So that's where we're coming from at this point when we start to talk to you people. And so I'd like to hear more. So I'd like, first of all, to introduce Amanda Duaro, who is a writer who started off in theatre, I understand, or at least has some experience writing with theatre. She worked at Magnetic North Festival as well as any other places. And she worked at Slant Six games, propaganda games, at Electronic Arts. And she currently works as a writer for Microsoft. And I've asked Amanda to tell us how she got into this and what she thinks. How I got into it. So well, first I should say my theatre writing background is pretty low. I just had a stage reading at Ottawa International Writers Festival. But I did work for Magnetic North, which is how. And that was when I lived in Ottawa. And that's how I learned how much interactive theatre was especially coming out of Vancouver. Because it was a national theatre festival. Got to meet lots of people and see a lot of their work. How I got into it. Well, I've played games since I was a kid and fairly seriously for most of my life. And I have an English degree. I love reading. I loved writing short stories and screenplays. But somehow the idea that the games that I loved and writing in them eluded me for many, many, shamelessly, too many years. And so shortly after I finished my script writing program, a friend of mine told me about the National Screen Institute had this program just once, unfortunately, where they accepted submissions from Canadians and from all different type who have written for lots of different things. So novels, theatre, script writing, poets. And then they selected 10 of us. And then they sent us to Vancouver for a boot camp, essentially. So they had brought in mentors from all the studios in town. And we'd had these sessions just be kind of a lecture session. And then they put us in these groups. And it felt very much like a reality TV show scenarios they kept putting us in. They gave us, so my group was given to do a first person shooter based on Pan's labyrinth. And so we stayed up all night and we came up with an idea that made sense with that IP and that concept. And then the next day, they're like, OK, cyborgs are now in. So you have to include cyborgs into your idea. And then the next day, they're like, OK, you've lost the IP. You have to take out everything without sacrificing a lot of money. You can't change everything. You just have to take out the Pan's Labyrinth IP. And so it's as silly and stressful as that sounds. And maybe a bit of an exaggeration, that is what the games industry is. It is just as much problem solving and putting up fires as it is being creative. And then coming off of that, I was given a mentor. His name is Ian Christie, and he was fantastic. And he would basically give me feedback on this game concept that I was to work on for three months. Like everything, the game design, the characters, everything, completely unrealistic. That is not what the writer will. It's not just we like to hope that it would just be our own creation. That part of the program was a bit misleading, but still learned a lot from it. Being a writer in video games is very collaborative, and there's constant compromise. But without doing that, you're not going to make a really great experience. So coming out of that, I got my first, it was just like a two-week story consultant, like contract VA, where they had a game design issue that they didn't want to change because it cost too much money. And they're like, can you come up with a story solution that would essentially kind of gloss over this weird design issue? And so that was how it all started. I got contacts there. And then after that, I worked for one of Disney's companies. And I'm at Slant Six, and Radical, and with A Thomas at Black Tusk. So yeah, once you kind of get in there, you get to learn. You meet lots of people. That's kind of how you do really grow and evolve in the games industry. So that's my story. So can you tell us a little bit about what writers do? Depends how early you come in. If you get in there early enough, you are actually helping to come up with a story. And usually, you're just helping to come up with a story. A lot of stories in video games, unless you have a creative director who's kind of like the guy at the top there, or the girl, ideally, a lot more, they are the ones. If they have somebody who is a creative director and a writer, that's ideal. Because they are going to be the ones that say, yes, no, to the story. But generally, story is not just decided by the writers in the games industry. It's decided by the design director, the creative director. Even if they have no writing background, art directors, it is story by committee, which has a lot of pitfalls to it. And so it's trying to still find some truth and some key theme that, at least to come out of it, that that's the thing that you should always be working as a group together for. And so, yeah, so the writers sometimes are in there to kind of help guide that process. And oftentimes, the games that I have shipped was more when I came in very late. And it was just writing dialogue that now explains why that character has to go over there. Or it's even writing text that says that player goes over there. Yeah, there's a lot of different things to be writing in the games. So just one more question, and then I'll turn to ask Alexander to talk about this. But do you think there is more room for story in games than there are games in the story? Or not right now. I actually think that story is being included a lot more in games. I think there's still some process problems that need to be addressed. But there's still stories heavily involved. And I think in some cases, stories shouldn't be so much involved, especially in a more casual game or a game that already has enough legs that a lot of the narrative is emergent. It's more of a quantity issue, I think, right now. So that's it. OK, we'll pick up on some of that in a little bit. Quality, quality. Alexandra Mendrica has worked as the director of design at Ubisoft Montreal in Relic Entertainment and has been involved with many, what does an AAA brand? AAA, OK, just like you guys. The AAA, Assassin's Creed, Company of Heroes, and Splinter Cell. And his company is called Game Whispering Inc. And he consults on design, creative vision, and creative coaching. And if you go to the website for Game Whispering, you find some really interesting stuff. So I absolutely recommend it. So Alex, would you like to talk a little bit about what you do and what you think the place of story is in games? Yeah, well, maybe actually as an echo, as what you said, you describe writing in games as very like an afterthought most of the time. And actually, I was five years into my career, but my first enlightenment moment was at Ubisoft, where they really have almost a movie-like process to the creative process, where at the very early stage, you have that creative director that has, well, with his team developed that concept or that message they want to tell. And then each discipline tries to find technical solutions to implement it from the very start. So the question of the place of story, actually, when we first discussed, Caitlin, your first question was, how do I implement interactivity in a play? And my answer was questions not how, the question is why. The dichotomy we have between should a game be more about story or more about gameplay, I think is a very limiting dichotomy, because it's not exclusive. You can have one with another, and you don't have one to the expense of the other. You actually select the right tools to support your message and build your experience, as we were discussing earlier. So, yeah, it's interesting because you actually mentioned how much story do you need to have a theater play. And it's actually pretty interesting because nowadays, with more widespread and accessible tools to build games, there's more of a kind of a novel vague indie scene with people that actually want to create and convey more deep messages. And then you have the people called them gamers. Actually, people come here and say, oh, are you a gamer? No, I'm a game developer. I'm not here because I'm a gamer. I'm here because I developed games. And time to play games. And the gamers actually react very negatively to these new story-driven games and say, these are not even games anymore. So it's actually the same in a mirror effect, where they say, oh, but there's not enough interaction, so it's not even a game. But my answer to this is really these definitions are helpful when they're helpful. It's almost like saying, a nodule book, is it a book? A choose your own adventure book, is it a game? Or is it a