Free Candy For Everyone

Long time blog readers will know that I’m a huge fan of the game Civilization. I sunk so many hours into that franchise, I actually think it’s more time than I’ve spent on World of Warcraft. Not only do I love the whole Civilization franchise, I really enjoyed Railroad Tycoon. When I saw Sid Meier’s name on the GDC program I knew I had to go see what he had to say.

Overall, the talk wasn’t great. It was a Q&A run by Noah Falstein and as such it didn’t have much direction. Sid is clearly a smart guy with some interesting things to say, but this was a softball session with questions about where he grew up and what he studied in school. I didn’t really go to get a history of Sid’s life, I was hoping to hear more about his philosophy and future plans.

To paraphrase an interesting point that he made:

Focus has always been on the gameplay. That’s one of the things that hasn’t really changed with the technology. Core gameplay ideas that they experimented with and pioneered “back in the good old days” are still viable. See other people’s games, steal their ideas, see what others build on your ideas. Building on each other, we’re more in this together than working against each other.

Talking about his games in general, he said that they do the research after the game is finished. They’re trying to make a game about the fun stuff - whether we’re talking about a railroad game or civ or what. Do the research after to justify the historical context. Goal is to make the game as fun as possible and then justify it all after in a 60 page manual.

He talked about the value in being both a programmer as well as a designer. He says he sits in multiple seats - first the designer seat, then the programmer seat, then the player seat. Being both the designer and the programmer avoids a lot of meetings. Lots of decisions that you’re not sure of, you’re willing to try since can do it yourself and not use up someone else’s time. Very powerful to have the iterative flow. Play-improve-play-improve. Goal is to have a game up and running within a few weeks.

I find this to be a really interesting idea. In every project I’ve worked on we’ve had a clear delineation between design and programming roles. While I’ve frequently had input into design, I would never consider myself a designer. I can understand Sid’s point about prototyping ideas and only using your own time, I guess I just haven’t worked on a project that had that much freedom to experiment.

Noah asked “Would you recommend that all designers learn programming as well?” and Sid said he would. He thinks that with Xbox Live Arcade and Steam there is once again a place for a small team based in a garage. If you’re a young designer looking to prove your prowess, Xbox Live is a great place to do it. Then Sid made a really cool point - small team games doesn’t have to mean simple games. If you look at the credits of Railroad Tycoon, it was just a handful of people. A few people can make a game with complex gameplay. The games they made 10 years ago are casual by today’s standards if you consider only team size.

Talking about the very early games, he said that they had to do a lot of work with your imagination because they only had 16 colors. Finding ways to trigger those responses where your imagination comes into play. Red Storm Rising was a submarine sim set in the Cold war era. It was just two dots moving across the screen but it managed to evoke the feeling of a sub dodging a nuclear missile in your imagination.

Noah asked, “You haven’t gone down route of traditional story but your games are really good at evoking people’s own stories (like Will Wright’s). How do you feel about story, emergent or otherwise?” Sid said that the key rules of game design is who is having the fun. It is important that the player have the fun. In story based games, a lot of time the designer is having all the fun. Sid believes you should allow the player to tell an interesting and rewarding and brand new story. Keep the designer in the background and let the story emerge from the players decisions. But Sid was quick to explain that this was his philosophy and that he very much admired other people’s story-based games, that was just not something he is interesting in creating.

Some other random tidbits of wisdom:
Every unit in the game is useful. Came out of iterative tuning.
Always trying to keep the complexity at a manageable level.
Every unit and technology is a decision and it has to justify itself otherwise it’s just adding complexity without purpose.
Repeated play identifies the losers and they’re gone.
Taking bad stuff out is just as important as putting good stuff in.

What games is Sid playing?
Interestingly, he said he doesn’t play strategy games. When you do something all day you want a change of pace at home. He’s really been enjoying car games like Gran Turismo and Forza. He liked Mercenaries for some reason, though he’s not an FPS person. He liked Halo as well.

Asked “Do you ever have any intrest in making a sort of monumental combination game that sums up everything you’ve ever done?” (like Spore) he answered with an amusing and concise, “No.”

“What motivates you to make games?” The desire to play a game that hasn’t been written yet. Feel like the games that he creates fill a void, they haven’t been made before.

Finally, an audience member said that he’d once had the opportunity to ask American McGee what game would come ouf of a collaboration between Sid and American. American said something like “Railroads in hell.” So the fellow asked Sid the same question. This was actually pretty interesting, Sid said something like “That’s exactly why we should never work together.” He thinks that big designers shouldn’t work together. You’d get the worst of both worlds instead of the best. When making a game, you need someone with a creative vision and you can’t have multiple visions to make one game, no matter how big the game is.

He spoke a bit about the upcoming Civilization Revolution, the re-imagining of Civ for consoles. I’m looking forward to what they’re doing. Sounds like they’ve really revisited what it means to be a Civ game and really tried to figure out what makes Civ Civ, and boil that down into a new and unique console experience.