One rainy Sunday when the kids had too little to do and I didn't have the energy to chase them around the house, we came up with a game that they enjoyed but allowed me to relax. We call it the Gemstone Game, and it has become one of our favorites.

Number of Players: 1–4, or more if you have a big enough play area
Ages: 4 and up
Time to Play: 5–15 minutes. Really as long as you want.
Materials:

• Twenty or so "gemstones." We use little colored glass beads about 1cm in diameter, but marbles would work too.
• One smallish throw pillow per player
• Hiding Places: sofas, stacked sofa cushions, recliners, upturned tables (nicely padded with pillows and blankets), blankets strung across the room

Object: To place the most gemstones onto your pillow before the gemstone pile is empty.

Setup

Choose a play area, either in a living room or den, or outside in the yard. The area should be reasonably large—we usually play in our living room, which is about 25'x20'—and as clear as possible of hard surfaces and sharp corners.

One player—typically the lazy grownup—is "The Watcher" and sits at one corner of the play area facing outward, away from the play area. Line up each player's throw pillow a few feet behind The Watcher. Put "hiding places" all around the play area. These can be sofas and solid chairs—padded ones that you can't see through. Players will hide behind these hiding places, trying to avoid being seen by The Watcher, so the obstacles need to be reasonably wide and tall. You can string up blankets to make good hiding places. Overturned coffee tables can work well if you pad them with blankets and pillows.

Now, at the far end of the player area, behind one of the hiding places, lay down a pile of 20 or so "gemstones" (marbles or the like).

How to Play

Players start at the pile of gemstones. When The Watcher is ready, he says "Alabama Closed," turns away from the play area and closes his eyes. Now each player picks up one gemstone (only one!) from the pile and attempts to carry it across the play area to place it onto her pillow. You must place the gemstone, not toss it.

At any moment, The Watcher may say, "Mississippi, Mississippi, Mississippi, Mississippi OPEN!," turn toward the play area and open his eyes. If he sees any players, he calls that player's name. That player loses one gemstone from off of his pillow and has to go back to the pile.

When The Watcher is ready, he says, "Alabama Closed," turns away and closes his eyes again. He continues to alternate between "Mississippi... OPEN" and "Alabama Closed" until the players have moved the pile of gemstones onto the pillows near The Watcher.

Scoring

When the game is over, each player counts the number of gemstones sitting on her pillow. Stones that have rolled off onto the floor don't count! The player with the most gemstones wins!

Notes and Tips

• This game can be dangerous! Players run, dive for cover, slide into hiding places, and try to move quickly among obstacles. If there's anything hard or sharp in the area, players can get bumped, scraped, or cut. We only use sofas, soft chairs, and pillows for our games, so we haven't had many injuries. But players can still bump into each other. So be warned: This game is not safe. We're okay with that in our household—we think the chance of a hospital-caliber injury is low—but if you're not, don't play.
  
• It's generally wise for players to agree that they'll always move either clockwise or counterclockwise around the play area. If everyone moves the same direction, it helps avoid head-on collisions.
• For older kids, it's fun to make the game get harder as it goes on. The Watcher can warn, "I'm going down to three Mississippis starting next time!" Then say, "Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi OPEN!" before opening your eyes. We eventually go down to two Mississippis, though I say them pretty slowly.
• This game is a great workout for the kids. They laugh while they play, and get great exercise moving quickly around the play area, getting up to run, getting down to hide. We have to take breathing breaks every few minutes.
• It's also great relaxation for lazy adults. Reclining on a bean bag and turning around every few seconds—anybody can do that. I like this game because it's a great way to spend quality time with my energetic kids without wearing myself out.
• You can vary the length of the game by starting with a bigger or smaller pile of stones.
• You might think of using bowls rather than throw pillows as destinations for the stones. Don't. It's too tempting to toss gemstones into a bowl. Because throw pillows tend to be domed-shaped, players have to be careful of how they place the stones, else they'll roll off.
  
• If your kids are any good at the game, there's an eerie thrill to be had here. When your eyes are closed you hear all this giggling and movement. But every time you open them the room looks empty. The experience is pleasingly horror-film-like.

Trivia

The game was vaguely inspired by the old Atari arcade game, I, Robot.

