Our local game development oriented one-day event is happening on May 22, in Troy Michigan!
More information to be found at: http://www.iadtdetroit.com/interfaces_2009.asp
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Float Like a Butterfly - 20 Years of Street Fighter
Forgive me the fact that I've been browsing through some Tim Rogers writing lately, and along with the release of the 20th Anniversary Street Fighter art book recently, this makes me want to wax long and poetic about Street Fighter.
Every so often in life one has a brush with something that changes us forever. I've already written about Super Metroid in this regard so let me discuss another part of my personal equation. I'm not going to discuss Street Fighter mechanically in this little article, more artistically and emotionally.
I can't actually remember distinctly the first time I saw Street Fighter II. I do remember one specific time that made a lasting impression - during a sixth grade field trip, where all of us gifted students were riding a tour bus to Detroit, we stopped at a rest-stop that happened to have arcade machines, to take a dinner break. Here now a bunch of boys were clustered around the Street Fighter II machine, trying to do certain tricks or make certain moves happen, since, apparently, if you do the right sorts of kicks, you can see "her panties."
Street Fighter II, I here realized, had something many other video games did not have: a girl. Her name was, is, Chun Li, and she is the female fighter in a tournament that, at the time, was strictly a man's game. So unusual was the presence of this female character in the boys' club that she must, therefore be "the Strongest Woman in the World," and so it was. She wears a frilly, feminine garb that's all part of her plan of catching her opponents off-guard when she strikes them with her powerful series of kicks.
I hadn't gotten a chance to play a game as a girl since finishing Super Mario 2 with the Princess, and only the Princess. I was daydreaming myself of a game where you got to play as the Princess and rescue Mario, a vision that was obvious to me at age 12 and took Nintendo an embarrassingly long time to realize. (If Nintendo is interested in making another, I can probably find the intricate level maps that I drew at age12 to help out with this? I believe I had decided, that since Mario World took place in Dinosaur Land, there should also be a Dinosaur Princess, and drew one up that wore an outfit sort of like Ayla's from Chrono Trigger, with tiger spots. A digression.)
Chun Li and the Princess Peach had, have, something in common, which is that they can fly. Not the long, lengthy air-swimming flights that Superman and his boyish ilk do, but the way that I can fly when I fly in dreams: a push off the ground that requires effort, followed by a strong lilt up, a hovering action, the feeling of weightlessness, then a slow, controlled float back to the ground, landing precisely where one had initially planned. Chun Li can notably do this while rotating upside-down. I used to call butterflies "Flyfly stick" when I was little, and this is because it wasn't just the act of flight that was important, but it was that the landing, rather than being a heavy, pounding thing like the Hulk's jumps thing, be "stuck," a light but extremely certain lilt on the petal of a flower or a blade of grass. Fly, fly... stick.
Watching the boys play the game just to exploit a woman who was already inspiring me made me long to get good, really good, at the game, so I could wrap little painted fingernails around that joystick and knock them all down, one at a time.
This thing came out for the Super Nintendo and I had to buy it. I immediately started saving up all my allowance money or anything I'd stumbled across, because I needed that system, for that game. (With some exceptions, I usually don't buy a new game system until the "bolt of lightning" game that I absolutely must have comes out for that system. For the Playstation 2, it was Silent Hill 2, because I remember having the same reaction: Hm, that game is out? Buy console now, immediately.) I bought the console at Toys R Us. I just bought the vanilla SNES package without Super Mario World, because I didn't need Super Mario World; I needed Street Fighter II, which I also bought that day. I was practically counting pennies in to the clerk's hand.
I mostly played against the computer at first. I beat it on super-easy and easy and arcade difficulty and Hard and then Super Hard and then Super Hard. I only knew one character, Chun Li, but I learned her inside and out and also played her at the arcades as well when I got the chance. I got good at the game - not great, but pretty good, enough that I could beat most of my friends and usually my dad and sometimes my brother. Then Super Street Fighter II came out and they added - wow, another girl... which weirded me out a little at the time but I've never had anything against Cammy per se. And there was Mortal Kombat and I really liked that but discovered I liked Scorpion better than Sonia for whatever reason - his fatality was easier to do - I liked his story ... and then there was Time Killers and that's even MORE violent than Mortal Kombat because you can rip off people's limbs and stuff? And then there was Killer Instinct but it just kinda made me mad at first because the design of the woman character was so ridiculous with her huge bullet breasts... and so on.
