 When Corey Barlog set out to reimagine the God of War franchise, a guiding principle during the project was breaking the cycle. Breaking the cycle of games that Santa Monica had produced before, breaking the vicious patricidal cycle that has haunted Kratos from his birth, and breaking his own creative cycle to find a passion for making games once more. God of War released a much critical acclaim, sold millions of copies, and has received practically every game award that it has been nominated for. As an experience, the game expertly interweaves gameplay and story using a stunning single camera shot to tell an intimate tale between father and son, and in the eyes of many, redeemed a character many saw as irredeemable. The game isn't without its critics though. Some decry the fact that the fluency of the combat has been replaced with something Barlog described as more intimate, contextual, and gritty, which makes more sense in the narrative of the world, but lessened the versatility of the combat engine compared to other action games. Furthermore, unlike games like Eco or Brothers A Tale of Two Sons, the game perhaps wasn't as willing to commit to its narrative ambitions as well, preserving contrivances like an invulnerable escort character, for the sake of gameplay convenience, at the expense of truly meaningful mechanics. I feel comfortable levying these accusations, because Barlog himself admits this in his GDC talk, that he couldn't dramatize the exposition or convey meaning through mechanics, as well as he wanted. For example, he wanted there to be teaching through the mechanics, perhaps by having your actions affect atreus' behavior, but unfortunately, time and resources got in the way. As a case study, God of War is absolutely fascinating. It is torn between indulging the player's desire for a robust set of playful systems, while also wanting to ground those systems in an earnest story about companionship and redemption. At the same time though, it seamlessly shifts between its storytelling and gameplay to create something more than the sum of its parts. In many ways, it succeeds brilliantly at being a playable version of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, with expertly crafted exposition, a dense escalating plot, and a grounded exploration of the relationship between father and son. On the other hand though, in breaking its own conventions, it inadvertently adopted the conventions of many other games, whether it be Eco or The Last of Us. The game is still an exceptional creative achievement. Corey Barlog has a sincerity and dedication to his craft that is truly admirable, and in many ways, it was still extremely risky of the developers to change as much as they did. What it also illustrates though, and something that will be a trend throughout this video, is that breaking conventions is somewhat ironically conventional. If we step back to a time when creativity was more commonplace in the industry, we see an interesting assortment of ways designers have broken conventions. Will Wright has often been heralded as one of the most creative voices in game design. In creating the systemic city simulator SimCity and the domestic simulator in The Sims, Will Wright drew from a variety of inspirations. The game pinball construction set got him to think in terms of enabling player creativity, the work of urban designer Jay Forrester got him interested in the systemic dynamics of urban planning, and Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language revealed the embedded nature of living in a social context. In his GDC talk, Dynamics for Game Designers, he goes on at length about how viewing games as dynamic systems with vertical layers, feedback loops, and horizons of action can change the way we think of games. He also expresses how the participatory nature of these systems, as well as how they encode values, like the dynamics of urban decay in SimCity, can change how we see reality itself. SimCity and The Sims were revolutionary products, practically introducing new genres, selling millions of copies, and demonstrating the power of reaching outside of games to draw inspiration from. However, in many senses, his revolutionary design sensibilities were also somewhat derivative. They were just derivative of things outside of gaming. Creativity is fundamentally derivative. It's about fusing disparate things together to get something novel, taking something in one context and putting it in another. Or as Picasso put so eloquently, it's about learning the rules like a pro so that you can break them like an artist. Let's take another example. Shigeru Miyamoto is also viewed as a transformative voice in game design, with many citing him as their inspiration for joining the media. What Will Wright did for systemic design, Miyamoto did for the fundamentals of avatar interaction and level design. Having a background in industrial design, Miyamoto's games are by his own account, about empowering the player with a precise set of mechanics that just feel great to play. He stresses the importance of making an avatar fun to play independent of a game's world, and then building a world that tests players in a scaffolded, incremental way. This idea of escalating difficulty came from space invaders, where an accident of design led to the aliens getting faster, which also maps on to flow