Labels: family, games

You have a brilliant idea for a video game. It's creative, original, intriguing, and fun. You can picture it vividly—the breathtaking visuals, the jaw-dropping action scenes. You can't wait to play it, and when you tell your friends about it they can't wait to play it either. Your only problem is, you don't own a game development studio. How do you get your game idea made?

Then you meet me. You find out I make games for a living, and before you can stop yourself you're telling me about your idea. Your eyes get as wide as the twin moons over a desert planet, your hands scrub the air, spittle foams on your lip. I understand your game idea, I say it's pretty good. Then you ask me, "What should I do to get a real game development company to make this game?"

How do I know you ask me this? Believe me, I know. I've worked in games for almost fifteen years and this is the number one question I'm asked. But no, that's okay, it doesn't bug me. Ask away—I'm happy to offer some advice.

I'm going to answer your question by asking you two questions. First: Is your idea really a game idea? Second: How are you going to climb the Ladder?

Is Your Idea a Game Idea?

Let's start with the first question. You've got an idea for a "game." My first question is: Is your idea really able to be made into a game?

When a game development team starts building a game, they start with a Game Design Document, or "GDD". Usually this is a literal document but sometimes it's a more informal thing: sketches, whiteboard drawings, memories of fevered conversations. But the best game studios strive to record their design in a written, illustrated document. In order to have even the remotest chance of getting your idea published you need to turn it into a GDD.

A game design is much more than a game idea. It's a detailed specification for how the game should work. What does each button on the controller do? What does the HUD look like and what do each of the pieces do? How does enemy AI work? What pickups can players gather and what do they do? The game design describes every part of the game and tells how all the parts fit together to create a fun game.

This raises another question. What makes a fun game?

There are many possible answers to this question. No one has found a sure-fire formula for fun. Sid Meier says that a game is a series of interesting decisions, and this is a helpful starting point. Players have "fun" when they have to make choices. But not just any choices. Fun choices have to be intriguing, meaningful—interesting. How will your game design produce interesting choices for the player?

This is a hard question. Let me show you two examples that illustrate how hard this is.

The original Half-Life took the gameplay of Quake, then amplified and extended it in many ways. One of the ways they amplified the gameplay was to add a Reload button. Now ten years have gone by since Half-Life was released, and games like Halo have made Reload commonplace. But at the time it was a risky design. In earlier games you never had to reload, so Valve was making weapons harder to use. Players could easily get annoyed—"Why do I have to keep hitting Reload every ten seconds? None of the older games made me do this. Why can't the gun just reload itself?"

Valve took a gamble on reload and the gamble paid off. Players loved Reload even though it made more work for them. Why? Because Reload creates interesting decisions.

When you're fighting enemies and your gun has a little ammo left you don't want to spend the time reloading. If you're sure the area is clear of enemies you will reload. But what about those times when you'd like to reload but you're not sure whether an enemy is about to pop out at you? Then the choice of whether to reload becomes an interesting decision.

Half-Life was more fun as a result of Reload even though Reload made the game harder. Now let's look at another example.

Doom 3's design called for the game to be set in darkness. Many of the rooms had only one light and some were completely black. To counteract this, the game gave the player a flashlight that could be used to light up any environment. Yet the player could not shine his flashlight and wield a weapon at the same time. This created a decision: do you want light or protection?

Many players hated this game feature. It seemed arbitrary and unrealistic. It often put players into impossible situations where they could either see their enemies or fight them but not both. Players would find themselves either staring helplessly at oncoming bad guys or blasting away into blackness.

Half-Life's reload feature and Doom 3's light feature are similar in many ways, but one of them was fun and the other was not. If you can understand exactly why that is, you're one step closer to turning your game idea into a winning game design.

Most game designs also talk about the game's setting, story, and characters. But I want to stress that this part of the game design usually accounts for less than a fourth of the total document. When people tell me their game ideas, usually their idea is 99% setting and story and only 1% gameplay. I have to tell them that they don't have a game idea—they have a story idea. A game design is not a story design. If you want your idea made into a game, you'll have to fill out the details about how the game actually plays—what the player actually does, how he moves his character, how he interacts with the world.

It's hard for most people to think through how a game should actually play. Here's a helpful hint for how to do this. Write a "Five Minutes of Gameplay" document. A lot of studios require this, and it'll help you think through your game.