In High School I was playing Street Fighter Alpha 2 and there was this strategy guide for it, this tremendously crunchy guide that I didn't entirely understand that talked about tournament tiers and vulnerable "frames" and the attacks for everyone, and I realized that to get good at the game it wasn't enough to learn everything about just your favorite character, but you needed to know a bit about the others as well. And though I was so proud that Chun Li was a top-tier character, as if I was somehow sharing in her tournament victories, I also liked Ken and Ryu a whole lot.
We used to write these little play scripts as if pretending that Ken and Ryu had a talk show and they would invite other video game characters on the show to interview them and/or kick the crap out of them. They were basically comedy fan-fic and I guess it's been something like fifteen years now but darned if they still aren't as funny as half the trash on Newgrounds and hold up pretty well so many years later considering the point was only "random Street Fighter jokes and violence." One of the running gags was that Megaman, for example, couldn't count, you'd ask him to count to ten and he'd never make it because he'd go "One, Two, Three, I, II, Four, III, Five, X..." and never make it up there. (He finally made it to ten this year! Good on him.) Then of course you'd ask Ken to count to ten, and he'd never make it either: "One, Two, Super Two, Super Turbo Two..."
In 1998, I wrote an "episode" where the whole point of the joke was the guys from the game teasing Chun Li for turning 30 years old. Chun Li's birthday via her original profile is March 1, 1968. If she were a real person and that profile still stuck she would be 42 this year. I remember the date of her birthday because it used to be on March 1 every single year in high school I would go to school wearing little double buns in my hair as a way of celebration. They would often fall out a few times by the end of the day. This year, I will be turning 30 years old. Chun Li will always be now both older, and younger, than me, simultaneously.
I also, by the way, started taking karate lessons in high school. Shotokan. This last bit was almost an accident. The only thing cooler than realizing that what Ken and Ryu do is actually technically a real martial art, is going to your class as usual, seeing someone do a move, thinking "oh, that's what Ken and Ryu do," then realizing that the art they are supposed to be doing is the same one you've actually been taking classes in all along. I'm currently taking lessons in Kung Fu, and my teacher said, he started, because of "a video game," though he did not specify which and I did not pry. Kung Fu is of course what Chun Li does. That's kind of an accident too. I just like taking martial arts classes and that's the class that seemed to suit me best while being close to my apartment. I'm having a wonderful time with it.
In the back of that big crunchy strategy guide for Street Fighter Alpha 2 there was an art section. I remember browsing through it a few times and seeing some pictures I really liked, and it's great to be able to see them in the 20 year anniversary book again. There's a piece I particularly remember that has Chun Li, leaning forward, with her back up against the character Rose. I love both of these characters and I love this picture. I had it scanned to my computer just to study it, though I don't have it scanned right now and may have to repost it later. It shocked me a little to read the footnote on this picture - that the original artist isn't entirely pleased with it and sees only his regrets when he looks at this picture. I always feel that way about my art too but I feel sort of humbled seeing someone say that about a picture I distinctly remember admiring.
(Incidentally, my favorite picture of the character Charlie is not in the 20th anniversary book as far as I can tell. I remember actually redrawing this picture just to have a larger copy and for once in my life doing it almost perfectly. I don't know if I have it anymore though so I'll have to go diving again for that one.)
I remember going to see the original Street Fighter movie and being so excited because, hey, it was a movie about Street Fighter, so I have to like it! I still sort of like it, while realizing intellectually of course that it is bad, but it's the good kind of bad. A movie was made more recently about Chun Li and I was very excited for this, but of course it was really bad, the bad kind of bad. I knew of course that they would screw this up, but I still am baffled as to how they managed to screw this up. Because it would've literally been less effort to do it right than to screw it up. I remember when Chun Li in Turbo first got her fireball, and it was a little harder to pull off, and I daydreamed about how she must have trained so hard to learn this trick after watching the men who could do it. They tried to have this scene in the movie also but got it all wrong! They screwed it up in so many interesting ways! Please get a person to play Gen who looks like Gen instead of just reminding us that he was better when he was Liu Kang in another franchise! Chun Li is supposed to already be a cop, going in to the tournament undercover, because... and that's why the silly, frilly outfit, there was already a reason for it that didn't involve seducing a lesbian cougar in a nightclub. Please never see the Chun Li movie; it was a profound disappointment to my 14-year-old self even if my 29-year-old self knew exactly what to expect from it.
The Street Fighter anime movie is pretty good though, if a little long on that final fight with Bison at the end. (What I just linked, there, is a great movie fight. People get hurt. Stuff gets wrecked. Sure, panties are flashed, but that's been part of the Chun Li allure from day one. I don't like fights in movies where it feels like nothing is really at stake. This is not a fight like that.)
