No, the spirituality I’m talking about is the sort that appeals even to the most secular of us. Consider The Shawshank Redemption — a movie about perseverance, dignity, and a type of freedom that can never be taken away from us. The end of this movie fills you with the joy of being human, after spending several hours slowly dripping you into a state of hopeless nihilism.

I’ve never felt that from a game. Honestly, most games would be lucky to just get to the nihilism.

Lots of games tell good stories, but I worry as creators that we’re still catering to the same fantasies of the same teenage boys.

Where are the games that remind me of the sheer force of a community believing in someone ( It’s a Wonderful Life ), or how a person can change and improve themselves ( Groundhog Day )? (The last one is an interesting example, as the structure of the movie mirrors most game experiences…)

I know that we can point to things like Flower or Shadow of the Colossus as attempting to evoke higher emotions — but they haven’t really burst through to mainstream popularity. The films I’ve mentioned have all met with strong commercial success, even if it waited until the DVD with Shawshank. (Is this a sign of what the market expects or of what they’ve come to expect from us? Would it be possible to raise the emotional expectations of the market bit-by-bit?)

Really, in mainstream games, the closest we come to spiritual expression is a kind of tepid environmentalism or a vague transcendentalism that’s fairly well divorced from the mechanics — I’m thinking most of Final Fantasy VII with both of these examples, but really we tend to stick to overt power fantasies.

I guess what I’m saying is that simply conquering evil doesn’t sate me anymore. It’s not enough to destroy the Ring; I should learn the power of fellowship on the journey.

I want to play games that embody these concepts. I want to make them, too.

Writer’s Roundtable

Every year I attend GDC, I go to the Writer’s Roundtable at least one of the days. Every year I walk away disappointed. I think this year I realized why — it’s because it’s the Writer’s Roundtable, rather than the Writing Roundtable. I’d love to have a greater focus on the craft, but it seems like just a lot of whinging about the plight of writers in the games industry. Questions like “how do you unify tone across seven writers” are just met with blank stares when most people are struggling to get their studios to hire one full-time writer.

<shrug> I’d love this session to be more relevant, but I don’t know how to accomplish that. Getting people to listen to each other and stay more on topic would be a start.

(Also: writers complain that they’re not respected in every creative industry. Not unique to game writers. Try talking to screenwriters sometime about “possessive credits.”)

Permadeath

The Game Design Challenge this year was an odd one for me, the first time I’ve felt truly at odds with the prevailing opinion of the crowd. While I appreciated how he was able to infuse the scenario with humor, Jenova Chen’s Facebook game built around real people’s deaths really struck me as distasteful and borderline offensive. Assigning numeric value to human life (even as part of a game to help memorialize those lives) is just something I find inherently slimy, and I grew increasingly uncomfortable as he went on.

I thought Kim Swift, on the other hand, presented a thoughtful, reasoned game that had the potential to actually do some good. A prescription game to help people come to terms with their impending death and put positive energy into the world is the kind of thing we could use more of. All games teach, whether we want them to or not, and the lessons she proposed are some of the most important we can learn as humans. Should make us all think about what lessons our own games are teaching. I had some design quibbles, but she was tackling an incredibly hard subject as a solo designer, so I didn’t mind it.

The crowd, however, seemed to have the exact opposite reaction to the one I did — humor wins the day, as usual. That’s OK. Kim Swift, I salute you, and you win the official Shane Liesegang Game Design Challenge Award.

Overhead SMASH

My old creative director from EALA, Randy Smith, gave a talk about how he founded and runs Tiger Style. It could essentially be called “how to run a studio without becoming a business douchebag.” I’m not looking to start my own studio (at least not in the foreseeable future), but it seemed like there were lots of indie aspirationals in the audience who were inspired. As always, Randy gave an engaging, understandable, practical talk — the kind of nuts-and-bolts affair that I think GDC should do more often.