theory, which suggests that a sense of engagement can only be preserved if you have a challenge that rises in proportion to a player's abilities. This influenced his famous four-step design philosophy, which is about introducing players to a new mechanic in a safe context, and then ramping it up across a level to keep them in the flow state. You will often hear people talk about how Super Mario's level 1-1 shows how we should teach through implicit learning. You start on the left side of the screen, signifying you should go right, the angry eyes of the Goomba suggest he's an enemy, and the two-path structure, mushrooms and coins, all implicitly guide you towards understanding the jump, power-ups, and the dynamics of risk and reward in games. Where do we find this kind of implicit interface learning, though? Don Norman's seminal book The Design of Everyday Things is written from an industrial interactions perspective, and speaks to the importance of designing objects with their function being implicit. For example, having a door's handle telling you whether you should push or slide it purely through design. Miyamoto's innovations came from an assortment of psychological theories about engagement, object interaction, and implicit learning that are now standard in many fields of design. He just happened to be the man who applied it to games. However, with games like The Legend of Zelda, he was inspired by his experiences as a child, simply exploring the wilderness, and the open-world design sensibilities of that game were conceived to give players a sense of wonder, a stark contrast to the linear progression of Mario. He also had a love for manga that inspired his artistic style when he would later make games, suggesting he's not just an engineer, but also an artist. However, if design still sounds very engineering heavy, you are absolutely correct. But fortunately, we now have artists who are also entering the fold. Fumita Weda reversed many assumptions in games about the function of mechanics, and instead put theme above all other considerations. In his game's eco, shout-of-the-colossus, and The Last Guardian, Weda leveraged a design philosophy called Design by Subtraction to strip away anything that doesn't reinforce the core theme of each game and to use minimalist design sensibilities and sparse lighting to create an unparalleled sense of immersion. Eco doubles down on its escort mission, making your companion your essential to your progress. Your health bar is stripped away, and your well-being is actually tied to the survival of your companion. In shout-of-the-colossus, Weda sought to subvert the monster-killing trope embedded in games to suggest what we are doing is perhaps not ideal. Weda claimed that if he was not in the games industry, he would have wanted to become a classical artist, suggesting a different suite of inspirations than other developers. Eco drew inspiration from the manga series Galaxy Express 999, as well as the surrealist artist Giorgio Desharico, and we immediately see how the well he draws from is rooted less in engineering and design, and more in emotion. However, what we also see is a convergence between the design of Miyamoto and Weda. Part of the ethos of Design by Subtraction is removing anything that distracts from the immersive feel of a world. In order to guide the player then, Weda and his team also use implicit learning techniques, as well as cues like sound, light, and architecture to guide players through the experience. However, he also uses more emotionally grounded cues, like the dependency of your escort character, the design of wide-open space, and emotions like fear, alienation, and hope to compel players as well. Weda might not be seen as revolutionary as Will Wright or Miyamoto, but his work has been deeply influential, with people like Hidetaka Miyazaki and Hideo Kojima claiming that he opened their eyes to the possibility of the medium. As an artist, Weda revolutionized games not by drawing from psychology, systems design, or urban dynamics, but from other art forms and the range of emotions we all have access to. As different as they might be, Will Wright, Miyamoto, and Weda all broke conventions in their respective way, by drawing from very different sources of inspiration. Sometimes it is other games, other times it's other mediums, but it almost always requires the ability to repurpose patterns in a new context. This requires an understanding of the past, as well as being able to envision a new future. When Sid Meier set about designing the Civilization franchise, he drew from his love of history as well as strategy and war games he played as a youth. What's interesting to note is that Civilization started out as a real-time game, and he then shifted to turn-based mechanics, much to the chagrin of his publishers. In his GDC talk, he explains how this was done to give the players an opportunity to think ahead, instead of being mired in the anxiety of multiple decisions piling on top of one another. The interesting decisions this afforded players expanded the possibility space, and made the game sustainable for longer play sessions all due to this design decision. How did he make this decision, though? He may have resisted the prevailing winds, but to break with the assumption of real-time control, he adopted the even older convention of board games