Corollary definition for design

If design is a process which develops the value of an idea. Then a corollary to this might be:

- Design is aimed at reducing waste.

Maybe this lean perspective is the source of the first definition but I would not know.

The Cost of Art Forms

This is a relative type of general production cost.

• Poems are cheaper than Pictures
• Pictures are cheaper than Music
• Music is cheaper than Movies
• Movies are cheaper than Games

Hence games are the most expensive art form, unless we consider architecture to be an art from but I don't think architecture belongs here. I kind of tried to fit "website" in this list first, but it isn't an art form, just a technology which carry these other art forms.

Games are the most expensive in this list. There is however a component of the structure that I ignored here which games exploit to reduce the cost per minute of entertainment which is recursion. You can't effectively reduce the cost of a movie by reusing the same scene or the same music. But you can effectively extend the duration of a game by reusing the same rules with only minor variations of the underlying data.

The complete cat strategy guide for game production

This is a story about a group of agile cats with skills and a passion for games who build a game together. They met somewhere and founded:

One Lean and Mean cat machine which will be doing something cool and have an awesomely good time together while doing it. The cat team introduces themselves and writes witty descriptions about what they do on their Google Wave.

Fixer Cat: "I am like doing all that stuff that no one else does, making sure that nothing stops the other cats from doing awesome stuff. I am obsessive about development process, cycle time, kaizen, integrity and communication. Other IT projects might call me a combination of QA, Operations and maybe Producer."

Artist Cat: "Art is like a universe of symbolic language which has emotional resonance and communicate directly into the users brain through traditional data generation. I paint, I make sounds, I write texts, I make landscapes, labyrinths, hats, mice, animations, music, particles, movies and everything that you see and hear within the game. I got quite the education to know the theory, tools and practices of all these spiffy art forms."

Wizzard Cat: "Computers speak directly to my soul. Little impulses of electricity becomes living worlds full of cats and mice through the magic I perform. You might think the world is made out of things, I know it is made out of math, logic and process. Nothing within the game reaches the player unless I make it work. All the programming languages, technical platforms, rendering engines, deployment process, automated testing and the lot is stuff I have mastered. I am quite awesome."

Expert Cat: "Sun Tzu would be pwnd by me. If he wasn't dead already, I am still alive. I know marketing and how to position products. I know how to measure success and set goals which will be even more successful. I speak directly to the end users and learn what they desire. I communicate the markets desires to the team and workshop with the team until they prove they understand what the market wants. I test the products on the market and improve our results relentlessly. A game developer would call me a designer, maybe a non-traditional artist or a biz analyst. I also do stuff like interaction design and scripting when needed."

Our four cats are maybe not using the most conventional titles as the ones you might be familiar with. But keep in mind that these guys are mean and lean cats. They don't follow conventional rules. They make their own rules and play their own game to win.

Two kinds of players here, you know them already... In the world of cats they dont know they are a market. They just want to live their lives happily and in peace.

The cats start working on a vision which causes a lot of half friendly cat fighting, including hissing and big fuzzy tails. Eventually cool cats reach agreement and begin with reality checking what they agreed upon. They keep running around in this loop until reality align with their concept. Or maybe it is the other way around, its difficult sometimes. If they fail they go back to the vision but these cats are so mean they only fail about half the time.

The cat team takes a close look at the vision and how it is positioned on the market. They don't want to run into those nasty big competitors, some smaller competitors are quite ok however. They know what they are doing so they pick a spot which looks like it might have a few lonely cats without suitable and good games to play.

Since the cat team has found its market position for a game they can start hammering out the concept. What kind of thing is this game that these other userCats are likely to want? They figure out what kind of symbolism might stimulate this audience into taking action. What kinds of goals the userCats are likely to find engaging. And they put these things into a list of priorities for production.

With priorities sitting on the wall as post-it notes they take the first one and they go out on the streets where userCats are hanging around waiting to be entertained. They talk to the userCats and carefully nudge up some information about the highest priority. Woot! This works! UserCats like this type of stuff... well sometimes at least. Quite often they have to run this loop a few times before userCats seem to provide the correct information. They might also learn new things about the competition here which needs to be taken into consideration. Sometimes they even encounter the wrong userCats and have to change them for others.

With a successfully developed list of priorities the cat team starts producing prototype products. They think this is what a Minimum Viable Product is about. They bring it to the userCats and see what happens when the user cats try it. In the beginning it does not work very good, but the mean and lean cat team knows how to repair their broken prototype and after a while the userCats start to appear rather engaged when testing it.

And there it is! The cat team has found resonance after a few attempts of prototyping. This is a key moment for the team to get a morale boost which will bring them forward towards cat nirvana.

With the successful prototype to guide them the cat team goes into production.since they are so lean and mean they don't need any more cats for this, all they need is an even tighter relationship with the end userCats. So they pull userCats really close to the team to make sure they can test their product continuously against a useful feedback pipeline.

At this point the team starts investing a significant portion of their time into making sure that they can keep up a high speed through the loop. A lean and mean cat machine knows that the most important thing is to be able to react to feedback as fast as possible and they keep on making their reactions faster and faster for every circuit through the loop. The Wizzard protests loudly when the magic might be going kaboom in the future and the Expert stops the production and does a "5 whys" if the feedback from the userCats starts sounding like strange noises.

While running through the production loop the cat team is making these userCat loops, Daniel Cook named them STARS. Each feature consist of many of these loops and each iteration the cat team add value to these loops. Stimuli is the first thing the userCats encounter. The team makes sure all the stimuli in the game makes sense and fits the expectations of the userCats and sometimes they make sure that the userCats are positively surprised when moving through the STARS loop.

Daniel Cook is a hero for lean and mean cat teams.

Eventually the cat team will be successfully stringing the userCat loops together in some awesome patterns. As the Newbie user cat successfully runs through the loops the Newbie cat gets more and more engaged. The cat team is so good at this that the loops are whole and working. UserCats experience good pleasure and they don't burn out or feel confused and annoyed. As a userCat plays the first finished parts of the game it feels showers of dopamine in its brain which are produced when the nerve system extends its associations to better handle the Skills required by the game.

When the cat team picks up a new piece of the game to build they know that they are only in the beginning of a journey which will need a few round trips with the same piece. They are quite competent so they understand that trying to add another piece before the current one reaches the "market demand per feature threshold" is going to lead to a ton of waste in future production.