This is the year of Super Street Fighter IV. I'm excited for this game. I'm not really very good at Street Fighter IV though. I blame it on old age, lack of knowledge of the new combos, trying to get the right controller, but, really it's just an overall lack of practice, something I could and should correct. I play as Rose these days; Chun Li's pull-back style moves are too hard for me to do with the silly X Box controller, but now that I have a "real" fighter controller I should probably go back to trying to use my old favorite again too.
I don't have much more to say, except, I'd like to thank Street Fighter for being part of my life even if I'll never be world-class at Street Fighter. It doesn't have much to do with the game mechanics in the end: it just has everything to do with grabbing that arcade stick and playing as the girl that could beat up all the boys on the digital playground.
Yatta!
Every so often in life one has a brush with something that changes us forever. I've already written about Super Metroid in this regard so let me discuss another part of my personal equation. I'm not going to discuss Street Fighter mechanically in this little article, more artistically and emotionally.
I can't actually remember distinctly the first time I saw Street Fighter II. I do remember one specific time that made a lasting impression - during a sixth grade field trip, where all of us gifted students were riding a tour bus to Detroit, we stopped at a rest-stop that happened to have arcade machines, to take a dinner break. Here now a bunch of boys were clustered around the Street Fighter II machine, trying to do certain tricks or make certain moves happen, since, apparently, if you do the right sorts of kicks, you can see "her panties."
Street Fighter II, I here realized, had something many other video games did not have: a girl. Her name was, is, Chun Li, and she is the female fighter in a tournament that, at the time, was strictly a man's game. So unusual was the presence of this female character in the boys' club that she must, therefore be "the Strongest Woman in the World," and so it was. She wears a frilly, feminine garb that's all part of her plan of catching her opponents off-guard when she strikes them with her powerful series of kicks.
I hadn't gotten a chance to play a game as a girl since finishing Super Mario 2 with the Princess, and only the Princess. I was daydreaming myself of a game where you got to play as the Princess and rescue Mario, a vision that was obvious to me at age 12 and took Nintendo an embarrassingly long time to realize. (If Nintendo is interested in making another, I can probably find the intricate level maps that I drew at age12 to help out with this? I believe I had decided, that since Mario World took place in Dinosaur Land, there should also be a Dinosaur Princess, and drew one up that wore an outfit sort of like Ayla's from Chrono Trigger, with tiger spots. A digression.)
Chun Li and the Princess Peach had, have, something in common, which is that they can fly. Not the long, lengthy air-swimming flights that Superman and his boyish ilk do, but the way that I can fly when I fly in dreams: a push off the ground that requires effort, followed by a strong lilt up, a hovering action, the feeling of weightlessness, then a slow, controlled float back to the ground, landing precisely where one had initially planned. Chun Li can notably do this while rotating upside-down. I used to call butterflies "Flyfly stick" when I was little, and this is because it wasn't just the act of flight that was important, but it was that the landing, rather than being a heavy, pounding thing like the Hulk's jumps thing, be "stuck," a light but extremely certain lilt on the petal of a flower or a blade of grass. Fly, fly... stick.
Watching the boys play the game just to exploit a woman who was already inspiring me made me long to get good, really good, at the game, so I could wrap little painted fingernails around that joystick and knock them all down, one at a time.
This thing came out for the Super Nintendo and I had to buy it. I immediately started saving up all my allowance money or anything I'd stumbled across, because I needed that system, for that game. (With some exceptions, I usually don't buy a new game system until the "bolt of lightning" game that I absolutely must have comes out for that system. For the Playstation 2, it was Silent Hill 2, because I remember having the same reaction: Hm, that game is out? Buy console now, immediately.) I bought the console at Toys R Us. I just bought the vanilla SNES package without Super Mario World, because I didn't need Super Mario World; I needed Street Fighter II, which I also bought that day. I was practically counting pennies in to the clerk's hand.
I mostly played against the computer at first. I beat it on super-easy and easy and arcade difficulty and Hard and then Super Hard and then Super Hard. I only knew one character, Chun Li, but I learned her inside and out and also played her at the arcades as well when I got the chance. I got good at the game - not great, but pretty good, enough that I could beat most of my friends and usually my dad and sometimes my brother. Then Super Street Fighter II came out and they added - wow, another girl... which weirded me out a little at the time but I've never had anything against Cammy per se. And there was Mortal Kombat and I really liked that but discovered I liked Scorpion better than Sonia for whatever reason - his fatality was easier to do - I liked his story ... and then there was Time Killers and that's even MORE violent than Mortal Kombat because you can rip off people's limbs and stuff? And then there was Killer Instinct but it just kinda made me mad at first because the design of the woman character was so ridiculous with her huge bullet breasts... and so on.