Building Open Worlds

Nate Fox, from Sucker Punch (a studio on which I have an eternal crush), gave a superlative talk on how they built their open world city for inFAMOUS. It was just chock-full of little pragmatic nuggets of useful techniques. Sightlines, weenies (the Disney kind, not the hot dogs or the dirty kind), hex-grids, border alignment, etc. Made some good points about cutting corners on the in-between stuff so they can spend more time on “evil lairs,” or the parts that the players remember and care about more. Probably the most useful session I attended this year.

(My notes say “slides available on the internet,” but I can’t seem to find them now, which makes me sad.)

Train

Brenda Brathwaite’s talk has been well covered elsewhere so I won’t go into too much detail. Suffice to say, I was shocked by how emotionally affected I was — I think due to Brenda’s honesty in portraying and discussing her own emotional journey while creating it.

She repeated the assertion that “games don’t have to be fun” that I’ve heard before, citing Schindler’s List as an example from another medium. I agree with the assertion, and that’s obviously a great movie, but I also wonder how that fits in with the different place games occupy in our culture. Everyone in our society watches movies. Everyone. To be considered a literate adult citizen, you are simply expected to have seen movies like Schindler’s List. If you are involved in filmmaking, you would be actively shunned for not having seen it.

Games don’t occupy that same station — even among game developers, I don’t think there are games you are expected to have played. (Sure, we all assume you know Tetris, Civilization, Super Mario Bros., etc., but they’re more as a foundation to the medium than as “something you simply must experience.” [I would say Heavy Rain comes close to that category, but obviously it falls short of Schindler’s List in execution. {No shame in that.}])

I wonder if we can do non-fun games without having that sense of compulsory consumption. Or rather, if they would gain as wide consumption as non-fun works do in other media.

(Definitely don’t think we should stop trying to make non-fun, serious, affecting work — just wondering if it’s futile to try and get them to a wider audience. To her credit, Brenda Brathwaite is unconcerned with audience size for these particular games, and so my bringing this up is a bit of an unfair tangent.)

In any event, her talk is the kind that makes you look at your own work and wonder if you could elevate it to a more substantial level.

Gender Breakdown

One final observation. We hear constantly about the gender breakdown in the industry, how more women developers would be good for the industry. I agree with this wholeheartedly; more perspectives will help up make better games. The boys’ club is a self-reinforcing environment, and breaking down those walls will help us create more relevant art.

I noticed that there was a pretty high number of female conference associates at GDC, though. CAs, to my understanding, are predominantly aspiring developers, though there are some full-timers among them as well. On the other hand, the non-yellow shirts at the conference were the expected ratio of men to women (about 20:1) for a games conference.

This is clearly not scientific data in the slightest, but it would seem to indicate that there are a healthy number of women who would like to work in the industry, but they don’t seem to make it in. Why is there such a disparity of gender ratio between aspiring game developers and actual game developers? I’m not sure we can use the “girls don’t want in to our industry” excuse anymore (and it was always pretty weak). Now we need to figure out why that next step is missing.

There are lots of potentially confounding variables here: CA selection could be weighted towards women; professional women may be less likely to attend GDC than their male counterparts; etc. In any case, it makes you wonder.

I think this is one of the biggest problems facing our industry. I often wonder if, 20 years from now, games are like movies (everyone participates) or like comic books (small but devoted fanbase). If we stay predominantly white, predominantly male, predominantly immature, the answer is obvious.

Apologies

Once more, I’ve got to clarify something from my first GDC post. I’ve updated the original article, but wanted to apologize for not giving credit for the initial idea of post-rant group confession to Darren Torpey. We had a good discussion at GDC that was the impetus for that post, and I was remiss to have not given him a shout-out.

Anyway, some thoughts on Sid Meier’s keynote.

I generally don’t take notes at the big sessions since they’re the most thoroughly covered elsewhere. But something Sid said made me rush to pull out my laptop and get a thought down.