While working on making one function in the game good they methodically monitor the feedback from userCats for each iteration. They keep on iterating until there is statistically reliable proof that the purring is caused by the product and not something else.

Oh noez! The cat team has run into a road block!

Regardless of how many times they iterate on a piece of the concept which aim towards the vision they just can't make the userCat purr from it. This is a tough spot to be in. Now they have to do a pivot. Such a lean and mean cat team is not very scared of this problem. They know that they have a solid core product developed which causes userCats to purr satisfyingly. To keep on progressing their product so they can get even more purring all they need to do is some analysis and observation.

The cat team steps back a bit and takes a close look at the market again. "Ok" they say, lets figure out where to move now. Should they abandon the project? Switch to some totally brand spanking new vision? Or ignore the feedback and release it anyway? No, instead they keep one paw firmly planted in their current vision, and prepare to take a step towards a new direction.

They adjust the aim of the vision a bit, keep the successfully developed userCat value, kill the remainder of the old backlog and define a new set of concept pieces which will lead to the new visionary point they find interesting.

Eventually the game does all of the things it should be doing and the userCats are excitedly running along its dopamine infused feedback loops, having a blast and feeling the luurve all around. The userCats realize that the lean and mean cat team made something that was just perfect for them and they send love letters and even a bit of money to the cat team.

The Cat Team are heroes in the world of the userCats and they know it. What the cat team will be doing next is a secret hidden within the future.

Hypothesis - Bartle types as network agents

About a year ago I took the time to read through this http://www.tp.umu.se/~rosvall/publications/rosvall-phd.pdf which contains some interesting perspectives about the world which I find relevant to game design. The first quite practical idea that struck me from thinking along the lines presented is that we can look at the commonly used four Bartle types as agents in an information network. Before I go straight at the idea I have to describe what I mean by information network in relationship to this particular post.

An information network is any system which relays information through links to nodes. For the case of a an online game, which is where the Bartle types come from, this information is typically in the form of text, number, items, levels and so on. We can summarize it as everything any player does which can be observed by any other player either directly or indirectly as a piece of information in the network. The nice thing is that we don’t have to care about the details here.

If you want a good background for understanding the following arguments I recommend reading the publication linked at the beginning of this post. Otherwise maybe you might be interested in it for some other reason.

Quick and dirty Information Network theory background

Nodes are positions and actors in the system, for the case of this particular perspective they are players.

Links are connections between players which transfer information. A Chat conversation is a link, group membership, trade, spatial proximity and so on. We can categorize links as a kind of relationship between players. Links are commonly measured as a relative strength. Measuring links in a binary fashion as used in this text implicates that there is some threshold under which the relationship is too weak to warrant representation in the model. For example between two players who briefly saw each other or had a brief conversation. If you have a project where this type of detail is of relevance feel welcome to extend the model to fit the data which you can understand.

An important piece of background for understanding this text is that links are attracted to nodes which has and communicates information.

Some poorly formulated theory follows:

Bartle types can be detected within a game by tracking changes to the information network. How you would do this practically is not going to be part of this post. Each player can be considered as a node, or we can group players together if you like, but on this very abstract level it does not matter, at least not to me.

The Achiever is a node which generate information through its activities. The Achiever activities are typically focused on explicit goals within the system, such as obtaining things of value. The information gathered by the Achiever is primarily about the Achiever as a relationship to these goals. Such information will spread out from its source to other nodes in the system.

The Explorer determines the value and priority of information in the network. The values found by the Explorer are relevant as meta information and attract links just as any information does. By careful examination and comparisons of available information the explorer is the node which labels information as more or less relevant within the system. If you have played some WoW you might argue that this is done by the auction house, I would argue that there are other things which are information, such as raid tactics, rare spawns, cute little pets, fun quests, interesting situations, chat conventions and about everything else.

The Socializer is a node which relays information by attaching links to available nodes. Information and the priority of information attract attention from the Socializer. Once the Socializer node has obtained information it will use the information to attract new links.

The Killer is a node which cut the network by removing links and nodes. The Killer is unpredictable and will at random select a piece of the network and cut it. We can make a guess which says that the Killer will cut the network at about 2 degrees separation, or more, from its own position.

How. A sub-atomic structure

To begin with the effort of breaking down games into individual parts I need some rules to follow. I’ll begin with making a rule which says that the breakdown needs to have a useful purpose for making better games, or at least analyzing games for potential improvements. Since I preliminarily have the intention to make a comprehensive model for some analysis I will segment the effort and give each component its own story. I will also go for the large scope and make this breakdown for “computer games” rather than board games and I will aim it at what has value in the marketplace.

How Things Happen

Games are composed of “things”. At this point we don’t need to dig into what these things are, that is going to be covered later. What we need to concern ourselves with at this point is the matter of how.

When you create a game you have the option to determine how things happen in the game. A lot of your options are going to appear as hard wired in the technology or genre which practically is a matter of cost efficiency. Since we are not concerned with cost for this particular topic we can ignore things such as genres and technology and purify the idea of how.

How, for the purpose of this text, is a matter of matching sensory requirements of the user with events in the product. We humans have sensory systems which have been developed through a long time within an environment which honed our DNA through analogue API’s. These are often referred to as nature. Our senses are developed to detect things in nature and it appears as if things in nature come to our attention through some natural properties. A suitable example of the way nature works to catch our attention is perhaps how a branch of a tree breaks when you are climbing on it.

You are standing on a branch in a tree and feel it sway slightly beneath your feet. Suddenly you hear a crackling sound of wood fibers breaking, the branch bends swiftly and you fall. This is a simple model of a natural “how”. We can plot it over time and get a little sequence.

Swaying –> Crackling –> The Break –> Falling –> Ouch!

For the purpose of fully detailed analysis we can consider the crackling as an individual how. How does the branch crackle in nature?

The crackling is going on for a short time and begins with the first crackle, the first fiber that breaks signifies the moment when the branch starts crackling. When the branch crackles its most intsenively we definitely can tell there is some breaking going on. The last fiber that breaks signifies the moment when the branch has finished crackling. We can plot the sequence of crackling over time and get another graph. We can assume the time is short, maybe about one second.

First Crackle – Peak Crackle – Last Crackle

Us humans have developed a in a world where branches crackle as they break. The crackling is an integral part of how we learn climbing in trees, something which probably was more important to us a few million years ago but anyhow, our brain uses the crackling to learn about trees. Since games are much about learning things (which is a topic we will return to later) it is important that the way things happen in games match the criteria for how the brain organize sensory stimulation.

