Here is one of the most amazing glimpses into the behind the scenes of video game development I’ve ever seen: deconstructulator

This NES emulator shows how Super Mario Bros. sprites and graphics are stored both on the cartridge and in active memory. It’s really cool.

As a bonus, you get to play the first level of Super Mario Bros. and be reminded of how it’s one of the finest examples of a tutorial level despite (maybe because of) having no text, videos or scripted events. Watch how everything you need to learn is carefully broken down into logical bits, each one building on the last section of the level.

So good.

David Edery on how hard (or easy) you should make your games:

Too many of us are still holding onto design philosophies that were born in the days of quarter-gobbling arcade games. Too many developers get most of their design feedback from QA teams made up of hardcore gamers who have played a game way more than most normal people ever will. Making a game “just hard enough” (be that very hard or very easy, depending on the person playing) is one of the primary keys to fun — and, I think, an under-appreciated way to significantly increase sales. It deserves more attention from our industry, even as we search for ways to incorporate meaningful, educational, and remarkable consequences back into our games.

I’ve long been a fan of the approach of having multiple difficulty levels at once in the same place, using things like optional badges, multiple levels of success and bonus objectives. The simplest form can be found in most racing games, which allow you to pass a race in 1st, 2nd or 3rd place.

Medals, optional missing objectives, secrets, collectibles, level (and game) completion percentages – all of these allow you to have more than one level of difficulty on the same map at the same time, which can substantially reduce QA time and other design problems that come from a situation where you need to run the same content more than once during testing because the rules have changed in some way. If advanced players have the same experience as regular players, except that they skip less, a lot less can go wrong.

David Sirlin’s excellent analysis of Donkey Kong Country 2’s secrets was the first writing that got me thinking this way. Time and time again, working on small games with tight deadlines and short QA cycles, we took advantage of this technique.

This is not to say that it’s impossible to do dynamic difficulty well. People smarter than me are already working on better automated ways of adjusting difficulty in real time and presumably, they’ve solved the QA problem. I wonder how they’ll solve the emotional problem. Some people love being frustrated by games and some people hate them. Until game systems can detect how mad you are, the system will have to err in one direction or the other.

A fixed difficulty with a range of levels of success is the best of both worlds. Instead of dynamically adjusting difficulty is that it allows the player to decide for themselves how difficult they want the game to be, in real time, in a highly contextualized way. If the one section is too frustrating, then they can ignore the side missions and just get things done. If another is going really well, they can reach for the gold. If it’s going poorly but they are still enjoying themselves, they can reach for the gold anyway.

Plus, it makes it easier to compare the size of your achievements.

When you work on a product for too long, you get used to all of the little workarounds you need to do in order to use your software. Part of you is aware that they need to be fixed at some point, but then deadlines loom and memory fades and bugs become features.

The best cure is external playtesters. Fresh eyes, attached to bodies that have never played your game before. People who are as new to the experience as the people who will pay money for your product. In a perfect world, this means having the resources to build a multi-million test centre like Microsoft did for Halo 3 or building it in to your design process like Valve does and running playtest sessions every week or two.

Failing that, it’s a good idea to have people in your company who are not part of the day to day production of your game try a build. An outsider to the project doesn’t know or care about WHY you made the compromises that you made, they only care about their experience of the product. You should be using the same techniques as you’d use if it were external playtesters. Valve has a good PDF that covers this.

What put me in mind of this was a rant by Bill Gates about his experience trying to download Moviemaker in 2003. Most commenters seem to be taking potshots at Microsoft or at Gates, but it’s actually a great example of why having outside eyes is so important. Without knowing them, I am pretty sure that the people who worked on Microsoft.com were all pretty intelligent. Having worked in the trenches of software development, I can only sympathize and cringe along with the poor developers when Gates says:

So I gave up and sent mail to Amir saying – where is this Moviemaker download? Does it exist?

So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated.

“What if we’re all just brains in a vat?”

Before becoming the premise of the (increasingly disappointing) Matrix Trilogy, this was one of the more popular Epistemological essay questions for undergrad Philsophy students the world over. “If we got ourselves put in a situation where all of our experiences were simulated, would they be real?” and then “If you could arrange to put yourself into such a simulation, would you want to?”

There is a lot of hand-wringing in Epistemological circles about whether or not certain experiences or knowledge are ‘genuine’. This involves a lot of strange thought experiments with painted albino zebras and twins sitting in front of complex arrangements of mirrors. Being a dedicated gamer by the time all of this came to my attention, I had a lot of trouble understanding what the fuss was about. There are already millions of humans choosing to spend a large chunk of their leisure time having crudely simulated experiences. The first company to patent the Holodeck is going to clean up.

The media and our disapproving parents and friends also already know the answer to the first question: No the simulated experiences are not real, get outside and read a book. The latest warrior to toss her hat in the ring on the side of all that is good and genuine is Susan Greenfield.

She sets out a catalogue of repercussions: the substitution of virtual experience for real encounters; the impact of spoon-fed menu options as opposed to free-ranging inquiry; a decline in linguistic and visual imagination; an atrophy of creativity; contracted, brutalised text-messaging, lacking the verbs and conditional structures essential for complex thinking. Her principal concern is how computer games could be emphasising what she calls “process” over “content” – method over meaning – in mental activity.

Greenfield is an actual scientist and so enlightened by her argument, I humbly apologize to all the world for the part that I played in the imagination holocaust that is game development. I promise to turn my back on the simple spoon-fed menu options of The Sims, Grand Theft Auto and Fallout and devote myself to the genuine free-ranging inquiry of Independence Day, Sex and the City and anything by Danielle Steele.

Falling behind on my completely arbitrary and non-enforced posting schedule. So here is a link to a classic Old Man Murray article. Who Killed Adventure Games.