Contents
Title
Author
Letters
Doug Sharp, Bill Kunkel
New Interfaces for Interactive Entertainment
Brenda Laurel
Games Are Serious Business
Cliff Johnson
Geometric AI For Patton Versus Rommel
Chris Crawford
Anything But “Computer Games for Women”
Amanda Goodenough
Computer Game Developers’ Conference
Eric Goldberg
Editor Chris Crawford
Subscriptions The Journal of Computer Game Design is published six times a year. To subscribe to The Journal, send a check or money order for $30 to:
The Journal of Computer Game Design
5251 Sierra Road
San Jose, CA 95132
Submissions Material for this Journal is solicited from the readership. Articles should address artistic or technical aspects of computer game design at a level suitable for professionals in the industry. Reviews of games are not published by this Journal. All articles must be submitted electronically, either on Macintosh disk , through MCI Mail (my username is CCRAWFORD), through the JCGD BBS, or via direct modem. No payments are made for articles. Authors are hereby notified that their submissions may be reprinted in Computer Gaming World.
Back Issues Back issues of the Journal are available. Volume 1 may be purchased only in its entirety; the price is $30. Individual numbers from Volume 2 cost $5 apiece.
Copyright The contents of this Journal are copyright © Chris Crawford 1989.
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Letters
From Doug Sharp:
I couldn’t allow “A Rebuttal from the Editor” (JCGD, V2, N4) to pass without comment. The substance of your disagreement with Bill Hopkins’ article, “Once Upon a Time...”, I will not address here.
The term “Rebuttal” in your title and a few of the phrases you employ suggest a misconception about the nature and limitations of aesthetic discourse.
Assertions of opinion do not constitute a rebuttal. I fail to see how a statement of artistic vision can be rebutted, refuted, or disproved. Bill may be mapping a direction in computer art you don’t care to follow in your own work, but it is not for you to “deny the value” of his approach.
What disturbs me is the application of scientific-ese to arguments about art. Software artists fall easily into this trap because of the underlying rigor of our craft. Some of us even have computer “science” degrees. The title “Journal of Computer Game Design” fosters the illusion that all topics addressed in its hallowed pages are subject to debates in which rebuttal and proof are meaningful terms.
Strong opinions and perceptive criticism are precious scarce in our field. But we can criticize and opine about art in our pixel-stained smocks and still have plenty of technical and formal points to argue more rigorously in our lab coats.
Boiled down, my argument is - let’s get our feet in the air where they belong on aesthetic issues.
The flying gad,
Doug Sharp
I took a lot of criticism for that bit of self-indulgence. You were kind enough not to score me on my most obvious crime, namely, the rudeness of challenging the author without giving him a chance to respond. Also, playing both editor and disputant is a little too close to judge and prosecutor. The only defense I will offer is the lame excuse that I was scrabbling for something to fill the blank space that assaulted my editorial sensibilities.
While I must agree with you that proof is too strong a concept for so fuzzy a field as ours, I am not willing to abandon the use of reason. For Christsakes, I created this Journal to foster disputation, and I would hope that such disputation would be carried out in some kind of rational form. I will not turn this Journal into a demolition derby for unsubstantiable opinions. Chris
From Bill Kunkel:
I’m writing this in response to “Applause Instead of Victory?” in the February 1989 issue. You cite the classic cinematic prologue of the car that breaks down in front of the creepy old house and ask: how do you get the player from the car into the house?
There are lots of ways, all of them more consistant with reality than Icom’s use of the exploding car. Not only is it contrived, but it doesn’t solve the problem. The player is out of the car, but he isn’t in the house, either. The question of motivating the player to leave the car is best answered by simply ignoring the question altogether. The player will leave the car because remaining in the car is boring. Why do designers spend so much time worrying about how to get the player into the only interesting location in sight? In my experience, you’d only have a problem if you tried to keep the player out.
In an ideal game environment, the player would be allowed to wander around the grounds (but since it’s storming, he might eventually slip and fall down a hill, for example, only to awaken inside the house.) Heck, there might even be a highway, where the player could stand and wait for a car that never comes. Or he could simply wander down the highway until he gets bored and turns around.
Sooner or later, even the most stubborn of players will get around to entering that house. As long as the alternatives are less attractive, why would the player do anything else? It is the job of the designer to create an environment where the player explore the landscape, but where that landscape suggests the obvious direction of the plot.
This notion of applause strikes me as just another kind of score, since you’re still making value judgements You are still finding ways to bend the player to your will.
Several people voiced similar objections to that essay. It was too short to make its points well. The thrust of the applause scheme is to permit game play that would not otherwise be available in the traditional kill-or-be-killed approach. The trick lies not in the presence or absence of some kind of victory point calculation, nor in the value-laden or value-free nature of those victory points, but instead in the presentation of that scheme to the player. The traditional approach biases us towards direct conflict with direct resolution; the applause scheme endorses a wider set of player actions. For example, how could a traditional victory point approach support the ending for Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls?
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New Interfaces for Interactive Entertainment
Brenda Laurel
[Brenda Laurel does design consulting for computer hardware and software companies through her business, Interactivist. This article is adapted from a talk she delivered at the West Coast Computer Faire on 3/18/89.]
“Interface” is a word that used to make me twitch. What it referred to, I thought, was the monster at the gates — the thing that was the barrier between me and the computer, the thing that threw up indecipherable garbage on the screen and tied my fingers in knots by demanding twelve simultaneous keypresses to get the computer to do anything interesting at all. Since then, I’ve learned that my private monster was just a bad interface, and they come in lots of varieties.
I want to start by defining what I mean by “interface”, and then I want to share some ideas about the future. I think there’s a brave new interface idea out there, and “multimedia” isn’t it.
What is an interface?
An interface is the contact surface between two things. A doorknob is the interface between a person and a door, a spacesuit is the interface between an astronaut and the void. In terms of computers, the “user interface” is the way in which the user and the computer communicate with each other--it determines how they are able to interact, empowering users in some ways and crippling them in others.
