Soul Food for Business

I am hardly surprised at the findings of an MIT study that found that IBM employees that maintained online social relationships brought additional revenue to the company's bottom line. Any business involved in building relationships between the company and 3rd parties stands to gain from employees that regularly exercise their social circles. Malcolm Gladwell drives this point home in his book "The Tipping Point", in which he treats social and business circles as environments in which information is compared to a spreading virus and people are categorized into three distinct roles in spreading that virus. The thing that impressed me most about IBM's decision was their underlying philosophy of how to deal with the phenomena of Social Networking. Rather than to assume that it was a nuisance that interfered with the mechanisms of productivity, they decided that since Social Networking was not going to vanish, they might as well try to understand it. In the end, through regulation and guidelines to set expectations, IBM turned a "problem" into a competitive edge. Bravo.

The Tech Wave

Yesterday, one of my students asked if consoles would continue to be defined as ancillary devices hooked up to a TV, or if the word would evolve to refer to a new generation of devices that serve as portable multimedia players.

Historically, the record is mixed. In some regards, everybody still casually refers to broadcast monitors as TeleVisions, (TVs) regardless whether the technology is using a cathode ray tube (CRT), a plasma screen or an liquid crystal display (LCD). The same is not true of audio devices. You can identify the geriatric technophiles in the room by whether they listen to LPs, cassettes, CDs or their iPod. I'm pretty sure nobody says, " Check out the new tune on my MP3 player". And even if some folks did, it would fall out of fashion soon enough. After all, MP3 as a format will one day be supplanted by something either superior or with better compression.

By it's very technological nature, the video games industry must undergo change. Technology never remains static, but rather flows, like a wave, barreling in an unstoppable fashion toward new shores. Companies like Nintendo have always been able to adapt. Indeed, the ability to adapt to changes in technological waves has less to do with expertise, and more with innovation and core philosophies.

Can anything Virtual be Monumental?

Today I read that video games are now legally eligible for National Endowment ofr the Arts funding effectively granting them legal recognition as a work of art. Blogger John funk said it best: 

The "games as art" debate will likely continue raging for years before videogames reach complete cultural acceptance, but at least one important organization now officially considers games art: The US Federal Government. Or, rather, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) considers games art - which technically amounts to the exact same thing.

The whole purpose of NEA funding is to create a means by which an artist can create a work of art that would enhance the public good. The logic is fairly sound - beautification fosters civic pride and paves the way for economic prosperity.

This made me wonder:  It's easy to see how a physical work would add value to civilization and serve as a lightning rod for business and creativity. But what if the work you are creating is virtual? How do you associate the creators and the location in which the works were made with the works themselves? I think that film serves as the best model of what we can expect. As a resident of LA, it is easy to see the utter lack of monuments that actually represent the film industry. The real places of inspiration should be the massive sound stages at Warner Bros., Universal, Paramount, Sony, etc., but for lack of anything tangible, people are instead drawn to the Hollywood Walk of Fame or Mann Grauman's Chinese Theater. Yet despite the fragmentation of the film industry, Hollywood remains at least for now, the de facto capital of the film world. This is largely due to the legacy of Hollywood but really has little to do with the reality of any global monopoly on film making. But we can certainly see the cultural benefit the United States has enjoyed from the Hollywood legacy.

What is important to remember is the financial mechanisms, tax structures, investors, talent pools, etc. that were put into place that created the environment for Hollywood to exist in the first place. I think that the availability of NEA funding for video games is a step in the right direction. The reality is that the video games industry is very much still in its infancy. There is little reason to expect that without further state and federal economic incentives that video games will remain an iconic jewel of American culture and instead come to be known as an industry ruled by the China, Japan, Germany or France. If you don't believe me, go ask anyone if they still think France is the King of the movies.

Outsourcing Sensitive Material

I recently mentioned the potential benefits of outsourcing visual effects to a client of mine. After summarizing the typical cost benefit, my client lamented, "Unfortunately, outsourcing is not really an option for us since most of our customers are defense contractors. Nearly all of the materials we handle are confidential and can't leave the country". Indeed, this problem exists anytime there is any part of a visual effects contract that is sensitive such as a classified data, branded assets, intellectual property, or even a secret ad campaign. I myself have encountered this problem many times when dealing with Pixar and their peculiar brand of security and caution.

The final shot using confidential assets.

The proxy can be a close approximation...

Or the proxy can be a simple cube.