In High School I was playing Street Fighter Alpha 2 and there was this strategy guide for it, this tremendously crunchy guide that I didn't entirely understand that talked about tournament tiers and vulnerable "frames" and the attacks for everyone, and I realized that to get good at the game it wasn't enough to learn everything about just your favorite character, but you needed to know a bit about the others as well. And though I was so proud that Chun Li was a top-tier character, as if I was somehow sharing in her tournament victories, I also liked Ken and Ryu a whole lot.
We used to write these little play scripts as if pretending that Ken and Ryu had a talk show and they would invite other video game characters on the show to interview them and/or kick the crap out of them. They were basically comedy fan-fic and I guess it's been something like fifteen years now but darned if they still aren't as funny as half the trash on Newgrounds and hold up pretty well so many years later considering the point was only "random Street Fighter jokes and violence." One of the running gags was that Megaman, for example, couldn't count, you'd ask him to count to ten and he'd never make it because he'd go "One, Two, Three, I, II, Four, III, Five, X..." and never make it up there. (He finally made it to ten this year! Good on him.) Then of course you'd ask Ken to count to ten, and he'd never make it either: "One, Two, Super Two, Super Turbo Two..."
In 1998, I wrote an "episode" where the whole point of the joke was the guys from the game teasing Chun Li for turning 30 years old. Chun Li's birthday via her original profile is March 1, 1968. If she were a real person and that profile still stuck she would be 42 this year. I remember the date of her birthday because it used to be on March 1 every single year in high school I would go to school wearing little double buns in my hair as a way of celebration. They would often fall out a few times by the end of the day. This year, I will be turning 30 years old. Chun Li will always be now both older, and younger, than me, simultaneously.
I also, by the way, started taking karate lessons in high school. Shotokan. This last bit was almost an accident. The only thing cooler than realizing that what Ken and Ryu do is actually technically a real martial art, is going to your class as usual, seeing someone do a move, thinking "oh, that's what Ken and Ryu do," then realizing that the art they are supposed to be doing is the same one you've actually been taking classes in all along. I'm currently taking lessons in Kung Fu, and my teacher said, he started, because of "a video game," though he did not specify which and I did not pry. Kung Fu is of course what Chun Li does. That's kind of an accident too. I just like taking martial arts classes and that's the class that seemed to suit me best while being close to my apartment. I'm having a wonderful time with it.
In the back of that big crunchy strategy guide for Street Fighter Alpha 2 there was an art section. I remember browsing through it a few times and seeing some pictures I really liked, and it's great to be able to see them in the 20 year anniversary book again. There's a piece I particularly remember that has Chun Li, leaning forward, with her back up against the character Rose. I love both of these characters and I love this picture. I had it scanned to my computer just to study it, though I don't have it scanned right now and may have to repost it later. It shocked me a little to read the footnote on this picture - that the original artist isn't entirely pleased with it and sees only his regrets when he looks at this picture. I always feel that way about my art too but I feel sort of humbled seeing someone say that about a picture I distinctly remember admiring.
(Incidentally, my favorite picture of the character Charlie is not in the 20th anniversary book as far as I can tell. I remember actually redrawing this picture just to have a larger copy and for once in my life doing it almost perfectly. I don't know if I have it anymore though so I'll have to go diving again for that one.)
I remember going to see the original Street Fighter movie and being so excited because, hey, it was a movie about Street Fighter, so I have to like it! I still sort of like it, while realizing intellectually of course that it is bad, but it's the good kind of bad. A movie was made more recently about Chun Li and I was very excited for this, but of course it was really bad, the bad kind of bad. I knew of course that they would screw this up, but I still am baffled as to how they managed to screw this up. Because it would've literally been less effort to do it right than to screw it up. I remember when Chun Li in Turbo first got her fireball, and it was a little harder to pull off, and I daydreamed about how she must have trained so hard to learn this trick after watching the men who could do it. They tried to have this scene in the movie also but got it all wrong! They screwed it up in so many interesting ways! Please get a person to play Gen who looks like Gen instead of just reminding us that he was better when he was Liu Kang in another franchise! Chun Li is supposed to already be a cop, going in to the tournament undercover, because... and that's why the silly, frilly outfit, there was already a reason for it that didn't involve seducing a lesbian cougar in a nightclub. Please never see the Chun Li movie; it was a profound disappointment to my 14-year-old self even if my 29-year-old self knew exactly what to expect from it.
