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I
wanted to talk very quickly about World
of Warcraft, because you said some interesting things about that. You
called it unethical in its game design, I guess because of its exploitative
qualities.
JB: Yeah. Although, when I use a word like
"unethical," that's a strong word. I do think it's a little bit
accurate to say that about World of
Warcraft, but what I'm really applying the word to is the widespread
industry practice that produces all of those games. I
t's not like World of Warcraft came out of nowhere,
and it's not like no other game is trying to copy World of Warcraft. Everybody is trying to, with the same gameplay
mechanics. They exploit these psychological phenomena that are pretty well
understood by designers right now, and will get a better understanding of over
time, because that's how it goes. But they know what they're doing. That's what
makes it unethical.
I
was going to challenge that, not in the sense that I actually believe the
challenge, but just to see what your take on it would be. Don't these kind of
mechanics mirror all game mechanics, in that it's small returns for repetitive
tasks that you learn, and with a social dynamic overlaid over that, whether
you're doing it with your friends or whatever? You're having a nice time, and
it's just a different way of framing Tetris.
JB: There's always a matter of degree. One
of the things... I've done a couple of lectures on this, and I never remember
what I said in which one, but one of the things that comes down to is natural
rewards versus artificial rewards. Every game has both of those.
An artificial
reward is a cool-sounding sound effect for when you... I don't know, Tetris didn't really have cool sound
effects, but imagine that it did -- when you filled out four lines, you got a
cool, Bejeweled-like particle effect
or something like that.
Maybe
it would've been a success if it had that. (laughter)
JB: Maybe the XBLA Tetris...yeah. (laughter) So that's even an artificial reward, and
lots of games do that. But what I feel is that there's some very fuzzy line
somewhere, where if you're on one side of the line, players are playing your
game because of the natural rewards, because they enjoy playing the game's core
mechanics. Tetris is like that. It
maybe feels a little addictive, and we feel a little wary of having that
addiction, but it's innocent in certain ways.
Tetris
had little cutscenes in it. It had the little dancing Russian guys in the
arcade version. But I think that was maybe more to provide a break so that you
don't fucking die from all the intensity of dealing with this. But for the most
part, when you're playing Tetris,
you're enjoying it because you enjoy fitting the blocks together.
Whereas when you play World of Warcraft -- and what I'm about to say is a generalization,
since different players enjoy different things, obviously -- a lot of the
appeal of playing World of Warcraft
is not in the core gameplay mechanic, because it's boring, a lot of the time.
Sometimes when you're on a really good raid with a team and you're getting
teamwork going and that's a close call, that can be exciting, but if you graph
out what players are doing over the average 12-hour play session or whatever...
That's obviously hyperbole, but if you're
looking at what activities they're actually performing, there's not that much
good gameplay in there. I think what keeps them in there is, at first, the
level ding, because it's very addictive to get that. "Okay, I've got more
gold. Whatever." And eventually, they've made this huge time investment
and they've got a character there and they know what that level ding feels like
and the next one is pretty far off, but they can get there! And it's not any
better, because this is like number 67. It's got to be better than 66!
And
they've got their time logged that says, "I've now logged 78 days in this
game, and if I throw that away, then it's all been a lie."
JB: It's all been for naught, yeah. There's
many different reasons that people play these games, though. One of the things
people have said to me after lectures is, "Well, I play World of Warcraft for the social
element," which I think is a little bit true, but again, I think it's
magnitude. They're playing World of
Warcraft, and aren't on IRC or a forum or talking to people in real life.
Social interaction in real life is way
better. If you look at how long it takes to communicate to people in World of Warcraft, and the depth and
subtlety of the ideas you can get through may be a little bit better on a
headset... often it's just typing, but even on a headset, it's not good
communication like you have with a person in real life. If what they really
cared about was rich, social interaction, they would be out there in the real
world.
Questing.
(laughter)
JB: Yeah. What it's really about is that
the social aspect is something that they value in the context of this game, but
it's really the game. In fact, what they've said is, "Oh, I like having
social interactions when I can go out and kill some monsters with people."
I think that's true, but you just look at the whole of it and how diluted all
these things are -- how diluted the gameplay and social interactions and all
that are -- and it just doesn't make it worth it, I think. It's on the wrong
side of the line.