Outsourcing sensitive materials is indeed tricky, but not in the least a barrier to finding low cost alternatives to in-house production. Many studios use a technique in which proxies are used in place of sensitive materials. An example of this would be a promotional video of a new, high tech fighter plane in an exciting dog fight high above the mountains of Afghanistan. The plane, of course, is still in production and any part of the digital model, even the shape of the fuselage, could be considered highly confidential. But while the video would feature the fighter plane, the majority of the vfx budget would be consumed by assets that have nothing to do with the plane. Constructing the environment (the mountains, trees, volumetric clouds, lighting, etc.) constitutes a huge part of the shot. Another major cost is the animation, particle effects and camera work for the shot. None of these things are confidential... only the fighter plane is. Therein lies an opportunity to outsource the majority of the vfx cost to a lower cost studio.

The trick to making a proxy work is to design good proxies. In the case mentioned above, the technical lead would request a parent node in the final deliverable that contains a low resolution proxy of the aircraft. The level of detail could be anywhere from a perfect duplicate painted flat gray, to a simple cube. Since all of the animation, particle effects and lighting considerations are built around the proxy, dailies will reflect an excellent approximation of how the final shot will look. Once the technical lead is happy with the outsourced shot, the source files are brought back under the internal control of your studio. The proxy can then be replaced with the actual confidential model, and final adjustments can be made before rendering.

The overall cost benefit to using this technique is substantial. If you are producing a 15 second shot with a small, internal team of 1 3D modelers, 1 Animator, 1 Lighting/VFX artist, an Audio Engineer and a Director/Producer, you can expect to complete this shot in about 3-4 weeks, requiring 75 man days. This shot would cost roughly $39k internally, and about $17k if it were outsourced overseas. In the particular case above, fully 60% of the shot could be outsourced. This means the overall cost of this shot could be reduced to (39k)40% + (17k)60% = $25.8k for a savings of $13.2k. 

It is important to remember that the example above assumes a working relationship with a reputable outsourcing studio. Searching for and vetting outsourcing studios is a time consuming and expensive process. Furthermore, most outsourcing studios tend to specialize in certain areas and genres. However, once you have found several studios with whom you have established relationships, the savings become quite tangible.

Train Wreck Valley

"Train wreck valley" is a curve that describes the increasing likelihood that you will walk out of a movie with craptacular acting, writing, special fx, etc. But as the curve approaches 100%, a funny thing happens: you stay to watch the entire film because it is so bad, you find yourself laughing hysterically.

My favorite train wreck: "Savage Planet", a distant planet plagued by budgets so low, the giant carnivorous bears that stalk the "actors" can't be shown in the same frame because they are all stock footage. Priceless.

Train wrecks have a strange appeal to us that is at the same time, both morbid and hysterical. Morbid, because even though we know the film is so awful, we can't help but to stare as we walk out of schadenfreude. Hysterical, because the execution is so bad that we experience a pleasure response from creative choices that are so far from logical as to be absurd. Train wrecks essentially become parodies of themselves.

So far, the Train wreck genre has found a comfy home in the vaults of SyFy, but translating this genre to games will be a more difficult challenge. The reasons are that the game will have to walk a thin line between logical outcomes and the absurd in order to achieve satisfying game-play. This is best achieved by creating ground rules in which the player understands that certain core elements of the the game will remain engaging and reliable, while other elements are fair game for absurdity.  By this standard, Atari's E.T. doesn't hold up, because while the game itself is so awful as to be amusing, there is not sufficient structure in the game to keep it engaging or predictable. Starship Titanic, on the other hand, does a great job of being absurd without sacrificing core game play.

The number of games that venture into the realm of humor and absurdity are already quite rare. The prospects of someone developing games that are both profitable and witty, scathing parodies is doubtful... but for the sake of advancing games into new genres, I'd love to see some.

Logic as Art

Bertrand Russell once expressed his sense of mathematical beauty in these words:

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty — a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.^[1]

Games certainly have the capacity to entertain and enchant us. But is the logic of game design so separated from the narrative as to be irrelevant to the aesthetic qualities? I recently examined this question by conducting the following analysis:

Games, by definition are formal systems. First of all, let's look at the definition of a system:

sys·tem, n.

1. A group of interacting, interrelated, or interdependent elements forming a complex whole. 

2. A functionally related group of elements, especially:

a. The human body regarded as a functional physiological unit.

b. An organism as a whole, especially with regard to its vital processes or functions.

c. A group of physiologically or anatomically complementary organs or parts: the nervous system; the skeletal system.

d. A group of interacting mechanical or electrical components.

e. A network of structures and channels, as for communication, travel, or distribution.

f. A network of related computer software, hardware, and data transmission devices.

