Operation Launching Eeyore: Help Me Send an Amazing Game Professor to GDC

by Erin on February 25, 2013

Hi folks. Hope you’re all having a great February. A coincidence inspired me to write this: I heard about GDC’s great “share your GDC story” contest and Marc’s lack of a GDC pass on the same day. This led to the writing of this piece and a gofundme to raise money to send Marc to GDC. Enjoy, think of the influential teachers in your life, and please let me know what you think! –Erin
Edited 6:30pm PST”: Hooooooly crap. So we raised $500 in 90 minutes. You guys rule. I set up the first campaign to be fixed goal, so that backers would only pay if the goal was reached. Now that we know we can get Marc to GDC, we’re raising money for his GDC pass. $1500 or bust!! Please share/retweet/etc! Marc Meetup plans also in process! The internet is amazing!

GDC changed my life.

In 2003 I was not going to be a game developer. I had been accepted without funding to study existentialism at the University of California at Irvine. I was going to go and be a starving philosophy student.

I was a senior at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. I was an assistant game designer for Simutronics. And because several of my computer scientist friends were signing up for it, I signed up for a class taught by Marc Destefano, a brand new course in the cognitive science department about video games.

If it weren’t for Marc Destefano, I would never have entered the game industry.

(I’ll pause here for a second while you do a little chaos math extrapolation about what that means. Think of butterflies. Think of Jeff Goldblum. What? Fine. I’ll think of Jeff Goldblum.)

(What, done already? Sigh. Ok.)

Marc is an amazing teacher. He’s the kind of teacher that I aspire to be today. He has no distance from his students, no condescension, no agenda. He’s just there in the moment every single class, with every fiber of his goofy, hilarious being. We could reliably make him turn beet red with fury by maligning the good name of Sondheim’s Paradox or suggesting that one might have fond childhood memories of Monopoly. Every class was can’t-miss, and it wasn’t just me — his online reviews (they have those for professors now) are full of phrases like “best prof ever”, “this class changed my life”, and “easily my favorite professor ever”.

I had always loved video games — really loved them, all the way back to the Commodore 64 and through the NES, the Sega Genesis, the PlayStation, the Dreamcast. Marc didn’t teach us to love video games. That love got us in the door. He taught us to love making video games.

After taking Marc’s “Introduction to Video Games” class I was so enthralled by this strange world of game development that he was describing that I took his game making class — it had some long and ridiculous name, something like “applications of cognitive science in game development” (remember, this is 2003, and there are no formal video game degrees), which meant we had to sign up in teams and actually make games. It was the first honest-to-god video game I ever designed, and I’m pretty sure the first one my team ever built; the fiction was based on the world that would later become the setting for my published fantasy novels.

With all due respect to my truly wonderful classmates, we made a stupid little game. We didn’t even really finish it, though it was playable. It was a platformer. (A gryphon platformer. Land-to-air quadruped controls and all. I drew the sprites with Prismacolor pencils and scanned them. I made a strange and gawky gryphon in Maya.) I knew it wasn’t good. But Marc thought it was awesome, and I don’t think I’ve ever told him how much that meant to me.

Because Marc was a diligent, savvy, and connected instructor in a field that hadn’t really even defined itself yet, he told us all that we should be applying for the IGDA’s GDC scholarship.

We applied. I got in. I went to GDC. I knew from the first moment I set foot on the floor that I had found my people. I mouthed off at one of Gordon Walton’s roundtables. I got offered a job.

My life pivoted.

And as if that wasn’t great enough, in 2006 we met up with Marc at GDC again, and he bought us tickets to Video Games Live!.

We — I — underestimated the distance to the San Jose Civic Auditorium. I was in heels. I would have blisters for a week. But when we found Marc outside the theater, I pulled him aside, leading him around one of the unoccupied corners of the building and away from the crowding game geeks.

“I’ve got to tell you a secret,” I said. “Have you heard of this ea_spouse thing?”

Marc’s eyes widened. His body seemed to go into slow motion. “Yeah,” he said carefully. Something about it bothered him, which kind of surprised me. I mean, it was a bothersome subject — at that particular time especially raw. But his hesitation didn’t stop me from saying:

“That was me.”

Marc’s face turned ash white. It’s one of the only times I’ve ever seen that happen in real life.

It turns out he was upset because RPI’s game program had internship deals with EA at the time, and he was worried that, from what he was reading, he might be sending tender young game developers into the dripping maw of Satan. Years later — last year, in fact — I would work with a fellow alum at Greg Johnson’s company, formerly one of those interns. His time at Maxis changed his life, I think it’s fair to say, and not nearly the way EA had changed mine, considering how his eyes go all distant and starry if you so much as say the word “Maxis” around him today.

