It’s disturbing to be credited for games made by others, especially friends.
I recently saw my name attached to Bioshock 2, a game I greatly admire and played the hell out of, but on which I did not collaborate. Some of my friends inside Arkane and at 2K did, including Arkane’s Christophe Carrier and my friend and ex-roommate Jordan Thomas, creative director of Bio2.
Periodically, someone credits me with Thief, which I love, but did not work on. (I’m mentioned in special thanks for Thief 3, probably.) I think some people confuse me and Randy Smith; same last name, we worked together in the same roles at Ion Storm (Austin), we co-delivered a speech at GDC, and we’re both smoking’ hot (okay, well, he is at least).
The nature of the Internet, as a medium that excels at post-modern remixing of concepts, is probably the root cause of this problem; someone gets it close, but is off, then a bunch of people repeat the mistake, sometimes making it worse.
So here are my credits and the official bio I use for conferences and educational events:
Dishonored, Co-creative Director
KarmaStar (iOS), Designer/Producer
Blacksite, Studio Creative Director
Invisible War, Creative Director
Deus Ex, Lead Designer
FireTeam, Lead Designer
Technosaur (cancelled RTS), Creative Director/Producer
Cybermage, Associate Producer
Ultima VIII (CD re-release), Associate Producer
System Shock, Lead Tester
Super Wing Commander, Tester
Harvey Smith is a game designer who has been working in games professionally since 1993. Currently, he is co-creative director at Arkane Studios on Dishonored, working alongside Raphael Colantonio. In 2009, Smith released the iPhone game KarmaStar. From 2004 to 2007, he served as studio creative director for Midway Austin, managing the design department, starting three projects and shipping Blacksite during that time. He worked at Ion Storm’s Austin office from 1998 to 2004, acting as creative director of Deus Ex: Invisible War and lead designer on the award-winning Deus Ex, winning the 2000 BAFTA and many other awards. Prior to Ion Storm, Smith worked at Multitude, an Internet startup in San Mateo, CA. There he was lead designer of FireTeam, an innovative tactical squad game that was one of the earliest video games to feature voice-communications between players. He started his career at the pivotal game company Origin Systems, working as an associate producer on Cybermage and Ultima VIII, lead tester on System Shock and a play-tester on Super Wing Commander. He has written about numerous game design subjects and has spoken at the Game Developers’ Conference, MiGS, SxSW, E3, QuakeCon and other conferences. In 2005, he won the Game Design Challenge at GDC for his entry, Peacebomb! Smith has served on Advisory Boards for the SxSW Screenburn Festival and the Game Developers’ Choice Awards. In addition to working with Arkane Studios, he is currently pursuing an MFA with Savannah College of Art and Design, and has recently completed a novel, his third unpublished book, which he describes as a collision of Southern Gothic and Silicon Valley.
A small homework assignment, as part of my online MFA with Savannah College of Art and Design.
This very short work of interactive fiction was built with Inform 7 and a small snippet of code (the TV) comes from the Inform manual/open source code.
Recorded sessions and speeches from the Art History of Games Conference in Atlanta.
I imagine an ultra-cynical civics game, wherein the player must promote varying policies just before the Apocalypse.
Governments are bloated and meddling, led by people who have to conceal their real motives from fickle, reactionary voters. The whole mess is routinely stymied by bickering and political grandstanding.
Financial markets are amoral abstractions, apathetic toward humanity. The markets are never actually “free” and those who game them are often heartless monsters.
Go!
Updating my 3Gs iPhone to iOS4 was like getting a new phone. So I’ll probably wait to get iPhone 4, since the next version will probably be better.
Talking to some others, today I realized how much I use my phone now (and how little I use it *as* a phone).
Off the top of my head, this is my 3Gs iPhone usage, not in order:
Texting (SMS)
Calendar/scheduling
Weekly grocery list
Email
Twitter
Facebook
Directions/maps (I’m directionally impaired)
Reading (fiction)
Reading (non-fiction)
Reading (daily news)
Reading (political sites)
Reading (graphic novels)
Reading (blogs)
Wikipedia checks (ie, looking up words, history, etc)
Recipes (while cooking)
Listening to music (with headphones)
Games
Locating nearby places (food, coffee, movies, etc)
Buying media
Watching movies
Note-taking
Buying/canceling Amazon products (not just books…dishes recently)
Photography (for amusement)
Photography (to share)
Photography (to remember something, like the way someone else has decorated their house)
Home/car maintenance (while working on something)
Stock values
Weather
Tracking calories/exercise
Calculator
Recording audio snippets (for odd work tasks)
Checking local events (live music, festivals, etc)
Updating Netflix
IM (when on the road)
Approve blog comments
Identifying music (playing around me)
Phone calls
Finally home after the Game Developers’ Conference. Matthias Worch and I gave a talk on Environmental Storytelling, a subject we both love. Here are the slides and notes.