Sid is at his best when talking about his failures (if you’ve never seen his talk on the three attempts to make a game about dinosaurs, it’s worth trying to track down), so his section entitled “My Bad” was fairly illuminating. The tidbit that interested me was his revelation that the original concept and implementation of Civilization was a real-time game, but they found that it made the player into too much of an observer. Switching to turn-based play lead to a higher level of player engagement.

Now, as he described a real-time Civilization, I was playing through it in my head, and 100% agreed that it was easy for the player to just sit and watch stuff happen. But the thing is, we typically associate real-time play with higher levels of engagement. So why was that not the case for Civ?

The oft-cited “one-more-turn” phenomenon associated with the Civ games comes from the basic notion of delayed results. I start building a unit; it completes in 5 turns. I research pottery; it completes in 10 turns. I have my workers build a mine; it completes in 2 turns. With enough plates spinning, I’m always just a turn (or two) away from something interesting happening. The game is thus always keeping you from finding a good stopping point. It’s really a mastery of interlocking sine waves that keeps it from having no pacing whatsoever.

If the game was in real-time, you’d lose that quantization of the play experience, but more importantly, you wouldn’t have to do anything to move it forward. Each turn in Civ, you have to do something, even if that something is just issuing “Wait” commands or slapping the spacebar to advance to the next turn. It’s impossible to just sit back and let things happen, and while you’re engaging to advance time, you might as well do something in the world, which sets more plates spinning, etc.

(There’s a similar effect at work in the player-NPC bonding during Planetfall, but I’ll save that for the love letter I plan to post about that game at some point.)

There’s almost certainly more to real-time vs. turn-based Civ; I’m not satisfied that I’ve gotten to the bottom of it. But at least I’ve now recorded my thought process on an interesting design problem after giving it a modicum of attention. Need to do that more often.

Every year I attend the rant. I find it simultaneously rousing and infuriating, and here’s why.

The rant does an excellent job at bringing up important issues. Chris Hecker admonishing game jammers to try and explore depth over speed. Paul Bettner sharing the very personal story of how crunch destroyed his love for games and ultimately, his studio. Heather Chaplin calling us all out for being immature man-children. Nichol Bradford issuing a call for game developers to do more to encourage math and science education. Et cetera.

But here’s what bothers me. Every year, we listen to the rants. We applaud wildly at their populist assertions and give standing ovations to their celebrations of the yet-unrealized potential of the medium.

Then we all go back to our jobs and don’t change a damned thing.

The rants are just pure catharsis without actually encouraging action. We listen, we debate, we argue over their merits, we deliver mini-rants against them, we blog about how right they are, and we noticeably modify our respect meters for the developers giving them.

But we don’t change ourselves.

All the steering committees, whitepapers, and surveys in the world won’t make as much of a difference as individuals making changes in the choices they make in their daily lives.

So I propose the following.

Next year, after the rant session, while all the impassioned speeches are still fresh in your post-catharsis mind, go out with some fellow developers. Have a few drinks. (This proposal is made easier because it’s leveraging something we all do anyway.)




And then confess your sins.




Determine which of the rants most applies to you. Of which crime against games are you most guilty. Then offer a suggestion for how you, YOU PERSONALLY can work to not commit that sin in the coming year. This is not the time for “the industry needs more women developers” but rather the time for “I will consider gendered perspectives of my own work and strive to make my games less sexually biased and demeaning.”

Then, the following year, meet up with those same developer friends at GDC. Recall your post-rant discussions of a year earlier, and share how you have atoned for your sins. If you have failed to do so, feel no shame, for these are difficult matters. But share the difficulty of your efforts so that we can all become more aware of just how large these mountains are.

If anything, it will keep the important elements of the rants alive longer than it takes for their effects to stop rippling through the blogosphere.

There’s nothing stopping you, of course, from doing this right now. No need to wait until next year’s rant — do the same exercise. You’ll have less time for atonement since GDC falls earlier in 2011.