and strategy games, all of which have turn-based play. Was this creativity, or just having the ability to discern between the right gameplay device for the game he was making? Ironically, when Diablo was first conceived off, it actually started out as a turn-based game, but the developers adjusted it from its initial design document, as real-time play fit more with the action-oriented themes they were making. Both Civilization and Diablo illustrate something interesting, that being the importance of flexibility whilst making a game. Games are highly iterative, and almost always end up different to what was initially conceived. Revolutionary thinkers seem capable of adjusting accordingly, as the constraints of design impose themselves. However, this not only needs to come from the designers themselves, but the context surrounding the production of the game. For example, when Warren Spector was given free rein to make the game of his dreams, Deus Ex, he genuinely came up with something that changed the way we think of shooters. It is seen as the apotheosis of the immersive sim, which Spector describes as a game that does whatever it can to convince players they exist in an alternate world. To do this, he employed a design philosophy that always gives players choices to enable player agency with entirely defined bounds. Once more, though, the idea for Deus Ex didn't come from nowhere, it is steeped in the history of Spector's experiences with games. The game is a fusion of role-playing games, stealth games, and first-person shooters, and it is reflective of the implicit interaction elements of Miyamoto, the systemic design of Will Wright, and is similar to the embedded immersive sensibilities of Uedo. Spector wanted to create a game that views the player as a co-author, and for that, he drew inspiration from some fantastic Dungeons & Dragons campaigns. Dungeon Masters function like game developers, in that they set the rules of a world, but the ensuing action is always emergent. The game's world was also inspired by the conspiracy theory era of the late 90s, and was fundamentally about getting players to examine the future of us as a species. This emergent design ethos has inspired people like Ken Levine, who has now turned away from the metanarrative rationales for constrained player agency in Bioshock, for something that is genuinely interactive in the game he is now making. Has the era of creativity ended, though? Perhaps we have had our equivalent of a golden age in game design, and we are now stuck at the other end of a Cambrian explosion. In general, revolutionary thinkers in games have drawn from inspiration both within and outside our medium, have exhibited an ability to repurpose prior forms in a new context, shown adaptability that allows them to adjust according to the constraints of design, and existed in a context that, at least relatively speaking, afforded them the time and money to take measured risks. Strangely enough, this maps fairly well onto what Mihaly 6centmi highly argues as the necessary preconditions for enabling creativity, whatever the discipline may be. In today's age, though, we see the budgets of games spiraling out of control, more and more corporate interference on the creative freedom of designers, and a design cycle that demands more and more from game developers and their mental well-being. Fortunately, the indie revolution has given more free-range developers to experiment with newer types of games, emotionally driven experiences, and novel fusions of prior genres. Smaller budgets, a manageable scale, less risks and highly decentralized and iterative design, has given us quite a bit of innovation. However, saying being an indie dev is easy is probably an understatement. Regardless, the lessons we see from many in this space coincide with our general understanding about the convention of breaking conventions. One of the progenitors of the indie revolution, Jonathan Blow, exemplifies this well. Braid was conceived explicitly in opposition to many trends in design at the time, but to bring it to fruition, Blow put a lot of his own money into the project to break with the mold. Much like Ueda, Blow is interested in using the language of games to communicate ideas and emotions, which is why the themes of the game include regret, change and redemption, all related in some way to time. He is also an advocate for genuinely thought-provoking gameplay, and wasn't interested in simply using time as a gimmick as many other games do. What's fascinating about Blow is he has the mind of a technical programmer, but also the artistic sensibilities of Fumito Ueda. The design of his puzzles are all rooted in Miyamoto's ethos of non-verbal design, but he took this implicit learning structure and sought to create meaning out of it. Blow is unreserved in his criticism of AAA design, which he often describes as restrictive and lacking in imagination. In his talk, The Main Conflicts of Modern Game Design, he speaks about how ludonarrative dissonance, fake difficulty and the lack of true interactivity in game stories are conflicts we will need to address and are probably not going to be solved with the industry structure we presently have. In other talks, he speaks about how the medium of games constrains creative exploration and the broader ambition of needing to make games that interrogate