Why does this headline:

WildTangent’s St. John Declares Consoles Dead

Remind me of this quote:

“We besieged them and killed most of them, and I think we will finish them soon.”

?

Via kottke, I came upon this interview with book cover designer John Gall (I wonder how many Atlas Shrugged jokes he gets in his line of work?) that was fairly compelling. I love this guy’s covers despite having only ever seen them in this video. If you can’t get the video to work in Firefox, I got it to work in IE - just a warning.

He gives five rules for book cover design:

1. Read the Book
2. Inspiration is Everywhere
3. Be Thrifty With Fonts
4. Practice Sound Time Management
5. Rules are Made to be Broken

I think these are great and with a little massaging, can apply to game design as well. Here’s my version:

1. Understand the Context
2. Inspiration is Everywhere
3. Be Thrifty with Mechanics
4. Practice Iteration
5. Rules are Made to Be Broken

Number one seems like the hardest to shoehorn, but really was the first thing I thought of when how to apply this presentation to game design. Galt’s reasoning is that you have to read the book to understand where to go with the cover. It is about preparation. A designer has to have context. Reading the book is context. Playing games that have come earlier in a series, games that evoke similar aesthetics, understanding the fans of a licensed property - these are all ways to gain context and are absolutely essential.

One of the things that the designers on Superman Returns absolutely nailed was that earlier Superman games never let the player feel like Superman. They were hard to control, you ran into technological limitations that would not be limitations for the hero, etc. So they worked on really nailing the feeling of flying at speeds past the sound barrier. They really nailed the feeling of being able to use just your breath to blow away cars. They understood the context that Superman fans wanted the feeling of being Superman more than they wanted the specifics of any particular Superman story. They failed on numerous other fronts and that is a discussion for another time, but they did nail flight and power.

The second rule is just great advice and I didn’t have to change it at all. You would be surprised at how many designers limit themselves to only playing good games or only playing games of the genre they specialize in or never play indie games or Flash games or never read stories outside their comfort zone. You’ll never know what will stick with you, so expose yourself to as much as you possibly can.

Text is how cover designers deliver specific information (the ultimate purpose of the book’s cover) to readers/browsers. Fonts are the way that text is styled. The natural analogue to this in games is mechanics. Mechanics are the style that designers relay the purpose of the design to the player. Much like a book cover can have fonts that confuse, obfuscate and distract from the cover’s purpose, so can a game have mechanics that simple do not fit the setting or desired aesthetics. It isn’t impossible to be successful without being stingy with mechanics, GTA4 is a good example. World of Warcraft is another. Madden is another, at times. But the mechanics in those games are all working to fulfill a desired aesthetic. If the plan covers this, embrace gluttony of mechanics. Otherwise, be miserly. It is good advice.

By “practice sound time management”, what Gall really means is “don’t be stuck throwing shit on a cover because yous pent too much time pursuing the wrong avenues”. You see this excuse all the time in honest postmortems: “Well we had a great idea for an xyz system, but we just ran out of time.” Iteration, while it is turning into an industry buzzword, is one of the designers best tools in avoiding throwing shit mechanics into a game because you don’t have time for anything else.

Rules are made to broken is a cliché, but clichés usually stick around because they are grounded in truth. Most “rules” aren’t so much rules as they are guidelines or heuristics. Developers eager to ax a feature like to say “We can’t do that. It was terrible in Game ABC”. That may be. But is Game ABC of the same genre? Was it trying to evoke the same play dynamics? Did Game ABC’s team have time to figure out why that feature didn’t work? Sometimes those features are terrible by nature, but sometimes they just need massaged into fitting properly. This is why you see few game design rules. Given the proper setting, almost anything can be made to be fun.

All in all, this was a good list to keep in one’s back pocket.

EA Sports has been added to the BrandTags website yielding some interesting results such as “Sweatshop”, “Monopoly” and “Crap”. Thanks all. But no worries, each of those terms seem to be used on over a dozen companies each.