Something that is really rare in nature but awfully common in poorly built games is the metaphorical equivalent of branches that breaks without crackling. When things happen immediately we fail to learn what happened. We stand on the branch and suddenly the branch is broken and we are falling. This causes a sequence of sensory failures and the player often experiences a negative value in the product as a business consequence. Our ancestral monkey humans quickly learned that certain types of trees are treacherous and should not be climbed, that is the markets rejection of a poorly built “how”.

From here we can make a comparison with how things happen in a piece of music. This is a comparison for practical purposes because the structure of how has been dressed with a terminology in the music world. We can look at a note that gets played. We don’t need to care about which not or why it is played.

Someone who tweaks synthesizers will be quite familiar with the concept of envelope which sometimes is called ADSR. Envelope primarily defines how the sound signal changes over time. It is commonly connected to how the amplitude, or volume, changes over time, but can also be connected to other things such as filters, phase, pitch and everything else you might want to involve in the note. Since it is easier to understand what happens with amplitude than the other things we will use that as a reference.

When a note begins, the A in ADSR which stands for Attack is set to fits between two extremes. These extremes are instant and very slow respectively. No natural instruments really has an instant attack although some instruments which would appear to be close to instant would be a small bell, a pluck on a guitar or the pressing of a key on an electric organ. An instrument with a very slow attack is also tricky to imagine but rubbing a gong with a brush until it howls would be an example, a singer who makes a very quiet noise and slowly increase the volume until it is loud or an orchestra which slowly builds a crescendo from silence. The real point is that the shape of the attack matters a great lot to the listener of the music.

The remaining parameters of the ADSR will get a bit shorter descriptions.

The D stands for Decay. Decay defines how the note changes after the Attack has player through but while the instrument still is “alive”. For example how the note from a piano sits there while the piano key is pressed.

The S stands for Sustain and defines how the instrument behaves while it is continuously stimulated. For example how a violin sounds while the bow is acting on its string, or how the organ sounds while the key is kept pressed.

The R stands for Release and defines how the instrument behaves when it is told to stop. How the string stops making sound after you release the key and the dampener interfere with the movement of the string.

When building a game we choose how the envelopes for feedback systems are set. The shapes of the envelopes give the feedback fit within the overall experience. Chances are that a very successful game has more variation in its envelopes than less successful ones. It can be argued that feedback is a fractal concept which exists within all levels of the design and that there is an envelope on the feedback from managing a guild in an mmorpg as well.

Figuring out how your particular game should structure its envelopes is an iterative process within the development cycle. Making conscious design decisions for how each component operates from the direct to the abstract will likely help make you understand your product better.

Feedback envelopes are from the perspective of a structure or “grammar” for game design at the sub-atomic level. You can feel them, test them and evaluate them as individual contributions to the overall experience without needing to worry very much about their dependencies on the higher up structures such as skill atoms or story for a good long while. An important thing to keep in mind here is that it is a relatively hefty task to iterate feedback envelopes and you are likely to benefit from determining your level of ambition before you get started spending time on a very ambitious scope in this matter.

Example of mechanics which has an envelope you can test in some isolation.

An attack, accelerating a car, steering a boat, jumping, killing an enemy, selecting a puzzle piece, completing a puzzle, becoming a friend, using the manual, starting the game, etc. There should be no end to which things in a game has a how.

From here we can go back and look at the envelope for the full story of the breaking branch in the tree.

It begins with swaying, converts to crackling, breaks, sends the person falling, from where the next envelope takes over and defines some kind of ouch! A very big part of the learning in games comes from the envelope of the ouch. Learning in games is also something which has been well explored by many experienced designers the last few years so I won’t have to write much about it when I get there.

Protons, chairs and art

Things have a tendency to be composed by other things. How things break down depends on which system you use to break it down. Music as I have previously written about can be broken down into music grammar, an example might look something like this.

Opera > Act > Instrument > Key > Bar > Note

I don’t really know anything about opera so don’t think this is correct in detail, however the point is that the full experience consist of a significant hierarchy of information regulated by some grammatical rules.

Another example of a thing which breaks down into some kind of grammar could be a chair.

Chair > Material > Structure > Molecules > Atoms

Again I don’t know anything real about physics but again the point is the same.

It appears as nothing is exempt from the property of existing within a greater whole. The chair might exist within a room, which exists within a house in a town and so forth. The value of the chair might be linked to the town in which it is and what the local trends and cultures happen to be around there. Also atoms break down into smaller particles and forces if you desire to extend the model even further.

Now I’ll try get to the point of this little post.

In the case of music you can individually analyze each level of the breakdown for value and defects. If there are too many notes in a bar of music the music is defect which will make the whole opera sound foul. If you don’t know that the cause for the foul sounding opera is the existence of too many notes in one bar for a particular instrument you might attempt to repair the problem by adjusting everything else to fit the broken piece.

Much of the game design theory which I find on the internet contains the concept of how to break down games into their hierarchies. I find many of them exciting, especially the skill atom concept by Daniel Cook at http://lostgarden.com/.

However there is something which nags at me as feeling insufficient with all the models I have seen so far. I suspect the cause is that the breakdown into a “grammatical” type of structure is limited to present only a portion of the piece. In the world of music the missing pieces might be covered by two additional components.

1 – The instruments and their properties
2 – The musician

These two properties can be seen as extending the breakdown of music into even finer components which define the properties of a note.

.. > Key > Bar > Note > character > harmonics > dynamics > phase > modulation > etc

Or you can turn it around and describe the waveform which is the end product of the Opera as math... a suitable task for a clever programmer with a big computer perhaps.

It might seem unlikely but there are several pieces of music which has its user value linked to the interaction between phase and dynamics within a single note. Two types that come to mind are electronic music and classical soloists who both expend great energy at refining these subtle parts of the product.

Now It might be about time to make an attempt at breaking down games into their relevant areas or materials. That will be another post.

Care is needed

I just read through the excellent first installment on the Game Design Concepts by Ian Schreiber. I recommend reading it: http://gamedesignconcepts.wordpress.com/2009/06/29/level-1-overview-what-is-a-game/

The definition of game is an interesting matter. I would add to his something like this:

A game "requires that the player care about the outcome of the game."