truth using the language off-games. Braid was a critical and commercial success, and afforded Blow the time to spend years on the open-world puzzle game The Witness. The game Thumper was also conceived of as an explicit rejection of the conventions of design, but those that existed in mainstream music games. Made by the two-person team of Mark Flurry and Brian Gibson, Thumper broke with convention not just in its programming method and design process, but also in its gameplay. Both Mark and Brian were getting fed up of making music games in their prior studios, where they were given the task of highly specialized cross-sections of design, so they broke free and made a game of their own. In interviews, Brian Gibson, who happens to be a musician in the band Lightning Bolt, explains how the whole fantasy of being a rock star and guitar hero and rock band is actually antithetical to what music means to him. Music is a form of community and escapism, not the narcissism that accompanies celebrity. Thumper is not just about receiving pre-authored music. You create your own rhythm by violently slamming into the track, a metaphor for breaking with tradition. Also, the tribal drums that play in the background are meant to push us into unfamiliar territory when it comes to our conventional music tastes, and gets us to explore through gameplay, experiencing the abstraction of sound itself. Also, the time signature strays further and further away from the comfort of 4-4, which is what most music and most music featured in Guitar Hero and Rock Band are rooted in. By breaking away from a corporate context and engaging in a highly iterative design process between a technical programmer and an actual musician, Thumper has broken free of many of the conventions of modern music games and created a new sub-genre, rhythm violence. Subnautica came out of a desire to break with the conventions of violence that is pervasive in games to this day, in conjunction with the creative and survival based aspects of a game like Minecraft. It combines survival, stealth, crafting, horror and terror to create something utterly unique. The game involves escaping from an underwater alien planet after you have crashed landed on it, and you are forced to scavenge in the murky depths to do this. What's more interesting though was the process of designing the game. In a recent talk, Charlie explains how he thinks being creative in design is what is called a wicked problem, or a problem that you don't have the answer to, don't know when you are done, is completely novel and has no existing solutions. Navigating this possibility space required a few crutches which aided in the design of Subnautica. One was to use the lens of emotion taken from Jesse Shell's The Art of Game Design to recalibrate what the game was about. Charlie likened this to Stephen King's assertion that we should listen to the characters in our story and how they effectively write themselves. An underwater game about scavenging is inherently frightening so the game accidentally became a horror game. It wasn't just horror though, it was about terror and the existential fear of Lovecraftian proportions that come about us when we encounter a creature of the sea. To preserve this sense of dread and keep to its non-violent mantra, the game shifted to a stealth based one by using a mechanic called silent running, and the inherent tension of diving under the sea creates interesting risk reward gameplay and resource management scenarios. Another fascinating aspect of Subnautica's design was that it was in early access since 2014. This is something the developers called game design as a service, where your consumers become active participants and playtesters in a game. Not only did this method give them money to work with, it allowed for them to quickly prototype and test new design elements, calibrate the resources and plot points, and build an ever-growing fanbase for the eventual release of the game. Again, being adaptive to the constraints imposed by a game's design while simultaneously having a clear vision aided in creating something unique. This is a governing principle that also permeated the design of Into the Breach, a recent tactics game with a twist that you could see your opponent's next moves. In a recent GDC talk, the developers explained how the mechanic of giving people the ability to see ahead actually trivialized the combat to a point where it became boring, so they had to adjust accordingly. Instead of focusing on protecting the player's units, the design shifted to more defensive play, where you have to defend other units. As the developers at subset games explained, genre conventions exist for a reason, and you need to understand why they exist in order to break them. The lookahead mechanic is the opposite of something like a fog of war system we see in other games, it is an information constraint. The design of Into the Breach also involved removing overworld elements, adjusting enemy units, and adapting the story to fit to this new brand of gameplay, all to reinforce the core gameplay innovation they conceived of. The game also, much like Subnautica, had a fairly long development cycle, and this was afforded by the success of their previous roguelike game FTL. FTL, incidentally, was the product of the initial two-man team of Matthew Davis and Justin