My GTA progress has been suspended for a month or so due to my second Red Ring incident. The first was when I was just getting into Oblivion, so I guess the box doesn’t care too much for “open world” titles, hm? I could bitch about it, but there are more important things in the world. I feel like I’ve gained a (likely temporary) perspective after finishing Randy Pausch’s book. Seriously, go buy it or borrow it from someone.

Talk to you all when something riles me up.

Tom Chick is much better at the whole journalism thing than I:

I’ve variously read that the GTA4 storyline is “Oscar worthy”, “Oscar-caliber”, and “our Citizen Kane”, which makes me cringe. It just goes to show that the average games writer wouldn’t know a good story if it played itself for him. I still think it was a great game – yes, great – in spite of significant shortcomings. But now that I’m done, I wish Rockstar had made a better game for Liberty City and I wish they had written a better story for Niko Bellic. Because these are two of the most memorable characters you’ll meet in any videogame.

I’m not finished with the story mode yet, but I keep feeling anticipation that the Big Artistic Moment is coming if I’m patient enough. I had the same disappointment over the lack of such Moment in Bioshock. This is less of a rag on Rockstar, as GTA4 is better than anything I’ve been allowed to put out there and more of a rag on the Fanboy Media for failing to challenge us developers.

First, the headline…

Penguins honor Beaver County teenager with cancer

…is horribly and hilariously ambiguous. Secondly, the kid gets an e-high five from me for the following quote. Non-Pittsburghers: Rooney owns the Pittsburgh Steelers and Lemieux is part-owner of the Pittsburgh Penguins. Kevin McClatchy, majority owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates, much like his team during most games, was absent.

As John Challis was standing between Mr. Lemieux and Mr. Rooney, he looked at them and said, “Wow. I never thought I’d be talking with two owners of sports teams in the city.”

“There’s only one missing,” Mr. Lemieux said, referring to the Pirates.

John quickly replied, “Yeah, but at least the two winners are here.”

Oh, snap!

Link!

I usually don’t post about politics, because I think it is a loser’s game, but this gave me a smile. In 2004, the Libertarian Party ran a wingnut candidate* named Michael Badnarik. The guy’s name STARTS WITH BAD, not to mention the name sounds like something out of Rocky and Bullwinkle.

I heard on the radio that Bob Barr would be running on the ticket this year, so I jumped over to the site to see if there was news when I saw the name of the fourth place guy on the ticket. His name is Michael Jingozian. His name STARTS WITH JINGO. People like this should realize that they are disqualified for winning offices.

I mean it’s like running Jimbo J. Puppykiller. He gets my vote.

*In the interests of full disclosure, I voted for him out of disgust with my other choices.

I just discovered the GDC pictures that Robin Hunicke (MySims, Boom Blox) put up on her blog a few weeks ago. First, not only is she a cheerfully vibrant person that made the Game Design Workshop tolerable on what little sleep I was running on, but she is an excellent photographer. So if you want to know what the Game Design Workshop is all about, check out the photos. The extremely sparse captioning makes it even more compelling because even though I was there, I’m WTFing at some of the pictures. It looks like we all had a great time!

Removing the context from some of them made for some really compelling shots. I was looking at this one for about thirty seconds before I realized that was my handwriting. Then I remembered the card game we created from which the shot comes, but explaining it I think would take away from the beauty of the shots.

One of my favorites has to be this one of Frank Lantz (Parking Wars, Chain Factor). I guess he is psychic?

Moral of the post: go to the Game Design Workshop.

From NY Magazine:

Video-game players — and critics — want GTA IV to be everything at once: They want the story to be Moving and Important and Consequential in the manner of Coppola so as to defend their medium. Plus they want to fire rocket launchers from a motorcycle while drunk driving. It’s unlikely that this combination will ever quite work — not just because of the uncanny valley, but especially because the balance of action to narrative is tilted so heavily toward blowing shit up.

The fact that there is over a half million people that are on Facebook, care enough to join and stay and think that this will work makes me very, very sad that there isn’t an intelligence test in order to vote. This is why politicians can bend us over and have their way with us.