book? I mean, really, you use definitions when they help you, but you shouldn't let them limit you. So the key is you use the tools you need to support your intention and create the message you want to convey. So that's why I answered you. The question is that how? The question is why? So yeah, you gave me the role of being the contradictory here. You're not asking the right question. Maybe that's because I'm French. I was going to say, I don't think I gave you that role. But you do it gracefully, I have to say. You've been in making games, designing games, for quite a long time. Can you talk a little bit about how you got involved? Yeah, I've been making video games for 14 years now. And at one point I realized I don't want to do all these test tubes and everything. And I looked at games, which I enjoyed. And it's actually pretty interesting because all the psychology and learning about the human brain, you realize that it really applies on how to make a good game, because you have to understand what is entertaining, what do we respond to. And so yeah, it actually made sense at one point. But really, I think, as you introduced me, I'm a game designer, whatever it means. But really, I'm interested in the creative process of coming up with that message you want to touch your audience with. And then selecting the right techniques and tools to find these forms and the technical solutions. And by technique, I don't mean programming. I just mean lighting, or photography, or writing, or game design, or animation. All of these are techniques. And by techniques, I mean means to support your intention. And I think that that's where creating a theater play, or creating a painting, or a video game, or a movie has to follow the same creative process, even though sometimes you could be doing everything on your own. But in a way, you have to be schizophrenic and have these different people talk to one another in an organized way. So I would say it's actually harder to do it as a single individual, because you have to manage your own madness. So anyways, yeah, I think that's pretty interesting. I have to write that down. So I'm going to put it on my bulletin board next to me. Manage your own madness. A. Thomas Goldberg is a 20-year veteran of the digital entertainment industry. And I believe you have a theater connection as well. You said you designed sets at one point. I mean, specializes in the creation of interactive character performances for games and other means. And he's currently the president of Lifelight and Believeable Animation Design, Inc. And I am very curious about what you mean by creation of interactive character performances. So I'm sure you're going to tell me. Sure. Actually, after we spoke about that, I realized that my history in interactive experiences actually goes back now 30 years. I went to school for film in New York. But while I was in school, I spent two years working for an exhibit design firm that was doing interactive exhibit design. And my job was to design, and this was at a time when, to build anything before we had flash or even any. And so building an exhibit literally meant physically building the hardware and the circuit boards. And I didn't do any of that part. But my job was to design paper and pencil versions of these experiences and then bring people in and have them play them and to try to glean some insights from these that we could use before actually going and spending the thousands of dollars to build these things. And as I said, because we were, this was at a time before, there weren't any of these sort of interactive media forms. Like everything we did was completely different from scratch. I mean, we built a, for one location-based entertainment project, we had designed 30 games. We built three of them in the studio. And one, which was called Friday Night Food Fight, which was a boxing food trivia game. And the way you play Friday Night Food Fight is you actually stood with three other people in a boxing ring, the center which had a video chandelier and speed bags under each of four monitors facing you. A question would be asked, and you had to be the first one to punch the right answer to get the answer. We did another game which we designed was called Mystery Hotel, which the final design of it was going to be a three-story building where you had to go and search for clues in a mystery. And so as we had about 30 of those, there were many more that were rejected. There was one that the president of the company had come up with, which was called Cabaroma. The whole idea of this was you were supposed to sit in the back of this cab, like a physical cab, and find your way around New York City by sense of smell. Fortunately, there were some technical and aesthetic reasons why that didn't go forward. But you get the idea that it wasn't a, you didn't start with the, OK, we're going to put it on a screen and put a controller in your hand. It was really the fundamentals of what were people physically going to be doing as part of this experience? What was part of the questions that were asked? As you said, when I graduated from NY's film school, I spent several years, actually the first thing I did when I graduated is I went and joined a traveling circus, which I think is everyone should do fresh out of college. And but after I finished that, I worked for several years as a lighting designer. Did some set design, but primarily as a lighting designer in New York. And I worked in theater, and dance, and live music, and really gave me a very broad exposure to different kinds of performance. And so out of that, over the years, I was never locked in to any sort of one mode of performance. And the whole question of the different types of relationships between artists and audience had always been fascinating to me. And this kind of right before I got out of theater from the last year, which was around 93, I had started doing a bunch of interactive installation and performances in New York. Probably the last big one was a project I did called The Works on Shirts Project, where I invited 18 artists in New York City based artists, ultimately produced 21 works that were executed on the backs of white cotton dress shirts for button-up dress shirts. And over the course of two weekends, we entered the Met, the two Guggenheims and the Whitney. And what we would do, this was in 93. We'd enter, everyone would sort of circulate through the museum at a given time. We all sort of met at a pre-arranged location. And essentially, everyone sort of lined up in a grid. And we spent the next hour sort of doing an art gallery inside the museum. And yeah, it was kind of, I mean, it was sort of a flash mob before there were flash mobs, but it wasn't so much about being kind of disruptive. In fact, we tried to do it in a way that wasn't. But what was really looking at is we had the artists themselves who were the ones who were wearing the shirts, and it was about the artists engaging directly with the people who would then view it. And it was kind of just looking at the way museums and what we thought of art at the time where you go to a museum and some person you don't know has curated it, and you never see and never meet, has decided to be art on the wall by artists who you never see and you never meet. And then based on little plaques, we're kind of like, that's our whole experience of the art. And so this was just kind of a little way of sort of challenging that or just challenging the idea of that. It was shortly after that that I ended up going back to NYU, not as a student this time, but as artists in residence at the media research lab. And this is where I really, I started working on in interactive animation. And once you might focus then and has been over the years, has it really been about how do we give artists the tools to be able to do this? As Alex said, like deliver a message through interactive performance. How can we create characters that can engage with the audience, the player, if it's a game, in a way that they can respond meaningfully to the player's actions and the player's actions themselves can have meaning. We can kind of create this dialogue in circumstances where the artist can't be present on like theater, they're not there to interact directly. So they have to be able to kind of embed these sort of dramatic rules and the rules of the narrative in the characters that are then going to be, that the player was going to interact with. And so I've done that for several years. I worked at EA for a number of years. I built the animation system that's currently in use in all of EA's games. And since leaving there, I worked at Relic with Alex and then worked at Black Desk with Amanda. And now I'm kind of doing my