Interfaces have three components. The first two are obvious: the hardware and the software. The third component is the mental model, that is, what the user thinks is going on. Some interfaces use a real-world metaphor (like a desktop) as the basis of the mental model; others make it up as they go along.
Current interface paradigms
The Macintosh interface, for instance, is a combination of hardware (mouse, keyboard, screen, and so on), software (the icons, menus, and scroll bars, for instance), and a mental model that springs from the metaphor of a (slightly bizarre) desktop. The Mac interface is one flavor of the larger desktop paradigm, which you can find slightly different flavors of on systems like Amiga, Sun, ST, and even the IBM-PC for certain products. The rival paradigm at the moment is the command-line paradigm that you find on PCs, Unix systems, and your garden variety mainframe.
We often distinguish among forms of computer games solely on the basis of their interface paradigms. The action game paradigm features heavy sensory involvement and the mental model of directly controlling something — a vehicle or weapon, for instance. Control is largely kinesthetic (joystick, track ball, or mouse) with a minimum of keyboarding, and graphical and animated output predominates over text. Traditional adventure and FRP games, on the other hand, borrow from the command-line paradigm to emulate a textual, conversational style that many users find too fragile and constrained. A new genre was born when we started pasting action-game interfaces onto adventure games: the graphical adventure game. The best games borrow from existing paradigms to a certain degree, but also allow form and content to influence the shape of the interface in the same way that a spacesuit is molded to human form.
You are undoubtedly already aware of the difference that a good or bad interface can make in the experience of playing a game. A stupid parser, for instance, forces you to include the parser’s limitations in your game-playing strategy, which can be a horrible annoyance when what you really want to be doing is exploring a cave or hacking up a monster. And few things are more frustrating than a random status window popping up in the middle of an animated combat sequence. The point here is that the interface designer has forgotten to ask, “what does the user want to be doing?”
Now then we have the delight of mousing around hypercard screens for hot buttons in order to figure out what we can interact with. And the thrill of getting totally lost in a stack without even a little line of bread crumbs to show us how we got into the forest.
So what new interface paradigm is coming down the pike that promises to improve the quality of interactive entertainment?
Two new interface paradigms
Multimedia
Take “multimedia” — please. Multimedia is a horrible word; it makes me think of big, heavy, black Bell and Howell projectors and boring filmstrips being narrated by authoritative White Men. What multimedia means today is something different but a lot less specific. It can mean a videodisc and a computer, or a CD-ROM and a computer, or sixteen movie projectors and little input buttons mounted on the arms of the audience’s seats.
What it usually means, in 1989, is some kind of optical media that produces pictures — still frames or snippets of live action — hooked up with a computer. All too often it means two screens, one of them doing something video-like and the other doing something computer-like. Most of the user’s time is spent marveling at the mysterious connections between the two screens, trying to figure out which to watch when and who is doing what to whom. The screens are usually quite different in form, style, color, resolution, and size.The multimedia platform is hardware-driven, and it lacks an interface paradigm that can connect its disparate parts comfortably in the mind of a user. Hypercard-style interfaces seem to be the reigning paradigm, but too often they are only used to offer poor graphical imitations of what’s going on on the “real” screen so that the user can interact with it somehow.
The jarring disparity between the components of a multimedia system goes deeper than the interface. In fact, they are distinctly unlike in some troubling ways. The kind of interactivity you can achieve with video, for instance, even when it is delivered in a random-access medium, is fundamentally less robust than the kind of interactivity that you can have with things going on on a computer screen (Pong, for instance). The natural trade-off is between interactivity and the sensory values of hi-res realism and filmic style. Entertainment forms that try to map one onto the other have a very hard time of it.
I think that the two most significant challenges in designing good multimedia interfaces are the challenge of integrating the display (physically or at least cognitively) and the challenge of designing a kinder, gentler notion of interactivity that takes the intrinsic limitations of video into account.
I think we’ll see two trends in multimedia entertainment. First, we’ll see the evolution of new forms of entertainment (probably less and less like computer games) that reduce interactivity in order to enhance video values. These same forms will map comfortably onto delivery systems like interactive broadcast TV. Second, I think we’ll see a distinct branch of multimedia emerge that stores things quite unlike motion video on optical media — data that can be used for computationally-intensive processes like artificial personality or intelligent animation, for instance. These trends will force a divergence in multimedia hardware platforms and the kinds of entertainment products they support.
Transition time
So now it’s transition time. Those who are looking for the shape of the future will not find it in the multimedia hardware platform. Because what is missing is an interface paradigm — a notion of what is going on between the user and the computer — that can provide that shape.
Not that multimedia is all hogwash. Current systems constrain us to only a few channels of communication — words as text, some graphics and animation, and perhaps the ability to move things around on the screen. The notion of building systems that incorporate more and richer channels of communication can in fact transform our experiences — but that’s not what multimedia is about. The wrong question is, “what do we do with this hardware?” The right question is, “what new kinds of interactive experiences should we be trying to create?” And then we have to let the answer to that question drive the hardware platform.
Virtual realities
Whither this is all tending, at least in the visions of writers like William Gibson and a few pockets of crazies at NASA, Autodesk, and elsewhere is something called virtual realities, a.k.a. Cyberspace. Cyberspace is fundamentally an interface idea. But like all interface paradigms, it will change, not only the hardware, but also the underlying forms of what we do with computers.
I’m one of those people who likes to sit in the third row at the movies because I want to be totally surrounded by the imaginary world on the screen. Some of the folks at NASA Ames Research have put together a system called VIEW which attempts to let the user immerse himself completely in an imaginary world. The system senses where his body, hands, and eyes are and tailors a dynamic 3-D display projected for him on a special set of glasses. Binaural audio technology creates the illusion of direction and distance for computer-generated sounds. The user feels himself to be walking around inside a completely virtual--computer-generated--world.
The NASA VIEW system has an interface that the user literally wears. But at MIT and elsewhere, similar systems have been built in media rooms, where the images are projected on the walls (and even the floor and ceiling) and sound comes from speakers rather than earphones. An experience-hacker named Myron Krueger has been working on a system called VIDEOPLACE that combines real-time video feedback and computer animation to place the user in a virtual landscape on a large screen in a public space. In William Gibson’s books, the user enters the virtual world by directly connecting the computer to his brain, a technique that will probably not be offered by Atari any time soon.