The Street Fighter anime movie is pretty good though, if a little long on that final fight with Bison at the end. (What I just linked, there, is a great movie fight. People get hurt. Stuff gets wrecked. Sure, panties are flashed, but that's been part of the Chun Li allure from day one. I don't like fights in movies where it feels like nothing is really at stake. This is not a fight like that.)
This is the year of Super Street Fighter IV. I'm excited for this game. I'm not really very good at Street Fighter IV though. I blame it on old age, lack of knowledge of the new combos, trying to get the right controller, but, really it's just an overall lack of practice, something I could and should correct. I play as Rose these days; Chun Li's pull-back style moves are too hard for me to do with the silly X Box controller, but now that I have a "real" fighter controller I should probably go back to trying to use my old favorite again too.
I don't have much more to say, except, I'd like to thank Street Fighter for being part of my life even if I'll never be world-class at Street Fighter. It doesn't have much to do with the game mechanics in the end: it just has everything to do with grabbing that arcade stick and playing as the girl that could beat up all the boys on the digital playground.
Yatta!
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Achievements Considered Harmful? (How do we motivate students?)
This post is a response to the Chris Hecker talk given Day One of the main GDC conference this year.
I'll write a synopsis of this talk, "Achievements Considered Harmful?", in my own words, but I'm not the first person to do so. See also Game Set Watch's writeup and this writeup from David Sirlin (scroll to the very bottom of the entry for the Hecker talk). I'll also try to, as I just did, cross-reference relevant information about the talk as necessary to explain it. Hecker's talk about Achievements was full of cross-references to books and videos that describe the phenomina that he's trying to explain.
Hecker started out by saying he wasn't here to give a talk about how Achievements were considered harmful. He was going to give a talk that asked the question, are Achievements considered harmful, with a great big question mark. He jokingly showed a slide that also mentioned that Considered Harmful Essays are Considered Harmful and told us to take anything that anyone considers harmful with a grain of salt.
That being said, he got started on this track himself while reading writing not about game design, but about parenting. Meet Alfie Khon, a man who wrote the book Punished By Rewards. Alfie has some beliefs and some biases which are evident in his writing. This book in particular is about the gold stars and other rewards that parents and teachers give their children, and whether or not those rewards actually help, or hinder, childrens' learning and development.
Here's a talk on TED on a similiar vein: Dan Pink on Motivation. Pink also later wrote a book called Drive on the topic of what does, and does not motivate people.
Hecker read both books, but has a couple complaints: the books are very repetetive, for one, and for another, they tend to use a lot of anecdotal evidence to back the claims made in research studies. Anecodes are easier for a mainstream audience to understand than dense psychological studies, but they aren't science. So Hecker went to the studies mentioned in both books and the general literature about the issue of rewards.
He stops at some point to warn the audience that even the hardest psychological studies are not really a hundred percent conclusive. These studies do the best that they can, but in the end, experts disagree on what motivates people, and there's a lot of back and forth fighting in academia that he personally lampoons as being a little immature. People think of fMRI as hard data, but all science is a little bit "dirty," with conflicting evidence and different opinions that color studies.
There is a subset of psychology called Behaviorism, pioneered by B.F. Skinner. Skinner mostly experimented with rats, putting them in a thing called the Skinner Box which they pushed on to get the pellet. If you want to learn more about the connection between behaviorism and modern video games, this article on Cracked.com covers it pretty well, and in a way that a lot of people describe as scary. If that's not enough for you, here's another video: Jesse Schell at DICE 2010. (Have I given you enough reference material yet? It's the internet - it's all connected!) This particular talk got a lot of wide circulation because it discussed the "gamification" of not only games themselves but of the real world. Soon everything, Schell argues, may become a Skinner Box. Push button, get pellet.
A lot of people consider this a little bit frightening.
But Hecker also thinks, based on the studies, it probably won't even work. Schell says in his talk you might tend to read better books, if you discovered that your descendants were actually able to see a list of all the books that you had read. Hecker says the studies show, when people believe they're being monitored, they actually do worse.
On the topic of external incentives to do a variety of different tasks, many studies seem to be inconslusive and there are a lot of different variables. There are also a lot of different types of rewards. There are exogenous rewards, which are rewards given outside of "the realm" of the thing you are doing. One such example is the "Book-It" program from Pizza Hut, a program that gives kids pizzas for reading books. Books and pizzas aren't related, so that's an exogenous reward. However, if you got a new book for reading a book, the reward is related to the act, making it an endogenous reward. There's also the matter of whether rewards are expected or unexpected. It matters if they are dependent on performance. It also matters if they prescribe a certain action or merely state that you performed an action (the difference between "You killed five orcs!" and "You killed five orcs just as you were supposed to do!"). And it also matters if the reward is verbal, tangible, or symbolic. With all these variables, the science of rewards gets pretty muddied.