own thing and working on a number of different projects. Well, you talk about performance. What does that mean in video game terms? So I think that, I mean, it's not too dissimilar from what we're talking about performance, performance in theater or in film. We have characters that are playing a role and they have to deliver that. They have to kind of be in that character and deliver that role and can deliver the intention of the artists through their interaction with the player. Now that can take on different forms. As I said, every game is different. And the interesting thing about games to me is that the art form itself, I think at its heart, is about defining interaction. It's about defining the sort of interactive form. And that for me is what game design is. And we've had these discussions about, there are a lot of people who call themselves game designers who I don't know that that's necessarily an apt term. If you're making another first person shooter and the model of the game, the design of the game is basically essentially the same as a game you've done before, or things you've worked on before. I don't know that you've got errors, but unless you were designing the mechanics and the mechanics that really would define the interaction between the player and the game, then I think that's really, as I said, kind of that's what makes it interesting. And so because of that, the role that character's playing, the role that story plays and the role is going to be different in every case, because it's a matter of how those tools play into delivering the intention of the artist. Right, so, well, just to pick up on something I noticed on your website, you were talking about three different types of design, Alex, motivation design, system design, and interaction design. So could you talk a little bit about what those three different things are? Well, actually, so my definition of game design is simply not the idea of the game itself, which to me is more like the game director or the creative director of the game. To me, a game designer comes and designs the way you engage the player, the way you motivate him, so the way you reward him, that's mainly psychology, cognitive science, everything. So that's where understanding the human brain is actually pretty interesting. How you engage and motivate him and so how he learns or how she learns. System design is really, at first, I thought it was the core of game design. It's really the game rules. So it's like chess, okay, how the pawns move, how you take a piece, you know, it's like, really the game rules, the game systems, the logic of the game, the logic system. And the last one is the interaction design, where, so in the game, you have to make decisions. You talk about action, but it's also about decisions. And so the game gives you information about the game state and based on your understanding of the system that we discussed in the second part, you make your decision, but then once you make your decision, you have to input back your decision into the game itself. And so that's the interface and reaction. So that's all loop is the interaction. And actually, I think I'm gonna wait for your next question. Oh no, no. So for me, these are the three technical branches of game design. Then you have level design, which is more about almost like setting up the stage and being like a director of your scene. So it's actually interesting because the game designer for me is more in the mathematical realm, logic and systems. And level design is more in the director is directing that scene. But what's really interesting, well, what's sad or interesting is in the industry, it's seen as better, higher level or more enviable to be a game designer, because that's how you get to creative direction. Well, to me, a level designer is way more closer, way closer to being a creative director because he's interacting with the, he's the last line of defense. The first point of contact to the player, because he's shaping that experience saying, I need a country here, I need violin strings here. He's actually building that set pretty much like you would in a theater play. So, and then the last one is narrative design where you need to write, you need to understand player-centric plotting, like how to write a story where the player is the protagonist or instead of a non-playing character, as we call them in the industry, so that's a different skill. But I actually break it down into these categories so then you can learn it because there's academic background behind it instead of saying game design, fun, have game ideas, go. You were saying Amanda, it's very collaborative, this whole game design thing. Can you talk about a little bit about who's involved and who has a stake and who's the boss? When it comes to an entire game or just a story? Or a story, we'll start with a story. Because everyone is the game. So with the story, I'm usually, I'm always with the designers. Like the lead designer and creative director, they're always involved. And often audio will get involved as well and but I've found lately, and I actually do prefer this, that we're also bringing in art and we're bringing in animation. Because what I've noticed is that when I first started out especially, and I still notice some resistance to this, is once the writer gets involved, the kind of the expectation is the story is figured out like three years before the game ships and nothing should change, yet the game is constantly changing. Or just that the writer will write the story which will be these interactive cut scenes in between the action, like the playable parts. Yet there's no communication between what I wrote in that cinematic, that non-interactive thing that said what your motivation was or just kind of pin something on there and what the gameplay is. And so I find, not necessarily that everyone needs a stake in it, I think like how many people actually influence the story, like make those major decisions should be kept small because then if you go too large, you get very generic. But I think the people who should be always kept involved and always feeding back ideas about the narrative should be large. And on a game that I worked with A. Thomas on, the way we worked is we were in pods and a pod would have like an animator and a few artists, a programmer, a couple designers, a writer and audio would also be involved too towards the end of that project. And we would do entire maps so it would be like, hey, this is the story. Like, you know, given the basic idea of what emotion we want and the major points that we have to kind of hit. But otherwise brainstorming, like, okay, animation, like what is something that you could bring to the table that empowers this entire experience. And story, and the thing that I think story that always has to factor in probably more than anything else is the design. Like making sure that whatever that playable thing, what you're playing is true to what story you're telling because if they do this, it doesn't matter. Like people are gonna, even if you write something really great in a cutscene, if it just feels disjointed, you just want to skip. Like you do, yeah. So I agree. I thought you were like, yes, I agree. I agree, I have nothing to do with this. That's a spin to sell. And you're always sneaking around like this. And so you're actually trying to dodge the cars. And then you get to that door. They tell you, exit the scene now. Then you open the door and then that crazy cutscene is running, there's explosion. And then he jumps into chopper and he's like, that was so close. That's so not what you were playing. So that's where I should say it needs to be coordinated. Yes. So it's a game with that? It's a spin to sell. So there's a term that's used in academic circles that kind of describes this, which is called Ludo narrative dissonance is the term, Ludo from being game and narrative, being obviously narrative. And it's the idea where the gameplay and the story they're being told conflict with each other in a way. And so if you've got a story where you're supposed to be this guy who's trying to bring peace to some area, but the entire gameplay is you're running around shooting up as many people as you can, that's the example. And I think it comes down to it's very easy in these situations to create situations where what I call kind of, there's the explicit narrative, which is the story that you're trying to tell. And there's the implicit narrative, which is the story that comes out of the experience. It's kind of the story that when you go back and you describe what happened as you play. And when a game I think is done really, really well, those two are very much in line. You have a story that's all I can