But the point of all these systems and fantasies is the same: To allow the user to plunge directly into a virtual reality rather than negotiating with it via a keyboard and a little screen.
Of course, the hardware for creating any of these versions of Cyberspace is probably not the kind of stuff we will find in our homes in two, five, or maybe even ten years. But the interface paradigm is something that we can start realizing right now, even with these humble little boxes.
Interacting with a computer still feels very much like talking to someone in prison: you both pick up a telephone with a bad connection, or you push little pieces of paper back and forth under the glass. All that can change.
Even now, we can imagine kinds of interaction that explode the old notion of a tit-for-tat conversation with a computer. I am beginning to see products in development in which the force of the virtual reality is so strong that the user feels himself to be surrounded by it. And the mental model of what’s going on — that is, what the user thinks he is doing — is no longer interacting with a something on the other side of the screen but entering a virtual world. Making the cyberspace paradigm a reality will become more and more do-able as techniques for animation, audio, and multimodal interaction continue to evolve. But what Cyberspace is, regardless of its hardware platform, is a new kind of thing that users can do with computers. In fact, it’s a new kind of thing for people to do at all.
Everybody knows the computer world is changing. We can feel it and smell it, but we don’t know where we’re going. Well, who should we ask? The hardware isn’t talking.
We stand on the brink of a new age — the time when interactive entertainment finally ceases to imitate the forms of the past and takes on a life of its own. And it has less than some might think to do with technology. The right interface paradigm can drive, not only the technology, but also the creative evolution of smoke and mirrors. Because when we have a strong vision of what we want to do, we humans are pretty good at finding ways to do it.
Other publications by the author
“A Taxonomy of Interactive Movies.” New Media News, The Boston Computer Society, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Winter 1989).
“Culture Hacking.” The Journal of Computer Game Design , Vol. 1, No. 8 (August/Sept. 1988), pp. 4-5.
“Reassessing Interactivity.” The Journal of Computer Game Design , Vol. 1, No. 3 (October/November 1987), pp. 7-10.
“Toward the Design of a Computer-Based Interactive Fantasy System.” Ph.D. Dissertation, The Ohio State University, 1986.
“Interface as Mimesis.” In Norman, D. A. and Draper, S., Eds., User Centered System Design: New Perspectives on Human-Computer Interaction. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1986.
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Games Are Serious Business
Cliff Johnson
[Cliff previously worked in the movie biz, but now he has moved into the big-time environment of computer games. He is the author of The Fool’s Errand.]
Business? What’s business got to do with making games? Business is a mean, horrible, nasty word. We here in the game industry, why, we sing and dance all day! We don’t do business. We form relationships. We don’t sell product. We provide entertainment.
Or. . . do we do business too? Well, if you work for a publisher or a development house as a game designer, most likely you’re not the one to make the hard business decisions. But, if you’re a “lone wolf” dealing with a publisher directly, guess what? You’re going to have to do business. Now what kind of a person should you be?
Say you take a trip to Mexico and ask the man what’s the price of that vase and he says 10 bucks and you offer him 9 bucks and he takes it, you might think twice about being in business for yourself. He probably would have taken 6.
If you walk into a car dealer and get him to knock a hundred dollars off the sticker price, you might consider working for someone else. You should at least be able to get $500 or more off the sticker price.
And when you negotiate a contract with a publisher, are you always saying to all your friends “God I hate this!”, then you shouldn’t be a lone wolf. Trust me. You’ll sleep better.
Allow me to exaggerate further. Business is everything. I don’t care how good your game is, if you don’t make a good business deal, writing games is just a hobby and you’ll crab and bitch and moan for the next ten years to anyone who will listen about how terribly you were treated. In the meanwhile, the publisher, who is a very smart business person, may just make a fortune off your game. And it’s legal. And it’s fair.
Of course, it’s fair. . . because if you do not protect your own rights in the contract, then it’s nobody else’s fault but your own. These are the facts of life. Games are not designed by a bunch of happy elves at the North Pole. Games are big business. This is real money we’re talking about, not Monopoly money.
The book Winning through Intimidation defines the three types of business people.
Type One says that they are going to screw you and then they screw you.
Type Two says that they are not going to screw you and then they screw you.
Type Three really, truly, honest-to-goodness says and believes that they are not going to screw you and then they screw you.
There’s a common thread here. Now let’s replace the cynical “they screw you” with “business people make every effort to squeeze every dime of profit out of every business deal.” And frankly, what’s wrong with that? Don’t you want to make the most money you can off your own game?
You know the saying. . . never sell a used car to your best friend. And why is that? Maybe, just maybe when people sell used cars they might not be telling the whole truth in order to get the most money out of the deal.
See, there are people in this world who do nothing else but negotiate for a living. And those who do it part-time, you got it, they own or run a business. There is a very fine line between management and manipulation. Business is an artform that requires communication and personality skills that are in a class all by themselves.
It’s like you’re suddenly on the debate team and instead of arguing over the future of nuclear fission, you’re arguing about your own future income!!! Lose this debate by a couple points and you’ve lost more than the college cup. You might be losing thousands of dollars.
I’m not just talking about what should and should not be in a contract, there are experts who can advise you about that, I’m talking about the process of “debating” what does and does not appear in the final contract. It’s an odd brew of old fashioned wheeling and dealing and state-of-the-art psycho babble. You going to hear tidbits like “it’s standard in the industry”, “we never do business that way”, “everyone else uses the same contract”, etc. etc. etc.
And business people all have different ways of doing things. So be prepared for some Oscar winning performances. You might run into some nut who likes to get angry, storm out of the room and not talk to you for weeks. Well, good for him. It doesn’t change anything. It’s just a tactic. Sure he might really be mad, but is that a reason to change your position? Manipulating you through your emotions is a standard tool of business.