In this document, you'll describe, in absolute detail, what a player does in your game for about five minutes of play. When I say detail, I mean detail. Don't say, "The player goes North." Say, "The player pushes forward on the left joystick." Don't talk about what the player thinks or decides: just show what he sees and describe what he does with his hands. If you can describe five minutes of your game's gameplay in that kind of detail, you're well on your way to writing a great GDD. In fact, you can put your "Five Minutes of Gameplay" document into your GDD as a kind of overview of the game.

How Will You Climb the Ladder?

You are not the only person in the world with a brilliant game idea. There are hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—of gamers all over the globe who have ideas for games. How are you going to make your idea stand out? How will you get it to be one of the few that actually gets made?

You need to be realistic about this challenge. There are perhaps 8,000 people working in the game industry right now. Most of those people have their own game ideas that they want to make. They're not sitting around wishing someone would give them a great idea. They've already got ideas and are just waiting to get the power and status and respect to form a team to get them made. So these people—game developers like me—are your competition.

And if you're not already working for a game company, you're at a disadvantage. A professional game developer has all the connections. He can walk across the hall and talk to a potential financier for his game—someone who knows and trusts him. A professional game developer also has expertise. He knows how games are made. So if you're not already making games for a living, you have 8,000 other game designers ahead of you in the queue.

In fact, even if you're already a professional game developer you have a huge mountain to climb. Very few people in the industry get to run their own game project. Of the few that do, many of those projects are based on movies, TV shows, and other properties, so even the project leader has little creative control.

So there is a tiny, tiny fraction of people who have game ideas and actually get to make them. Yet even then their job isn't easy. They have to sell their game to publishers, explain and re-explain it to their teams, and ultimately convince gamers that their idea deserves the $50 it costs to play it.

There's a huge ladder above you—a huge pile of people you have to compete with, overcome, work with, and convince. How are you going to climb it?

It is possible to climb it. Some people do. I did. In fact there are two different strategies for how to get to the top of the ladder and make your game.

The first strategy is to work your way up. I studied computer science in college. Along with my studies, I also did extra work teaching myself linear algebra, C++, 3D rendering, and game programming. By the time I graduated from college I had written two game demos. I showed them to game development studios and before I even graduated I had landed my dream job working for Origin Systems—at that time, the biggest game developer in the world. I worked as a programmer for a few years, then moved up to lead programmer and ultimately producer and director. I worked for four different companies on a dozen different projects, many of which were canceled. But a few projects shipped and a few did well, so I was able to keep climbing. It took ten years, but I got to design games and lead large projects. If you have the talent, the dedication, and the people skills, you can climb the ladder this way.

One step you can take that will shorten your ladder-climbing journey is to study at a game development education program like the Guildhall. I teach game programming at the Guildhall, so maybe I'm a little biased. But every one of the programmers we've graduated so far has gotten a good job in a real game development company, so obviously we're doing something right.

No matter how you start, getting to the top of the game industry is a hard, long, difficult climb. If you want to make big, sophisticated, AAA titles, it's the only way to go. But if you're willing to make smaller games there's another strategy that is both easier and faster.

The casual game market is growing rapidly and offers lots of opportunity. Casual games are the sort of simple, quick games you play on websites like Armor Games or Shockwave or on your cell phone. They're usually created in Flash or Java and are relatively easy to make. In the last couple of years I've made a dozen or so Flash games, and they're a lot of fun to make and play. Best of all, you can make a game all by yourself or with just a couple of friends. You don't need millions of dollars, a hard-to-find game job, or even a publisher. You just do it!

There's even money in it. If your games get popular enough they can get sponsored by a website. Websites will usually give you either an up-front license fee or a cut of the money that they receive from advertising. You'd have to make a lot of games every year to make a living this way, but it can be done.

Casual games are a tremendous opportunity. The downside is that they're casual. They're not big, grand, gorgeous experiences like BioShock or Fallout 3. If you can be happy just making modest, simple, fun games, you can be happy in the casual game market.

Whether you decide to climb the big ladder to making big games or the small ladder to making small games, you can get your game idea made if you work hard and stick with it. No matter whether you decide to make big games or small games, you have to start with more than just an idea. You have to turn your game ideas into game designs by thinking through the details of how your game actually plays and by discovering how to make it fun. This skill, too, comes with practice.

Best wishes as you start your journey. Drop me a line when you have questions. Let me know about your successes and I'll celebrate with you.

Good luck!

