MIGS Day Two

Allright. Day two.

I had to opportunity to get familiar with the event yesterday, so there was no uncertainty as to what to expect on the second morning, apart from the contents in the conferences.

I got there a bit later than on the first day, but early enough to visit the expo room before the first keynote.

Video Game Symphony

Upon arriving on site I realized that there seemed to be an event going on in the main room. I was very surprised, because I made sure to double check the schedule before coming, and it clearly said that the first keynote was at 10:00 AM.

It turned out that there was some sort of video game symphony, where someone was playing a game with only sound effects on, while a live orchestra was playing music to fit the mood that was currently in the game. I think that it a really cool idea, and I am a bit sad that I missed it.

Expo Room

Even though I missed the video game symphony event, I still had time to go around the expo room to see if there were any new stands that I could visit. There were obviously none, so I headed to the main room to get a seat for the keynote.

I encountered a friend who wanted to visit video game studios and leave his references. I went with him, which was a very good idea because we were given a beanie hat from Gameloft and a t-shirt from Eidos.

I think that is a pretty awesome way to begin the day. :)

A Brief History of Indie
Ron Carmel, Co-founder, 2D BOY

The first keynote was supposed to be a brief history of indie, as the title implies, but it was more about the opposition between indie and mainstream, and creativity in general.

Ron Carmel started with a comparison between video games and TV series. According to him, we have only recently begun having masterpieces in TV series (The Wired, in his opinion) while video games are still not mature enough to have created anything that could be considered a masterpiece.

He thinks that in order to witness the first video game masterpiece, the video game industry still has a long way to go exploring creativity. While there have been some games, like Shadow of the Colossus, who tried to push creativity to a new point, he still feels that it is not enough.

It is often stated in popular belief that indie developers try to go towards creativity, while mainstream developers only wish to make money. Ron Carmel thinks that we should ideally have some sort of in between to get better creativity.

The problem is that mainstream studios will not try this option because it is too risky, and indie developers will not try this option because they will argue that it is not indie.

He also wanted to redefine the opposition that was illustrated between indie and mainstream. In his opinion, the "indie" label is really ambiguous. A lot of developers are considered indie while they are in fact, divisions of mainstream studios, small studios or any other similar example. A lot of different people have different opinions about the definition of indie.

It is however true that there are some differences between people that make game. In his opinion, this opposition can be translated into "Design Studios" vs "Commercial Studios". The goal of design studios would be to try new ideas and aim towards creativity, and the goal of commercial studios would be big productions generating a lot of money. I think this is actually closer to reality.

If we get back to trying to get in between, this would mean that he thinks we should be seeing more intermediate studios, trying to get more creative on big projects.

The question period was a bit controversial. Some people argued that the design vs commercial opposition was actually a developer vs publisher opposition. Others argued that none of the stated examples were indie. 

This confirms the fact that it is clearly difficult to define precisely what is indie,  that any game maker who considers himself indie should be indie, and that in the end the indie label does not really change anything. What is important is the intent that the game developer has.

Building a Global Technology Strategy When East Meets West
Julien Merceron,Worldwide Technology Director, Square Enix Group

I was looking forward to this conference. The first reason is that Square Enix is one of my favorite game developers. The second reason is that the recent acquisition of Eidos could be the first step towards increasing collaboration between the western and eastern video game industries, and I am actually very curious about how this could develop.

This presentation was divided into two parts. The first half tried to highlights the cultural differences between Japan and America when it comes to video game creation. The second half was about the current technological strategy Square Enix is trying to implant in order to increase collaboration between Square and Eidos.

I think that the first half of this presentation was the most interesting. In the past year I have seen a lot of conflict about the difference between Japanese and American games. I have read a lot of different comments about the Japanese industry being far behind in game making.

By defining clearly the cultural differences between Japan and America, Julien Merceron exposed something that should have been obvious : the fact that both industries simply approach game making in different ways and that they do not have the same goals. For this reason, the products are very different, and the technologies used are very different too.

In the western market, video games are about gameplay. Western companies try to make better human machine interactions, more subtle UIs, more realistic animations. They try to give excitement and emotion to the player through the actions he makes and the way he controls the games.

In Japan, video games are about storytelling. Japanese companies spend a lot of times creating characters and stories. They spend a lot of time trying to make realistic characters, but sometimes lack on the animation part, which is a risk towards the uncanny valley. Because storytelling is so important, Japanese companies have developed very advanced pipeline to create cinematics. For this reason, japanese games still use a lot of cinematics even though it could be possible to use only in game graphics because of the current generation of hardware. The main difference is that japanese developers do not try to give emotion through controlling the game, they are using the game as a medium to give emotion, so it does not matter to them if the player is not controlling anything while there is a dramatic cutscene.