Other people like to whisper and sit cross legged on the floor, saying things like “well, we like to develop long term relationships and grow with our developers”. Translation: work cheap now and we’ll pay you more later. If you decide to go for this, don’t kid yourself. Yes, you will work cheap now, but I wouldn’t start planning that vacation to Europe just yet. The company might go bankrupt, that computer might be discontinued or maybe just maybe they were telling you a little white lie.
And don’t reply with things like “is that an offer or is that a joke?” Let them do all the grandstand speeches. You must remain cool, calm, and detached. Every question does not deserve an answer. If they hit you with a zinger you never thought about before, just say “hmmm that’s an interesting point. I’ll have to think about that more.” Never give answers to important questions from the top of your head. Go home and think about it. Talk it over with some people. Get advice from a lawyer.
And by all means, get a lawyer. The proverb “a man who represents himself has a fool for a client” is not only true, but a gross understatement. People who represent themselves are proclaiming that they will take responsibility for all of their own mistakes. Are you prepared to do that?
By the way, you can also stop dreaming about the deal of century! The only people who get those kind of deals are people with power. So go in the bathroom, take out your personal power, plop it on the scale and see how much it weighs. Unless your last three games were unqualified hits, you might as well forget about those 25% royalties. Unless you have a sparkling reputation for delivering on time, you’d better get used to the idea of milestones and penalties.
People do not all get the same deal. Each deal evolves according to each parties wants, desires, strengths, weaknesses, and POWER. All you’re trying to do in your contract is to avoid getting less than the market will bear. And to do this, you have to know how much you’re really worth, not how much you’d like to be worth.
Keep in mind that negotiation takes time and money. Nothing gets decided in your first meeting. . . or the second meeting. . . or the third meeting. Six months per contract is not unusual, for the best deals are massaged into place, not hammered flat. And be prepared to spend up to $1000 per contract on lawyer fees, even on contracts that you never sign. It’s been known to happen.
Now if that sounds like too much time and money, then why on earth do you want to work for yourself? It’s like going to Las Vegas with the rent money and pretending it’s a sure thing. Well I’m here to tell you, it’s a risk, like any business venture. There are no guarantees. Worrying about money all the time is not only going to give you ulcers, but it’s also not going to do your work any good either.
Time for the bottom line. No matter what anyone says, you don’t have to sign anything that you don’t want to sign. If you don’t like the contract now, you are certainly not going to like it any better a year from now. Contracts do not heal with time.
You have to be able to walk away from any deal. It’s not a privilege to work in the game industry, it’s a job. No one is doing you any favors. And if you don’t take care of yourself, no one else is going to. Working for yourself is not easier than working for somebody else. It’s a nightmare unless you have the correct business and management skills.
Once you sign a contract, you can’t make a publisher feel guilty for not doing their job just because you didn’t do yours.
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Geometric AI For Patton Versus Rommel
Chris Crawford
Patton Versus Rommel is not my best work, but it does have some interesting geometric techniques for its AI. In this article I shall try to explain the ideas behind the AI.
Figuring the Line
A standard problem in computer wargames is figuring the line. The military units of each side line up along the frontline and duke it out, attempting to penetrate the enemy line and hold their own line. The first task for the AI to perform is to figure out where the line is. This is not so easy a task. Consider the following map:
There are several difficult judgements to make about this line. For example, should the black line be drawn 1-2-3-5 or should it include unit 4? That is, should unit 4 be treated as a member of the front line or a reserve unit? How far back or forward must unit 4 be to be excluded or included?
Black unit 7 provides us with another quandary. Is it part of the black line or should it be treated as a unit cut off behind enemy lines? We could draw the black line as 5-6-7-8- 9 or 5-6-8-9. Which is better?
One would expect that the line would be built according to the proximity of units. That is, the line is a sequence of units in proximity to each other. This creates problems of its own. For example, white unit 2 is closer to white unit 3 than white unit 5; this would pull the line through 3 and on to 4. Then the line would have to double back on itself to get back to white unit 5. Obviously, proximity alone is an insufficient criterion for building the line.
I tackled these problems with a sequence of algorithms. The first algorithm draws not a line but a polygon. The polygon is constructed as follows: start with an arbitrarily chosen unit; call it UnitA. Choose the closest unit and draw a line to that unit; call it UnitB. Now choose the closest available unit to UnitB and draw a line to that unit. Continue until all units have been chosen; then draw a line back to UnitB. While drawing the polygon, keep a running sum of the line lengths; this is equal to the circumference of the polygon. Store that circumference. Draw every possible polygon and select the polygon with the smallest circumference. This is the most convex polygon and is the best initial choice for building the line. It may seem excessive to draw every possible polygon but with only a few dozen units the number of available polygons is within reach and some elementary pruning methods can make the computation reasonable.
The next step is to convert a polygon to a line. This is done by anchoring the easternmost and westernmost ends of the polygon to the edges of the map. We sweep along the polygon looking for the easternmost and westernmost units in the polygon and snip the polygon at those units, extending the line to the edges of the map. A few complexities arise if we want to be able to have the line go to other map edges, but these are complexities of detail, not fundamental algorithmic issues.
The next task is to clip out tight bends in the line. This is done by a simple sweep down the line, looking at groups of three points. With each group of points A, B, and C, we calculate the distances AB, BC, and AC. If AB+BC is greater than twice AC, then the bend in the line introduced by unit B is too great and B is removed from the line. This is a very simple test, yet it works quite well in play. Its only weakness is that it does not consider the significance of enemy units. In the sample line presented earlier, black unit 7 would be included in the line regardless of the presence of white units 6 and 7.
Looking over the shoulder
The most difficult algorithm in the project arose from the need to check behind units to make sure that they are not in danger of being cut off. Since the military scenario in Patton Versus Rommel presumes a wide-open battle with fragmented lines for both sides, I could not rely on a simple-minded search for any unit behind the line. To be threatened, a unit had to find an enemy unit in its own rear. This raised many tricky problems. Exactly what constitutes the rear area of a frontline unit?