However, the psychologists can all agree on two points:
For interesting tasks:
Tangible, expeted, contingent rewards decrease motivation.
Verbal, unexpected, informational rewards increase motivation.
Hecker only wants to talk about what motivates people to do interesting tasks. There's a lot of research on how you motivate people to do "dull tasks," as well, but he didn't want to cover them in the talk. Our games should be interesting, after all. If you're making an intentionally dull game, but need to motivate people to play it anyway to bilk them out of their money, Hecker says, "I pity you." (This of course got some serious applause.)
Games should be inherently interesting. But if you're rewarding people with some kind of concrete reward in order to play a game, then you're actually discouraging them from doing so. In effect, what should be play becomes "work" because you're getting "paid." I know I've felt this phenomenon acutely in my own artwork... I seem to do better when it's just for fun.
Here's a problem in game design right now: we have more metrics than we ever had before. As a result, game designers may be getting "blinded" by these. The effect of an external motivator on gameplay is easier to measure than the effect of a person's internal motivation. So when we see, in the metrics, that the external rewards added are getting people to play the game more, we're tricked in to thinking this is the right way to get people to play games, which may lead to duller games over all.
That was basically the gist of the talk, which then moved on to audience questions. Some people seemed to agree with the findings, a lot, and others didn't.
I found myself asking... what is an Achievement anyway? Is it a verbal reward, a tangible one, or a symbolic one? Does what it is vary from gamer to gamer? If an Achievement is unexpected, as in, you didn't look up how to get it beforehand, it counts as unexpected. I think the happiest I ever was to get an Achievement was the "Renegade" Achievement in Mass Effect, because it dropped on me spontaneously only after making the Renegade decision in the game's finale and I hadn't been expecting it at all. But if an Achievement is expected, suddenly, you're "grinding" for it... if I had been trying to just fill the bar and got Renegade at a less dramatic moment it wouldn't have been nearly as interesting.
And I also found this whole topic relevant to my work as an educator. Grades, A plusses and B minuses, are certainly extrinsic and contingent rewards. They might be thought of as symbolic, or concrete. Maybe they don't work very well. Grades are, however, a reality of what I do, and even though in a perfect world I probably wouldn't have to give them, I do. Some teachers are now experimenting with things like "leveling up" and "Achievements" in the classroom to replace or supplement grades, and find that this actually works for their classes. Maybe students of the current school generation would prefer filling a bar to being stamped with a letter. But maybe this is just the same thing over again: replacing one external, exogenous motivator with another one with a different label. It seems that though some kind of evaluation is required of educators, true motivation to learn, to grow, and especially to create, can only really come from the inside.
I would say overall that Hecker is right to say the science isn't conclusive, and more of it is needed. It's all definitely food for thought both in game design and in teaching.
I'll write a synopsis of this talk, "Achievements Considered Harmful?", in my own words, but I'm not the first person to do so. See also Game Set Watch's writeup and this writeup from David Sirlin (scroll to the very bottom of the entry for the Hecker talk). I'll also try to, as I just did, cross-reference relevant information about the talk as necessary to explain it. Hecker's talk about Achievements was full of cross-references to books and videos that describe the phenomina that he's trying to explain.
Hecker started out by saying he wasn't here to give a talk about how Achievements were considered harmful. He was going to give a talk that asked the question, are Achievements considered harmful, with a great big question mark. He jokingly showed a slide that also mentioned that Considered Harmful Essays are Considered Harmful and told us to take anything that anyone considers harmful with a grain of salt.
That being said, he got started on this track himself while reading writing not about game design, but about parenting. Meet Alfie Khon, a man who wrote the book Punished By Rewards. Alfie has some beliefs and some biases which are evident in his writing. This book in particular is about the gold stars and other rewards that parents and teachers give their children, and whether or not those rewards actually help, or hinder, childrens' learning and development.
Here's a talk on TED on a similiar vein: Dan Pink on Motivation. Pink also later wrote a book called Drive on the topic of what does, and does not motivate people.
Hecker read both books, but has a couple complaints: the books are very repetetive, for one, and for another, they tend to use a lot of anecdotal evidence to back the claims made in research studies. Anecodes are easier for a mainstream audience to understand than dense psychological studies, but they aren't science. So Hecker went to the studies mentioned in both books and the general literature about the issue of rewards.