The rest of the conversation was kind of a blur. But Marc was one of the first people I told. I had to — you know, because it was his fault we got into games at all. And I also needed to tell him that we didn’t regret it. Regardless, it remains true that if I have changed the game industry, then by extension Marc’s mentorship has as well.

In retrospect I kind of feel bad that that whole bombshell might have ruined VGL for him. At least, I hope it didn’t.

Lest you suspect that my life is in any way not incredibly weird, I am writing this essay from the EA campus at Redwood Shores. (Well, from the parking garage, because I was on my way out and realized I needed to pull out my laptop and write this right now.)

Marc is one of the nicest people I know. Usually that’s something people say disingenuously — and usually the person in question is either recently dead or the holder of a large debt. But Marc is neither, and he’s the real deal. I can think of few people more truly ethical, empathetic, humble, unassuming, or video game passionate as Marc. And considering the sheer number of truly wonderful game developers I know, I don’t say that lightly.

Marc doesn’t have a 2013 GDC pass.

This year I’ll be giving a talk for the first time about that whole ea_spouse thing. That’s why he needs to come to GDC. If he’s not there, how will he fully understand all that he has wrought?

=====
Erin Hoffman
aka “ea_spouse”

And this is the first gofundme!

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Isis

by Erin on January 23, 2013

In 1995, I went to the Humane Society in San Diego to adopt a kitten. It was the summer before I started high school. My parents graciously tolerated what would become a kind of ever-growing menagerie; but the reason I began keeping birds at all (beginning with budgerigars and finches) was because cats tended to disappear in San Diego if let outside. My family had had two of them (a tabby named Dufus and a black-and-white named Patches) before I was ten years old who each left home one evening never to return. After that, since it seemed cruel at the time not to let a cat roam outside, we kept to animals that lived indoors, which for me meant birds.

At that age I was still entertaining ideas of being a veterinarian, and I vaguely remember this being related, though mostly one wants a cat because one wants a cat. And by then ideas had changed about indoor cat-keeping. So that summer there was a cat, though not the cat we planned.

Her name then was “Angel” and the dubious individuals who bestowed it had unceremoniously dumped her at the shelter because they were “moving to an apartment that doesn’t allow cats”. This tepid excuse still infuriates me. The likely truth is that she was an impulse kitten acquisition and had had the poor taste to cease being a kitten after about a year, and become boring.

She was so traumatized by being abandoned that upon arriving at the shelter — about two weeks before I saw her — she had stopped eating. She was a small cat already, and would remain so, but by that time she was emaciated, really skin and bones. I have a photograph still; cats should never have hollow cheeks. And so though I went looking for a kitten, I came home with a cat, quickly renamed something a bit more dignified and reflective of a more appropriate respect for her catness: Isis, queen of the gods, daughter of the earth and sky.

Though I think she appreciated the name change, at first she was far from convinced that her situation had genuinely improved: she hid under my bed for two days. Despite being plied with many kinds of canned food, kibble, and toys, she would not come out, and still ate almost not at all.

At last, she did emerge, and after she started eating, she wasn’t inclined to stop. For most of her life she was more round than cat-shaped. She proceeded to take over the house, ousting the family dog from her place at the foot of my bed at night and generally bossing everyone around. The computer chair in the main room was a particular favorite spot. If you so much as leaned forward to take something out of the printer she could be up and into the seat before you sat back down, which could be an adventure. I believe that, unless the humane society bathed her, she had a bath twice in her life: once to figure out if we could do it, and again to figure out if we could do it any better. Instead we discovered the capabilities of a fully operational furry tube with a 360′ rotating spine and twenty-four distinct and autonomous sharp edges.

Like most cats, she disliked having her nails trimmed. But she could be bribed. For a long time I restrained her while trimming her nails, but always gave her a treat afterward. Blood (mine) still sometimes resulted. But when I added giving her a treat before the trim as well as after, she was completely docile. Economy is everything.

When I was in high school my brother adopted a rabbit who mainly lived in the garage. I would sometimes let her out to run around the house, where she enjoyed running laps and kicking her feet up behind her. Isis was quarantined in my bedroom for such expeditions for obvious reasons. But during one outing, Shady, the rabbit, had ventured into the front room. She didn’t get into much trouble on her own, so I mainly listened for her while doing my teenage internet things on the computer. I think I was playing DragonRealms, and I was in combat.

Out of the corner of my eye I noticed Isis slinking around the corner of the hallway. I was fully engrossed in whatever monster I was battling at the time, and so at first all I registered was that Isis was in the hallway, which was a fairly normal thing. I remember a vague sense of oddness that she was slinking, because she didn’t usually slink, being that she owned the house. Just as she disappeared into the front room, the realization shot through me: THE CAT AND THE RABBIT ARE OUT TOGETHER.