My solution makes use of the following sketch diagram (not drawn accurately):
Units A, B, and C are frontline units; we are considering the rear area of unit B. We first calculate Point 1, the point on the line connecting B with C that is as far from B as A is from B. This makes triangle A, B, Point 1 an isosceles triangle. We then calculate the midpoint of the baseline, Point 2. This is easily done by averaging the coordinates of A and Point 1.
Now comes a cute trick: the perpendicular to a line is easily calculated by taking the negative inverse of its slope. This allows us to calculate the perpendicular to the line Point1 - Point 2. The significance of this perpendicular is that it points towards the rear of Unit B. Now, we could get very messy here with the problem of getting our perpendicular to pass through Point 2. It would involve the equation for a line with a given slope passing through a given point, and would be ugly. Fortunately, we don’t need the full-blown equation; all we need is a single point, Point 3. For reasons to be seen later, we desire this point to fall on the perpendicular at a distance equal to the distance Point 1 - Point 2. Rather than belabor the arguement, I shall simply show you the code to calculate Point 3:
DX := X2 - X1;
DY := Y2 - Y1;
IF ((DX>0) & (DY>0)) OR ((DX<0) & (DY<0)) THEN
BEGIN
DX := -DX;
DY := -DY;
END;
X3 := X2 - DY;
Y3 := Y2 - DX;
In this code fragment, I use "X#" to refer to the x-coordinate of the #th point, and similarly for Y. DX and DY refer to delta-X and delta-Y.
Note that the negative inversion of the slope is handled by reversing and negating the coordinates in the last two lines of the code fragment.
Now that we have Point 3, things get easy. Point 3 forms two isosceles triangles: A - Point 2 - Point 3; and Point 1 - Point 2 - Point 3. I shall begin with the latter triangle. We can bisect the segment Point 1 - Point 3 by averaging their coordinates; this yields Point 4. Since the triangle is an isosceles right triangle, the line Point 2 - Point 4 lies at 45 degrees to line Point 2 - Point 3. Unfortunately, Point 4 is not quite what we need, as it yields a line based on Point 2, and Point 2 is displaced from Unit B. This is easily corrected by creating Point 5, a point displaced from Point 4 by exactly the amount that Unit B is displaced from Point 2. This means that the line Unit B - Point 5 runs 45 degrees out from the line to Unit B’s rear.
A similar calculation yields Point 6 and Point 7. With the two 45 degree lines produced by these computations, we can define a triangular region bounded by these lines as the rear area of Unit B. Any enemy unit placed in this area constitutes a threat to Unit B. To determine whether an enemy unit falls inside this region, we perform some analytic geometry:
AX := XB - X5;
AY := YB - Y5;
BX := XEnemy - XB;
BY := YEnemy - YB;
CX := X7 - XB;
CY := Y7 - YB;
DX := XEnemy - X7;
DY := YEnemy - Y7;
IF (((AX * BY) - (AY * BX)) < 0) AND
(((CX * DY) - (CY * DX)) < 0) THEN
BEGIN
{Yes, he is behind us!}
This last IF-statement makes use of the equations for the two lines. The inequalities express the notion that the tested point falls on a particular side of a line.
Conclusions
The point of this rather tedious exercise is that it is possible to use analytic geometry to tackle some apparently difficult problems in wargame AI. The analytic geometry approach may not be simple, but it does yield good results.
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Anything But “Computer Games for Women”
Amanda Goodenough
[Amanda is the author of a series of Hypercard stacks on the adventures of her cat Inigo and “Your Faithful Camel”.]
When I was little I loved Tootsie-Roll-Pops. As I ate my Tootsie-Roll-Pop I would amuse myself by looking at the wrapper. Do you remember those? They were covered with little pictures of boys and girls playing — flying kites, dressing dolls, pulling wagons. I remember counting, and finding that there were more boys than girls. Well, I said, I’ll count the dolls as girls. That still didn’t make the numbers equal. There was a picture of a puppy. The puppy might be a girl, I thought. That brought the numbers a little closer. I still have a habit of noticing female representation:
MacWorld Expo Speakers
Jan 88: 118 men, 13 women
Aug 88: 166 men, 22 women
Jan 89: 100 men, 18 women
Computer Game Developers’ Conference Sept 88
Speakers: 30 men, 4 women
Attendees: 166 men, 14 women
West Coast Computer Fair Mar 89
Speakers: 120 men, 23 women
Advisory Board Members: 19 men, 2 women
Computer Game Developers’ Conference May 89
Speakers: 38 men, 5 women
Attendees: 171 men, 26 women
Does women’s participation in these activities (about 12%), reflect the number of women who play computer games? If so, then raising women’s involvement to the level of men’s could remarkably increase the audience for computer games. That sounds great! Why isn’t somebody doing something about it?
Because there are two blind spots in the industry.
You will hardly believe me, but I heard it said at the September 88 Computer Game Developers’ Conference that women are only interested in soap operas and Harlequin romances! I hardly need to attack that premise, since we all know that what women are really interested in is making command decisions on the bridge of the Federation Starship Enterprise. What we may fail to realize is that being Captain James T. Kirk is romantic. We confuse romance with junk fiction. That’s the first blind spot.
A round table discussion on games for women, planned for the last Computer Game Developers’ Conference, was scratched from the program as being degrading. We suspect affirmative action of being at worst sexist and at best ineffective. We avert our eyes from woman’s cultural identity for fear of degrading it. That’s the second blind spot.
I intend to defend romance, explain why women are interested in it, and assert that it is good computer game material in the hands of a good designer. I realize that I am picking up a hot potato. I’m putting romance, which already has a bad reputation, at the head of the list of a controversial category. I’m in for it, but here goes:
What is a Woman?
My favorite definition is in Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land . The hero was born and raised on the planet Mars, and always believed himself to be a Martian. He is ’rescued’, brought to earth, and told that he is a man. He spends the rest of the book figuring out what that means:
“What is Man?”
“I am a man, you are a man, Larry is a man.”
“But Anne is not a man?”
“Uh...Anne is a man, a female man. A woman.”
If a woman is considered biologically as a “female man”, then dramatic conflict in game design — Man vs. God, Man vs. Society, Man vs. Man, Man vs. Himself — applies to Woman as well. But culturally there is more. From infancy people are socialized according to gender, and one of the strongest influences is that women are taught to define themselves by their relationships with men.