Update: Smaller, compressed PDF with slides and speakers’ notes together:
What_Happened_Here_Web_Notes_Small
Thanks to everyone who attended. (Sorry about the momentary technical glitch. I really thought we were going to have to give a GDC talk with no slides…terror.)
As always, it was great to see developer friends from outside Austin.
While studying up on art theory (semiotics and simulacra), I stumbled across this Fake Album Cover meme. Seems like my kind of thing, so how did I miss it?
Fake Album Cover from Know Your Meme:
How to Make Your Own Album Cover
1 – Go to “wikipedia.” Hit “random”
or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.
2 – Go to “Random quotations”
or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.
3 – Go to flickr and click on “explore the last seven days”
or click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days
Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.
4 – Use photoshop or similar to put it all together.
Cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard wrote: “Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyper-real which is henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and the simulated generation of difference.”
Artists work in semiotics now, trading in signs for things, rather than representing nature. Or they create hyper-realities that are simulations of things that never actually existed to begin with. This leads some pessimism, “marked by the loss of an organic relationship between experience and the representation of that experience.”
But there’s another person from which we can question why the natural world, or an authentic and pre-existing original, carries so much value.
We do not necessarily revere the painter who can most realistically represent an image; instead, we often value the deliberate or stylistic deviations from realism. That is where the artistry resides. Even with photography or image re-presentation, we look for the compositional or content choices made by the artist, rather than the perfect reproduction of reality. With re-presented images or readymade objects, artists find a way to offer personal expressions or cultural critiques through mediation, or recontextualizing a commonplace object. In video games, visual representation and sounds are secondary; these are elements from traditional media that are less relevant to video games than interactive systems, the differentiating aspect of the medium. It’s through the interactive systems–as related to the player’s agency–that we see the artistry in video games.
If we take this same line of thinking and we factor out the less valued, less characteristic aspects of human existence, treating it as a medium, we can distill it down to what is most germane, most sublimely unique…our emotional and intellectual responses, and our connections to one another.
The unorthodox question that follows is this: Might we be able to better experience, better appreciate these things in a fully simulated space? Again, if we ask why the real world should carry so much value, and we determine that the aspects of human existence that matter most are not related to the constraints of the real world, but to our intellectual and emotional responses, then we might agree that simulated reality is actually a better environment in which to be human.
Further, the nature of the real world is arbitrary; it’s the condition into which we’re born. Much of our experience with the real or natural world is about physical constraints, environmental vulnerability or resource scarcity. We share those things with animals and plants. Our emotional, intellectual and social capacity make us human; those are elements unique to humanity.
We might, paradoxically, have a truer experience swimming together through simulacra; an experience almost exclusively focused on the things that make us human, on the things that separate us from bacteria, shrubs or insects.
I don’t subscribe to this view, but it is not necessarily true that Baudrillard’s theories lead a pessimistic conclusion.
I’m finally home after driving with Brenda Brathwaite to the Art History of Games Conference in Atlanta.
http://arthistoryofgames.com/
The event was great and timely, since I’m also taking an online art history class with SCAD. As usual, one of the best aspects was interacting with friends (old and new), talking about games.
Some of the speeches given at the conference made me realize that while–in crafting games–designers take up fierce positions and move toward absolutes, critics and academics often rely an elusive series of shifting positions and various lenses as a means of analysis. We tend to drive toward something hard, guided by a core statement or belief that might not hold up as consistent or perfect under intense scrutiny. (But a core statement that might be critical in terms of reaching the goal. Ie, “Multiple solutions to problems,” or “Modeling fight or flight response.”) They tend to ask questions from many different perspective, which is thought provoking and provides insight from earlier efforts.
Ever interesting, games vs stories comes up year after year. People make statements about whether games should include any embedded narrative borrowed from non-systemic, non-mechanical media like fiction or film.