Maugh. Both were employees of 2K Games Shanghai Studio, and became dissatisfied with working in a large studio. After seeing the proliferation of indie studios and the creativity afforded to developers by more hands-on design, they founded subset games, and the rest is history. Procedural generation has become extremely popular in the indie space, because as Spelunky's designer Derek Yu explains, it allows for small developers to create huge amounts of content without an obscene amount of work. The problem is that it sometimes creates disjointed levels and uninteresting gameplay, which is why when Derek Yu set out to make Spelunky, he combined the roguelike with a familiar genre and platformers to create something comfortable yet novel. In his book on the game, he also stresses the importance of combining procedural elements with curated design. Seen in how his levels are created using a standard 16-room template that always starts at the top, ends at the bottom, enables pathways between the two, and then layers and objects to create dynamic gameplay and emergent scenarios. Like Into the Breach and Sibnautica, Spelunky also had a lengthy dev cycle. Thanks to investor interest and the help of Jonathan Blow, the game has gone on to popularize roguelike games for a new generation. Procedural generation was also used to excellent effect in Tynan Silvester's innovative game Rimworld. By his own account, the game isn't even really a game, it is a story generator that allows for players to be co-authors in the creation of a story. If you recall, this lineage of collaborative storytelling can be traced back to Warren Spector, and the game took many of its dynamic elements to craft a dynamic story generator in the vein of Dwarf Fortress. However, this new type of game required changing the player's assumptions about how to play. Tynan explains how he had to reframe the assumption players had about how skill should always be rewarded in games. However, in challenging the assumptions of what a game is, Tynan had to get players to accept misfortune and death as part of the game's dynamic storytelling. It has a narrative director you can choose who injects interesting scenarios into the resource-gathering play at the core of the game. You also set the parameters of the world and your characters, like set dressing in a play, and play out unique scenarios every time. Everything from the low fidelity of the graphics to the central loops in the game to the many procedural elements as well were conceived to reinforce the dynamic storytelling of the game. Another fascinating thing Tynan mentions is his method of being creative, or the Ludeon method. It involves just building a database of ideas as they come to you that have no particular use, and then coming back to it at a later date, he explains it as outsourcing the use of an idea to the smarter version of you in the future. Also, much like many of the games already mentioned, Rimworld was in early access for an extended period, having players be an integral part of the creation of not just the stories in the game, but the game itself. It's fascinating, right? There seems to be a through line that unites all these creative indie developers. They all explicitly if not tacitly rejected the assumptions and constraints of mainstream design, created small teams that allowed interdisciplinary collaboration and more holistic design, and stressed the importance of a prolonged period of experimentation and iteration. The trends of procedural generation, genre mixing, designed by constraint, theme and subtraction all make more sense in light of this as well. They serve to enable the creative fantasies of often disgruntled corporate workers who just want the freedom to make something new. Change the process, change the outcome. This was the mantra of Doom's composer Mick Gordon when he set out to create a soundtrack fitting for the apocalyptic shooter Doom. Instead of starting with conventional guitars, he started with synths, forcing him to be creative with its use. He also borrowed techniques from music concerts and cinematic production, drawing inspiration from outside sources, and most importantly, the developers at id allowed him the freedom to experiment with these techniques, which resulted in a soundtrack which was both very familiar, but utterly unique. We often forget that design, regardless of the medium, is a highly process-oriented affair. Creativity can absolutely come out of a specific method, but it is a method of shifting frames and being adaptive. In his GDC talk Level Design Histories, Robert Yang suggests that the programming tools, the culture at the studio, and the assumptions about design formalism have affected the way games have been made, and breaking these assumptions requires we create new conventions of design. In his talk, Practical Creativity, Raph Koster echoes the idea that creativity is ultimately about fusing disparate things together, and this should be at the core of the design philosophy of games aiming for this. This is what I mean when I say breaking conventions is often very conventional. For example, the original Doom was a revolutionary game, setting the template for how first person shooters would be designed for the next decade. The atmosphere at id was one of creative collaboration, and this is reflected in how the game was designed. Although