Games Education and Research at Aalto University
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Research showreel 1 First some personal timeline. I’ve studied both at the Aalto schools of Science and Arts. Got my doctoral degree in 2007, then been working in the games industry. 2 3 There are many definitions. The image was selected because I remembered the second definition just a few days ago when my son decided to start walking only on the seams of the pavement at Helsinki railway station. In other word, he made the journey a game for himself by creating an artificial but fun challenge for himself. 4 Digital games are a medium that can encompass all others: text, visuals, audio, story, video, comics... 5 Games are also a growing business and the most significant Finnish cultural export area. In addition to the design and technology, the business side has been evolving rapidly. The latest trend is Free to Play, which means that the game is a free download, and money is made through in app purchases, which help the player progress. One may decide whether to grind for hours or to skip the grind and pay up. The specifics of free to play mechanics are currently evolving. One may also pay for the game with a variety of currencies. For example, Candy Crush let’s the player to decide whether to pay for new levels or advertise the game on facebook, which effectively means using up one’s social capital. Advertise too much and people will hide you from their feeds. 6 Currently in news: Rovio’s fall from the 100 top grossing list in App Store. On the other hand, Rovio just launched a video network – distributing an Angry Birds animated series through their games, reaching a wider audience than many television networks. Mobile gaming future looking bright because it attracts new users – casual gamers who might have started playing games on Facebook and have migrated over to mobile thanks to the streamlined user experience, and mobile offers better tools for charging money and paying. The statistics might not be fully accurate, they are based on what I heard from some industry executives a few days before making this talk. They are probably in the ballpark anyway. 7 The games business side of course comprises other things than games as a product that the customer pays for. Here’s an example of games in advertising, combining recent technology and gameplay (a Kinect dancing game) with advertising in a public space. It’s also a vending machine, rewarding players with a free bottle of coke. 8 9 Considering games as design, there’s four main components in the form of the Elemental Tetrad of Game Design (from the book The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell). The figure also shows the visibility of the components. On the surface there’s aesthetics, and as the important but less visible basis there’s technology. 10 11 There’s a variety of definition for a ”game mechanic”. For some authors (Rogers) it’s about equal to an interactive element such as a lever. Other authors consider mechanics equal to the rules of interaction, speaking of, e.g., the ”jumping mechanic” which includes when and how the character can jump, double jump and how it is implemented. Game mechanics is also where a computer science student may excel over self-taught game programmers. They are often basically simple to implement, but polishing and finetuning may benefit from some science background. For example, physics simulation is not that trivial because it needs to have a solid basis in reality, but on the other hand, game design may require an artistically motivated deviation from reality. Understanding how to build or tweak physics engines benefits of an understanding of the underlying math. Also, game camera movement is a challenging field where it is difficult to come up with simple and robust algorithms/rules that work in all the special conditions, such as player moving into a corner or inside crowded and tight spaces, below obstacles etc. Signal processing, e.g., knowledge of different low-pass filtering (smoothing) techniques helps in achieving a believable and pleasant camera movement. I’ve often used the following, which one will encounter on a typical audio or image processing course: a box filter (FIR with equal tap weights), a first order IIR lowpass, and a variable timestep double- exponential filter. 12 Other useful skills/technical skills: basics of machine learning (kernel regression, decision and regression trees/forests), numerical optimization (Newton, gradient, Jacobian transpose, stochastic optimization), Bayesian inference, particle filters (e.g., Sampling Importance Resampling) 12 From Level Up! by Scott Rogers. To illustrate that game mechanics are not invented out of thin air but the evolution and innovation is typically incremental, with totally new genres spawning only occasionally, often inspired by a new platform or technology. 13 From Theory of Fun by Raph Koster 14 Modern innovative gameplay (Portal by Valve) 15 The modern innovative indie platformer (Braid, inspired by Blinx: the Time Sweeper.) 16 Katamari Damacy. Both innovative gameplay (rolling things into a ball) and technology (dealing with scale changes from miniature to planetary on a PS2) 17 I agree with Rogers in that one needs to find just the right amount of story for each game. Some backstory helps in motivating the players, but too much dialogue or cut scenes can kill the interactivity. No story is better than a boring story. Heavy rain: mechanics mostly serve the story, make a gesture to continue. Some players dislike, but has also its fans. 18 According to Rogers, Robocop is a good example of games missing the importance of the first act in the classic three act story structure. In the movie, the main character almost dies at 25 minutes, only to be resurrected as Robocop. By this point, the viewer has established a bond to the character’s human side and the love story has been set up, without which the movie would be a lot shallower. 19 However, all Robocop games skip this crucial part and start from the player as the Robocop – a huge missed opportunity considering the emotional depth of the playing experience. 20 Alyx from Half Life 2 as an example of a character with which the player can become emotionally attached to. For me, Alyx’s voice instructing me through headphones inside an enemy base, with her face occasionally showing up in a security monitor was the first moment of such gameplay intimacy that I begun to wonder if I had actually become at least a bit infatuated with a game character. It was both embarrassing and awesome. A deep and strong emotional experience is still more of an exception and not the norm in games, and remains a challenge for researchers and designers alike. 21 The importance of aesthetics must not be underestimated, although some game designers like to focus on the mechanics. There’s more and more evidence of humans perceiving the world through a holistic process that integrates various senses and cues, and our percepts of visual beauty can for example be affected by audio. Schell cites a study where the same game was ranked lower regarding the visuals when the players were listening to an audio track that lacked high frequencies. From the study of human cognitive biases, we know that a single attribute may dominate our judgement, masking away deficiencies in other areas. For example, good looking politicians tend to get more votes even though they might be terrible candidates otherwise. Considering games, Trine 2 is an example of glorious visuals selling a quite traditional puzzle platformer. 22 Regarding visual design, many people recommend the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, which is about learning to see and observe details that we don’t pay attention to. 23 An example of the effects of increasing photorealism in games. 24 Limbo is another example of a novel visual style as the selling point for a game with quite a traditional platform game mechanics. The approach also made it possible to produce the game with a small team and budget, because there was no need for texturing or highly detailed 3d geometry. 25 Fez has both unique style and mechanics. 26 Technology is what underlies and enables everything else in the elemental tetrad. 27 Having discussed the elemental tetrad, I’ll now focus on technology, which is the most relevant for most of you computer science students. 28 There’s been several transforming technological breakthroughs throughout the history of gaming. In the following, I’ll first show some examples from history and then look at some upcoming things 29 3d graphics and mouse are probably one of the most fundamental ones, spawning the first person shooter genre in the beginning of the 90’s when the PC started to have enough CPU power for textured 3d instead of just lines or colored polygons. 30 Nowadays graphics technology is mostly not the limiting bottleneck for gameplay innovation, and we have to look elsewhere for inspiration. 31 Having said that, there’s still interesting things happening if one looks at the demo scene, especially the 4k intros, which force the focus on procedural content generation instead of just rendering visuals and sound designed using standard artist sofware packages. Here’s Cdak by Quite & orange (http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=55758) 32 In addition to graphics, I think physics engines deserve a mention, as people have been innovating physics based gameplay for some decades now, and there’s still fresh ideas popping up, although not so often anymore. Getting started with physics based gameplay design is easy nowadays, as one can download a physics engine such as Box2D or Bullet and have an Angry Birds clone up and running in a matter of hours.