Labels: games, programming

I just watched the Saddleback Forum in which Rick Warren asked Barack Obama and John McCain about their beliefs and policies. Both candidates reminded me again how blessed America is in this election to have two such excellent candidates. Over the twenty years that I've followed politics, our elections have consistently featured a pair of self-serving, corporate-funded liars whose noblest ideas involve the personal acquisition of power and wealth. This year we finally have two genuinely good-hearted, intelligent, capable leaders from which to choose. The Saddleback Forum solidified that impression.

McCain seemed to come out stronger in the forum. He generally answered more quickly than Obama did, with little to none of Obama's humming and hawing. He had a rich repertoire of highly compelling anecdotes to draw from. His policies were mostly agreeable to the conservative Christian audience he was addressing.

Most interestingly, his answers were far more decisive. Asking about abortion, Warren asked, "When do human rights begin?" McCain responded instantly: "At the moment of conception." Obama, in contrast, gave a much more cautious answer stressing the difficulties of drawing a hard line. Warren asked whether evil exists and whether we should ignore it, contain it, negotiate with it, or defeat it. McCain never hesitated. "Defeat it." Obama affirmed that evil existed, then gave a considered, careful answer that stressed we should "confront it." If decisiveness is what we want in a President, McCain won the day.

And doubtless many Christians and older voters believe he did. Decisiveness, after all, is a crucial quality for any leader.

And yet many younger voters—including many conservative Christians—will find Obama's careful, sometimes ambiguous answers equally or even more compelling than McCain's decisive, no-nonsense answers. What I want to explain now—in careful but unambiguous terms—is why it is reasonable to be attracted to Obama's careful ambiguity.

In order to make my explanation useful I want to frame it in terms of two ways of thinking: divergent and convergent. Whenever anyone makes any decision, these two kinds of thinking are at work. The difference in the way my generation sees McCain and Obama is, to a large extent, the difference between these two ways of thinking.

Divergent thinking is what enables you to consider a wide variety of answers. It allows you to break down answers into their components parts and rebuild them in new and synthetic ways. Divergent thinking is the voice of uncertainty.

Convergent thinking is what enables you to make clear, practical decisions. It allows you to weed through the haze of ambiguity that clouds any decision to find the one key answer that you believe in. Convergent thinking is the voice of certainty.

For example, you're thinking about where to eat supper. There are thousands of potential answers. You could go to a fancy restaurant. You could go to any of dozens of fast-food joints. You could cook something at home. Grab a microwavable meal at the gas station. Order pizza. Show up at a friend's house unannounced. Those are the "stock" answers. Then you've got the synthetic answers: Pick up food from a fancy restaurant but take it home to eat it. Grab a microwavable meal and take it to a friend's house.

The more skillful you are at divergent thinking, the more options you'll be able to think of. But ultimately you have to narrow down those options, and to do that you have to use convergent thinking.

Both convergent and divergent thinking are "Good Things." It's not as if one is practical and the other is artsy-fartsy: both are necessary for skillful living. The person who makes snap decisions about everything—who is, in other words, highly convergent—will often miss important options that a little contemplation could have uncovered. The person who considers every question deeply and avoids drawing sharp lines will often fail to make any decision and allow opportunities to pass by.

If you think I'm about to say that McCain is a convergent thinker whereas Obama is a divergent thinker, you are converging your thinking too quickly. These men are not as simple as that. Both candidates are smart and experienced enough to have learned a lot about making good decisions. McCain's creativity can be seen in his willingness to oppose his own party on many issues and his choice of Sarah Palin as runningmate. Obama's decisiveness can be seen in his consistent stance on Iraq and his effectiveness in defeating Hilary Clinton. Both convergent and divergent thinking are necessary for good leadership and both men have shown they can do both kinds of thinking.

What I'm actually about to say is this. My generation is very cautious about excessively convergent thinking. There is such a thing as excessively divergent thinking—consider the hippy generation, for instance—but in the last several years we've discovered some of the horrors of excessively convergent thinking, and we are anxious to avoid past mistakes.

Let's consider again Rick Warren's question about evil. Imagine you're a Christian Presidential candidate before a Christian audience and I'm asking you, "Does evil exist? If it does, should we ignore it, negotiate with it, contain it, or defeat it?"