This is relevant during the play session. Since the game is defined as an "Activity" already I will lump this one in with the definition of game. If the definition was aimed at the construction of the game in its idle state I would remove it.

Format

Something i have been pondering for a while.

The form of play in games is to see what happen when you do things.

Along the way you encounter other forms, play goes through feedback which presents consequence. Is it that easy to describe?

Planning for Greatness

How can you plan to achieve something which is great? This is quite an interesting problem when the details of the end result are unclear as they always are with any entertainment production. If I were to supply an answer to this question I would have to begin with trust. Mutual trust is imperative to greatness.

This pops up in the game development industry through various funky ways. Almost no one has enough credibility in the gaming industry to be trusted with anything that is not an oldskool artform such as painting, writing code or making music. This results in a tiny number of pioneer game design luminaries riding a positive feedback loop of trust which everyone else struggles with aiming for a foothold.

A lot of people are struggling to develop trust in the arform of game creation (design is not an artform) but almost no one is reaching a point of credibility. The number of people who prove their ability to make games which work is enormous, the number of people who prove their ability to reliably create game which are profitable business is miniscule.

Almost everyone who has created profitable games did so by getting lucky. I usually call this kind of system a "darwinistic process" which means that the reason why they were successful is obfuscated by complexity. This is also the reason why a "repeat performance" is extremely rare on the level of the individual production unit. Getting lucky is a statistical anomaly and it is even more rare to get lucky twice in a row.

To plan for greatness you have to understand this pattern. Even if you do have a "trusted" fellow who can claim responsibility over a portion of the creation you have to understand that this person was mostly likely just lucky and got involved with a project which had a randomly lucky destiny. Armed with this knowledge you need to integrate the experience from this person with the new team. Teach everyone in the team how the successful fellow learned to reduce the statistical probability of failure with healthy motivation. This will develop trust.

Trust can also develop in several other ways. I would personally recommend communication as the primary tool. Once you have trust you can have success. If you demand success to feel trust you reduce your chances of success to the same level as all the other random mutations within the darwinistic soup of creativity.

Btw, being just another random mutation in the chaos that is life gives you a very poor probability of success.

No great result is really random

I was fiddling with the mix and arrangement of the latest Spaceforce song and realized that I was messing with something that one of teachers said in at Musicians Institute. It wenst something like this:

- Parts of the production might appear to be random, such as the slight out of tune guitars on a nirvana album, but in truth it never is random. It is well through out and set to be just that way conciously.

There is a lot of wisdom in this and it does apply to a whole lot more than nirvana songs. It happens to apply to Spaceforce as well, when the production is young it has a lot of randomness in it coming from the first iterations which define the structure of the work. But the process of finishing anything is partially about removing everything random and replacing it with the concious refinement of the data.

This also applies to game design and storytelling, maybe you start with randomly generated pieces, but you should be well aware of why you keep anything which was randomly created. It will rarely do more good than harm to the end result.

Defining a motive

I am very much driven by the need to have a motive. This reflects strongly on my hobby projects and when I do things aimlessly the result tend to be reduced to a conceptual effort without value.

To do something about this I need to create a reason for putting up with an effort. For hobby projects there is a good lot of slack on the side of communication. There is no need for anyone except myself to really understand the motive. To make a different type of thing I will try document this incomprehensible process here, you might not be able to follow it well. But I'll try make it readable.

I need a motive for making some sci-fi music, for a larger scale hobby project which is a bit under the radar and hopefully will deserve proper mention later on. What are my options?

1 - Make something that I want to have for my own pleasure.

2 - Make something I think others will like.

3 - Make something for the fun of it.

Ok, so I pick the fun, thats #3 in the list.

So what is fun?

Fun is learning something by using skills which I can develop during the creative process. This is the reason for picking option 3.

If I were to go for #1 I know I will personally dislike the result until my highly picky ears are willing to accept the output on an emotional level. This will require something I expect to be close to an infinite number of iterations. SinceI am somewhat reluctant to invest the rest of my life in this hobby project I will abondon this option.

If I were to go for #2 I would expect to need to work so hard that I will never finish, if I aim at pleasing an external audience my probability of success is limited by my inability to measure my progress against a target audience so this one is out.

Going for #3 I'll start with identifying which skills I want to develop. Thats relatively easy. Production methodology, guitar playing, mixing, rigging, storytelling and some other random stuff not worthy of mention. I will conciously abandon the skills of designing up value, I'll move outside that concept by pretending that I dont care about it in this particular case. The work involved with design in this case would also not be within my means to execute.

Now I have the basic idea, so how to I create the motive from here?

Last piece I made defined pieces of a motive I will use and I'll call this an informal vision.

The informal vision

Setting: Sci-fi (Technology has made changes to the world and the idea is to use the context of the changes to present a message about something which may be more or less deeply hidden in a story or fantstic context. What the technology is will be part of the vision of the effort.)

Method: Roleplay (I'll pretend to be some entity within the context and define details of this entity partly during the development process starting up. This entity will be a band, which is a part of the technology in question.)

Background: A Story

The story in short:

A political party, The Network Party, created a new ideology based on mathematical proof of optimized average and total life value of all humans in the world. This was such a powerful ideology that the political party spread its rule to cover the world and save the planet earth from destruction by consumeralism and economic competition for resources. As the party gained strength it became obvious that mathematically proven principles are well managed by computers. This led to the ideology being implemented in code and thereby further optimized, the implementation was known as The Network of Organized Democracy, usually called The Network or "TN" as shortened by l33tspeeking people.

Humankind was now living an awesome life happily together and they decided to journey towards the stars. A few million years later humankind has spread across the vastness of space. To establish new colonies they sent robots which are connected to The Network. These robots spread propaganda for The Netowrk to alien worlds in preparation for the arrival of human tourists and adventurers.

The Network developed several series of propaganda robots, one of the successful brands travel through space in the form of musicians. They bring the glory of The Network through galaxies by playing songs which they modify iteratively towards fitting whichever alien species they encounter. They can also defend themselves if attacked, but they generally are peaceful. Humans can also purchase these robots directly from The Network by spending a decent lot of their consumption allowance on each robot.

Anyhow... the setting for the work in question is to create odd iterations of the robots propaganda music. This leaves me without any reason to worry about making anything which either attempts to sound real, natural or great. I can focus on the skills I think I can hone through the work.

