I re-read the Livingstone-Hope report (Next-Gen.) and watched the promotional videos.  I was really encouraged by it initially but in hindsight it seems to put forward the picture that skills in art, maths, physics and some programming are needed for a job in game development and visual effects.  The emphasis on computer science seemed to be lost in favour of programming skills in association with other sciences.  As a post-doctoral computer scientist I was a little aggrieved. I began to think that after 16 years of making video games I’ve lost an appreciation of where computer science fitted into video game developer.

After doing some research and talking with some ‘real’ computer scientists, I was reminded what defines computer science. Simply put, it is the study of the application of algorithms to data.  As Niklaus Wirth’s book was entitled, “Algorthms + Data Structures = Programs”.  When we write a program, we are simply manipulating data and presenting the results.  Consider the famous Turing Machine.  Computer science takes the ideas we have to manipulate data and wraps rigorous methods around them. Methods for the creation of machines and techniques on those machines that enable processing of data.

Computer science is pure discipline like mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, and so on.  However, an understanding of computer science is not required to become a video game programmer.  This is, perhaps, the reason that having other skills like maths and physics (depending on the game genre) is really important to game development teams.  It is when these disciplines are married to computation thinking, that a great video game developer emerges.

Computational thinking is something exercised through our attempts to understand computers.  As a scientist formulates an algorithm for processing quantities of data to convert it in an alternative and more useful form, they are thinking computationally.  If they can get create or utilise a machine to enact this algorithm they can apply new data to the algorithm to get new results.  This ability to understand how data and algorithms work together is what benefits us to get optimal results during game development.  Although we mimic physics and utilise mathematical methods, good computer scientists in the game development team will be able to take abstract problems outside these domains and invent new ways to manipulate the input data stream to get desired results.

While I am happy to say you do not need to be a graduate computer scientist to develop video game programs, I think it will help you become great at it.  The best video game programmers are those that have either an innate ability to develop algorithms through computational thinking, or have exercised their ability through the study of computer science.

I would recommend that anyone considering or even undertaking a degree in computer game programming or game technology or similar, review what that course is offering with respect to computational thinking and computer science.  Similarly anyone currently involved in computer programming of games (or anything else), consider how much you are exercising your computational thinking.  You will grow and develop as a software engineer if you do.

Finally, while writing the Raspberry Pi manual, I am very aware of the “excitement quotient”.  That is, the tendency to chose topics that are exciting over those that are computationally challenging, just to capture an audience.  While it casts a wide net to catch those that would enjoy computer programming, I feel it is dangerous for us to encourage them too much down the learn a programming language route.  To look for a metaphor, it is akin to encouraging future building architects to learn carpentry, bricklaying and roof tiling.  They will have the pure skills to build some of a house but they could never understand the whole house building methodology.  Dijkstra famously remarked, “Computing is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.”.  Inventiveness keeps us successful, and without it we will have many people that can create software to order, but they cannot push the boundaries of computer technology

So, if you want to be a highly sought after engineer in a video game studio or visual effects house, take a degree in computer science, exercise your computational thinking ability and apply that to innovating new game development technologies.  Avoid a narrow minded approach by learning only programming in C++ with DirectX (say).

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A while ago, I had a talk with Dr. Andrew Hague (who is posting this item for me) about game elements I’d seen so often in the last 35 years (that’s not a misprint, I’m 55 and played my first game, a text-based Lunar Module Lander sim, on a mainframe teletype in 1976), that at least FTTB I’d like never to see them again.

Partly for amusement, I wrote up the elements as a hit list of “things it should be possible to design games without”.  It wasn’t intended to refer to any particular genre, although due to age and health problems I don’t have the reactions for some, and this post is about single-player only. I’ve certainly tried most genres on most platforms over the years, and technically I’m very happy with current-gen hardware.