In that exact instant, Isis came streaking back through the doors, around the corner, up the hallway, and back into my room. Shady was right behind her, galloping and snorting like an angry bull. She was average sized for a rabbit, but probably had about equal weight on Isis — and was having none of this slinky stalky business. Needless to say, I jumped up and saved the cat from the rabbit.

Rabbit-stalking was a considerable step up for Isis, and so she was duly chastened. Mostly she liked small birds. She would sit by the window staring wide-eyed at them for long minutes, finally making this soft and fairly disturbing ak-ak-ak-ak-ak-ak sound with her open mouth, unblinking. And she would harass my finches when she could, but would not so much as enter my room, even to eat, if a cockatiel was visiting. She loved feathered toys, and Cheetos.

After I left for college, she expanded her reign to include the rest of my family. In particular she became very good at training my dad to get out of bed. He usually fed her in the morning, and she discovered that she could move up the schedule on this minute by minute through a combination of sitting on his chest to whack him in the face at around 5am, and clawing the carpet. She wasn’t allowed to claw the carpet, you see, but she figured out that if you’re lying in bed there’s not a lot you can do to stop her. So she’d claw the carpet first about two feet from the bed until he got up to stop her, then move two feet back, and two feet back again — all the way down the hall until she was in front of her dish.

As she got older, she developed more eccentricities, as very old cats seem to do. When she turned seventeen she started meowing loudly from the upstairs loft in the family room, and late at night. She had never been a vocal cat, and when she did meow it tended to be this small, croaking thing — so this change was a big one. I don’t think it was ever determined what she was meowing at — although she had a bit of a history of perceiving things no one else did. When she was younger she would race around batting at invisible things on the carpet — “psychedelic spiders”, my stepmom called them.

When she was eighteen she developed a sudden interest in sneaking outside, almost as if she realized she hadn’t that much time left and should get out and see the world a bit. She’d escaped before, never for long and never beyond the backyard, but it was a rare thing before that year. And one night about a year ago she met some other creature while sneaking out that was part of the reason why outdoor cats have much shorter lifespans; whatever it was (a large cat?), it took a huge bite out of her side and sent her shrieking back into the house. She was already an old cat, and my family thought this might be it for her. But she was bandaged up and she healed cleanly — the photo above is from last June, when she was about three months’ healed. And she stopped sneaking out.

When we visited this weekend, I knew as soon as I saw her that she was packing up to go. She moved feebly and her eyes were distant; she’d shed much of her body weight finally, in the way that old cats do. My parents said she was having trouble keeping food down. I picked up a can of tuna (being no judge of canned tuna, I got the most expensive one they had) and coaxed her into drinking its water, something that had enticed her to eat when she’d been sick before. She seemed to keep that down, and the next day I heard her meows were a little stronger. But by the time we left on Monday she wasn’t moving from her cat bed, and seemed not to have the strength even to close her eyes.

For whatever reason, her sight had seemed to suddenly leave her. She’d been frail when I saw her on Thanksgiving, but alert, even playful. And she was so old that I’d been saying goodbye when I left for the last year or more, just in case. But this time it was real.

She couldn’t see me, but some part of her was still there. When I petted her in that small bed, her head lolling and eyes vacant, I was expecting nothing, but needing to thank her for so much that she had given me, given all of us — for her feistiness, her oddness, her bossiness… and she started to purr. Neither her head nor her eyes moved, but her chest rattled, softly at first, then louder. It seemed impossible.

It amazes me to think that I’ve known her for nearly two thirds of my life. She was nineteen when she departed at last. Over the years she has inspired many a gryphon quirk, and if someday you read of a gryphon patched in grey and white, you’ll know it’s me trying to give her another home again, in a world that might be fairer than ours for having her there.

edited 1:27pm: courtesy the breaking in of the Cintiq: a quick isis-gryphon:

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His Last Words Were ‘Aloha’: Farewell to Senator Daniel Inouye

by Erin on December 17, 2012

The news has been brutal this week. I was running errands with Jay when I saw Senator Inouye’s name in the CNN headline, and my heart sank.