He stops at some point to warn the audience that even the hardest psychological studies are not really a hundred percent conclusive. These studies do the best that they can, but in the end, experts disagree on what motivates people, and there's a lot of back and forth fighting in academia that he personally lampoons as being a little immature. People think of fMRI as hard data, but all science is a little bit "dirty," with conflicting evidence and different opinions that color studies.
There is a subset of psychology called Behaviorism, pioneered by B.F. Skinner. Skinner mostly experimented with rats, putting them in a thing called the Skinner Box which they pushed on to get the pellet. If you want to learn more about the connection between behaviorism and modern video games, this article on Cracked.com covers it pretty well, and in a way that a lot of people describe as scary. If that's not enough for you, here's another video: Jesse Schell at DICE 2010. (Have I given you enough reference material yet? It's the internet - it's all connected!) This particular talk got a lot of wide circulation because it discussed the "gamification" of not only games themselves but of the real world. Soon everything, Schell argues, may become a Skinner Box. Push button, get pellet.
A lot of people consider this a little bit frightening.
But Hecker also thinks, based on the studies, it probably won't even work. Schell says in his talk you might tend to read better books, if you discovered that your descendants were actually able to see a list of all the books that you had read. Hecker says the studies show, when people believe they're being monitored, they actually do worse.
On the topic of external incentives to do a variety of different tasks, many studies seem to be inconslusive and there are a lot of different variables. There are also a lot of different types of rewards. There are exogenous rewards, which are rewards given outside of "the realm" of the thing you are doing. One such example is the "Book-It" program from Pizza Hut, a program that gives kids pizzas for reading books. Books and pizzas aren't related, so that's an exogenous reward. However, if you got a new book for reading a book, the reward is related to the act, making it an endogenous reward. There's also the matter of whether rewards are expected or unexpected. It matters if they are dependent on performance. It also matters if they prescribe a certain action or merely state that you performed an action (the difference between "You killed five orcs!" and "You killed five orcs just as you were supposed to do!"). And it also matters if the reward is verbal, tangible, or symbolic. With all these variables, the science of rewards gets pretty muddied.
However, the psychologists can all agree on two points:
For interesting tasks:
Tangible, expeted, contingent rewards decrease motivation.
Verbal, unexpected, informational rewards increase motivation.
Hecker only wants to talk about what motivates people to do interesting tasks. There's a lot of research on how you motivate people to do "dull tasks," as well, but he didn't want to cover them in the talk. Our games should be interesting, after all. If you're making an intentionally dull game, but need to motivate people to play it anyway to bilk them out of their money, Hecker says, "I pity you." (This of course got some serious applause.)
Games should be inherently interesting. But if you're rewarding people with some kind of concrete reward in order to play a game, then you're actually discouraging them from doing so. In effect, what should be play becomes "work" because you're getting "paid." I know I've felt this phenomenon acutely in my own artwork... I seem to do better when it's just for fun.
Here's a problem in game design right now: we have more metrics than we ever had before. As a result, game designers may be getting "blinded" by these. The effect of an external motivator on gameplay is easier to measure than the effect of a person's internal motivation. So when we see, in the metrics, that the external rewards added are getting people to play the game more, we're tricked in to thinking this is the right way to get people to play games, which may lead to duller games over all.
That was basically the gist of the talk, which then moved on to audience questions. Some people seemed to agree with the findings, a lot, and others didn't.
I found myself asking... what is an Achievement anyway? Is it a verbal reward, a tangible one, or a symbolic one? Does what it is vary from gamer to gamer? If an Achievement is unexpected, as in, you didn't look up how to get it beforehand, it counts as unexpected. I think the happiest I ever was to get an Achievement was the "Renegade" Achievement in Mass Effect, because it dropped on me spontaneously only after making the Renegade decision in the game's finale and I hadn't been expecting it at all. But if an Achievement is expected, suddenly, you're "grinding" for it... if I had been trying to just fill the bar and got Renegade at a less dramatic moment it wouldn't have been nearly as interesting.
And I also found this whole topic relevant to my work as an educator. Grades, A plusses and B minuses, are certainly extrinsic and contingent rewards. They might be thought of as symbolic, or concrete. Maybe they don't work very well. Grades are, however, a reality of what I do, and even though in a perfect world I probably wouldn't have to give them, I do. Some teachers are now experimenting with things like "leveling up" and "Achievements" in the classroom to replace or supplement grades, and find that this actually works for their classes. Maybe students of the current school generation would prefer filling a bar to being stamped with a letter. But maybe this is just the same thing over again: replacing one external, exogenous motivator with another one with a different label. It seems that though some kind of evaluation is required of educators, true motivation to learn, to grow, and especially to create, can only really come from the inside.