Now what's scary about that is that World of Warcraft was the most
concentrated gameplay version of an MMO ever, right? They have the least
downtime. I haven't played some of the games since then, but certainly EverQuest is like fucking downtime
forever. It's like you have one fight, then you go sit and meditate for like
five minutes before you can have another fight.
Think
about what you've done! (laughter)
JB: (laughter) Think about the tragedy of
killing the poor swamp rat that you just killed, and the next 100 that you're
going to have to kill. That's I think is one of the core reasons... obviously
there's audio and visuals that WoW
has that are better and stuff, but they also did give the player more gameplay.
I don't want to say, "WoW is
completely barren," and things, but by the standards of any good
single-player game, the gameplay in WoW
is really kind of terrible.
Is
it possible to have an ethical MMO? How would you go about doing that? Or are
MMOs basically about hitting things for numbers?
JB: No, I think that you easily could. What
is an MMO? It's just a game where you have a lot of players in a world. That
really could be almost anything. I actually had a plan for my next project
after Braid, which I almost would've
started by now if I hadn't decided not to do it, which was like an MMO with a
different core gameplay mechanic, which was heavily about communication and
puzzle-solving and that stuff.
It had a level progression system, but it
was more about having pacing to how the levels open up. It was like a Diablo-style, isometric perspective, 3D
rendered game, but like that, where you're looking down at a dungeon.
So the
leveling system is more about having the dungeons open up at an appropriate
pace of complexity. It wasn't about keeping people playing. In fact, people
would max out relatively early, and hopefully they would keep playing the game
after that because the new levels they could explore are interesting, and they
actually enjoy exploring the levels.
 I think there's some extent to which some
games have already had gameplay that people enjoy for the gameplay. Puzzle Pirates is an MMO that's done
very well, especially for an indie game, and for the budget they developed it
on.
It doesn't have WoW kind of
numbers, but it's an MMO, and you go in there and there are games like Bejeweled and Dr. Mario and stuff like that that you play.
I haven't played that into the late game,
but I played like eight hours of it or something, and the time that I was
playing it, it was really about the gameplay. It was like, "Awesome! I'm
going to beat a carpenter on this trip and fill in the little gourds," and
it was fun.
I enjoyed it for what it was, unlike every other MMO that I've played.
And I'm sure that there are other ones. I haven't played one percent of MMOs,
and if you count all the ones out of Korea
and stuff, I don't even know what they all are. So I'm sure that there are some
doing it, but they're not the most popular ones.
One
final question. You sat out the start of your session about how you just want
to make games that change peoples' lives, in a way, which is a good vision, but
a grand one as well. Is that possible? Has that ever happened before, you
think?
JB: Absolutely. In fact, it's not a
question of whether you can change peoples' lives, because that was the point
of my three-minute opinion thing that I gave. And actually the first Montreal
lecture where I was talking about World
of Warcraft being unethical, which is that games are part of peoples'
environment now. They're everywhere.
And it's the whole nature versus nurture
thing. The old philosophical question is "Are people products of their
origins or their environment?" And it's kind of been resolved that it's
sort of both. We always seesaw in different ways, but your environment has a
big effect on who you are, so games have to have an effect on who you are,
because they're just there, and you play them. They're a mental environment and
an audiovisual environment that you spend time with.
So then the question is not "Do they
affect you?" but "What is the effect and how big is the effect and
how long does it last?" And I don't know the answers to those things, but
it's definitely something that we should explore thoughtfully. That's all.
Which is something that previous people
haven't done. Television, obviously, has an effect on people, whatever that is,
and various contradictory studies say different things, but it does have
effects. Television very rapidly degenerated into just crappy shows, like
"whatever we can get viewing eyeballs for."
In some sense, the same thing is inevitable
in the games industry, because if you're just chasing money, that's what you
do. The big companies are going to chase money, and that's fine, but I'm hoping
with the internet, people who have different goals than just chasing money will
be able to find distribution for their game. It may be a smaller audience, but
they hopefully can find it.