they had a design document bible that suggested the game would be open world, they quickly shifted to level-based play to fit the design of the game. They started out with level geometry that was inspired by the efficiency of military buildings, but then shifted to structures with more sweeping form to create a sense of place and verticality. They also removed unnecessary contrivances like collection mechanics and retries, amplifying the momentum-fueled gameplay at the heart of its design, and pioneered what Matthias Warch called orthogonal unit differentiation, where clear enemies exist on two 2D axes between hitscan and projectile and ranged and melee to create interesting priority decisions for players. Doom revolutionized the design sensibilities of a genre by creating a process of creativity that enabled it and iterating heavily to craft the right experience. What's interesting is how the Doom of 2016 also broke many of the conventions of modern shooter design, that being linear levels, hitscan weapons, and setpiece-oriented design, by going back to the lessons of the original. In their GDC talks, the developers of Doom explicitly outlined how they wanted to go back to the momentum-based combat of the original, so they conceived of push-forward combat to realize this. You get more resources for close-up glory kills, the AI has a harder time hitting you if you are moving, and your guns work as crowd control mechanisms in a level layout that incentivizes moving frenetically through the environment. Once again, by delving into the past, and combining that with a clear process-oriented vision, creativity was enabled by going back to an older convention. Another recent shooter that has been cited as creative is Titanfall 2. When they were prototyping the game, Respawn conceived of action blocks, which are just small chunks of gameplay all members of the team go out and prototype, that serves as a repository for future design. The brilliant time-shifting level was actually conceived of entirely by one member in this phase, giving him free reign to go crazy with design, but it also served as an incredible staging ground for fusing different elements together. The Into the Abyss level was a fusion of the labyrinthium design of one dev, the wall traversal segments of another, a prototype for a shifting landscape by another dev, and a bunch of other conceptual and mechanical details put together by the rest of the members of the team. You would think this would be the recipe for a Frankenstein Monster of a level, but by iterating further on this assortment of ideas, the team created one of the best first person levels in recent memory. Collaboration between departments is one thing, but unity between different disciplines is something else, and this is what Yu Suzuki did when he created his revolutionary game Shenmue. Shenmue is a hybrid mix of adventure game, fighting game, and role-playing game, with grandiose cinematic aspirations, and the team used a method called borderless development to realize this. Designers, screenwriters, playwrights, and movie directors would meet and collaborate, and the design of the game also reflected this. Themes would be complemented by musical compositions, which would then inform the way the game was written and then designed. What was also impressive about Shenmue was how it worked within the constraints of the hardware of the time to push the frontier of cinematic storytelling. Yu Suzuki suggested that you should pursue unconventional things in design, but also find an efficient way of realizing this once you do. For example, the game used procedural sea generation and AI that was both scripted and emergent to create a robust world that still had enough data compression. The motivation for emergent and procedural systems very much parallels Derek Yu's philosophy when it came to its use in spelunky, even though both games could hardly be more different. Shenmue also had an extended period of field research in conjunction with its highly iterative design, with Suzuki making trips to sites in China, and this philosophy also informed Rez when Tetsuya Mizuguchi first conceived of it. The game is a blend of an on-rail shooter and a music game that uses dynamic layering and generative effects to get the player to be a part of the creation of music itself. He drew inspiration from old shooters like Xenon and Xevious, paintings by Vasily Kandinsky, but also went to music festivals and clubs to get a sense of the delirium that accompanies musical creation. Much like the developers of Thumper, the music in the game is meant to be a metaphor, but for unity and transcendence, not breaking conventions. The music in the game was composed specifically for and with Mizuguchi, and he also used novel methods like quantization and generative effects to make sure the player feels like they were in control. In the book Game Invaders, the authors cite how both Shenmue and Rez are games that defy classification because the whole creates a sum that the parts cannot fully realize in themselves. Shenmue becomes a dynamically interactive world where cinema and gameplay blend, and Rez is a synesthetic experience that functions as a metaphor for beauty and creativity itself. The future of creativity in games might feature more interdisciplinary collaboration that can birth even more