Senator Inouye was a living legend, a man who personified what it means to be “the greatest generation”. He stared first bigotry, then Nazis, then Washington politics in the eye — and I don’t believe he ever lost. Among his many accomplishments and life events:

• teaching first aid in Honolulu when Pearl Harbor was attacked in 1941;
• volunteering for the armed forces after the attack
• volunteering again (and being accepted) when the Army’s ban on Japanese was lifted in 1943
• serving in the legendary 442nd regimental combat team, the most decorated unit in US military history,
• where the record of his service strains belief, documented to include:
• walking off an explosion of grenade shrapnel into his leg;
• serving in six combat operations;
• advancing to Sergeant and participating in the also legendary rescue of the lost battalion, where 216 Nisei died and 856 were injured to rescue 200 Texan infantrymen;
• losing his arm in Italy, after surviving the above operation in France, in an engagement in which he is reported to have single-handedly killed 25 Germans (I’ll link again as it does truly strain the imagination);
• and receiving the Distinguished Service Cross for his service, later upgraded to a Medal of Honor, along with a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart;
• completing a law degree after returning home and hieing himself to Washington;
• where he fought for the rights of Japanese Americans and shepherded vindication and reparations finally made in the 1980s;
• and where he became the second longest-serving Senator in American history, serving nine consecutive terms,
• never lost an election,
• received the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun and the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Paulownia Flowers from the Emperor of Japan,
• and became President Pro Tempore of the Senate, making him the highest-ranking Asian American politician in US history.

Obviously one day we would have lost him, but I wish it hadn’t been so soon.

It is hard to imagine a more epic life, or a truer definition of the word ‘hero’. We are much diminished for his loss, though far more fortunate are we that he lived. Aloha, Inouye-san.

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Guest post: Developing the Storyteller within the Game Designer

by Erin on November 26, 2012

Hi all — hope you had a great Thanksgiving if you are in one of those turkey-consuming regions. Earlier this year the New York Film Academy got in touch about a guest post (see shiny new policy on the about page), and subsequently provided this great piece by Chris Swain. They have a nice-looking program with some great faculty. Enjoy!

Developing the Storyteller within the Game Designer
By Chris Swain, New York Film Academy—Game Design School

My students tell me that the best movie this year was the videogame Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception. I like this comment because it clearly shows how far story has come in modern videogames. The game is a landscape, a structure, a set of rules that bind the players while simultaneously allowing them to live and play. Ideally, the game compels the player to return again and again eager to express his or her own story each time they do.

Game designers have to be both storytellers and structural programmers. This may seem like a challenging interplay, but for the graduate of a game design school it is an essential mix of skills. Most students enter an academic game design program simply because they love game play. They are armed with the audacious notion that a happy player makes a happy game designer.

On that point they are right. It is a great thing for the designer to love playing. But that alone does not guarantee the game designer’s success. They may never be a true programmer, but they should have a working familiarity with the skill so as to be effective in overall game design. More importantly, the game designer must be willing to learn about the structures and methods of storytelling if they plan to be a versatile and skilled creator of compelling games.

At the New York Film Academy, we guide the game designer-storyteller as follows:

• Learn a playcentric design language of games – There are three systems that comprise the canon of modern game design: Dramatic systems, which include character, pacing and story structure; Dynamic systems, the emergent qualities of games in motion; and Formal systems, basically the rules, procedures and resources available to players. With a common vernacular, game designers and programmers can effectively collaborate.
• Learn the human history of games – Game play is identified far back in human history. “The casting of lots” is referenced in the Judeo-Christian bible. Very early versions of dice used 3,000 years ago have been discovered in Iran, while board games have been discovered in pre-dynastic Egypt (5,500 years ago) and China (2,200 years ago). Gaming seems to touch a universal human characteristic to tap into the imagination and competitive spirit. Games instruct and are passed from one generation to the next. The student needs to understand this very instinctive behavior as the fundamental basis for why people will play their games.
• Study improv – One benefit of the NYFA Game Design School being within a larger school of performing arts is that all students take a semester in improvisation acting (the class is mandatory). There are clear parallels between acting within the rules of improv and the rules of a game: In each, players interact with a set of dynamics while working toward a goal or outcome.
• Practice interactive writing – The theory, craft and tools of storytelling within an interactive medium should be examined within the past several decades’ successful and unsuccessful game concepts. There are reasons why certain games (think of the biggest-selling titles) are as popular as they are much of it owing to the appeal of the story to the player.

The relentless human appetite for stories is easy to find throughout the culture in movies, books, television and games. We all have our own stories, or wish to be in more interesting or exciting narratives. Providing players with this opportunity is both the task and the opportunity of the game designer.

# # #

Chris Swain
Chris Swain is a leader in the games design and development industry, with two decades experience that includes co-founding the Electronic Arts Game Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California while a professor in the School of Cinematic Arts. Chris developed games for Disney, Microsoft, Sony, The Los Angeles Times, Rockefeller Foundation, U.S. Department of Defense, Discovery Channel, Intel, among others and garnered many awards. Serious games that Chris has created include Ecotopia, Play the Game Save the Planet, a cinematic, story-driven game focused on environmental protection, and The Redistricting Game, which was funded by the Annenberg Center for Communication to educate citizens on the U.S. congressional redistricting process. He is the creative director in the Game Design program at the New York Film Academy.

Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception
The lines between passive and active entertainment are blurred in the landscape of this videogame-inspired movie.

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