When Andrew posted the list on the discussion board at the games company he works for, it was not popular with his colleagues, being variously described as “obnoxious”, a “tirade”, and an objection to any game I happened not to like, whereas I’ve liked many games with these features some time in the past, I’m just sick of the sight of them now.

So this post attempts to explain why I’m objecting rather than just what to. I think other than cliché (Zombies, Nazis, boss battles, mazes, crates…), most of the list derived from two main issues:

ONE: Insufficient compaction of rote

Consider the ‘Eagle Tower’ in the original Assassin’s Creed (neglecting the metastory justifications): Altair starts without a map but if he climbs to high points he can memorise the surrounding area and gradually stitch one together from the views. You/he add a view as follows:

Arrive at the base of a tower.
Hold down High Profile/Free-Run/forward (occasionally shifting to left or right) to climb the tower
Shuffle around at the top to crouch on a ‘perch’.
Press Vision to watch a helicopter shot circle the tower and be told there’s a map update.

There is a shortcut ‘Leap of Faith’ for getting down, but even that requires the player to orient the character exactly first, rather than assume that he’d only jump off a vantage point several hundred feet up in the direction of a soft landing…

…there are variations: towers with odd mount points, or a guard to kill at the top, but fundamentally that’s it. The whole thing could be replaced by a street seller selling a map segment at a stall on the base of the tower, one selling a map of the whole city on arrival, or a design that admits an Assassins’ Guild would likely have decent maps to begin with. There are many of these towers in the game, so repeating the mechanical exercise for each one could absorb a couple of hours of playing time, without generating more than moments of actual gameplay.

Other examples of shorter, but similar, rote sequences common in other games:

— breaking a vase/opening a box to get at a pickup; having to holster weapons to collect it
— having to pick up every object in a pile separately
— moving a box to reach up to a broken ladder
— door opening pantomimes (keycard slots, locks to pick, windlasses to turn, …)
— having to travel to a ‘shop’ each time you want (need) to update inventory

The limiting case is what I call ‘Samuel L. Jackson’ gaming, where you absolutely, positively, have to kill every last MF in the room (and break every breakable object) because one of them will be carrying something (or concealing a switch) without which you can’t go on. Even worse, fancy randomised death animations result in the something being dropped over a cliff, or under the tracks of the tank you’re supposed to use it on — Nolan North’s ad-lib “what kind of a ****wit design forces a restart for doing the right thing?” didn’t make the final edit…

Now I know, for example, that for most of the 90s, platformers from the original Prince of Persia to its 3D successors would expect players to safety-walk to an edge, hop back for the running jump, and then hold down the Grab key for the entire following ledge shuffle, but at the time they were seeing something new and cool in exchange. No longer. This game’s innovative custom code is the next game’s middleware subroutine, but the associated mechanical button-pressing often doesn’t diminish in the same ratio as the code to invoke it does.

To quote a review that was posted as I was putting the finishing touches to this, “There’s nothing wrong in decoding a lock with a cryptographic sequencer, or blasting through a weak wall with explosive gel, or even opening up a shutter door with a quick blast of your remote electric charge device. But when you have to do all three in a row for the umpteenth time, you start to think that perhaps a simple door knob would have sufficed.” wHOLeY Repititious, Batman…

Stuff gets old. Zipf’s Law operates. In games, not so much. This needs fixing.

TWO: Hair-shirt attitudes to problem setting

There are probably theses out there on how choices that were originally random, or worse (e.g., the QWERTY keyboard), become so established people forget the alternatives and act as if they’re the only possible answer. Here are some examples I see as gaming choices-too-often-mistreated-as-axioms:

(a) any solo game with anything resembling a player avatar must have a storyline, no matter how thin, to justify the gameplay. Find the treasure; reassemble the amulet; defeat the wizard; rescue the princess; …

(b) the storyline must be monolithic, as in a novel or play or film, rather than an anthology of related short stories, or a music hall/vaudeville programme, or standalone episodes of a TV show, or just a list of one-line jokes

(c) the player has to experience the storyline serially as if it were a live performance, despite it actually being a pre-recorded one which in other similar media has chaptering, skip, and search functions.