I would say overall that Hecker is right to say the science isn't conclusive, and more of it is needed. It's all definitely food for thought both in game design and in teaching.
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Thursday, March 11, 2010
GDC 2010 Thursday Report
This writeup will cover the sessions I attended on Thursday of GDC (Day One of the main conference).... or at least those ones I can talk about. My writeup will go a little long so I'll set up a jump, which may also be useful if you don't want any potentially spoiler information about Metroid, Other M or Fable 3. It's somewhat novel for me to be writing about games that haven't come out yet considering my focus on games at least a few months old, but GDC lends itself to this sort of thought.
If you just want a cover of what was said, the major game outlets have most of these talks discussed in depth or blow-by-blow, and I can link to those coverages as needed. This will be a slightly more personal flavored account than a news outlet blog would deliver.
I attended two other talks today, a Pixar talk I can't talk about as he asked people not to blog it, and Chris Hecker's talk on the psychology of Achievements. I want to talk about the Achievements talk more in depth but he gave out a lot of supplemental link material about that talk and I really want to let my thoughts settle before I review it in depth. Hecker's talk said basically that Achievements might make a fun game less fun... maybe... but psychology is hard...
Below the jump, talks on Fable 3, and the work of Yoshio Sakamoto.
If you just want a cover of what was said, the major game outlets have most of these talks discussed in depth or blow-by-blow, and I can link to those coverages as needed. This will be a slightly more personal flavored account than a news outlet blog would deliver.
I attended two other talks today, a Pixar talk I can't talk about as he asked people not to blog it, and Chris Hecker's talk on the psychology of Achievements. I want to talk about the Achievements talk more in depth but he gave out a lot of supplemental link material about that talk and I really want to let my thoughts settle before I review it in depth. Hecker's talk said basically that Achievements might make a fun game less fun... maybe... but psychology is hard...
Below the jump, talks on Fable 3, and the work of Yoshio Sakamoto.
GDC 2010 Report: Create Something
Hi internet! I'm currently at GDC 2010. This is my first time attending. I attend a lot of events but I do not usually have a laptop, so I'm still getting used to the idea of being connected on the road. I'm going to do my best to write a bit about my experiences here at GDC. I am a first timer to this particular conference and the amount of information to be had is just amazing.
This morning I attended talks hosted by Peter Molyneux and Josh Atkins of Lionhead Studios and Microsoft, and Yoshio Sakamoto of Nintendo. I do not think it's necessary to say, for anyone who has read other entries in this blog, that I'm unabashed fans of these people and their work and it was an honor and privilege to attend both talks. I'm going to try to write more information about each talk later on, but I'm still used to taking notes the "old fashioned" way and will take a little time to convert them in to proper articles.
There is one takeaway I'm already getting from the convention at large, and it can be illustrated this way... Sakamoto said during his talk that there was a "click" moment for him when he was working at Nintendo, when a woman sent his team a box of Valentine's chocolates because the game they had made had made her so happy. Until that moment, he said, he did not realize that the things that he made affected the lives and hearts of others so profoundly.
I suppose then that I did not need to walk up to Sakamoto and tell him that his game, Super Metroid, changed my life. When I think about how happy I am just to have been in his presence it almost brings me to tears, because Metroid means that much to me. Now, he doesn't speak my language very well, so, it's just as well that I didn't try to walk up and gush my enthusiasm all over, but it's shocking to realize that there was ever a moment when he didn't understand that he was touching others and making something profound.
Last night I spoke to people who worked on games like Warhammer Online, and Legend of the Five Rings. If you are doing these things.... they are your job. These creators all have a great sense of humility. It takes a wake-up call to realize that what was just your job one day became something of great passion to someone else. I watched people gush enthusiastically over the Lo5R creatures, and, given that one of the best campaigns I was ever in was also Lo5R I was also among them. But they are humble about creating such a thing that had a strong impact on so many people... and they are just people, like you and me.
Maybe you are reading this as a creator, an artist or designer, and don't realize this, but this was a wake up call for me. If you create something, and people experience it, it touches them. What you do changes the world. It may be small, it may be large, but if you make something, it changes things for someone else. You are a ripple in time no matter how little you may think of your own work. What seems small to you, because you just did it, may touch the heart of someone thousands of miles away, or a lifetime from now. Physically, Sakamoto could probably not have been much further away from me on the planet when I finished Super Metroid for the first time, but it is a moment I will remember forever.
So create something. Touch someone.
Thursday, March 04, 2010
GDC Next Week
I will be going to GDC this year! It's my first time. I'm pretty excited about this opportunity and hopefully will learn a lot to bring back to my classes.
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