Steve

Episode 6: Randy Smith of Tigerstyle Games (and longtime Thief designer)

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Wow, oh wow

 

In a very special episode of Tone Control, Steve and Randy Smith got onstage at FantasticArcade in Austin, TX to talk about their games and approaches to game design. Afterwards they huddled in an alley and worked back through Randy's career at Looking Glass, Ion Storm Austin, and through to the founding of Tigerstyle Games.

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Randy Smith is easily one of my favorite people named Smith who worked at Looking Glass Studios on some of the best games ever made! Can't wait to listen to this one.

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Excellent podcast, despite the windy conditions:).

I want to agree with the  stance that Randy Smith, Clint Hocking and you take on 'think first about player activities not story' but what if you envision first is a story space that you feel only Video game can serve - a bunch of questions, themes or topics you want to expose the player to or want him to express himself in? Can you picture  'reverse-engineering' the activities that would be relevant to that space and make the experience within it meaningful?

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Excellent podcast, despite the windy conditions:).

I want to agree with the  stance that Randy Smith, Clint Hocking and you take on 'think first about player activities not story' but what if you envision first is a story space that you feel only Video game can serve - a bunch of questions, themes or topics you want to expose the player to or want him to express himself in? Can you picture  'reverse-engineering' the activities that would be relevant to that space and make the experience within it meaningful?

 

I feel like this would be tough, though is I'm sure achievable-- but my expectation would be that you'd end up wrapping back around to the "what actions are being performed by the player that are interesting" thing on your way to making a successful version of what you're picture. Papers Please, for instance-- I don't know how that game emerged, but I could totally see it starting from the idea of "I want to make a game about the security state and the inhumanity of border crossings" and making its way to "so what you do is you're a border crossing agent and you have to move documents around and compare them and decide whether to let people through or not..." etc. I don't think any approach is just universally untenable, but I think it is always important to consider what makes the player's interactions interesting for something to really end up successful.

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For anyone that is interested in Randy Smith's career trajectory, there is another podcast that was done with ex-Looking Glass studios people. I recommend the whole series if you played most of those games. Here's the one that was done with Randy: http://gambit.mit.edu/updates/2011/06/looking_glass_studios_intervie_3.php

 

Oh yeah, these are definitely great. Highly recommended. The one with Ken was really earnest and warm and I enjoyed the hell out of it. Need to listen to some of the others...

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My favorite part of the interview with Ken is when he is talking about like his first day at Looking Glass, it really cracked me up.

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Another great episode! It's always a treat to hear Randy Smith's thoughts on game design. He's got a real talent for articulating "immersive sim" theories.

 

He was such a huge part of the Thief series. I fear the next installment is suffering from a lack of direction. My biggest concern is that while original games were basically about taking a systemic approach to environmental navigation, Eidos Montreal have opted for a more contextual approach for the reboot which seems to be missing the point. It could be a neat stealth game but it won't be Thief. I feel sorry for them having to follow up Dishonored.

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Randy was a great guest. I feel that he did a particularly good job elucidating his beliefs, motivations, and processes. Well spoken.

 

Yeah, it seemed like the rapport was almost tangible.

 

On a side note, Steve, of the half-dozen people I know who played and liked Gone Home, all of them would buy cat DLC for a five-spot. Food for thought.

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Yeah, it seemed like the rapport was almost tangible.

 

On a side note, Steve, of the half-dozen people I know who played and liked Gone Home, all of them would buy cat DLC for a five-spot. Food for thought.

I'd do it for ten!

 

Oooh you should also talk the Viscera Cleanup Detail guys into doing a Gone Home version. That's tone appropriate, right? (I'm sorry.)

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I enjoyed this episode a lot, and I agree that the chemistry felt great. In fact, it didn't even sound like you were on a stage at all, just two dudes chillin' and chattin' 'bout gam' d'sin'.

 

 

The discussion about what characters in video games are right now was particularly interesting. Mentioning the two outer points, enemy obstacle and static dialogue tree, made me wonder, how far away are we from system-based characters? AI routines as advanced as Halo enemies, but focused on talking and interacting, rather than dodging and shooting?

 

The closest I've experienced is actually Animal Crossing. The inhabitants remember things you did for them, act a certain way, and go about their daily routine. But I know a lot of that is fudged, by f.ex. having a pre-set personality archetype. 

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Sometimes I feel like all this effort at trying to realize characters in games is all for nought. After all, games are basically just a collection of interactive rules/systems. Using rules to express things like physics or strategy games is one thing, and maybe even simple animal behavior, but to try and express human freedom and emotions like love in a highly simulated world seems like it is at cross-purposes with what games are. That's my pessimistic take on the problem at any rate.

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(My optimistic take is that there are people much smarter than me that are probably working on this problem!)

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Sometimes I feel like all this effort at trying to realize characters in games is all for nought. After all, games are basically just a collection of interactive rules/systems. Using rules to express things like physics or strategy games is one thing, and maybe even simple animal behavior, but to try and express human freedom and emotions like love in a highly simulated world seems like it is at cross-purposes with what games are. That's my pessimistic take on the problem at any rate.

 

Not to be "that guy", but books are just a collection of words. Given enough parity with what we know from real life, our brains love filling out the gaps.

 

 

That's not to say it's not an enormous undertaking, of course. But while we might never achieve simulating a human, I think it's definitely possible to get to the point where a simulated character can feel real.

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Just finished re-listening to this episode and I wanted to chime in on a topic Steve and Randy were talking about: the "deadness" of environmental storytelling.

 

It's interesting that you guys refer to this as "archeological" or "forensic" storytelling; as a history student, I've always thought of it as "historical" storytelling, since you're sifting through documents and objects trying to discover something about the past just like a historian does. So when you mentioned how these are dead stories, I immediately compared that to history. The thing is, people think that history is "dead" in that it's in the past and you can't change it, but it's very much alive. Historical narratives change all the time: new information is discovered, previously ignored topics get attention, interpretations differ among scholars, new popular representations emerge. Our conception of history is always moving, because history is gigantic and it's impossible to understand the whole thing.

 

I think this is a possible avenue for adding life to the stories in games like Gone Home. While there is often a lot of subtlety in how these stories are told, once that's figured out, the stories are fairly unambiguous. Gone Home has some ambiguity:

what exactly happened between Mom and Rick, do Sam and Lonnie make it okay?

but for the most part, I didn't have a ton of doubt about who these people were and what happened to them, especially after reading other people's impressions of the game for stuff that I missed. Adding more ambiguity and contradiction, so that there are a variety of legitimate, competing interpretations of events and maybe more significant holes that people have to fill in for themselves could, I think, go a long way to making these types of stories feel more dynamic.

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