(d) the player is constantly tested on whether they’re paying sufficent attention, and barred from the rest of the content till they get a pass score if not, despite having already paid for the entire performance. 

Finish level N or you can’t play level N+1; complete the fetch quest; beat the boss; solve combinatoric inventory puzzles by exhaustion; or you can’t access the rest of your property, that you’ve paid for.

Is it any wonder most games don’t get finished any more? Would the designers of such games accept a CD or DVD or even a media download in which they couldn’t select, skip, and fast-forward over the bits that didn’t interest them? If so, why do they expect players to work through their dull or unpleasant bits when they won’t even sit for other peoples’?

It may be that the whole idea of ‘winning’ at solo games has historically been overplayed because the preponderance of testosterone in early generations of both players and designers led to the idea the game was a contest between them. No-one ‘beats’ a book’s author by reading it, a film’s director by sitting through it, or a composer by listening to their music — although I admit there are exceptions that prove the rule in all three categories — hi, Jean-Luc ;)

If you want to peek at hidden cards at Solitaire, you’re free to do so, the game mechanics don’t stop you, and anyway you can’t cheat when the only person affected is yourself. As the computer gaming demographic widens towards the card playing one, perhaps the range of difficulty levels should open up at that end too?

If a player can’t/doesn’t want to solve a puzzle or find a pickup, why should they have to look for a walkthrough? (Jonathan Blow’s argument might have been valid had he given his game away as art, but once he took peoples’ money it’s grubby commerce, and the customer is always right…) If they can’t/don’t want to beat a boss, why should they have to download a save, assuming the platform deigns to let them? Why don’t the controller’s media trick play mappings work in cutscenes, when, apart from menu-to-skip, most buttons don’t do anything at all?

Shortening playing times or offering DLC add-ons isn’t the answer, that’s just including a tiny number of skips at point-of-purchase, instead of systematically offering of them at all points of play. Dumbing down the basic content isn’t either; that just alienates the hardcore instead of the casual. Selling skip codes as DLC is just criminal, and I wouldn’t touch any game that tried it (and didn’t touch those that have)

So why not just ditch the Neitzschian “that which does not kill me makes me stronger” attitude to game roadblocks, by simply extending the range of difficulty levels to include the same kind of skips for content as cutscenes? In many cases, players will actually play (and enjoy, and come back for more of) more of your games by skipping the hardest material, and actually getting to the end, than they do currently when they trade-in at the first barrier they can’t get over…

Postscript

I now think my original list should have been titled “things it should be possible to design games without forcing the player to do“…

—–END

 

 

I wanted to use my first blog post as an opportunity to talk about something close to my heart.  That is computer science in my home country of England (part of Great Britain and Northern Ireland).  This article may just explain some feelings you’ve had in recent years about a lack of programmers in Britain.

Look at the veneer on that computer

I: Wooden Computers Be Good

Great Britain has been very influential in the video games industry over the past 30 years.  I was lucky enough to have lived through it, ever since I first heard of Apple (& Tangerine), Texas Instruments, Acorn Computers, Sinclair Research and, for my sins, the EACA Video Genie (a clone of the Tandy TRS-80).  In the 80’s we had a massive push from government to get computers into schools and into homes.  Cheap hardware such as the BBC Micro, instructive television programmes and a global fascination for movies about a future in outer space assured Great Britain would be a leader in entertainment technology.  Let’s jump forward 15 years, or so.

II: Computational theory

Over the past 10 years I have interviewed many people for potential programmer jobs in the games development companies I have been working.  I’ve hired some great men and women to those roles and I’m happy to say they’ve all worked out really well.  However, about 5 years ago I found that the skills the applicants had were changing and becoming less easy to match to those I expected.  The knowledge with which programmers come out of college and university is so different to what it was 10 years ago.