I think that this is a very simple explanation about the cultural differences between Japan and America, and that when you think about it, it seems pretty normal that there are so many differences between those games, and it does not feel at all like one or the other is doing it wrong.

This gets intersting when we get a company like Square Enix, which has access to staff members all over the world. Those cultural differences also lead to differences in technology. This also means that it would be possible to share that expertise. 

Square Enix is slowly trying to merge some of those ideas. There are some people from Japan who are eager to work in Montreal. On the other hand, there are a lot of people from Montreal willing to learn Japanese and work in Tokyo. This could lead to great new ideas, and I am looking forward to it.

Pipeline Design: A Non-Intrusive Data Driven Architecture
François Paradis, Tools Technical Lead, Ubisoft Québec

Jonathan T-Delorme, Tools Programmer, Ubisoft Québec

This presentation was based on tool improvements that were used in making the Scott Pilgrim video game, so the visuals and examples featured Scott Pilgrim, which was very cool. :)

The presentation focused on tools developed to make a data driven architecture. Nowadays, data driven design is a very desirable thing in game development. Games use a lot of data, and the engine should not need to be modified because the data is different. 

While this has been achieved in several ways, Ubisoft Québec tried to push it to a higher level.

The first step was to clearly separate the tools from the engine. And when they mean separate, they do not only mean to encapsulate stuff in different projects or solutions. They mean to separate it entirely.

What this means is that their tools are using C# and XML data, while their engine are using C++ and binary data. This means that they have access to very different functionalities in their tools, and that the data is duplicated to work on the engine. The general concept is that the tools are easier and quicker to make, while the engine can still benefit from the execution speed coming from C++.

The consequence of this approach is that tools can make use of C# reflection to adapt to data. Data can change a lot during game development, and it can be a pain to modify the tools each time a new data type is added. With reflection, it is possible to look up the types at runtime, and use whatever is really there at the time. The main downside to reflection is that it is done at runtime, so it is slow. But it does not really matter because those are tools. They can still generate the data that will be used by the engine in the same way.

The second proposed solution introduces data inheritance. In the same way that classes can inherit properties,  data can inherit properties. This enables them to define some data, such as a character, then to define a character that is a specialization of the previous character, and use data inheritance to specify only the differences between the two. This recudes the need for copy-paste all over the place when needed to modify some data, and it also makes it easier to adapt the data to some varying situations, like applying the same game to different platforms.

The whole idea to this data driven approach is simple, but it is still a new approach, and I liked the way they implemented it.

Balancing Game Mechanics Using Game Theory: Modern Analytical Approaches to Achieving Desired Gameplay Dynamics
Christopher J. Hazard, President, Hazardous Software Inc.

The goal of this presentation is to use knowledge from scientific/mathematic background in game theory and to apply it to game design. This allows to predict gameplay dynamics, especially when it comes to game balance.

At first I had no idea what game theory was. And I was not sure what to expect from this conference. After listening to the whole stuff, I can say that this was in my opinion the best conference at MIGS 2010. The general idea was pretty complex, and I did not understand everything. But I am eager to look more into game theory, and I am really looking forward to a future where more companies will be using game theory in their game design.

The basic principle of game theory is to apply mathematics to games. It is possible to use game theory to predict what people are going to do, to quantify utility and risk, and to solve games.

Game theory can be used to oppose skill vs strategy when it comes to games. I had never thought about it, and I generally hear about skill and luck in games, but it is true that games are more skill and strategy than skill alone. 

Skill is the ability to do something efficiently, and is revolves around decision theory. Strategy is the approach to do something, and it revolves around game theory. As an example that was not in the presentation that comes from my own understanding, being able to dodge in a fighting game is skill, while staying away or rushing in is strategy.

I would not be able to explain clearly how game theory can be applied to game design, as I am not an expert. What I can do is talk about some of the things I understand can be done.

The thesis is that is possible to define gameplay mathematically. 

• It is possible to measure payoff and risk. 
• Problems such as rock-paper-scissors can be given a level of transitivity and have predetermined probabilities.
• Any game can be expressed by a currency, the most basic of which is player time to obtain an achievement.
• Feedback in a game can be positive (skill leads to rewards, like in Modern Warfare) or negative (skill leads to hindrance, like in Mario Kart).
• The effect of feedback can be measured.
• A good way to evaluate when balanced has been attained in a game is when players complain about every class or unit as being over powered. 
• There is a direct relation between the utility and cost of any item in a game.