Woman vs. Man
One of our culture’s myths is that men are more interested in sex than women are. That may or may not be so. But this I propose — that women have been more interested in sexual conflict than men. It is a specialized category of dramatic conflict, Woman vs. Man. Full dramatic conflict exists within it, for Man has often been arbiter between Woman and God, Woman and Society, Woman and Woman, Woman and Herself. The vernacular for the term is “the battle of the sexes”. Women play the game more intensely than men. It is the struggle for emotional intimacy and power, generally expressed in the tension of romance. Unfortunately, a prejudice prevails that links the word romance with the dime store novel.
Romance is also the stuff of great literature, an art form often compared with that of game design. Read Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen. (The characters in her books are real! Once during a discussion of Pride and Prejudice, someone made a comment about Elizabeth Bennet, the heroine. One of the gentlemen present, a physicist, literary connoisseur, and married man, turned to the speaker and said, “Madame, you are speaking of the woman I love.”) Or read Tolstoi’s Anna Karenina , or George Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man . Sexual conflict — the balance of power between Woman and Man — need not be Harlequinesque, any more in computer games than in literature. If the characters are cardboard, it is the fault of the author, not of the art form.
Biological Similarity, Cultural Disparity
There are good reasons for women to be drawn to games exploring sexual conflict. Basic needs — survival, security, sex, achievement, and recognition — are some of the forces that drive people to play games. And until recently, the marriage state was the only thoroughly respectable means of provision for the basic needs of women, not excepting even royalty. Selecting and securing the proper mate was socially and economically as well as personally vital. The weight of this history is still powerful. Both men and women bear its consequences, and could stand to learn more about it, from inside each other’s roles.
How can we do that? How can a woman be a man? How can a man be a woman? Our best shot is through the technology that aims at letting any of us be Captain Kirk — computer games.
The Game of Love?
Imagine a computer game that allows the player to enter courtship with a feminine or masculine bias. Personal factors (maturity, humor, intelligence, interests, sexuality, etc.) and cultural factors (family background, education, career, wealth, gender bias, etc.) are distributed among several computer characters. With each character, the player shares some history (measured in terms of duration and intensity) of work and play, intimacy and commitment.
The player engages in romantic interactions with the characters — a steady old childhood sweetheart, a tender but scary new lover, a frolicsome friend. The Love Algorithm (at the heart of the game) responds to each interaction by comparing established history with recent history, and increasing or decreasing intimacy with the characters. The Character Devel-opment Algorithm reads the decisions for a measure-ment of serious rectitude, staid circumspection, and sweet folly — analogous to height, breadth, and depth. (As Omniscient Designer, I decree that a well-rounded character gets a higher score than a single-dimensional one, be it ever so moral, ever so prudent, or ever so fun. And, as long as we are imagining, let’s throw in Cupid’s Arrow, striking at random, introducing the human passions — are there any suggestions for my list?) After a delightfully fatiguing period of courtship, the player must make a decision. The score, based on intimacy and character development, is a thumbnail sketch of connubial bliss and cultural contribution — or lack thereof.
Of course, it’ll take a Jane Austen among game designers to pull it off.
Now, Don’t Be Ridiculous
I am not saying that women enjoy only those computer games that are romantic. I am saying that women enjoy computer games for the same reasons as men, but from a different perspective. That perspective shows up strongly in sexual conflict. It is a clue that may help designers answer the question: How can we get more women to play computer games?
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No Salary Survey This Year
We had a total of 6 responses to the salary survey described in the last issue of the Journal. Next time I shall have to provide a response postcard.
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Computer Game Developers’ Conference
Eric Goldberg
Your software is as good as your last royalty statement. Variations on this theme were hammered home throughout the third game developers’ conference, which found a fast-maturing community reeling from a first-quarter slump and coming to a grudging accommodation with the “N-word” (as in “Nintendo”).
Despite these sentiments, the prevailing mood was hardly one of ashes and sackcloth. Rather, American society’s fascination with reducing every endeavor to a common business denominator now extends to our corner of the world. As the industry is in tough — but hardly desperate — times, there was a strong sense of concern and unease. Call it MBA malaise.
A leading proponent of the business school approach to the process of building games is, unsurprisingly, Joe Ybarra, entertainment software’s most successful producer (at least as measured by aggregate dollar revenue of his titles). Ybarra touched on most aspects of this process in his kickoff speech, tying commercial results to design success at every opportunity. He reminded us that most all of Bach and Beethoven’s finest compositions were commissioned works; if these two geniuses produced great art to order, went Ybarra’s line of reasoning, what software designer could deny that market considerations are of paramount concern in design?
(Ybarra prefaced his talk by announcing that, though Infocom’s Cambridge office was closed earlier in the week, the company would continue on the west coast. Several Infocom alumni took vigorous exception to this interpretation of events; rumor has it that gory details will be found in Computer Gaming World, for those who care about such things.)
The publishers, of all people, took a more cautionary view of an emphasis on marketing. Robert Garriott of Origin Systems, in presenting reasons for the recent slump, admitted to some embarrassment that the software industry did not know how to weigh the various factors. Joe Miller of Epyx went further, by saying that, despite their marketing resources, publishers cannot explain customer buying patterns. (The irrepressible Trip Hawkins [Electronic Arts] was not in complete agreement.) Garriott and Miller, in spite of their professed fallibility, followed through with keen analyses of the software scene, and urged the Software Publishers’ Association to develop a consumer buying decision feedback loop.
Gary Carlston of Broderbund was the first of many publishers to grapple with the Nintendo problem. Carlston and his peers agreed that sales of PC versions of video (i.e., arcade-style) games have been obliterated. They concurred with other speakers in drawing a distinction between game machines and home computers; game machines, which use the 6502 chip (just when you thought it was safe to go back into the CPU...), are characterized by purpose-built sound and graphics chips, and occupy a place in the family living room. Several of the publishers suggested that, rather than trying to compete with Nintendo and other consumer electronics giants, we should dedicate ourselves to finding the advantages afforded by the greater power of the home computer; that we should find our niche; and that we must increase quality, because, without that differentiation, we are vulnerable to the marketing might of the game machine companies.