Back then, programmers knew all the low level stuff: assembler, bit twiddling, fixed point vs. floating point arithmetic, memory cache usage, branch prediction, sorting… to name a few.  I can’t ask these questions anymore as I always get blank looks (try it!).

So I started to ask more language related questions such as those that anyone who knows C++ should get.  What are the 5 ways in which the keyword ‘const’ can be used?  What is the difference between a struct and a class?  What class can access a ‘protected’ variable?   The blank looks disappeared thankfully, for a while, but not for long.   From what I could find out, the universities back then were teaching Java, Javascript, Python, HTML, PHP, and others that were not C++.

III: The abandonment of theory for practice

About 4 years ago I moved jobs.  I went from a small independent company to one much larger which had a lot of links with education.  This link was one of the factors that drew me to the company.  It is not the only company thankfully, but back then, there weren’t that many.
It became evident after hearing their experiences that games development courses were poorly structured.  They were focusing on new media, i.e. the web, and they were clumping game development into that group.  As a result we have been pushing these courses to teach C++ to those that want to attract students that want to get jobs in console game development [SkillSet].

Thirty things to do with a computer that don't involve learning about the computer!

Unfortunately it doesn’t end there.  About 2 years ago there was a noticeable drop in the students coming out of university with computer science or similar degrees (57% fall in A Level Computing between 2001 to 2009).  It wasn’t that they were teaching the wrong material any more, but that there weren’t the students going into computer science degrees.  This had partially been the reason that universities had started dumbing-down the courses in the preceding years.  The intake was waning and they had to attract more to their courses.  “Bums on seats ==£££”

So what was happening? Unfortunately for the British education system our government had listened to very big business & corporations when setting education policy.  Computer Studies (the study of how computers work, and a course that I took at school in the 1980’s) was replaced with ICT (the study of how computers can be used).  ICT should never have been seen as a replacement as it teaches children how to use a word processor, a spreadsheet, a database, a web browser, an art package, etc.  (Of course, you can all guess which particular brand of word processors, etc. they were being taught).  The teachers could follow a curriculum and they could mark how well they understood these tools.  Everything seemed good.

But there was no study of computer science.  From my investigations, the study of computer science for British children ends at about age 11.  They do a bit of turtle programming, instruction sequences, and traffic lights then it’s onto Microsoft Office.  They could have moved onto type theory, the model-view-controller or more deeply into sequences-selection-iteration with the aim of finding those interested in the science. However, children spend 6 years clicking boxes and dragging rectangles and then they are asked at 17; “so do you fancy doing more of that at university in a computer science course?”  What do you think they say?

IV: A New Hope

The Livingstone-Hope report (Next-Gen.) of last winter has made recommendations for skills we need to encourage for our creative and technical excellence.  Google’s chairman Eric Schmidt has criticised how the British, who invented many of the computer software and hardware advances, have uninspired its future technology innovators.   The Computing at Schools working group is supporting and promoting the positive vision of computing in UK schools.

I’ve been following all of these groups, initiatives and reviews over the last couple of years and, as an active member of CAS, I can see a definite change in how children between the ages of 11 and 18 are going to be taught.  I am very excited about the prospect of this and what it will mean for computer science.  After a period of hiatus in growing a new generation Britain’s programmers, I hope to see the next decade as being very exciting for computer science across the country.

Even tonight (Monday 10 October 2011) I hear that the BBC Newsnight programme has an article about exactly the topic of this blog.  David Braben will be showing the Raspberry Pi, which could be a new BBC Micro for this decade, although I’ve also just read about a project for a BBC Micro 2.0!  Finally there is the Behind the Screen project which is running a trial curriculum for computer science skills in schools.

We can increase the number of talented programmers in Britain but it clearly won’t happen with our current system. And the worst thing is,
we had the answer back in 1982. Wooden computers be good.

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