What I hope you'll notice about each candidate's answer is that neither candidate got this question remotely correct. Not from the Christian point of view, they didn't. Both gave answers that were wildly divergent from what Jesus Christ taught about evil. Obama said that we see evil in our city streets and in child abuse. McCain said we see evil in Osama Bin Laden and that he would hunt him down "to the gates of Hell"—a rather interesting answer if we're thinking in Christian terms.

The Christian answer is terribly easy to express: a single thumb pointed at the chest. Who is evil? I am. What do I do about it? Ask Jesus to wash it away.

Well both men admitted they were imperfect and had made mistakes. They both talked about sin. But when asked about evil, they didn't point to their chests. They pointed to the exploiters of the weak and disadvantaged (stock Democratic answer) and around the globe (stock Republican answer).

Both answers are insufficient. Both answers, taken to their extreme, are dangerous and—indeed—evil. And here's what older generations need to understand about my generation. In our time, we have not seen Obama's answer taken to the extreme. Welfare is not killing America. Democratic spending on government aid programs is not filling us with terror. In our time, McCain's answer has been taken to the extreme. Out-of-control wars, out-of-control military spending, out-of-control corporations, and an out-of-control intelligence community are filling my generation with terror.

When McCain says, "Defeat it!" without hesitation, our minds pass over the travails and uncertainties of the Iraq War and we think, "Hold on a minute. Was Iraq really an evil regime in any kind of unique way? Isn't preemptive invasion of a sovereign country evil? Isn't torture evil? Isn't thumbing our nose at the international community evil?"

And now as I ask these things, perhaps you're thinking, "Ah, this is one of those anti-war soft-touch guys." Well, no—you've converged too quickly. I'm not against the war. I'm not exactly for it. I'm confused by it. I'm still processing it. My thoughts remain in a divergent state. And that's just where I think they should remain. Because the situation is too complicated for a firm, decisive, no-questions-asked sort of answer.

If you were raised in the aftermath of Nazism, during the trauma of Stalinism and the long boil of the Cold War, you were raised thinking in terms of them=evil / us=good. This is the kind of thinking that Bush invoked when sending "war criminals" to Guantanomo without trial and when rallying America to invade Iraq. After the fear and anger of 9/11 this kind of thinking seemed good again to many Americans.

But the Patriot Act and Abu Ghraib and Enron and domestic wiretapping and Halliburton and waterboarding and Katrina and the mortgage crisis and a thousand other villainies have brought many Americans to believe what Christians should have proclaimed all along.

Who is the evil one? I am. That's the Christian answer. We are evil—whoever we are—and we are at our most evil when we see ourselves as good.

There is a time for decisiveness, for get-out-of-my face, no-nonsense laying down the law. McCain is a military man, and the military loves decisiveness. In battle you don't have time to explore all your options, to nuance the subtleties of this position or that. Your best choice is often your first choice. There are times in any President's term when he will need to show the kind of decisiveness that McCain consistently demonstrates.

But not every situation is like a battle. Sometimes you do have time to think things through, to mull rich uncertainties. A candidate whose decisions are too bold, too confident, too decisive is a candidate who makes my generation nervous. We've seen too much militarization in too little time, heard too many do-or-die gung ho speeches. Politicians who seem too sure of where the lines fall—who the good guys and the bad guys are and how to take them out—more and more smack of arrogance, or at least crudity of thought.

We live in a complicated age. Technology is making it easier than ever to talk things out, to diverge and converge in large, informal groups. It's a matter of time before I've got Google implanted in my brain, before representative democracy is supplanted by pure democracy and the American people become their own legislature. Unless we've been bombed or de-banked back to the stone age, America will change vastly in the next four years, not to mention eight. We want a candidate who can provide steady leadership amidst the changes ahead. In this respect I believe McCain could be the stronger leader.

But we also want a candidate who embraces complexity, who is slower to proclaim judgment, who is cautious in converging. This is, in some measure, Obama's strength. Perhaps Obama will prove excessively divergent, slow to act in a crisis, too open with enemies, slippery in his opinions. But after the decisiveness of Bush and Cheney, we're willing to take the risk.

Here's the punchline. I voted for McCain last Thursday. As I said before, I think both candidates would make great Presidents, and I agree with McCain on more of the issues. But I can't wait to see Obama as the next President of the United States. How's that for ambiguity and divergent thinking?

Labels: politics, technology, thinking