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ARGFest 2007 - Roundtable ~ 42 Entertainment ~ Development Process Part I 30:35
- Introduction: Sean C. Stacey (SCS)
- Roundtable by 42 Entertainment - The Whole Picture
- Moderated by: Kristen Rutherford (KR)
- Mike Borys (MB)
- Steve Peters (SP)
- Sean Stewart (SS)
- Elan Lee (EL)
- Jim Stewartson (JS)
Credits: Roundtable: The Whole Picture, ARG Fest-o-con 2007, San Francisco, CA
Intro
SCS: Let's see if I can remember everybody's name. From 42 Entertainment, we have Mike Borys, Steve Peters, Sean Stewart, Elan Lee, and Jim Stewartson, and moderating this panel will be Kristen Rutherford. <applause>
KR: <aside> Oh, man. I've never moderated anything before.
<aloud> So this is called The Whole Picture of ARGs, and it's going to be a roundtable discussion by our friends at 42 and I don't know if you guys want to start off by saying something about yourselves? <uncomfortable pause> <laughter>
Speaker Introductions
JS: Yeah! I'm Jim Stewartson. I'm - what they make me do is the Tech Guy, so they make me run servers and ring the payphones and stuff like that. But what I like to do is be in the design meetings and do all that fun stuff.
KR: Play poker?
JS: Right.
SS: Cheers.
Yes. To briefly add to that, Jim was "Lucky" and "Lucy," so for all of whose ass got kicked by them playing poker, that would be Jim, with a [Puppetmaster] writing the dialogue. And saying, "What?! What did you bet?! You moron!" <laughter>
That and Jim is also the author of Flea++, the programming language that's sweeping the nation. <laughter>
EL: My name's Elan Lee. I guess my official title is the "VP of Experience Design" but I work for 42 Entertainment and make stuff up, and hope we provide entertaining experiences. <throws invisible hot potato to SS, which explodes in a shower of goo, ruining the entire proceeding. except invisibly, so no one notices>
SS: My name is Sean Stewart. I'm 42's strong, silent type. *laughter*
SP: Steve Peters. I'm one of the game designers for 42. I started to work with them on Last Call Poker but also I've been known to hang around Unfiction and ARGN, and some of those sites for--
SS: What, in Science Fiction, is called, a "filthy pro." <nods>
SP: A filthy... thank you. <laughter>
MB: I am Michael Borys. I am the Visual Design Director at 42 and I also work with game design as well. I work with Elan and those guys and do the same stuff; it's great!
EL: So we wanted to kind of give you guys a feel for how we do stuff at 42, what our design process looks like, where some of the ideas come from. We also want to, as quickly as possible, open it up to questions because we know that you guys probably have a very specific direction you want to take this in and we don't want to ramble on and on.
SS: It has everything to do with being responsive to the player and nothing to do with being unprepared. <laughter and applause>
KR: I guess what's on everybody's mind is, what are you going to make them do to get to ask a question.
AUDIENCE: Human pyramid!
EL: We had this original idea of - it was called the Moderator Piñata-- <laughter>
So? <gestures to SS>
Gateway "Chemistry Puzzles"
SS: So we're going to do this in two sets. One sort of origin story is from the Beast and then talk a little bit about Vista [Vanishing Point], which we just finished, then maybe take some questions. Actually if you go back to the very, very, very beginning of things, the first of these that we did was a project called "The Beast," for the Steven Spielberg film, "A.I."
I don't know how many alums there are-- <half of the audience of 100+ raises their hands, to the panel's manifest surprise> Whoa! Oh my god! That's like - I didn't know there were that many left on the Earth. <laughter>
That's kind of very effective for me; I should have worn my "Evan Chan is Dead" sweatshirt. I'm the first person the company always buys the player-made swag, so giving back one dollar at a time. <laughter>
Early on in the campaign - those of you that played that may remember that there was a page that you got to that had a really pretty series of atomic symbols. The puzzle has sort of passed into the design nomenclature at 42. It was a series of - for those of you who haven't seen it - it was a series of funky-lookin' kind of chemical, diagrammy things, and it looked very complex and spooky, but in fact you just had to name each element and the abbreviations for them spelled out a website. Or spelled out, "Coroner Sweborg," depending on how... right you were-- <laughter>
For all of you who remember that puzzle, by the way, there were two ways you could go with is. The more scientifically advanced people worked out the molecular weight of the whole thing. Then people told them, "That's dumb. what do you do with 414?" If any of you here did that, the very first person we ever tried that puzzle on was the Science-Fiction writer, Neal Stephenson, who wrote me back and said, "Okay, the answer's 414 but I don't get it." <laughter>
So you are not alone. The point of the chemistry puzzle, or why the chemistry puzzle is now referred to in our design lexicon, is something that looks really cool and spooky but in fact is pretty easy to solve, so that people feel smart and feel like, "Man, I kick ass! I'm gonna do more of this!" <laughter>
But it's visually interesting, and we try to design - when possible, we often try to make a gateway that we call a "chemistry puzzle," that has those things. So we have a long conversation, Elan and Jim and I, about a "chemistry puzzle," something that would look kind of cool but in fact be a fairly easy opening to open I Love Bees. And at the end of that conversation, probably the hardest puzzle ever known to man - because we're not very bright, but it's so cool.