say, well, this was the story the characters went through. And I felt the same way as they did as I played it. But in many cases where, as Amanda was pointing out, where a story may have been written and sort of nailed and locked down here, but the designers have gone in a completely different direction, you get to think where it's like, well, I think they were telling me it was about this, but when I played it, it was about this. And it just feels weird and disjoint. Yeah, and often I've been brought on way later where early on in a project, the story was figured out by another writer or from the heads of the studio. And then, and so I think that the team kind of keeps that story in mind. And then two years later, right before we reach alpha, which is kind of our lockdown for new content, they'll bring me and be like, okay, none of our objectives makes sense with these cinematics. Can you just like hand fist in some dialogue that says, well, technically that still made sense because, and then it goes on. Unless, yeah, unless that gameplay just feeds, the story doesn't match it, you can like expose it all you want, why that really made sense when it didn't. It's, by that point, the player is zoned out. They're just like, I'll just read the objective. Okay, I don't know. Which means they're still an enjoyable experience there, but it's less rich, that's what I'm saying. Yeah, I mean, if you're playing a game, and I think it's either the case, if either you want to skip the gameplay or skip the sort of narrative parts of it or the non-indirect parts of it, then the designers and the people who made the game have like have failed and they'll have to kind of achieve, I think they sort of ideal kind of goal. You guys have all talked at one point or another about a game called Heavy Rain, is that what it's called? And it has elicited really a lot of interesting conversation, so is there, can we just explain a little bit about what that game is about and then talk about who you are in that game and how it appears or how you follow the action in that story. There is a story involved in Heavy Rain, is there not? Oh, I'm just like, okay, I've had a huge David Cage. I'm like the worst one. So Heavy Rain has been here since I played it, I've never finished it, so. Okay, I won't ask you. So the idea is basically that you start off the game and you're just kind of like this everyday guy, you're playing with your kids, like everything and it's just kind of more of a mundane life and everything you do is just interactive. It just kind of asks you to participate in what essentially seems to be like a long cinema, like a 10 hour cinematic. And then you lose your child and then so there's like a killer that's on the loose and so they're sort of cycling between your story and then a psychic detective story or something and then a female cop and I forget the other character, there's one other character, isn't there? Maybe there's just three? I thought there was four. Oh, okay. That wasn't the psychic detective? Okay. But the nice, the interesting thing about that game is that your choices do have an impact on how the story plays out. And if you die, you're dead, which is unusual for games. Usually there's, yeah, you can start again, that's all right, well pretend that didn't happen. And he also has another game out recently, Beyond Two Souls, which I'm a bit more familiar with. Oh, no, never mind. No, I'm not taking a shot, have you, right? Let's talk about it. No, I do, right. I just was interested in how, when you said how your decisions really matter in that game and that's kind of one of those interesting things. So I'd like to talk about that a little more. Well, actually, so that's where I stuck myself when you asked me the last question. Well, actually I'm gonna derail on what I haven't said. You know, when cinema appeared, at first it was you would film theater plays, literally. And so that's why for the first, I think, 20 years, everything was sideways, and oh, no, no, no, no, we do this and blah, blah, and there's an insert. It actually took them 30 years to have the shot, counter shot, you know, like to, when we discussed to have that axis broken. And so really at first movies were film theater, and then it gradually evolved into its own shape, like it actually assumed the medium itself, and then it could actually become what it could be. And 30 years is the time it took them to actually do that trick. And we're pretty much like 30 years in video game right now. So that's pretty much where we are. And so to me, we're still kind of like watching a movie with a joy pad attached. And it's actually interesting when you look at the code of 54, Modern Warfare, it's like Titanic, like the first level. And you're engaged because they ask you to do something, it requires you to move forward for the story to progress. But really you're not making decisions, you're not really involved, they have you engaged. And so, you know, I guess, well I'm not, let's, yeah. So these games like David Cage is actually trying, at least he's trying, maybe he's probably trying too much in the versatility aspect and trying to be photorealistic, which I think is actually missing the point. So most like saying, painting should be about perfect one-to-one reproduction of reality. I think that's missing the point. But who am I to talk about this? Anyways, but he actually, I think, speaks to what it could be for a theater play, like the value of interactivity is that you engage your audience, or you engage your players, or your, you know, and you could just engage them and it actually just unfolds like a typical linear story. And the main way for you to convey emotion to your audience is through linear storytelling and empathy and, you know, these emotions. But where it actually diverges is interaction is about I make my own actions, I make my own decisions. And so, and the line becomes, well, I don't, well, maybe some of them like we solved that already, but actually the line is like, what does your primary mean of interaction, of making your audience experience something? Is it through empathy? Because I care for these characters, or is it through interaction? It's gonna be meaningful for me because I'm making these choices. Maybe there are choices, but I experience them because I'm making these decisions myself compared to seeing characters that have a dilemma and experience a dilemma and all your supporting means create, you know, create suspension of disbelief. So I identify and I'm empathy with that character compared to I'm really facing that choice myself. So, and the thing is, I think, oh, I haven't solved it, but I think so far, you have to take one axis as the primary axis and use the other one as support. Like you could say, I want my audience to feel these emotions to empathy and use interaction as a secondary mean as engagement or make sure that put your users or audience in a situation where the experience that's condemned through having to make the decision and the delivery of the story is actually a supportive mean as the aesthetic experience to keep you engaged with the fantasy. So I think that's actually true for certain types of games, but I think it's where a lot of this kind of discussion kind of falls to, but I think it ends up, as a result, we have a tendency to get too caught up and I think that kind of that one model. And I think it ends up sort of limiting the sort of possibilities of both kind of interaction and storytelling in doing so. As we were talking about earlier, I was first involved in this type of discussion 20 years ago at an interactive story system symposium that was run by the American Institute for Artificial Intelligence. And I remember on the first day, somebody got up on the whiteboard and they drew a line on the whiteboard and on one end of the line they wrote storytelling and the other end where there were interactivity so we're going to talk about finding that kind of perfect place like where was the perfect place in the middle there. And that just sort of set the tone for this whole thing and it drove me nuts to be quite honest because all the conversations over the next two days seem to be about, well, as writers, how do we keep the player from doing the wrong thing? That was the big question. It's like how do we keep them from doing the wrong thing? And the example we were talking about before is the movie The Fugitive had just come out and so that was being tossed around as an example. You made the game of The Fugitive and what do you do if someone asks if the player, as Richard Kimball, gets on a train to Mexico? Well, it's like, the story's not in Mexico and now he's in Mexico, it's like we're stuck and people are talking