Which just means you’d better get cracking. Let’s fix our industry.

1. I used it to complete a non-trivial project
2. I spent the majority of my day in it for over a year

#1 Means I have to have actually gotten into the guts of it and made it work for me. For example, while I had toyed with Python several times while in grad school, it wasn’t until I integrated it into Angel that that I could really say I knew it, thus it gets a date of 2008.

#2 allows me to include languages I learned for games that haven’t shipped. :-)

• 1998: TI-BASIC
• 1999: Visual Basic
• 2000: AppleScript
• 2001: C and C++
• 2002: x86 Assembly
• 2003: Objective-C and PHP
• 2004: Cg
• 2005: ActionScript, Java, JavaScript, and C#
• 2006: Unreal Kismet (yeah, I’ll call it a programming language)
• 2007: Ruby
• 2008: Python
• 2009: Whatever we call the game scripting language we use at Bethesda

So now the question is… what should I learn this year? Everything else has been inspired by a project (either personal or professional), and I don’t have anything on the horizon that would necessitate learning something new.

So I ask you, internet, what is worth learning? What new paradigm should I consider? What will expand my mind and my programming chops?

It had to be something:

• broad enough to appeal to digital humanities scholars who may not necessarily follow games
• engaging enough to interest people who do follow games and would likely end up coming to the talk because they saw “game designer” on the poster
• unrelated enough to my work at Bethesda that I could talk about it without tipping our hand as to our current project

In the end I decided to talk about procedural content, its current place in game development, and where it might be going in the future. I could try to sum it up, but here’s a video of my slides set over the audio from the talk.

My own feedback:

• I still talk way too fast.
• When speaking off-the-cuff, I have a tendency to preface too many statements with “I mean.” I should to work on that.
• The “character choices” segment is still pretty hazy and doesn’t make its case very well.
• My final conclusion could benefit some from more concrete examples, even if they have to be hypothetical.
• I need to do better keeping up with the blogosphere, even when spending all my free time prepping a presentation, since I only found out after the presentation that Clint Hocking has been making most of my final points, in a characteristically far more thoughtful and articulate way as part of his Click Nothing Tour ’09. Ah well.

BIG THANKS to:

• Joe Gilbert and Bethany Nowviskie from the Scholars’ Lab for inviting me.
• Liz Bernard for making an example animation for me.
• Jesse Schell, who first introduced me to the Innovator’s Dilemma.
• Joel Burgess and Ben Cummings, who served as invaluable sounding boards and test audiences. If you didn’t like it in its current state, you would have hated it before these guys were able to tell me all the problems it had. :-)

This past weekend my friend Benji and I made the long trek from the Capital Wasteland up to Boston for a new-ish un-conference called GameLoop. Apart from seriously misunderestimating the amount of traffic that would slow us down, the trip itself was uneventful. I did score a gold medal in the “going through a toll booth without having to come to stop” game, though, which was a great moment of victory.

As for the event itself — it was terribly cool. Darius Kazemi and Scott Macmillan made the thing happen by sheer force of will, and I heartily applaud them for it. They more than doubled the attendance from last year, and based on what I saw, I imagine it will continue to grow for some time to come.

GameLoop is essentially a games-specific version of BarCamp — if that doesn’t mean anything to you, just know that it’s a sort of ad-hoc organized-as-you-go conference. The day starts with about an hour of people standing at a whiteboard saying “I’d like to do a session on X” or “can we get a roundtable to talk about Y?” Then you just do it. The second spiritual element of an un-conference is that if you’re sitting in a session and you feel you’re not getting anything out of it, you vote with your feet and head to something else; nobody gets offended, everybody learns.

Due to the inherent mutex lock on me, I could only go to one session in each timeslot, and in some cases the choices were hard.