The application of all theses principles is that it is possible to evaluate mathematically if a game is balanced. The general feeling that I get from games nowadays is that they try as best as they can to make the game balanced, and if they get the feeling that it isn't, they semi-randomly try to fix it. If we could balance games based on mathematics, this would be a huge progress in competitive gaming.

The whole idea does not simply apply to game balance. It is possible to predetermine gameplay mathematically and apply it to the game afterwards.

I think this is a very promising subject. As of today I do not understand it fully, but I really want to look more into it. And I hope to see this applied to games in the future.

The Narrative of Narrative
Rafael Chandler, Narrative Designer & Scriptwriter

Last choice of the day. At this point I was really not sure about choosing between a very advanced conference on body animation using hardware acceleration, a conference on tips to start your own gaming studio, or a conference on tips for narrative content in games.

Normally the default for me would be to choose the tech conference, since it is my domain of expertise. However, I had the feeling that this was going to be a very advanced conference on a field that I know nothing about. It was also getting late and I did not feel like listening to complex technicalities.

Starting your own game studio seemed like a good conference. However, while these could be very good tips, and I not planning on creating a studio in the near future. And if I really wanted to create a gaming studio, I would have to hire an attorney anyways in addition to listening to the conference.

The narrative content one was about game design. And I figured that out of the four other disciplines featured in the summit, design is probably the one thing that I could end up doing if I am not doing something that is tech. I pictured this as if my main class is software engineer, my secondary class could very well be game designer. 

(It could be argued that in fact business should be my secondary class, as engineers - especially software engineers - do a lot of project management and planning. However, the business part here felt more about law and finance that project management. On the other side, I am currently considering working on some video games projects demo/indie development/whatever. I know that I am not a jack of all trades and that if I do that I will need help from other people. But if I start creating games, I guess I should need game design. I realize that this is a very big parenthesis and that it has absolutely nothing to do with the MIGS.)

So I decided to go to the design conference. I honestly have mixed feelings about this one.

The conference was about narrative of narrative. My understanding is that the conference was about writing, more specifically about how you should try to make your writing tell what you really want it to tell.

While I am never planning to write stuff for video games, as I am not a good writer, and I think that I do not have imagination, I still learned interesting stuff about game writing. 

I seems that it is actually harder than one might think for game writing to project the good message. I also learned that game writing is actually technical writing. Game writing should not feature complex style. It should be straight to the point, and clear. The whole idea behind that is that you do not want the rest of the pipeline development wondering about the meaning of a word, or looking through your poetry when their goal is to find out which characters are present in a given scene. Game writing is different from writing in other media, mostly because it is interactive and not only narrative.

I also learned that every line of text in a video game should tell a story. While this is a very simple idea, I actually like it a lot. This is not necessarily intuitive, and I think that it is true.

Other than that, I did not learn that much from this conference. I guess this can be explained by the fact that I was simply not the target audience at all.

Maybe I should have gone to the business one about creating a game studio.

New Kids On the Block: Studio Heads Tell All
Ken Schachter, Founder, Trapdoor

Miguel Caron, CEO, Funcom

Yanick Roy, Studio Director, Bioware

Martin Carrier,Vice-President, Studio Head, WB Games Montreal

The final keynote was actually a sort of discussion panel featuring the heads of studios recently established in Montreal. 

I would say that it was entertaining overall, but not exactly instructive. I guess it was more for fun at the end of the event that as an academic event.

Next year

During the final keynote, the dates for next year's summit were confirmed. It was also stated that next year, the event will not only be Montreal's International Game Summit, but something bigger regrouping web, eLearning and games.

I am not sure what I think about this decision. This will definitely mean that the event will be bigger, and it would be good if a video game professional event in Montreal was bigger. On the other side, I fear that adding web stuff in there would reduce the amount of video game content and that the event would drift away from its original purpose.

I guess that as long as the MIGS inside the bigger event is at least as big as this year, I will be satisfied.

Closing comments

I think it is pretty obvious that I had a great time at the MIGS 2010. I learned a lot of cool stuff, I met people, and mostly, I am leaving the event with a very big boost in motivation.

I am looking forward to working in the video game industry, and I feel like I should start working harder. I have a lot of work to do on my grad school project, I need to read books to get new knowledge, and I should definitely start my own personal projects.

This would allow me to get some practice and something to show to companies in interviews. But this would also allow me to create stuff, which was something recurrent during the whole event. 

There are a lot of indie developers surfacing, it is now easier to make video games on your own, and you do not necessarily need a lot of money to create games. Most people in the industry agree that more creativity is always good, and they are waiting for us to create the new stuff. So I guess I should participate and try to see what I can do.

I think that every one who has the opportunity should attend, and I am looking forward to next year.