about, well, maybe the weather in Mexico can be bad and that'll convince him to turn around. But to me it was like, why is there a train in Mexico in your game? And it just seemed to be like, well, if you really just want to tell the story of The Fugitive then there is no role for the person to do it. I mean, there's this sort of fantasy of we'll create this environment where we're going to tell this sort of plot point for plot point story and the player is just going to magically just do all the right things. But that assumes that the player is this character that you've defined that would do those things in that order. And every person you bring, they're not going to be the character you wrote. They're all the stuff they bring to it. So, actually, when you watch a movie or you read a story, you see the characters do bad decisions and that's one of these moments where you care. No, no, don't drink poison because she's not really dead. She's just faking, don't kill yourself. Don't do it, don't do it. So you engage through empathy. The problem is in a game, you know, I will not drink the poison. I'm not going to kill myself because you're trying to win. So, I understand that, you know, it's not a total ectomy, but I still think there's a branch at where what is my primary motivation? I guess my point is that if your goal is to have, and I think we talk about there are sort of examples, even kind of within the realm of games where I think that this has been successful, but I think if your goal is to create a set of characters that we are supposed to empathize with and we're supposed to kind of watch their story, which is where the empathy comes from, seeing their story play out, then maybe a game is not the right medium for this. And so one of the things that comes to end the interactive story system symposium story, at the end of the two days, I was actually getting very frustrated. I was at one point where Brenda Laurel, who wrote Computers of Theater, got up and left. And I was like, oh, I totally get it. I just want to do that too, but it turned out she was just sick. But I was like, oh, you're making a protest against this. And so, but the last day I got up and I said, you know, I told the story about, you know, that I had this story that I just optioned and I wouldn't have made a game out of it. It was a story of these four childhood friends who, you know, they arrive in Atlantic City. They've got a little bit of money they've saved up and it's during the real estate boom in Atlantic City and they start buying, you know, they start developing the land and over time they kind of team up with each other. The alliances are formed. People are stabbed in the back. Friendships are broken up and eventually there's just two of them left and it becomes just this conflict to the death to see who's going to kind of come out on top and just the relationships they had going are all kind of been destroyed by this. And I said, but you know, I'm struggling with kind of how to come up to make a game out of this and then I found out that someone had already done it and they'd done it 100 years ago and they called it Monopoly. And the thing about Monopoly is that if you look at any game of Monopoly, there is a narrative arc that flows through every single game of Monopoly that's ever been played in 100 years since it was made, or 110 years now since it was created that starts with, you know, that takes on one form at the beginning of the game where everyone's just buying a property. And that's the whole start of the game, is that every turn results in people buying a property around the board. And the game fundamentally changes at the point where all the property is now bought because now it becomes about, you know, trading with others and making alliances and so forth. And the game then fundamentally changes again when you're down to the last two people. And because then it becomes about, like, as I said, it's that kind of race to the death to see who's... And that arc kind of plays out in every single game. I mean, it changes a little bit if you change the rules and everyone's got house rules. But even then, once you define those house rules and the arc is slightly different, but that arc persists. But that's not written down anywhere. There's nowhere in the rules that you say that the game's going to go through those phases. And yet it's a function of the way the game is designed. You know, and as I said, it's kind of, that's the sort of implicit narrative of Monopoly. And, you know, there's kind of a more recent example, and I sent that out, was Brenda Romero, who's a game designer who's been working for ever, worked on the original Wizardry games back in, you know, pre-8-bit days. And she's worked on a, recently worked on a series of non-digital games. It's a series called The Mechanic is the Message. She's taken on different sort of cultural issues and made board games out of them. And one of the games is called The New World. And it was actually kind of, she made it up on the spot with her eight-year-old daughter one day. Her daughter had come home from school, where they had just learned about the Middle Passage. And her daughter's father was black, so the Middle Passage is the story of the slave being brought over to America. So it was like, you know, it was an important thing in their family. And Brenda was very, you know, great. They're finally learning this, she's old enough to learn this is great. We're going to have a discussion about this and how it affects, and she asked her daughter what they learned. The sequence of events, the historical sort of sequence of events that started with slavery and ended with the abolishment of slavery and now they're here and now there's no slavery and that's great. And as Brenda put it, it seemed to her, she could have just as easily been describing like a cruise ship from Africa rather than what it was. And so her daughter was like, well, can we play a game? And Brenda was like, okay. And so what she did is she had all these little pieces, these little wooden figures which she has for designing games. She grabbed a bunch of them and they spent the next hour painting like little sets of them in different colors for different families. Pink ones and yellow ones and blue ones and so forth. When they were done, Brenda then just basically takes a whole bunch of, you know, scoops them up at random and puts them in the boat which was just an index card. And her daughter's first question was like, well, mommy, you know, the little blue family, the babies from the little family are with the mama, you know, or the daddy's not with the people. And, you know, she was like, and she was like, no, that's the way it's played. And then the rules were simply they had 10 turns to get across and they had 30 units of food and then every turn they would roll a die and that's how many units of food would get used up. And as, you know, as she's playing she ends up rolling a number of like the daughter ends up rolling a number of like high rolls pretty early and at some point she turns to her mother and she says, mama, I don't think we're going to make it. And everyone was like, well, okay, we've got to make a decision now. Do you put the, you know, we either try to like cross our fingers and hope for the best or maybe we have to put some people in the water and we go over and, you know, and like when I got through the daughter was like, mama, that would really happen and she was like, yeah, that's what happened. And, you know, and so playing this in sort of the implicit narrative in that very simple game, you know, conveyed that message much more than this, you know, the sort of the recounting of the just historical events that led up to it. You know, and for me that was kind of an example which is a powerful example using the sort of interaction and interactivity to convey a story. As you can see, there's a very specific narrative that's being conveyed there that's just as implicit in that design. You know, for which that medium was probably the most powerful medium to deliver that message in. So is that the sort of equivalent of interaction design portion of the game or the rules or whatever? So that would be system design but actually, I agree, you just use different words. I don't say, you know, that interaction to me is that decision conveys the meaning, the message. You say it conveys the story. To me, story is another way to convey a message, but in that case, it's really that decision even though you built the fact that you cared for the blue ones and the pink ones through, I would say, more of a passive mean. But the key point where you have that insight, oh, that's what happened is because you had to make that