The details is to roleplay the robots. And the robot band is known as:

Spaceforce

Vocals: All 4 robots participate in singing

Guitar: Roxxor

Drums: Tricklock

Keyboard: Schmooth

Bass: Doppz

The first job in the process of creating the next song in their setlist is to define the sounds of Tricklock. This time I'll aim at the Make it Flawless principle, meaning that I'll spend a lot of effort on getting the drum sounds of Tricklock. I think Tricklock will get his own post before I am done with him. Now to setting up a whole lot of samples in the drum machine... time to start working.

Practicing Agile on Art

To practice the kinds of principle which are described by Lean I started with creating a piece of music. I like making music, it is meditative and it uses some of my usually dormant skills which when I fire them back up gives me a serious dose of pleasurable feedback chemicals in my brain. Anyhow, creating music is an example of a very well defined production system and I like making abstract generalizations from things I know well to things I know less well. On the whole I can claim to be quite an efficient music production team all on my own, something I have a hard time claiming for the art of making games. Games require so much wider skill sets to go from idea to fully implemented in the cases that I am interested in so I can’t make a micro experiment to test the concepts of Lean development on my own with the game medium, and I can’t program well enough to make anything useful.

One of the great advantages with creating music is that I have access to a relatively decent implicit iterative method which covers the full production pipeline. I can tell if the instruments are tuned poorly, if the arrangement is busted and such technicalities. I can even tell if playing the instrument in the recording is giving a result which pleases the musician. This means that I pretty much know when I am cheating the creative process by accepting less than flawless components in the production. I can also cheat and get some explicit feedback from various sources such as sending snippets to friends over the internet or check details with a spectrum analyzer etc.

I also know that the end result is the interaction between the components and that I will not really be able to know in advance if a production will be good or not. I can generally feel it growing if I keep working on something which keeps me motivated. Almost everything which I ever finish is based on a mashup of old prototype songs. This mashup process is something similar to stage gate portfolio management which defines little pieces but without the information of how the pieces should interact to deliver an impression. This is also poorly managed by me with various references in my brain and plenty of broken snippets of recordings which I usually forget about. To bring this mess of components to life as something which I can claim to be something I finished I have to work through what my limited experience would label as a large process. I don’t like using samples, when I try I tend to get bogged down in editing the samples so its more efficient for me to just go straight at making the whole arrangements and tweaking the hell out the individual instruments.

The way I make music is fundamentally iterative. The goal is a mix of creation and refinery towards reaching greatness. Greatness is a state of perfect fit, “the goose bump factor”, an implementation which creates unique emotional response of some kind. This is hard work, I am rarely motivated enough to not give up and leave the effort as a part of the busted stage gate portfolio. It happens sometimes that I keep on going and the finished results are what I can use to run production technique experiment.

Writing this I sense that I will not be able to combine the whole argument in one big post. I will have to dig at details another time if I get there but I got some direct references at this point.

1 – Make it Flawless; applies to music production. This is a well known oldskool audio engineering principle which says that: “Make quality recordings of sounds; you can not make bad sounds good by tweaking them.” You can also not effectively engineer up a poor performance or a bad melody through creative editing, you can make it better yes, but you will be much less efficient than making the recording good in the first place. Compromising these early stages of the music production is like technical debt in software development, you can use them to move fast to a certain point but you will never reach greatness unless you go back at a later point and fix it. Such late fixes are often big risks as the new recording might interfere with the whole arrangement. This often leads to cascading failure of the whole production and all you get is yet another ambitious component of the stage gate portfolio.

2 – One piece Flow; this very much applies to music production. If you fail to follow it you will fail the Make it Flawless principle and learn to accept a poor result. The trick to one piece flow is to know your production method which is much easier in the world of music than when making games, especially for me since the process of making music in my case happily operates at a loss as long as I have fun with it. In the world of music production this goes through layers of development. You will benefit greatly from having the rough shape of the arrangement in place before starting to mix, you don’t start with the mix because then you will break the idea of one piece flow and en up with all pieces. The real question here is what the “one piece” is. In music the “one piece” is a multi dimensional argument. It can be used for an instrument, section, harmony, melody, mix, arrangement, lyrics and so on. The matter is the ability to identify the pieces and to learn how to be satisfied with one particular piece. This identification has its roots as a craftsmanship based on skills, theory and vision.

3 – Maintain multiple options; this is integrated with tools pipeline. In an ideal world I would call this “the mix” which is what you do last before sending the work to the ears of an audience. I am not sure if this is because I want the reference to fit or if it fits. The idea also carries through the arrangement by the theoretical structure of music theory. There is this huge set of lore which a master musician can use to apply multiple options to any given situation. I am not a master in this sense but I had an awesome Jazz teacher who showed me a few things about which doors can be opened to toss things around in a technically “legal” manner. It has been half a life time in my world since I had those lessons but their fundamental concept remains with me still. I’ll tell you the secret right here: All that theory is just a shortcut for connecting your ears to be the judge of what is good. It is a great shortcut and it is the key to collaboration and communication about the creative process of the medium. But it is nothing which resembles strict laws and the rules are there to be broken by the creator at will.

4 – Avoid Waste. This is a tricky beast, also very relevant to music. Defining what waste is in a music production is not that straight forward. Recording random things and putting them together is generally waste, sometimes it is a process which rapidly can fill up the stage gate with concepts. The real answer to the question of what waste is depends on the vision and goals of the production. If the goal is to increase the stage gate then an ambitious mix is waste, if the goal is to deliver on a vision then aimless noodling and random recording is waste. To know how to spot waste you need to be a well practiced craftsman of music creation.

My biggest problem for my music hobby is lack of vision. I like to blame this on the extremely efficient development method which gives me an extremely agile context. The studio software allows me to change anything at any time so I never feel like I have to spend any effort at creating a vision for the work. This makes it easy to get a false sense of progress towards greatness and the lack of vision rears its ugly head as technical debt within the whole arrangement which sends everything to the stage gate relatively often.

All of this stuff is generally applicable to most things in life. The biggest problem with implementing process optimizations toward value production is a lack of common grounds for communicating these kinds of ideas. Just as it is hard to make a band play good music without a fundamental common ground in music theory it becomes hard for a game developer to make good games without a common ground in development methodology and game design theory. Lack of common ground will require blind faith which is a rare human trait and it rarely lead to good results.