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In this interview I said that Braid had some influence on Rod Humble's game The Marriage, but this can't be true since Rod didn't play Braid until close to the ship date. I must have been thinking of something else, and gotten things confused due to the sleep-addled state in which the interview was conducted.
I find this to be a shocking and horrible development in modern gaming, and anyone who follows this model with the intent of "taking it to the next level" - a common goal in development; the same thing, but more of it - is moving beyond the unethical into the outright immoral. It is not merely an encouragement of irresponsibility, but an active extermination of individuality and creativity.
This is not in any way intended to be a slam on Jonathan Blow's desire to drive gaming in new directions and provide experimental types of games, nor am I saying that Braid should never have been made. Any defense of individuality must accept that individuals will frequently want things and do things that are distasteful to others, and those things may even be seen as desirable by large groups of people. It can be productively argued that if nobody hates your game, your game doesn't have any real merit in the first place, and Jonathan has certainly opened a valuable discussion. He injects great insight to that discussion, and asks valid questions that drive the seeking of valid answers.
When you turn from playing Braid to reading Jonathan's elucidation of the principles behind it, you find the very opposite of how I see Braid itself: he encourages creativity and individuality, calling for developers to display more of both.
Jonathan's most incisive statement (IMO) has been the basic truth that WoW is not a good game, that it has gone too far. I entirely agree with that; I don't like WoW either, but for very different reasons. What Braid demonstrates to me is that it is every bit as possible to go too far in the other direction, and every bit as bad for the industry as a whole. If most game developers were trying to make something like Braid instead of something like WoW, and there are certainly many people pointing at Braid as an inspiration, things would still suck. The real lesson - and I think Jonathan would agree - is that what really sucks isn't what game you're chasing, but the idea of chasing someone else's game at all. When all the games are variations on the same theme, whether they're all MMOs or all RTS or all Braid, there is simply not enough variance in the population.
The principle of expressive fertility applies: there must be many kinds of games with many kinds of gameplay. There must be games like Braid, and there must be games like WoW, and there must be games like Tetris (yet another game I don't like), and all the spaces in between. You can't eliminate the games that suck, because your opinion is no better or worse than mine - and we'll never agree completely on which games suck.
Getting beyond that, this was a fascinating interview about a great game. Pages 3 and 4 in particular, dealing with the intent and thought processes behind Braid, grabbed me.
So you contradict your own conclusion, because Johnthan *is* expressing himself through his game. Braid is in part a response to the *way* WoW makes players meet designer expectations. He's saying it forces players, therefore it's artificial, where as with Braid the player learn naturally what the designer expects.
I don't see why he'd agree that "chasing the designer at all" is a bad thing, as not all games are sandboxes. A great designer is a pleasure to "chase".
Expressive fertility is for players. Designers already have it; they can make whatever game they want, and they can restrict and control the player experience as much or as little as they desire. Where Braid fails in this regard is that most of the goals have one and only one path leading there. It reduces to a maze - one path leads out, the rest are dead-ends. The ability to choose another maze and come back to this one later is just a book of mazes. "This one is too hard; I'll turn the page." The player has no ability to solve any maze in a new and unexpected fashion.
Chasing someone else's game is about designers. A designer who begins construction of a new game by saying "this will be just like that other game over there, except with X and Y and Z" is chasing someone else's game, instead of leveraging the environment of expressive fertility he naturally enjoys.
Creativity that begets more creativity is good. Because Braid does not beget more creativity from the player, it is not-good in that space (which doesn't make it bad). Because chasing someone else's game is not creative at all, it is also not-good, although creative elements might conceivably be added. Even the sandbox game is not necessarily good; it takes very little creativity to stick an avatar in an environment with a physics engine, and you have no assurance that the player will do anything more than duplicate what he does in other sandbox games.
The restrictions of the game environment stimulate creativity - make them too loose, and there WILL be none; make them too tight, and there CAN be none. While neither is good, I find only the latter to be actively bad.
How many of us joined this industry with high hopes of making outstanding contributions and redefine genres ? Only to end up being wage slave for large publishers trying to create and design the next Slot Machine of the industry. The take-over by large corporations and the recent mergers are only further proof of this tendency, obliterating the creativity and leaving a lot of people in the dark, hoping for their big break, one day... It's very easy to criticize but how many of you actually took 3 years of your life and made a game that you truly believe in ?