projects like this, but it has to be infused into the structure of design and not foisted inorganically. God of War was unanimously the game of the year last year, but in the year prior to that, the Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild revolutionized open world design. In their GDC talk, the developers of the new game were explicitly motivated by breaking conventions, and hence the title of their GDC talk. Making the game was one of rediscovering the essence of Zelda and breaking conventions at the same time, fitting our general thesis here. The designers wanted to create a sense of freedom in agency, and to do so, they went back to the original Zelda that afforded players more freedom with what to do. Much like the newer Doom, to break conventions, they went back to their own past. To create this sense of freedom though, they stumbled into some roadblocks, and this is where being adaptive to design is also important. Linear progression and impassable walls become a problem in an open world game, so they changed the structure of progression, giving you the option to tackle dungeons in any order, and circumvented the problem of impassable walls by giving players the ability to climb. This constraint became an opportunity to create new gameplay, and so the climb in conjunction with the gliding mechanic gave players interesting new ways to maneuver in the world. This adaptive quality is much like what Sidmyre did with civilization, and into the breach did with its forward thinking design. This inspired the core gameplay conceit of the Legend of Zelda, which is multiplicative design. The idea here is that players are given the agency and tools to solve problems on their own, and it's up to the designer to enable this. This combines the agentic philosophy of Warren Spector, with the systemic ideas of Will Wright into one package. Also, much like Subnautica, Spelunky, and Braid, there was an extended period of prototyping new mechanics, but it was done in 2D. Conceits like fire-burning wood and log-sloting on water were prototyped first in 2D then applied to the 3D realm. The general structure was to give a goal and let players use their tools to solve problems however they want. For the physics and chemistry engines in the game, the developers wanted to continue the trend of multiplicative gameplay, and so it was designed to service those ends. Magnesis allows you to move objects, but also drop it on enemies. Stasis can be combined with the climb mechanic to propel you over large distances, and the chemistry engine is a system that links all the elements of the world together, whether it be fire, water, electricity, or wind. Again, this was prototyped heavily in 2D before it was implemented in the game. Even the art style of the game was conceived off to reinforce the gameplay. It was stylistic enough so all these absurd mechanics made sense, but it was also realistic enough so people could draw analogies between reality and the game's world. As the art director stated, it made it easy to tell the lies of the game, and create Gotokoro, or the Japanese word for stirring the soul. At the end of the talk, the three designers on stage, or the Triforce, representing creative vision, technical expertise, and artistic integration, were all united under a simple mantra. As you've seen in our talk today, a longer path to bring this game to completion, the three of us, as well as the development team, made some significant changes to some elements while leaving others as they are. I hope you were able to see that breaking conventions means to change, but it can also mean to not change, to keep things as they are. There is a storied tradition of breaking with convention that exists in many pockets of both indie and AAA design today, but it seems as if the context surrounding the creation of games is equally as important. Revolutionary designers like Will Wright, Shigeru Miyamoto, and Fumita Ueda drew inspiration from outside of games, whether it be systemic design, psychology and industrial production, or art and emotion, and infused us into their games. Other designers like Sid Meier and Warren Spector had a clear vision they wanted to realize, but were smart enough to adjust the contours of their game as the constraints of design imposed themselves. They were also given enough freedom and time to realize their creative ideas and teams passionate about implementing it. In the indie space, we see explicit rejections of the status quo for design and smaller teams and longer iteration cycles enabling a proliferation of creativity. Many of the people who have revolutionized the space in the indie scene are former employees of larger corporations who wanted the creative freedom to truly express themselves. However, what unifies all these designers are a set of core principles. Revolutionary designers have a clear vision and focus, but are also adaptive to constraints as they arise. They prototype a lot in isolation, but also iterate and playtest for extended periods of time, and this is all supported by a production context that allows for people to truly express their creative voice. Breaking conventions requires we respect the traditions of the past, but repurpose them for our ideas in the future. Perhaps revolutionary creativity will become a commonplace thing. A convention of breaking conventions.