choice. So I mean, I agree, you just use different words, but I agree. Whoa! Oh my. It's time to take a little break, isn't it? We're just going to give everybody a little break and just come back in, if you can, in five minutes and we will get you to ask some questions. Thanks. No, it's cooled off a bit. Yeah. Wow. She's taking by times she's taking by. No, it's not technology that we're very much used to using. So my fear, I guess, is that we start using grittiness as a cheap thrill in a way to convey emotion to not really explain the story and really just show how badly somebody is dying. And one example of the counterpoint for this that I'd like to give is there's a game that's called Mass Effect. It's a really big game that's actually really good. And there's a scene where you don't really see any kind of blood, anything. But you're faced with a comrade who's committing mutiny because your objective of your team is to go and exterminate a member of his race. And you're faced with a decision to point a gun at his head and shoot him or let him go and compromise the objective of your team. When you shoot him, you don't see anything on the ground. You don't see him fall. You don't see your teammates and they're facing the animation that conveys and what they say. And that was one of the most heart-wrenching moments of that game. But that's not done very often. And so I guess I just wanted to have a bit of a perhaps discussion around that if that's okay. I guess it's the same in movies. The one that comes to mind, well maybe you see some blood, the scene with Chen So in the shower. You don't see it. But actually the director said you hit the audience so hard in the first 10 minutes that they're going to stay put for the rest of the movie, right? So it's about suggestion. It's not only linked to video games, I think it's more the maturity of the artist. Do you really have to spill the guts or can you suggest it? Imagination is way more powerful, I guess. But I guess, you know, different audiences, different types. Depending on who you want to reach, maybe you want to spill more or less guts. Yes? Let's go back to what you were saying about monopoly having a certain narrative. How important do you feel something like story depth for there to be implicit narrative? Because I'm thinking of games like Well, especially with a game like Minecraft, you have an implicit narrative in some ways, in that you have creepers that are kind of creating some amount of an implied narrative in the world through the fact that they're sort of these zombie creatures or whatever they are. So that's the sort of implied narrative. It's very light though. Whereas the emergent narrative is what Minecraft is essentially relying on, what the players are doing, how they're acting in the world to stop their building creates an area for them that just purely emerges out of their actions. So there's sort of that other line. It's the stories you tell of the experience you have. Yeah, exactly. So we're the third one that I think you get from games like that. That's not very emotional so it has an implied narrative through basically just a normal progression system. There was somebody over there? Yeah? The first one I played in the last few years was the Portal series which struck me as a pretty beautiful marriage because I think it started actually as a physics engine that was modded from the Far Cry I think. It was based around a gameplay mechanic and then the storytelling is great and the dialogue is great and the art direction is great. I'm curious from your perspective of the people behind the scenes what is it that puts together that package? Is that a really good creating director that just sort of has his hand on all pieces or is it something else institution-wise or what is it that creates those beautiful synthesis of gameplay that's so great in the long run? What is the answer? So you're asking what is it that creates the synthesis of an excellent game experience and I'm sure it's... It makes me think it's not really theater but in movies you can actually treat non-human characters, entities as characters. You can treat one that comes to mind is that movie in Africa with Leonardo DiCaprio Blood Diamond where the landscapes are almost react to the plot twist and it's almost like saying oh you know when you're sad when the main character is sad it's going to rain that's almost like saying the environment is part of... it's almost treated like a character in theater I guess with lights and you could even have drapes you could also... it's just like using an animated element as a conveyor of meaning One of the games that we actually had out there which we haven't talked about at all but I think is relevant here is the game Gone Home which is from the Fulbright Company and the premise of this game and I think you'll see why it's relevant for this is the premise of the game is that you've just returned home from a year abroad your parents in the time that you've been away have moved into a new house and so when you arrive at the house the house is unfamiliar but you feel comfortable entering it because it is it is your house but nobody's home and and so your parents and your younger sister aren't there it's rainy out and it's dark and the game is entirely about just traveling around the house finding just different artifacts in the environment letters that the sister has written to her friend the pamphlet from the marriage counselor that the parents left on a table in their study and as you sort of move through the space and the whole experience is about two to three hours long you learn the story of what's happened and kind of where everybody is and what's happened while you were gone and it's incredibly like an emotional, powerful experience but it's all done through this kind of this environmental interaction and there's certainly very little that was done in that that couldn't be done in an actual physical environment in the actual space and there are people that have played with that but the great thing about this is that there are characters there's no animated character in it at all like even you it's first person so you don't have no body but there's this whole entire story that unfolds and there's this primary narrative that unfolds but then there's also all these other things that you learn about what your parents have been going through and what their life is like and they come along the way and they are just done through this kind of interaction and I think it's a sort of a brilliant game but it's also kind of as we were talking before it also provoked articles like there was one the title of which was like how has gone home a game and people are questioning whether or not it's a game at all there's no there's no there's no win-lose even momentarily mechanics there's no skill that one has to learn to sort of play it's like a rock house, body roll you see different music exactly and that's what I was saying there's kind of the wrong questions I guess there may be some academic interest in kind of being able to define what constitutes a game and what doesn't but I don't know that it solves a problem for either the audience or the creators to try to pin that down are there questions over here I'm just curious because we've been talking about using the environment as a way for player decisions to actually create a narrative I was just wondering if it would be possible in theatre to be able to create a theatrical piece where you could use where the audience members interact with the actors and create their own media through making decisions I guess have any of you ever seen anything like this do you think it's going to be possible where the audience members interact with the actors and create make decisions to create well the only thing I can think of right off the top of my head is the one that was called the Oak Tree that basically every night there was a different person playing one of the characters who was on book and it didn't I mean it certainly created a different experience for everybody who saw it not to mention the people who were in it but there was another question I was a lot of that theatre and these questions are a little bit broader I'm just wondering to see the evolution of where it came from when I was playing Oregon Trail they've moved in this incredibly immersive cinematic interactive expansive environment for the most part and I was just wondering within the gaming industry was there a distinct moment or time because it feels like this is happening in the theatre world where you started to notice that your audience, your players desires and expectations out of the game were distinctly shifting that they required more from what you're offering