The industry is in a very sad state right now. The future brings us: In-game micro payments, free to play with tons of ads, slot machine design approach (think about the pathetic old lady with her ice cream bucket filled with quarters at Las Vegas). The Asian gaming market is actually a very good example of this unethical design approach. I understand the economical mechanics behind our industry, but I think that now we are unbalanced and we lean only toward the financial aspect of this medium.
Since I first entered this industry, I've been waiting for this day forever, the day when finally creators can make games with their soul and their mind. I believe that democratizing the game creation process and making it accessible to small teams is key to reinvigorate this industry. Jonathan did not mention XNA, but in my opinion it's a good first step in the right direction (PSN and WiiWare as well).
I truly hope that one day our industry matures enough to reach a point where we can offer content for everybody and we don't only focus on the next big trend / Pop phenomenon. Where we can aspire to offer something else than pre-chewed ideas and universes.
Gaming is more than money, it's a beautiful blend of art, literature, philosophy, cinema, music and more.
We do have now a very powerful medium in our hands, and I hope that we push it to where it truly belongs.
Why are we so afraid to create intellectual content ? We will scare the mass ? We won't sell enough of Ever Crack 28 or Bejewel V.45 ? There is room for all genres, just look at the literature industry and the movie industry, we are no different.
Again, thank you Jonathan for your achievement, and lets hope it will pave the way to more creations like yours. There is hope for this industry.
That Braid only has one right solution out of an amazing variety of clever ones makes it a failure? Are we using the number of solutions as a metric for successful game design now?
"Expressive fertility for players" can also take place in the mind. That doesn't mean the game should (or can) respond to all the creative approaches players have.
If you've played Braid, then you know that you can try all sorts of creative ways to reach the "one" solution. You don't solve all parts of the puzzle in the same order or way either. You also know there are many layers of interpretation of the story. If these aren't enough for you, I'm surprised you haven't dismissed almost all non-Spore games out there as "not-good".
The problem is, this is exactly the kind of game that should have extra levels or DLC. I'd like to play more, but I can't, because now I know the solutions!
And to the anonymous commenter... XNA is an absolutely awesome step in the right direction, especially with the arrival of Community Games. I think we're going to see a lot more games next year that aren't "more of the same", but by the same token, I think none of them are going to be like Braid. There's a world of possibilities out there, and a lot of them haven't been explored simply because nobody knows how to make money exploring them. To the indie developer, this is an open doorway begging to be entered, while the larger studios just nervously scurry past as though it isn't there.
Designing a puzzle with a primary solution dictated by the environment and rules of play isn't the same thing as creating a sequence that the player must follow, the difference being that the player is completely free to move within the space created and by the rules created, and all those rules are transparent to the player. Because of this, I don't believe that creating a space with a specific puzzle solution is limiting the players' creativity, any more than placing them in another environment that limits their movement. There may often be only one 'right' solution, but if that solution is a natural product of the rules of interaction and of the environment I think there's still plenty of room for players to feel creative, if not necessarily inventive.
And yes, it's an original puzzle game, disguised as a platformer. So don't be surprised if the challenges it features have only one solution. Puzzles aren't meant to be solved in unexpected ways.
I think some puzzles should push for more possible solutions or methods of a solution, but even if they do only have one solution that can be good. Especially in the case of Braid, where there is a message involved and themes to be expressed. Those things could be compromised or more easily misinterpreted or simply backfire or contradict with the important messages and subtler metaphors.
"subjugation and submission", wow. What a closed mindset. I see it more like the designer saying "Hey, I thought of a cool riddle! Can you solve it?" Most of the puzzles can be solved by logical thinking, so it's not necessarily forcing you to think like the designer, just to think logically...
In a way, the fact that the game puts you in someone else's head and shows you how someone else is thinking is still a beneficial thing. It's expanding someone's world-view somewhere :)
I especially liked the usage of the puzzle you create to effect the environment you are playing in.
great demo
I believe in every game I make.
Being in the industry proper does not make you less important, less creative, or mean you contribute less to 'advancing games' than some indie who sinks a bunch of money into a personal pet project.