3. An organized set of interrelated ideas or principles.

4. A social, economic, or political organizational form.

5. A naturally occurring group of objects or phenomena: the solar system.

6. A set of objects or phenomena grouped together for classification or analysis.

7. A condition of harmonious, orderly interaction.
8. An organized and coordinated method; a procedure. 

9. The prevailing social order; the establishment.

All of the definitions in red are directly applicable to games. Now, let's examine what makes a formal system.


According to M. Alan Kazlev [1], a formal system is [a construct] in which statements can be constructed and manipulated with logical rules. So at the core, a game is basically a logical construct. Everything else is superficial, that is to say, the narrative, characters, music and art is all window dressing placed on top of the construct for aesthetic reasons.

Here's an example from Raph Koster of how a story tacked onto a formal game structure can have profound ethical implications:

The bare mechanics of the game do not determine its semantic freight. Let’s try a thought experiment. Let’s picture a mass murder game wherein there is a gas chamber shaped like a well. You the player are dropping innocent victims down into the gas chamber, and they come in all shapes and sizes. There are old ones and young ones, fat ones and tall ones. As they fall to the bottom, they grab onto each other and try to form human pyramids to get to the top of the well. Should they manage to get out, the game is over and you lose. But if you pack them in tightly enough, the ones on the bottom succumb to the gas and die.

I do not want to play this game. Do you? Yet it is Tetris. You could have well-proven, stellar game design mechanics applied toward a repugnant premise. To those who say the art of the game is purely that of the mechanics, I say that film is not solely the art of cinematography or scriptwriting or directing or acting. The art of the game is the whole….

 …All artistic media have influence, and free will also has a say in what people say and do. Games right now seem to have a very narrow palette of expression. But let them grow….It is not surprising that we wonder whether games or TV or movies have a social responsibility–once upon a time we asked the same thing about poetry. Nobody really ever agreed on an answer.

    The constructive thing to do is to push the boundary gently so that it doesn’t backfire. That’s how we got Lolita and Catcher in the Rye and how we got Apocalypse Now. As a medium, we have to earn the right to be taken seriously. [2]

But it is important to note that while all games are formal systems, they are also media. All media has the capacity to be art and in fact achieves the status of art when the communicative element is either exceptional or is open to multiple interpretations:

Raph Koster argues that Media becomes art when the communicative element is either novel or exceptionally well done. This communicative element should be open to multiple interpretations, for if there is only one possible meaning, the message no longer becomes an interactive dialog between the piece and the observer. He further argues that there is a crucial difference between games portraying the human condition and the human condition merely existing in games. [2]

Games, therefore, possess a unique duality, in that they are simultaneously constructs of logic and media. The implications of this formal duality is that games are constructs in which logic manifests as art in such cases where an underlying narrative exists within the game. While the narrative of a game can be distinguished from the game itself, the outcome of the narrative resulting from gameplay is inseparable from the formal system of the game itself.

[1] http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/45b2b9be57dea
[2] "A Theory of Fun for Game Design" Raph Koster, 2004  http://www.theoryoffun.com/

What is real in social gaming?

In a recent editorial in the New York Times, a reader laments that 60 million people playing Farmville might better spend their time getting out and growing some actual plants.

I actually agree with the dismay of the author that so many people would spend both money and time investing in Farmville. It can be argued in defense of Farmville that people enjoy playing games and as such it stands on the merit of entertainment. However, I would argue that Farmville offers poor value as social entertainment and to this point I should draw some very important distinctions between Farmville and social networks such as Facebook or Real Life Plus, a social network I am currently building.

The first point is that Farmville is not truly socially interactive. Players build and optimize their farms in a bubble without any real time interaction with friends. The sole purpose of roping in your friends is to increase your farm efficiency through networking, not meaningful socializing. The mechanic exists for marketing purposes and it is very good at sucking in new players. Social networks like Real Life Plus want to facilitate genuine, lasting friendships through chat, sharing and interactive social play.

The second point is that Farmville is completely endogenous. No value is created from Farmville that exists beyond the scope of the game. Social games ought to build an online community by building a space in which users can play, explore and chat in real time. Real Life Plus creates meaningful value that is tied into the real world through our Personal Assistant who will suggest movies, books and activities the user might like based on their personalities. After you have your adventures, we encourage users to share their experiences with friends online.  In the end, both Farmville and RLP will teach players basic skills in economics, but players at RLP will have additionally built meaningful friendships.

Online social spaces are now the norm for the new generation. You can't separate online socialization from reality - it is part of our society in every sense that cell phones and e-mail are part of our society. The lack of a cell phone or e-mail is considered a huge social handicap. Ultimately, I believe games like Farmville will fall in and out of fashion, but social networks like Facebook and RLP will have a lasting presence because they have the social glue of true friendships to sustain them. I can't wait to look backwards ten years from now to see where things went.