them and then was there a way that that was directly addressed and also kind of sort of leading to that the elements of interactivity you mentioned I just wanted you to spend also on those a little more on the motivation and reward but starting back from that again was there just a moment where you realized our gamers, our people are playing our games are expecting more and we have to find what that is and give it to them or was it sort of a natural metaphor I have a very cynical answer to this because I have an optimistic answer well, what you're describing you know the race for photorealism and more realistic effects and everything it's mainly driven by the big companies they rely on better graphics more polygons more assets, bigger maps I won't I won't give any names because I don't want to stand in front of people but I mean and obviously you know it looks to me like that's one way what you want instead of saying what do they really want because that's easy for them to say we have the money we have the edge, we have the big computers so we're going to push some polygons on the screen and tell you that's what you want, right? So what's the good side of this? Okay, here's my optimistic take on that answer I actually think we're right now going through a fairly significant phase in game development I don't think that the big AAA blockbusters are going to go away by any means I mean we still have big AAA blockbuster movies and they continue to be made but what we've seen over the last five years and there's a number of things that feed into this is an independent game sort of scene that's gone beyond that largely started off as people you know a lot of kind of 8-bit nostalgia because it was what people could do people just wanted to make a game but what we're seeing now is a few different things that are happening one, we're seeing a number of people who are kind of leaving the AAA game industry to work on independent titles because they've gotten older maybe they have kids maybe they have just had life experience and it's $20 a month you can download the whole thing and make your own game with it and so it's gotten a point where you can actually build some fairly sophisticated experiences with a relatively small group of people for a much smaller amount of money and so what I think we're going to see fortunately is that in much the same way that you know independent film then goes on to inform sort of bigger budget film as certain things become successful we're starting to see as kind of these independent games certain ones become successful that the sort of the aesthetics and the kinds of things that go into them start to inform much bigger budgets on games and so that's why I'm optimistic because I actually see this field growing and a lot going on in there right now I think it's pretty exciting Matt is itching to say something I just very much agree with both of you my answer kind of sits right on the middle but also I do still enjoy those big budget games that's still something that I agree but it's not something I need so I love indie games have a few pixels and that's it it's using the right tool what your vision is it shouldn't just be default you know great visual I think there's nothing wrong with sort of big beautiful games with lots of high-risk textures solutions and incredibly well-animated characters detailed scores but the fact that we're now for the first time we're really having sort of legitimately challenging those assumptions so that hopefully when those decisions are made because it's the right decision for that experience not because well to make a game it has to be X, Y and Z there's one there and we're just about are you were okay start with actually since Minecraft came out I've seen similarities between video games and the books in art history so there are some followed by far-rock by romanticism by realism by cubism and Minecraft is for me a different counter movement from our super everything high quality realistic and this is a step back so yeah I would say the past and you know for the future and I think they follow a logical pattern actually and that's why I would say the success of Minecraft's logic for consequence and I think when you talked about the team including designer sound designer writer and all that so I think my question is is it also important to have is it important to have a researcher on the team or a dramaturg I've worked with researchers on my teams and I worked on a part of the Caribbean RPG and we hired somebody to be like an expert in 18th century culture essentially and dialect I don't know if that's quite what you mean but they are you sometimes because yeah you don't maybe other the rest of us don't have time to be researching we need someone to go out there and be like here you go here's a little presentation about what you need to know I do think it depends on the type of game the type of experience you're creating but I also think that it's people who it's people who are doing that that are these sort of innovative games and it's kind of new experience they come out of that and I love the example of Minecraft because it almost seems counterintuitive that it should have been so successful for the very reason that you're putting on these big blocky things that seem very primitive but if you look at the interaction model it's about people sort of building things he could have gone in and made it like this perfect ultra realistic landscape thing and it would have been incredibly difficult for people to get the results they wanted to get they would have to learn they would have to become highly skilled at using the tools to be able to craft something that kind of fit that aesthetic and fit that model but by making it giving it that visual style pretty much anyone big giant blocks what could you make out of them that constraint made it that anybody could build didn't matter how good or bad you are it was going to be blocky but you could build any blocky thing so I just want to say yes the one thing I wanted to ask was those of us in the theater community who knows painfully is that when you're walking to a preview and opening night you know something's working and you know something's not working same with the film screening you go to a screening you can be there with your audience and you know when it's not working I'm just wondering for you guys individually and personally where most of the feedback comes from for you guys because we see all of ourselves as artists I think on a personal and individual level we are looking for feedback in our work so when you have a game that's put together in its whole form how do you each individually get feedback from your audiences because it's something that tells me that it's a little more difficult for games than a play that you can see on opening night or a movie screen so how do you get feedback we certainly do have people who come and play the games and it's often during that process that something either something that you thought worked because now that you've played it a gazillion times you're really good at it but when someone comes in to play it and they're struggling and stumbling over themselves and they can't figure it out a lot of that stuff gets revealed in that part of the process and ideally we try to do that as early on as we can as we start to develop mechanics and things like that are elements that we try to make sure that they're working in the way that we think that we're working or at least that our intention is coming across I've seen that process sort of taken to used for evil or taken to because I've also seen that process used to try to validate the intention of a piece and I think that for any work if you have to ask somebody else whether what you're doing is worth doing then you probably aren't the person to be doing it you have to have the confidence that at least your intention is right you can ask people whether your intention is being successfully conveyed through either the work or through the gameplay or through the story or whatever but I think if you don't have the confidence that in the intention that's at the core of it and I said that I think it's where a lot of games go astray is that there isn't a confidence in the intention so they keep looking around for someone to tell them what game to make and eventually everybody's got a different idea of what game they're supposed to be making because they've all asked different people what game they should make and I think that would be asking people what period should we put what do you want to see because I can't decide as the director you know it's like I think of that note when anyone comes to me and say what should I do should I make it blue or red or