A reductionist model of humankind

Anyone who read this is statistically likely to be annoyed by it. It is also not founded in any real research that I know about, just a bunch of conclusions drawn by myself through looking at things and probably cherry picking my sources.

Humans are agents in a big system based on other humans and the rest of the world they live in. The system is too large for us individuals to see how the system works even at a short distance away from where we stand. This is what makes us individual, local properties.

What makes us different on an individual level is what we know and how we think and this might appear like great differences on the surface. But in fact it stands for a tiny portion of what a person is in comparison to the position within the whole system. The definition of the individual – you come from your most immediate surroundings through life until now and your expectations on the future based on extrapolating the system in a predictable direction.

As we grow up we learn to attach blame and praise for how we operate on ourselves but this is primarily a bunch of fake social magic which our system has invented as method for success, as success for the system, not for you, through the last few thousand years. The biomechanical machinery in your brain is built to trigger on stimuli which it learns to associate with rewards or stress based on randomly testing the world to see how it operates. We spend the vast majority of this random testing on figuring out how people within the system work and what things we can do to make them exhibit useful behavioral patterns. It was quite a different result a long time ago when we roughly belonged to the same system as some kind of monkey.

Anyhow, condensed this means that we really all are just the same. We think we are very special because our own consciousness happens to sit without ourselves but we can be relatively certain that we would have been easily replaced by any other consciousness given the same circumstances as ourselves.

Given this potentially evil, if you like that type of language, argument we can probably figure out how the system operates even at a great distance. The people that are so far away that you have no chance of knowing anything about them will have done exactly the same thing as you did until right now. They have been trying to figure out how the system operates from experimenting randomly with the available local properties. Based on these local properties they have developed a personality which will be roughly the same as your own, regardless of where they are in the system.

It is very unlikely that they will be reading this text, har har, which means that you will possess a different set of data to use for interpreting the world. Which also mean they might even speak another language and associate other things as stressful or rewarding, that’s their local experience and it will have the power to shape their model of the world.

Now the responsibility of art becomes to manipulate the agents in the system towards performing actions which increase the experienced value of the whole system. Increase the full volume of the value, the average, the mean average and increase the minimum value per system component, the risk of failure and so on. The only reasonable compromise is the reduction of the individual maximum, which on a system level is waste anyway.

Target audience

Who likes a particular piece of music?

This question has a lot of answers. I would not be able to answer it in detail. All I can hope to do is to understand the piece of music and how it relates to world according to some quantifiable properties.

• What kinds of music it is similar to
  
• If it is easy or challenging to listen to
  
• If it is easy of hard to perform
  
• Maybe also what it is about

These can be broken down in little pieces. Like which things are similar to what, detailed infuences and so on. The relationship to the audience is influenced by these details. You rarely really know in advance which things have what influence. To get a satisfied audience as a musician you focus on making the music as good as possible. There are some genre dependant properties which define more or less strict rules for the audience. I usually like the extreme of improvisational jazz, as it is one of those hardcore music genres with a comareably small and devout following. It is also defined by quite rare properties with strong influence over the artform.

There are those moments when peple convert to become listeners to this type of jazz, they might make the leap based on a lot of various motivations. Not very relevant really...

When it comes to games I am quite confident that the same general principles apply that exist for music. The difference for games is from my perspective that most of the games we know are like improvisational jazz. Every game has relatively strict and strong influences which fence the player off from the experience.

A game will require the player to make that leap to become a player. The interesting question is why the player will make the leap. And how the game can make the leap as painless as possible.

When you want to push normal people to become listeners to improvisational jazz you can use a few tricks. Like making the musicians play things which are easier to listen to and follow than what they commonly do.

Maintaining multiple options

This is a Lean productivity trick. Mary Poppendieck describes it well in this awesome movie; http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5105910452864283694 - you have to watch it if you care about making good things.

When looking at game development this is done on a regular basis in some of the pipelines, most obvious when drawing art images through how the layer system operates in photoshop but also in how programmers write code with branches and classes, how storywriters use word processing software to keep dialogue and story flexible and how musicians create the music score with their software such as ProTools maintaining all the versions of the songs on the HD while edits are happening to a subset of files.

Now the question becomes how to apply this to the combined user experience which results from bringing all these pieces together. As the network theorists say something along the lines of: the whole system is the combination of the nodes and the interaction between the nodes. The game which becomes the user experience is the interaction between the nodes, the code is one node, the music is another node, the image art is a node, the interface is the tool which the user has available to navigate the network which in a good game becomes a modular agent in the network.

The game itself is a system which measure the skills of the user, these skills are deployed in context by the user to navigate the whole network. Any piece of the network which is outside the users path is roughly what lean would call "waste".

For the whole game system to maintain multiple options we'll need to expose the interaction between the nodes as readily changeable and generally transparent, human readable, data with some level of backwards compatibility. This is an utopian model, but it is not fully a pipe dream. In a not very far future we will know much more of the principles of game design. From my perspective these principles started with Chris Crawford and his model of interactivity, they have moved forward a lot with things like Raph Kosters theory of fun for game design and Daniel Cook's model of skill chains. There is a lot more stuff in this mix worth a mention, but maybe we'll go there another time.

With a better understanding of the principles for game design we will be able to identify differrent types of interactivity and thereby define the interactions between the nodes in the system with an explicit format. Music has several kinds of explicit data formats to present the patterns of sound on on various levels of abstractions, waveforms, instruments, overtones, harmonies, rythms, notes, tabulature and so on. Several of these have alternative modes, you can define a "tone" through various methods either as an "instrument (violin) playing a note (A) for an proportion of a bar timeunit" or a "fundamental frequency (440Hz) with 9 overtones (i think thats the violin if I remember it right) playing for a time in seconds". You can keep on going and define the waverofm as a function based on trigonometry if you prefer but I'll skip that example. I think the point made it through without. Note that the actual psychoacoustic representation of the violin is a lot more complex than these primitive models but on the theory side of things you go there if you want to, which is about never unless you are a bit "special". For the synthesizer manufacturer its all the way down through the trigonometry that wins the day with modulation, also trigonometry, controllers and stuff.

Game design theory is today at the stage where everyone communicate with a randomly selected spray from the whole arsenal of terminology, or rather, different people use different terminology to say the same thing and they generally don't know that there are other terminologies which define the same interactions within the system. They can barely even communicate with each other without first synchronizing the language which is a hard problem. Some very experienced designers will have a gut feeling for a lot of the principles, I myself find that I have a better grasp of some models when analysing a game play experience and some others when writing a game concept. I must admit that I also don't know the whole system, I don't think anyone does. There is no "first dan black belt" of game design and not even Sid Meyer, Will Wright, Chris Crawford or anyone else would have it if there was one.