I believe in our medium’s plurality. There’s no right answer. But for me the strongest experiences *right now* involve a synthesis…sublime moments that come from interacting with very analogue systems, wrapped in fiction that contextualizes the experience emotionally.
Best example for me, from the last year, is my 100 or so hours with Far Cry 2. Soon I’ll be playing Bioshock 2 and Battlefield Bad Company 2, trying to get the same sensation, which I cannot find anywhere else. Certainly not in film, lit. or art.
Charles Lieurance is an incredibly gifted writer and cultural critic, something that stems in part from his breathtaking intellect but equally in part from his intoxicatingly rich life.
I’d almost forgotten about this, but he asked me to list 5 desert island movies. My response:
Question: Why are we so obsessed with deserted islands? Answer: Because no one wants to be alone.
If I could take 5 movies with me (and none of them could be porn), I’d choose the following:
1) Run Lola Run (Tom Tykwer, 1998)
I love this movie because it evokes some of the same multilinear feelings that I experience when playing a well-crafted video game. In a game, you often stop and save your progress at a specific point in the timeline. Then you can race forward, trying various tactics and exploring new areas. And if you die or if the exploration cost you too much in terms of resources, you can back up to the point in timeline where you saved then proceed again. Often, after backing up, you move forward optimally. (A side effect of the unique way players experience their own narrative in games.) As a result, when you get to the end of the game, you’ve got this long linear experience, right? Your memories of what happened from beginning to end. Except that what’s missing are all the moments when you advanced, then died and backed up to the point at which you saved your progress. Those are like moments that happened, but didn’t happen. At the end of the game, your memories cannot be untangled; you remembered the things that happened in the actual playthrough timeline and things that happened in the discarded, aborted side timelines. Run Lola Run left me feeling the same way. And I have an intense and inexplicable love for German women like Franka Potente.
2) Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)
I love the nihilistic ethos of this film. And I love the music. Brando here is one of the great villains. I like the original version btw. The Redux version is too long and contains some side threads that I found largely irrelevant.
3) The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971)
There’s something about small, dying towns that I love. If I ever survive an apocalypse, I will probably choose to live in a small town rather than an urban center. Growing up, my great grandparents had a farm in Moulton, Texas, and it was already dying back then in the 1970s, so I’ve got an innate longing for the spirit of such places. So much happens in this movie, and the scenes and dialogue imply a lot more…years and generations of lives lived with partial success and the accompanying regrets.
4) Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982)
It’s a cliché for someone of my generation and tastes to choose this movie, but it’s so undeniably great, such an obvious labor of love and vision, that I’ve got to include it. Roy Batty has some of the best lines ever delivered. There’s some lesson in here about a director or screenwriting elevating an actor. Half the movie’s appeal is the vision style and graphic design, but really all the elements serve the whole in a way that’s rarely accomplished. As a 16 year old boy, I wanted a Pris replicant of my very own. I’m actually torn on which version I’d take; I know what I’m supposed to say, but I feel there are strengths to both the original and the director’s cut. From the director’s cut, the darker, more ambiguous ending is a complete win for me. From the original, the monologue adds a lot of depth to Deckard’s character. Sure, we all loved the director’s cut *after* gaining familiarity with the original, but I have to ask: Would the more stripped down version have been as powerful without the context provided by the original, heavier-handed version? I hate it that Ridley Scott feels like he’s answered the question definitively about whether Deckard was a replicant, because—first—the director’s intentions are far less important to me than the audience interpretation, and—second—because the ambiguity and doubt that the character felt about the possibility of false memories, of not being *real* were more powerful than a definitive answer either way.
5) Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942)
I’ll admit that I don’t normally like movies made before the 1970s. People like Scorsese, Cimino and Coppola brought so much grittiness and depth to film that it’s hard for me to go backward. Casablanca is one of the exceptions. I love fiction that focuses on a specific point in time, when a mixture of events and pressures up the ante for all the standard elements of human life. The love story still chokes me up.
I love Kubrick, and The Shining might have made the list except that if I had to watch it over and over on an island, the nights would be unpleasantly unnerving and I’d probably end up hanging myself from a coconut tree with a rope woven from my hair. And—for the mood, cinematography and sex—I might have included Eyes Wide Shut if, you know, anyone actually got properly laid in the movie.
Link to the original ILUVVIDEO post (and more responses to the desert movies question by others) at http://www.iluvvideo.com/content/view/63/10/