should it be plus 2 or plus 20 I ask them what is it you want to make and I don't even want to give them an answer on how to implement it I just tell them it means you're not able to say what is it you're trying to achieve with the different solutions so I just point them at the questions you're missing at the solution and then the everyday as far as testing we also have QA testers they provide feedback there is that problem of being too close to the material because even us in the studio will give feedback on how the game is feeling although probably the most valuable feedback you'll ever get from a member of the studio is when they first start playing this game give us your feedback because they're informed they know they can offer solutions they can speak intelligently about it but they have no preconceived notions and no investment in what is in there I know you have been dying to talk and you haven't talked yet so you get the last question Part of what I wanted to say was to answer a question that was asked earlier have you spent far too much time doing interactivity in theater there are a lot of groups who started doing that now and they borrow a lot of game mechanics actually in the way that they put it together you have companies like Punch Drum out of the UK who use navigation as their main form of interactivity so you can navigate to different you can walk through a building to different parts of a performance and see different things and different orders and construct your own stories like on the intimate's wedding for example which have linear stories where people can have conversations in the middle to very much along the same lines as the standard unfortunately standard RPG game type format so there are a number of examples of that if you want details I can give them to you later my question though for you though is to turn that around Alex you talked about film moving past theater on medium I'm a little bit curious what if anything you see games being able to you learn from theater at this point so is there anything that games can learn from theater well we discussed what makes a good game and you also described the way sometimes the studio heads decide what games should be or what the story should be I think what's really missing in the video game industry is even though it's the youngest entertainment industry it's also the most profitable one but I think it became very quickly a very industrious industry and so I think that's the way I work I always go back to other creative industries and I look at the creative process and say this works there it works for movies I haven't looked much into theater but you know it's the same process the creative process and I think it's really a matter what the industry at large like the triple A studios but also the indies that go on the gut feeling type stuff like understanding how to structure the creative process and how to understand established intention and how to have different discipline specialists and empower them not only to give solutions but also to shape back what the intention is that top down bottom up creative process has been around for centuries, millenniums well in the case of writing, in the case of theater in the case of movies and it feels like the video game industry is kind of we're just like, Charles you know and most you guys said I'm not a gamer I want to be a game developer and I want us to mature and so that's where we say you have to all my quote is you don't get high on your own supply you have to realize and that's the most most people want to make video games because they like playing video games but we like driving cars do you like building a car no it's a very different process so I mean as you said we're too close from the subject matter and we're kind of like toy kids playing in a sandbox and we think oh I love making castles so so let's build the sandbox no it's a different thing so we don't have the you know we need to take a step back and that's from other creative industries or creative endeavors yeah that's what I think it's a type of creative discipline there is process design that's what we do there is actually one which isn't directly related to writing but it's something that's always intriguing and has to do with the kind of work that I do is that I think a lot of games especially the big AAA games right now a lot of the kind of visual language from film or try to borrow this sort of visual language from film but for me that because I deal with animation and performance I actually think that you know the sort of performance language of theater is actually much more relevant than that of film because in film you're constructing a frame like that is what you're doing you know you are positioning the actors in the frame relative to the frame and you know and that's how it's built whereas in many of these games that we talk about you don't have that control over the camera you know and or you have limited control you have very limited control over where of the player's point of view relative to that so much of what we're trying to do is actually define the relationships between the characters that you're encountering and to do it in such a way that we understand you know their status relative to each other and in a way you know that we can block that out that doesn't rely on a fixed frame or fixed editing and so forth and it's something I don't think because it's one of the things that I spent a lot of time with animators working with animators who are new to games because many of them come from doing animation where you have even more control over the frame than in traditional film where you're defining absolutely everything as an animator and having to talk to them that it's not about we're not defining silhouettes and poses relative to the frame they kind of give that up and have to think about this more in terms of who are the characters and what are the relationships you show us and how do we define the relationship by how they move relative to each other in space so that's something which I I think can be drawn from theater and try to push and hopefully we'll draw more from it Amanda? I think one of the things that we can take from theater is I think theater there's more of an emphasis on the creative and the experimentation because we are a lucrative industry there is a lot of fear of taking risks an awful lot of fear especially in the AAA space it is nice that the indie scene is coming out because like you say they get success then the AAAs are going to be more likely to kind of follow suit but I think we can learn a lot from like you guys are doing some of the heavy lifting for us in the case so this is like what have they done we will take that and also it's as far as iteration and it just takes longer to with games like it's not something you can just you know act out and figure out and like get a good feel for it sometimes just the technical limitations and all that can kind of slow down that process a little bit but yeah I think that is what we can learn a lot from theater is to be older and to take those risks and not worry so much about trying to please everyone and not upsetting anyone in order to try to to get the most respect because I think in the end that just we're just going to keep making the same kind of bland games and I think audiences are asking for some variation I think it's less that they're asking for higher fidelity and now they're like okay these games that now are on sequel 5 were really great and they first came out but like I'm really craving the AAA new title that gets me excited like they come out every so often but doesn't feel as often as they used to I'm afraid that's it for the formal part of this presentation I'm sure you can talk outside while they show you how to access these games and I just have a lot of a few thank yous I'd like to say thank you to Alice Honigin who created this event and who's sitting back there with her headphones on our speakers, A. Thomas Goldberg Amanda Duarone and Alexander Mendrica V.J. Matthews from Hell V.J. Matthews from Hell round who's on the other end of that video Christopher Grubowski our videographer our volunteers today, Matthew Willis and James Tyler Irvin Michael Cider for Technical Advice, Cartems Donaturi Community members who helped share this event Broadley Pie Theatre Rice Paper Magazine, Vancouver Fringe Fire Hall Arts Theatre Dennis Carroll, Ben Wabus and really helped getting into the game community we really appreciate being visited by strangers don't be a stranger anymore and I'd like to also thank our fearless leader Heidi Taylor the artistic director of PTC awesome dramaturg extraordinaire thank you all three pieces of donut left rocket rocket yes