However we can start in the pragmatic side of the equation and create a data model which best expose the whole system as nodes of data and interaction which is the transportation of other data through the system at the request of the user through the interface agent.

Now you could claim that this is already done with the programming langugage itself, and to some degree that is true. However the game systems which people play today are requiring domain experts which are not always competent programmers. (Programmers don't tend to spend most of their time doing user research as example, thats sub-otpimal to most production efforts.) Also maintaining multiple options through having several version of the whole code base is unlikely to be much help.

So what kind of data can define the interaction between nodes in the system?

If anyone wants to take a stab at it go for it, or bring up examples from various game engines. ^^ (Or I will later on and then it gets texty as usual.)

Iterating towards value

It is commonly accepted that the user value in a game and most things has a statistical probability to increase with the number of iterations it has gone through. This goes for things such as fried meatballs, your DNA, a guitar solo, a sound and so on.

This takes on different forms in different areas of life, since I am interested in writing about game development I will focus this story on some of the forms involved with making games. The process relates to cooking and music production, but since this is a big topic I’ll leave most such fun references out.

The relationship between iterations and value is often plotted as a neat little graph.

Note the S-curve type of deal going on. That says something about the existence of “no value” iterations at the beginning of the process. You got to get to some point before you have anything, then eventually it is finished and stops getting any better. To get anywhere interesting with this topic we have to take a look at the definitions of the graph. What is the value you get as a function of # iterations?

What one iteration is

One iteration is the work done from the point where there is an idea about doing something to the point where what was done has resulted in useful feedback. This is a fractal concept and it has several types of zoom levels and dimensions. The one zoom level most commonly associated with game development is on the product level. One iteration on that level have its value measured by feedback originating from the potentially shippable product through various test procedures such as user testing, technical testing and getting accepted by the product owner. These are examples of something I will call explicit feedback.

Explicit feedback gives a quantifiable measure of value which is obviously visible to the involved parties. These summarize as “done” when everything pass defined criteria often called a “definition of done”. Generally if feedback from the work shows an insufficient or negative value increase the iteration has failed.

Another zoom level for one iteration with an explicit feedback loop is the creation of code data, commonly called programming. If the code is broken it will fail to compile and all kinds of feedback is generally built into the code pipeline to prevent broken code from entering the system. The programmer makes a new iteration of the code to improve the value of the code without first shipping the code to the end user to test if it has any value. These iterations are fast, some broken code can be iterated on in a matter of seconds. This time unit defined by the time it takes to iterate is sometimes called “cycle time”, which I will also use a fractal concept. I will call this comparably low zoom level of iterating for “creative process”, the programmer creatively create the code.

Another type of creative process is the creation of images. The artist uses an image creation tool such as photoshop to create image art. This is also a fast process. The artist will generate art data on a second to second basis, undo things that go wrong and create new pixels with a stylus without thinking of it as iteration. The artist also maintains and switches between multiple options throughout the production of one image. The feedback which closes one iteration in the creation of a pixel of art data is internalized by the artist. I will call this implicit feedback.

Implicit feedback is not obviously visible to anyone. It is to the observer a subjective measurement and often leads to all kinds of emotional distress for the involved parties when it comes time to analyze the value of the output of the creative process based on implicit feedback structures. To the professional artist it is not fully subjective as some principles of the arts guide the creative process but in large it’s a relative mess compared to the efficient explicit structure of code creation. It also happens that different artists use different principles for this process which often cause communication problems, but mostly everyone has learned to live with this process quite productively.

Now that we have a model to differentiate iterations between ones based on explicit and implicit feedback it becomes much easier to understand what things you can put in through the value creation process.

A guitar solo runs its first several thousand iterations as an implicit process before it reaches the point where it gets explicit feedback in the form of praise or complaints from band members, audience or other people involved with the music production. Improvisational jazz is an example of the solo going directly from implicit practice to the end user without explicit iteration, even driven by the goal to change between each gig! The details of the solo are guided by a lot of musical theory internalized by the jazz guitarist.

The development team for a product increase its value based on explicit feedback from the producer or the team itself, as well as the implicit feedback within each team member and their feelings towards doing good or bad work. Scrum is an example of a process which forces some of this feedback to be explicit. This is good in the sense of providing direction but as all game designers or players should know we humans have the property of “gaming” systems towards maximum reward for minimum effort, hence it is likely that if not guarded well the process is used by the team to optimize towards getting the positive explicit feedback at the lowest cost possible. This is in game design terms sometimes called “bottom feeding” and needs to be guarded against by the rules of the game which define what to do to get which feedback. Another game design term which becomes relevant in explicit systems is the “mastery problem” which means that the better players will dominate the feedback structures of the game and win at a cost to the other players. Neither is good for the value of the product and digging into these details may be a topic for the future.

When explicit and implicit feedback systems fail to agree on if an iteration is successful or not there is often all kinds of problems surfacing. If these problems happen often the whole product is most likely going to fail on the market.

Implicit equals difficult

Making enjoyable and fun interactive games is primarily based on implicit iteration. Some fundamental infrastructure such as code and having a development team can be considered explicit but getting the experience to a point where the market value motivates the investment goes through tons and tons of implicit iteration.

Many of the implicit structures in a game are based on established art disciplines such as creating images, animations, music and storytelling. The product trusts itself to these domain experts effectively collaborating as a team. There are tools to rapidly iterate these components in isolation and it is part of the expertise of the experts to be masters of these tools.

The real problems surface when the implicit feedback relates to the sum of the parts of the system in the form of information design and game design. To make the game play experience have any value these also needs much iteration. Yet again there are skills and principles in the design expertise that help this process but they all fall under the implicit feedback umbrella and thereby cause communication problems.

If you look at the game industry at large you will find that there are a lot more games in certain categories, this makes the game industry appear relatively narrow. Many games resemble each other and are based on each other. The games that have been successful become so by playing on their strengths. The things that can be iterated relatively fast are strengths while things that iterate slow are weaknesses. Most are built on development techniques which upfront know where the pipeline is fast and where it is slow. This gets successful when each domain expert in the area of design owns the iterative loop for the implicit creative process. The things that have a cycle time measured in minutes or seconds reach the point of noticeable value, while anything which has a slower cycle time measured in hours or days should be considered as experience-wise valueless infrastructure. Those slower components of the experience will not be what make the user reliably have a gratifying experience. You might get lucky, but to get from lucky to certain the fundamental trick is to get the cycle time down to the range of seconds.

