i’ve just been notified that i am the gamasutra geek of the year. this is cool, in that anti-cool industry kind of way. my thanks to all the people who voted for me. (i guess…)

in other news, i have recently spent my time working on the catacombs in paris. if you don’t know the history of that place, it’s this: at a certain point, there were too many corpses buried in paris…the cemetaries were piled so high with graves that the dirt was spilling over the edges of the 8 foot graveyard walls into the cobblestone streets. putrid gasses were leaking up out of the ground and making people sick. so the government executed a plan to move all of the buried dead into the tunnels under the city that were hollowed out earlier by stone miners. (the stone was mined to build the city’s amazing structures, leaving a labyrinth of tunnels and chambers in the rock below.) so workers started digging up the dead and transferring them to the tunnels. it became known as the catacombs. the workers got creative in the way they stacked the skulls and other bones, working patterns into the walls. so now, when you tour or hang out there, you are in a maze of human bones. pretty interesting.

like all of warren’s designers here, when i signed on with deus ex, one of my first priorities was taking ownership of some areas that i could get excited about. one of those was paris, because i’d spent time there (when i lived in germany i used to visit france) and because i thought the catacombs would make a perfect game space. we’ll see…so far, so good.

my other major location remains a closely guarded secret, but it excites me even more.

also, i’ve played more fireteam lately. the game is still addictive and the frame rate seems to have improved dramatically since the first beta test a while back. for more on fireteam, go here: http://www.fireteam.com/

okay, i hate technology.

but i love how people express themselves through technology.

i have just added the amazingly cool ‘goth quote generator’ to my web site. it was written by L. Fitzgerald Sjöberg, who is clearly a genius. each time you load the page, it will randomly create something dark and seemingly deep. so have fun (or not, since that is not really the intent of the generator).

this is a special occasion.

the third and final (load test) beta cycle for FireTeam has come to an end. you can now order the game by calling (toll free!) 1-888-689-TEAM. if you like multiplayer games, i urge you to check out FireTeam.

after i left origin, following the death of my beloved strategy game Technosaur, Art Min and Ned Lerner hired me on as lead designer of the game they wanted to make–FireTeam. i moved out to cali and spent the next year working on the game. i learned a lot, had a blast and really came to love the game. at the end of the first FireTeam beta test i moved back home to texas to work with Warren Spector on the rpg, Deus Ex. but FireTeam remains close to my heart and Multitude is a way cool company. (i will go on record, however, as saying that i hated california…)

my favorite thing about the FireTeam project (and Multitude as a company) would have to be the approach to game design there. passion is a word i use a lot and it applies here. the people there, from the testers on up to the execs, are totally into what they do. Art, a friend from System Shock days, just breathes game design. there was nothing like sitting around with those guys and discussing the pros and cons of any given feature, how much fun it might add, how it would affect the community, etc. the atmosphere was one of analysis and academic thoughtfulness, but it was fun too. when i say i learned a lot from working with all those guys, i mean it…Multitude was one of the single best learning experiences i have ever had, including all the myriad game people i’ve worked with. if you want to find a completely committed company full of people who really *love* games, look no further.

when Art actually offered me the job at Multitude, we were ‘standing’ in the Diablo town after a night of playing. i was in austin, he was in cali and we had played with friends in other places (including boston, home of Looking Glass). we were standing in the town, chatting in text (a meaningful conversation that turned into a sort of interview). that’s how integrated Multitude is with the gaming industry.

so FireTeam is the last game i worked on before coming to ION Storm. it’s a game of co-operative squad tactics. there are 3 characters to play. (scout, gunner & commando.) teams form up in the lobby, choosing characters & discussing strategy, then the game begins. each game is 10 minutes long. there are 4 types of games to choose from. (basetag, gunball, team deathmatch and flags.) the game comes with a little headset and microphone (like the marines in Aliens wore) and you can actually talk to your squadmates, over the internet, during the game. unless you have played multiplayer games with voice (like office-to-office speaker-phone Doom a few years ago), you cannot imagine how much energy the voice adds. there is also a strong sense of community–you get to know friends quickly. one of the cool things we did was include lots of functionality in the lobby from other internet chat/community sources. for instance, lots of irc commands work in the lobby. there’s a lot of whispering back and forth. for some reason the game seems to really appeal to both genders, so there is a good mix in the lobby of men & women.

the billing model: you buy the box & never pay again–online time is free and unlimited.

anyway, that’s it for today. oh yeah, you can also get lots of info about FireTeam, including screenshots, from here: http://www.fireteam.com/

i just saw a usenet post saying something like, ‘a few years ago i wrote a SEAL team warfare storyline for a game and now Rainbow 6 comes out…’ the person posting seemed frustrated by something. i’m not sure whether she thought that someone had ‘beaten her’ to executing a great idea or what. but the post reminded me of what i consider one of the hardest lessons i had to learn about game design.

games are first about simple interactions–player action and system response. any fictional ‘storyline’ comes second and is far less important in creating a good game.

this may sound like an odd thing for a person from a writing/rpg design background to say, since it devalues the writer with regard to the game development process. five years ago i would have argued that this was not true until i was blue in the face. now i am a firm believer.

so in the rainbow 6 example, what makes the game fun is far more centered around moving through a maze, avoiding line of sight detection with enemy ‘units,’ avoiding the fired projectiles of enemy units, shooting the enemy units before they shoot you, switching to a different avatar unit if the one you inhabit is ‘killed,’ etc. and of course, shooting and killing simply mean putting your cursor on top of a section of the enemy art and pushing the mouse button. the terms ‘shoot’ and ‘kill’ are simply more of the fictional context. and initially, until the simple game-play interactions are worked out, they are irrelevent. in fact, they seem to me to get in the way of development.

this may seem simple to some people, especially programmers, since they usually evolve as game makers by painstakingly building a series of games from the root level up. by the time a programmer is ready to get hired by a professional company, he or she has probably systematically created a number of small games. and in the process of doing so, the programmer has come to understand games at an abstract level: how does game piece A relate to piece B?

the person from a fictional background comes at the problem from the opposite side: wouldn’t it be cool to do a game about the power struggles between kingdoms?

and from the collision of fundamental game-play and fictional context, hopefully, you get something like chess. for good game-play, which is the most important aspect of any game, you have to focus on the simple interactions that actually make the game. and hopefully your fictional context is so interesting that it enhances the game experience, as it does with Rainbow 6.

the context is still very important (and as we move closer to simulations instead of classic games the context is of course getting more important). much of the modern game experience comes from the player immersing himself in the context–thinking of himself in the terms established by the game’s setting and fiction…a medieval thief, a modern special forces assassin, etc.

i hope this does not sound like preaching. and many people, especially programmers, will think it’s obvious. but it was one of those things about game design that took me a while to grasp.