In a thoroughly entertaining keynote speech, Stewart Alsop took a jaundiced view of the current situation. Alsop, who publishes the highly readable P.C. Letter (which, as a newsletter, is priced out of the reach of the struggling software designer), told us that the decline in software sales mirrored a drop in hardware sales. He had further discouraging words about the prospects for hardware design; the manufacturers aren’t going to make machines with games in mind. As Scylla to the manufacturers’ Charybdis, the consumer electronics companies will not — or maybe can not — figure out how to make the software developer’s job any easier, either.
Just as rusty razor blade futures began to look like a good investment, Alsop relented and gave us the good news: for all the wrong reasons, the hardware and consumer electronics companies are going to give us a tremendous opportunity. None of the behemoths who dominate these two industries can see, let alone exploit, the middle ground between them, and that’s where we can literally and figuratively play.
Amidst the chaos of the present and the promise of future shocks, the developer could be forgiven for longing for the so-called “Golden Days.” Jon Freeman, Richard Garriott, and several other crotchety old farts in their late 20s and 30s reminisced about that halcyon era some five to ten years ago. Freeman and company observed that the business card stapled to a plastic baggy (containing a diskette) was through as a packaging vehicle, and unconvincingly mourned the loss of innocence or naive expectations or some such.
Chris Crawford treated us to his customary all-speaking, all-gesticulating, all-important exposition on game design extravaganza. This time, he set about to define interactivity, to prove its “absolute centrality” in game design, and to establish it as the design tool which gives the game designer his competitive advantage over other entertainment media.
Chris was in good form: windmilling his arms, speaking in different voices, making use of an eclectic selection of props. The star props were a range of headgear, from a court jester’s hat to represent a game designer to a train engineer’s cap for a programmer to a German infantryman’s helmet for the programmer confronted by players who mess with his perfect code.
The speech’s substance was driven home by a tight focus on Crawford’s three points, though he was nearly done in by an excess of hyperbole in his closing remarks. Crawford flatly stated that the next several hundred years’ interactive entertainments would consign existing artforms, such as the popular novel and Beethoven’s symphonies, to the trashbin of history. (Poor Ludwig von. His name and masterpieces were invoked constantly to “prove” this, that and the other thesis.) With prompting from Cliff Johnson and other sympathetic listeners, Chris quickly retracted that statement, and segued into the lively give-and-take that follows his better speeches.
(Chris noted that, at any time in his speech, he had, on average, 25% of his audience’s attention, and that, with a top-notch effort, he might command as much as 30%. This limitation is inherent when dealing with a passive group; only interactivity can increase the interpersonal “baud rate.”)
If you were afraid that you missed any of Chris’s greatest hits, an enterprising videojournalist can allay your worries. A sign festooned with breathless advertising copy (“See Chris crack the whip! See Chris reveal the fundamentals of game design!”) and action photos (!) informed passers-by that VHS tapes of Chris’s most recent talks could be had for $24.95. Chris tacked on a disclaimer that he had nothing to do with this, but had given his permission. Next, we may see the merchandising of the Crawford designer programmingwear line, from chamois shirt to workboots.
More conventional licensing was the chief topic of the Movies and Games panel. Noah Falstein, Elaine Ditton, and I dutifully trotted to the podium, advised everyone to stay away from licenses in the present climate, and, in virtually the next breath, said that we were presently working on licensed product anyway. In any event, the licensing joyride is over, and, with Steve Cartwright, we outlined the risks inherent in basing software on properties from other media.
Charlotte Taylor-Skeel’s presentation on how a software developer should deal with the press was the highlight of the Press and Games panel. Taylor-Skeel also prepared handouts, which, aside from recapitulating her recommendations, served as checklists for the prospective interviewee. Another useful handout, on publisher relationships, was from Stephen Friedman, and gave estimates on publisher sales, staff sizes, salaries, advances, royalties, and negotiating tips. If we’re fortunate, the data survey and checklist will become conference institutions.
A fledgling “institution” was set up when Elaine Ditton was confirmed as chairperson of the model contract committee. The committee hopes to learn from the examples of several writers’ associations (in particular, the Science Fiction Writers of America), and to bring software publishers into the drafting process at a relatively early stage. Anyone who plans to be in this field for a length of time will understand the importance of this first small step.
The greatest influx of new people was from the paper game industry, and, in their honor, I was asked to chair a panel on the applicability of paper game design technology to computer games. (Paper games include the work of the very best game designers, simply because those designers have been thinking longer about game and design theory than anyone who’s worked exclusively on the electronic side.) We were also fortunate to have Ian Trout and Roger Keating (Reach for the Stars, etc.) from Australia.
Award winners were Electronic Arts for Best Technical Support; Sierra On-Line for Best Q.A. Operation; Cinemaware for Most Innovative Publisher; Accolade as Best Publisher; and, in a tie, Shelley Day (of Accolade) and Rich Hilleman (of EA) for Best Producer.
As anticipated in last year’s report, the network game providers were very much in evidence this time around. Producers from CompuServe, GEnie, Prodigy, and Quantum led the discussion in Dan Bunten’s multiplayer game roundtable. These producers were united in their sense of mission, their desire to communicate to the stand-alone computer game designer the power and attractions of the network environment. For some of them, the confer-ence was also the first face-to-face forum in which developments in network games could be discussed.
(It will be interesting to see how the network people are accepted at future developers’ confer-ences. If the attendees can be said to speak with one voice, it is that of the PC game designer: one or more disks, one machine, one player. Publishers, and particularly marketers, are viewed with suspicion, but so is our peers’ work on coin-op and Nintendo games. It is the publishers who ought to fear the networks, which have the potential to bypass conventional distribution channels; for developers, the network game should be a natural evolutionary progression from the PC game circa 1989.)