Session 1: Designer/Player Trust-Building

I wasn’t quite sure what to make of this session — I felt like we were discussing good game design principles, but couldn’t necessarily see how they were specifically related to trust. You want to have understandable level designs, make sure your player understands their goals, etc. Maybe the point was that trust is so endemic to game design that the two can’t be separated. I felt like mid-way through we ended up just naming examples of games that made us trust the designers (I was guilty of this as well, contributing Donkey Kong Country), and, as was pointed out by one of my colleagues later that evening, it’s not the most productive form of discourse.

Session 2: Prototyping

I had given a talk on Prototyping back when I worked at EA, had originally considered dusting it off (and removing EA-specific portions), but just didn’t have time to get it together. Darius sneakily (and a bit cheekily :-) ) put it up on the board anyway, and it received enough support that we pretty much had to do it. So I pushed it towards a round-table format as much as I could.

This was a really productive session, at least for me. It made me feel better to hear that everyone seems to have the trouble of execs/producers mistaking prototypes for shipping code, and we talked about strategies for mitigating that. We stopped short of saying actively sabotage your code, but writing it in a different language from the shipping game was one of the cuter strategies.

I think my slightly controversial view that prototypes are science experiments and should only answer single questions did exactly what it should do — spark discussion as some people agreed with me and others disagreed. Most people in the session were contributing, and it felt like everyone was learning, so I felt like this was a win.

I walked away thinking it would be fun to de-EA-ize my old prototyping talk and do it at events like these. At least a 10 minute version to help frame give-and-take like we had here.

(I also met Darren Torpey for the first time — he worked porting Angel to XNA, so it was cool to finally shake hands with one of the folks with whom I communicate semi-frequently.)

LUNCH

Very tasty sandwiches. Very large cookies. Above average coffee.

Session 3: “Programmer Designer” vs. “Designer Programmer” + Game Design Basics

Early on in my career I had to make the call as to whether I would be a programmer with design skills or a designer with programming skills. I went the design route and have been pretty happy with it, and this discussion was exploring that boundary and how people on either side of it felt.

I definitely think as games become more systemic that this line is going to get blurrier, if never dissolve completely. It’s also been my experience that it’s far easier for designers to get input on programming issues than for programmers to get input on design issues, though that’s largely an individual studio culture thing and case-by-case. One engineer said that he felt he couldn’t make any change to a system without getting clearance from a designer, and that the process was more of a handoff than a collaboration. That made me sad, but from what I heard, it’s pretty much the general state of the industry.

I’m not sure where the talk went after that, because I decided to bounce and go into the “Game Design Basics” talk and share my vast reams of knowledge. :-) For the most part it was a “how to break into design” roundtable, which always interests me, as you might remember, dear reader.

Session 4: Procedural Story & Emergent Narrative

Another roundtable type thing that I was attempting to run. I felt really bad about this one because I think I did crappy job with it — it’s obviously an overly broad topic and there are lots of quagmires hiding in there waiting to drag a discussion down for hours. I warned that I was going to shut down lines of conversation if I thought they were going in that direction, but then defined the problem so loosely that the rest of the session was spent trying to better define it, which was the chief quagmire I was wanting to avoid.

<sigh>

I could tell there were some equally frustrated people wanting to get it back on track, but it’s hard to control a passionate crowd who wants to talk definitions. This is definitely a situation where a 10-minute prepared opening could have really helped.

Session 5: Meaning in Games & Interactive Metaphor

On the long drive up, somewhere, I think, in Delaware, Benji and I got talking about Passage, which I described as the best, possibly only example I could give of “interactive metaphor,” something where the mechanics themselves are metaphorical. It inspired Benji to run this roundtable, the last of the day, to get people talking around this issue. There was some confusion over exactly what was being discussed, but to be fair, this is a complex and hard to grasp issue. A lot of people latched onto the moral choices of Fallout and Bioshock, but I think we all at least walked away willing to acknowledge that some more subtlety in those choices would be more interesting.