That's the problem with this stuff: people get carried away. We get that you like Braid. Many of us don't understand why (simple platforming, simple puzzles, time mechanics that are mainly borrowed from other games, etc) but that's a matter of personal preference.
But Braid has redefined nothing. It has 'advanced' nothing, at least nothing more than any other game. It's just a game that has some fans and some detractors.
The only thing Braid seems to have truly proven is the 'indie' effect: if an independent developer makes a game, it gets a cred and score boost from every reviewer who is anxious to rattle on and on about 'death of the industry' and 'games need creativity' and blah blah blah. It's a soapbox catalyst.
Industry games have done more to 'advance gaming' than any of these recent indie darlings. That's just a fact.
"simple puzzles, time mechanics that are mainly borrowed from other games"
Case in point. Now, I can entirely understand how playing through some small early portions of the game could give this impression, but I can only say that anyone who believes the complete collection of Braid puzzles to be 'simple' is either a genius beyond the reckoning of man or someone who has only played the demo.
Anyway, there's no need to get defensive. If it's a soapbox catalyst, then I think it's perhaps time you took a CLEAN look at where you, yourself, are standing.
I have.
My issue is not specifically with Braid. My issue is with the culture of defeatism that we engender with the constant, nonsensical cry of "there is no creativity in games!". While I don't doubt that some people (naively) believe this to be the case, most people only make the argument to preface their self-aggrandizing and soapboxing. It's the game industry's form of conspiracy theory: belief in an unprovable, tenuous assertion that confers upon its belief group a sense of superiority. E.g., if I say there is no creativity in games, I come across as a more creative and concerned person than the average gamer.
There is no romance in defending the status quo. But just because a position is or isn't romantic doesn't make it right or wrong. We'd all like to be the single voice crying out in the wilderness while tragic music plays; but the fact is that there is no 'creativity crisis' in games.
Anyway, just because you're annoyed at people being callously dismissive of something you've worked on, there's no reason to callously dismiss something someone else has worked on to try to restore some kind of cosmic balance.
I think that there are so many incredibly creative people working in the mainstream games industry, working so hard, but I believe that they are hobbled by their medium. The companies are becoming more and more risk averse. However, I know that I, personally, am not fond of most of what gets released nowadays. You can't tell me that the industry at large is creatively healthy when every fourth game is an FPS/TPS with either a gritty futuristic theme or a World War 2 theme. This is not an insult to the people who worked on these games. This is economics at work. If I ran a game company, and was beholden to the stockholders, I might well find myself making the same decisions. Those who did not could expose themselves to lawsuits.
Does this mean that only indies will ever be any good any more? Of course not. The industry moves forward, and bits of brilliance shine through; but with so many people working on a single project, and in many cases working towards cross-purposes, I don't believe a large and externally funded team can ever create as streamlined and unified a product as a small and internally funded team can. Once again, merely economics at work. It's not a matter of who's creative and who isn't. We're all creative. It's a matter of who has the most freedom to pursue that creativity.
I just read the last comment from Ben Taber, and it basically sums up what I was about to reply. This is actually what I meant when I first wrote my comment, but maybe expressed it too much in a drama tone.
I've been in creative lead positions working on AAA titles for a while now, but the more I progress in this industry and the more it goes the way that Ben stated it, design by committee and diluted visions.
I know this is a generalization and there are many examples of studios and teams that benefit from more creative freedom, and not surprisingly this is from where comes most of the innovation and breakthroughs. Until they get bought by EA or another big publisher and then fall into the "machine". I am not saying it's necessary a bad thing, it's part of the industry ecosystem.
Right now we are witnessing the end of a cycle. The industry started with garage gaming and a more democratized way of developing games and then we switched to the corporate / MC Donald business model for many years. I am just glad to see that new options and distribution channels are becoming available to Indie developers.
I really think that we need to create a change in the way we do videogames. It's not about the hottest graphics, but how an ORIGINAL design, music, gameplay and game mechanics leave to your users a unique and unforgettable experience. That is the real challenge; and is what we need to make the exception like Jonathan. The future of the industry is in the people that thinks (and acts) like him.
Both thumbs up for you and I hope meeting you soon.