A network clears the first hurdle a computer multiplayer game must surmount, which is bringing together a community of people to play the game. An intermediaryless modem game, such as Bunten’s Modem Wars, is not very useful unless the player is either fortunate or resourceful enough to know where to find other players. The other major hurdle, at least as perceived by the attendee developers, is the still small multiplayer game audience, and, by extension, the insufficient financial incentives to work on such games.
Randy Klein of CompuServe observed that the income stream from a network game behaves like an annuity, in that, though it doesn’t have the potential sharp upward spike of retail distribution, the stream is constantly renewed as new subscribers join the network service. Neil Harris of GEnie noted that price was not a barrier to entry: a network game can be sampled for about 50 cents, while a high-end PC game has to be bought on 40 dollars’ worth of faith — which leads to the thought that, even if piracy weren’t extremely difficult on a network, much of the motivation for doing so is absent.
As people with design and technical backgrounds, we have embraced the implications of the “New Hollywood” for the product side, while missing the equally dramatic changes which must occur in distribution. Networks are the cable-TV and, perhaps, VCRs of this future scenario, and thus an immensely significant part of the revenue equation.
Robert Gehorsam pointed to networks as a way to reach the broadest possible audience. This effect is more pronounced on the Prodigy service, of which Gehorsam is a producer, than on its competitors, which compete for the computerphile market; however, the inexorable trend in all aspects of computing is towards greater user accessibility. Gehorsam also sees distributed intelligence as an inevitable direction in network games; let the PC terminal do what it does best, and relegate the mainframe to the role of server. Anyone who’s experienced a system crash should think this is a very good way of going about things.
Rob Fulop, for his part of the Network Games panel, presented an original and thoughtful view of the design issues. However, Fulop argued that only games of luck could be viable on a network, as the “solutions” to strategy games would be given away via electronic mail. The audience jumped all over this assertion, pointing out that solvable games are, in actuality, puzzles, and that chess and Diplomacy, among many others, clearly do not satisfy his criteria. Fulop maintained that licenses are not necessary to networked games, but he later talked of a need for themes with built-in market recognition. Fulop also warned against sponsored games, which he sees as subject to the sponsor’s editorial control; Gehorsam, who’s produced a game independent of its sponsor, took a different view.
In reporting the apparent contradictions in Rob’s speech, it has been done some injustice. Rob’s thesis is marred only by a solipsistic view of the network game universe: because his Rabbit Jack’s Casino is successful on Quantum Link, Rob extrapolates from its strengths and jumps to conclusions for the entire spectrum of network games. His underlying logic is well worth repeating with or without the lessons of the Rabbit Jack experience, and my hope is that Rob can be prevailed upon to present his thoughts in a future Journal.
A double-track of roundtables was a new item on the conference program, and, by all accounts, it was a resounding success. The program abounded with provocative titles, including “The Future of Interactive Arts,” “How to Get Normal People to Play Games,” “Why Programmers Should NOT Design Games,” “Let’s Design a Game in 1 Hour” (no warranties were expressed or implied), and “Censorship: Sex, Drugs, & K-Mart.”
This year’s conference came complete with a celebrity: Timothy Leary, he of 1960s radical and mind-altering substance fame. Leary, whose Mind Mirror software might best be described as a character analysis utility, was invited by Brenda Laurel to co-lead a roundtable on the design process.
He came, we saw, we gawked.
After a brief eulogy of Abbie Hoffman, Leary went on to describe the options available to an inner-city teenager consumed by rage in a future 15 or so years from now. He had the teenager take home Rambo III, and use a handy home editing tool to replace Sly Stallone’s musclebound body with that of an ape, and Rambo’s rocket launcher with an elephant’s dick. Having worked off some aggression, the teenager replaces the tape on the video store shelf the next day.
“Before you leave, call Mary.”
With those epochal words (to his brother Doug), Gary Carlston led off the first publishers’ panel, which will seem a lot more historic as we get further away from the event. Tim Brengle was on hand to police audience behavior, and, even in their ruder moments, the cut-ups among the publishers kept the feigned yawning to a minimum. Even though revelations did not come down from on high, and the earth didn’t shake, the panel was quite a coup for the conference committee.
(The Gang of Seven, otherwise known as Barrett, Brengle, Crawford, Friedman, Johannigman, Laurel, and Menconi, turned in another splendid job, and this time they had to handle 300 people.)
Richard Pferdner, speaking for all developers without a track record, politely challenged the panel to back up their statement that the development of new talent was extremely important to the various companies. From his personal experience, he recited a catalogue of massive indifference, which consisted of being bounced from one department to another without any sense of getting to someone who might deal with an unknown. (The classic response is still an Avalon Hill reply form from the 1960s, which read, “We do not accept games from people.”)
Several panelists acknowledged that a steady stream of new talent was necessary to the long-term growth and, indeed, the survival of the industry. Bruce Davis of Mediagenic interjected with a reality check, pointing out that, for every wonderful new talent, there are many, many more who, for one reason or another, cannot reliably deliver new product. Add to this state of affairs the plight of the typical publishing staffer, who is in a constant struggle to meet deadlines and to keep up with the latest technological developments. The result: there just isn’t enough time to wade through the electronic equivalent of the slushpile.
After the act of creation, the development and nurturing of new talent by publishers is the nearest thing to black magic. Davis’s statement should not be construed to mean that a publisher can’t afford to evaluate any would-be software developers. The best publishers set up an environment in which staffers champion promising would-be developers, and give these developers occasional assistance as their first projects head towards fruition. However, finding these talents is still very much a matter of serendipity. A proposal from the next Dan Bunten may wander across your desk, but if you’re wrestling with the umpteenth graphics standard for the IBM PC version of a project that’s already several months late, chances are that Dan will be safe from competition for a little while longer.
Our business has the distressing habit of doing things at a highly accelerated pace, and has gone from boom to bust to boomlet to slump in less than seven years. The people who’ve been aboard for the whole of this roller-coaster ride can be forgiven if they are a bit cautious and very concerned about from where the next dollar comes. These people have many impressive accomplishments to their collective credit, not least of which is the rapid maturation of the developers’ conference. It should not be long before this group turns its attention to the proper balance between art, commercialism, and technology. We can all look forward to the results.
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