Techniques for effective iteration

Now that we have gone through a somewhat too big background of the problem we can take a look at a solution.

Based on concept, product vision or creative direction take a deep look at the idea which is going to result in user value then list the main components of the user experience.

• Take a through, cross-functional, look at each of these pieces. If there are more than a few dozen and in the hundred or so range you probably mistook the user experience for something too granular or technical. Or your team might not understand what the experience is supposed to be which might be a sign for future trouble.
  
  
• With the list in hand maintain the cross-functional approach and categorize the pieces in cycle time as estimates in seconds, minutes, hours, days and weeks. Include dependencies in these cycle times if needed, for example if it is relevant that some animations blend properly in the feedback system consider the pipeline for animation blending in the cycle time for animation feedback.
  

Now make three categories

1. Usability Infrastructure, everything with a cycle time of days and weeks in here
   
2. Shoehorn User experience, the things with a cycle time measured in hours
   
3. Reliable User Experience, seconds and minutes
   

With these three categories freshly composed remove everything except the third, fastest, category and see how well the things in this fast list match up against the idea about the product. It probably won’t match up very well. Don’t panic! This is quite common when making interactive entertainment and it is to your advantage. Most of your competitors will expose their weaknesses if you can figure out where their user experience is bogged down in the infrastructure category. You can also save your project by avoiding dependencies on the user experience which resides in this category. You will have some, that’s unavoidable but at this early point you have the ability to shed complexity to move the right things to the category of reliable user experience.

A general trick for getting the interactive parts of the system to the level of reliable user experience is to make all feedback elements dynamically changeable. For example if you have a storyline with a movie in it you will have the experience defined by the movie as a feedback element for an event triggered by the user. It is now important that the person who knows how to make movies can change the movie inside the experience with fast cycle time. If the cycle time is slow for movies don’t make them as parts of the system. Put the movie in the beginning instead as an intro which has no dependencies of interactive nature.

This can also be done for the verbs of the interaction circuit. You can’t expect to add a new verb with a fast cycle time so the verbs themselves go in the category of infrastructure. You can however adjust the subject the verb interact with, such as the width of a hole you need to jump over, how fast the opponent is running in a shooter. The verb can be changeable too such as the target area of the weapon or the height of the jump, expose suitable adjustable variables in an easy to change and preview data model. Beware tho, don’t mess up all the level design by changing the jump variables after production of the levels has started!

Use a recursive strategy to tune the experience. Make sure that the user is protected by efficiently tweakable variables to lean against all the way along the user journey. This will allow you headroom to react to feedback on the user experience at any point during the production. The larger percentage of what the user experience you get in a fast iterative loop the better. It’s better for the user to play a tiny game with a flawless emotionally satisfying user experience than a bigger game with a few uncomfortable moments. Note here that proper pacing is not to equal “uncomfortable” because the player will need both peaks and throughs on the emotional side to enjoy playing.

Exceptions

There are some exceptions when we look at the established game industry. Mostly they are rooted in incredibly huge budgets. Someone is spending so much money on the business that you can move the infrastructure category one notch up to the week level and just pour calendar time and man hours on making slow iterations instead. This also tends to interact with established development pipelines such as game engines for specific types of interactions. This approach is however on its last legs or already dead but it made some good stuff the last decade.

Another type of exception is the undiscovered market. You usually don’t predict these, but it happens that a new market is discovered by a product developed with a random approach towards creating value. Usually the resulting product is soon dethroned or bought by a big budget competitor. Looking at the music industry we see these random productions rather often but for each successful one we see thousands and maybe millions of failures. Reliable and consistently successful musicians iterate more or less consciously towards a safe result including all relevant disciplines in the process.

A lot of products also have no ambitions of providing a valuable experience. Instead they provide something else of value which may be relevant information or a service with pragmatic and explicit solutions to specific user needs, however games are only partially explicit and rarely pragmatic experiences.

phew, thats a long post...

Approaching Design as topic

From what I can find there is no common description of what design is. There are quite many different definitions around the web and several additional ones if you look through books on the subject.

Let’s have a look at the better candidates of what I found by googling the topic.

As a verb one definition I like is “to plan and make (something) artistically”. As a noun there are other good ones such as “an ornamental pattern” or “the arrangement or features of an artistic or decorative work”. These speak about the artistic nature of the word which is highly relevant.

Another way to look at is through formal definitions. A good one by Dick Buchanan who is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University School of Design says:

"Design is the human power to conceive, plan, and realize products that serve human beings in the accomplishment of any individual or collective purpose."

This is nice. It takes into consideration the human component in the creative process and in the perspective of the end user. It also, the way I read it, takes into consideration the realities of turning an idea into a product. This is a useful insight but I rarely find it to be properly attached to design in particular and more associated with product or business development in general, where design is of relevance but not the primary responsibility. I can't claim to understand what the last third of the definition really means, “in the accomplishment of any individual or collective purpose”. Maybe it exists to exclude that which has no purpose. Maybe I should take some time and study the topic in question rather than ramble on about it.

Despite the fact that I like this definition by Dick Buchanan as well as some descriptions of the meaning of the word design I don’t find them useful to serve the purpose of approaching the everyday problems of designing products.

Instead of spending a lot of time to find a definition which works for me I’ll make my own. I want a definition which is useful when describing what I do. Which also brings out the kind of goals a design effort aims to meet. It would be nice if the definition also is easily understood by normal people. A definition made for specialists may be helpful when digging deep into the problem but a definition suitable to the topics I intend to dig at with this blog needs to be relatively simple.

My definition of design becomes this:

Design is a process that realize the value of an idea.

Is this enough, or is it too wide? A potential point of failure for this definition is the concept of “user value”. This definition becomes all about user value, but it excludes the conception of the idea. Unless the idea is to come up with a valuable idea in which case we can apply the design process to develop the idea in itself, messing around with paradox is not a hobby of mine so I’ll quit here.

If I am lucky someone will come along and shoot this definition down before I get horribly entangled with it. Next topic might take a closer look at user value in particular.