Of course, moral choices are not necessarily interactive metaphor. Perhaps the fact that we couldn’t come up with any other examples means that this is still an area ripe for development.

Post-Conference Shenanigans

Afterwards, most people headed over to a local watering hole for some refreshment. Sat down with Scott and spent a lot of time talking about his game Heritage, which I’m really excited to actually see in action when finished. Also met (or re-met possibly) Marc ten Bosch, talked about indie games, multi-dimensional thought, and the pros and cons of EA. At least I think we did. The beer at that place was good.

Ended the evening at the office of Orbus Gameworks, playing my first round of Race to the Galaxy, which I found delightful, if a bit non-orthogonal for my tastes. I think more mastery of it might reveal systems I didn’t see before. We schemed about ways to make next year’s GameLoop even better. Which I guess means that I have to go back next year. :-)

On the drive back Benji and I debated the merits of doing a DC area GameLoop (Capital GameLoop?) — there’s not much of a scene in the area, but maybe a smaller event could snowball and eventually draw in folks from North Carolina and Philly. Anything is possible; it would definitely be good to see more game development community in the area.

As I find more interesting metrics, I plan to post them, as well as update this post. But hopefully the 10 games themselves will remain static, unless there’s some moment of “HOW ON EARTH COULD I FORGET TO INCLUDE CATWOMAN?!”

Unordered 10 Impactful Games

• Rez
• Sly 2: Band of Thieves
• Portal
• Braid
• Marathon
• Super Mario World
• Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
• Civilization
• Final Fantasy VI
• Planetfall

These are the games that, over my life, I played the hell out of. Ones that I was obsessed with. Ones that impressed me to my core. That haunted my dreams when I wasn’t playing them. Ones that I will evangelize to people who haven’t played them.

There are many other games I loved, enjoyed immensely, and replay from time to time. But in the interests of keeping the list to 10, I just went with the ones that had a profound impact or rose to the level of obsession for me.

Note that I’ve limited this list to video and computer games, or else I would have to include Dungeons & Dragons, Diplomacy, and several others.

(Not meant to be a “top 10” of any sort or a declaration of industry impact or anything.)

Metacritic

• 93: Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
• 93: Braid
• 92: Super Mario World
• 92: Final Fantasy VI
• 91: Rez
• 90: Portal
• 88: Sly 2: Band of Thieves

In places where a game had more than one rating due to remakes or multiple platform releases, I went with the highest rating. Marathon, Civilization, and Planetfall have no Metacritic rankings. The Super Mario World and Final Fantasy VI rankings come from the GameBoy Advance re-releases.

This yields an average Metacritic ranking of 91.2, which would seem to indicate that the games which mattered most to me are also games that the industry as a whole (or at least the press) also consider to be paragons.

Chronologically Sorted

• 1983: Planetfall
• 1990: Super Mario World
• 1991: Civilization
• 1994: Final Fantasy VI
• 1994: Marathon
• 1997: Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
• 2001: Rez
• 2004: Sly 2: Band of Thieves
• 2007: Portal
• 2008: Braid

At first I was troubled that there was too much clustering in recent years, but this has an average of 2.8 years between games. If you throw out the first 7-year gap, that drops to 2.25. I would be comfortable with either number.

Genres and Demographics

• Rez: music-based rail shooter
• Sly 2: Band of Thieves: adventure platformer
• Portal: first-person puzzler
• Braid: puzzle platformer
• Marathon: first-person shooter
• Super Mario World: action platformer
• Castlevania: Symphony of the Night: action exploration RPG
• Civilization: strategy simulation
• Final Fantasy VI: RPG
• Planetfall: text adventure

So breaking that down:

• 3 games that could be classified as platformers
• 2 first-person games
• 7 games with strong story elements
• 4 games where the story is absolutely endemic to the game’s quality
• 2 shooters (and one had very strong story)
• 5 games with gameplay focused around puzzles
• 3 games with majority gameplay focused around puzzles
• 4 games made by Japanese developers
• 6 games made by American developers
• 0 games made by anyone else
• 2 games that lose a substantial amount of (if not all) impact after first play-through
• 1 game that is meant to be played through multiple times for most enjoyment
• 3 games that expose fairly complex numerical models to the player
• 4 games that are continuing titles in a series
• 3 games that kicked off a series
• 1 game that is rumored to be the start of a series
• 2 games that stand alone
• 4 PC/Mac games
• 6 console games
  • 1 Dreamcast game (I played on PS2 originally)
  • 1 PlayStation 2 game
  • 1 Xbox 360 game
  • 2 Super Nintendo games
  • 1 PlayStation game

I first visited New Orleans when I was a kid. I don’t much remember the details of that trip, but I came away with a mild-to-moderate distaste for the place. But I figured it had been well over a decade since then, so I decided to give it another chance on my recent trip across the country.

Man am I glad I did. Stayed in a little spot in the French Quarter, wandered the lonely streets, and had the best food and drink of my entire trip.

My lord, the food. So good it deserves its own paragraph. And those folks know how to make a Bloody Mary.

But I digress.

As I wandered the streets, I started thinking about how it might fare as a gamespace. At several levels, New Orleans would make a fantastic setting for an open world RPG. Very few tall buildings (fewer interiors to develop), a party district, narrow alleyways with character, wide boulevards, music floating in from far away, docks, travelers from all over, foreign languages, multiple religions, etc. It would be even better if you jumped back 150 years or so to, say, the period just before the Civil War. Then you’d have a wide countryside to explore, could play up voodoo magic, have guns that were fun to play with but not semi-automatic, various backwater settlements.

As I walked back to my hotel from dinner, I thought about it more. There’s such potential to make a compelling game! Why have there been so few games set in New Orleans? As a matter of fact, why hasn’t the Old South been used in an open world setting?

And then I remembered — oh right. Slavery. Something no reasonable game developer wants to touch with a 39-and-a-half foot pole. Rightly so. It’s an incredibly dicey topic that would be near-impossible to present in a sensitive manner while giving the player freedom.

You could, of course, let the player free slaves, join the Underground Railroad, maybe even start as a slave themselves. But if you care about player choice, you’d also want to give them the ability to suppress the slaves, capture escapees, etc.

Oh, man. The headlines would be horrible. How would the forum moderators even begin to know what was appropriate? You think games get negative attention for violence…

And one of the arguments that would inevitably brought up from the enthusiast press is that slavery has been dealt with in games before, and this should be no different. You have a choice to enslave people or free the slaves in Fallout 3; Civilization makes it into a mechanic with tradeoffs as you build your cities.

But of course, this is different. There is a substantial, fundamental difference interacting with completely fictionalized slavery and interacting with a recreation of very real historical oppression.

It’s kind of unfortunate that this is sort of an untouchable area for games, because I think there’s tremendous power to educate people about the time period and those attitudes, beyond what you can learn from reading or watching movies with similar settings and themes.

I chose to free the slaves in Fallout 3 (I seem to always play goodie-two-shoes as much as games will support it), but I’d be interested to hear from people who took a more evil track. Do you think you would feel any differently about your actions if you had been tracking down runaway African-American slaves in 1850’s Louisiana than you did in the 2277 Capital Wasteland? Would it make you question your actions more? Would you be able to turn off the bad behavior detector in your conscience the same way I do every time I kill hundreds of people over a lunchtime session of Team Fortress 2?

I don’t have any answers to these questions. I don’t think there are. Maybe someone reading this will have some answers, or at least more articulate questions.

But as for getting that first break, I was recently pointed to an article by Steve Gaynor on getting in to the industry with no experience. Every designer I’ve met has a different story on how they got their first break, but many are a variation on his. He has some really good advice about the right attitudes and work ethics to get you started.

After this, I go back to talking about games themselves. F’reals.