Removing Ambiguity
EL: Should we hand it over to Jim? Jim would be our architect of the, um--
JS: Of just the <lie?>? <laughter>
It was Sean's fault. Sean had this great idea to have dual stories, which was one by actual words and the other, the same story but told in the language of this artificial intelligence that had crash-landed on the computer's website. So, Sean tasked me basically with inventing a language which could describe this very elegant journey, written by a very good writer, in a language that had approximately ten words. It took us, what, 75... 80 hours to finally come up with that.
EL: The process was taking Sean's story and we had this concept that, if we tell this in a programming language, do we think that players will be able to look at this programming language and translate it back into Sean's story? Having never seen the actual words but actually get back to that story so that when they finally do see it, they will understand, "Hey, we've seen this before! We actually know how this ends. We understand that." Jim set to creating that language and <laughs> the world of ARGs has never been the same. <laughter>
But we wanted to talk a little bit about the process that went into that, and the iterative process and the man-hours that went into that process. I think it's really indicative of how 42 works, and how we go about solving problems and creating experiences that we think people will enjoy. <to Sean> Do you want to start with the beginning and then...
SS: We were talking about it and I wrote a little fairy tale - because I do that a lot - and then I wrote it up as some sort of programming stuff and I said, "Do we think something like this would work?" And he said, "Why don't you not write any more programming." <laughter>
Elan is probably the most consistently creative person at 42 and people think of him as someone who makes puzzles and creates ambiguity, but in fact more than half of what Elan does 360 days a year is remove ambiguity. One thing that I often see people talking about that is kind of wrong way 'round is the sense that you're trying to make puzzles difficult and trying to hide the signal. What Elan spends 93,000 hours a year doing is trying to sharpen the signal because the rest of us always forget just how noisy the noise is. To jump past the Widow's Journey for a moment, a little later in I Love Bees, there was a moment when people were trying to communicate with the Sleeping Princess. People would send in text to her and then she would write letters back, and I would go through all the mails and choose the individual words and phrases from people's emails, and construct her language going back. My favorite response involved getting to cobble together the words, "I want a cupcake." And Elan said, "Can't do it."
"Noooo! 'I want a cupcake!' That's really cute!"
He said, "Yes, but it's a call to action. They will try to figure out what a cupcake is and how to get it to her." <laughter>
He was absolutely right and we have that conversation literally 200 times a year. <looks at Elan>
EL: <shrugs and shakes head> Don't know what you're talking about. <laughter>
SS: I'm better, but not very.
Compensating for Asymmetrical Information Between PMs and Players
EL: Just to keep talking about that a little bit, one of the things that we always run into just over and over again is we have all of this information in our heads and we really want to get it out to the players, and the hardest thing - I think really for all of us - is remembering that we have information that you don't have. We so easily take it for granted that anything we have thought up, you'll immediately know, and we'll just tell you all the really cool parts and we don't have to tell you the base and the core because we thought of it, therefore you know it. It's a problem I know that comes up again and again and I see it in all kinds of games and movies and television shows, where the creators have this concept--
Here's a great example, what song is this? <taps rhythmically on table>
What, don't you guys know that song? I mean, I know what I'm tapping is so clearly Mary Had a Little Lamb. <laughter> What's wrong with you?
It happens just over and over and over again, and it's this struggle. It's really this very complicated challenge of trying to say, "We don't want to be too obvious but we need you to understand what's in our head." The creative process I know, especially at 42, is trying to find interesting ways to get you inside our heads, and not make you feel stupid about going there and not make the game feel pedantic for taking you there.
SS: Another way of describing the creative process at 42 is Elan saying, "That's really good but can we have another draft?" <laughter>
EL: Mike and Steve joined our happy little group for projects past I Love Bees and the Beast, and so we should talk about - you guys want to talk about what you perceive as the creative process that went into Vanishing Point? You want to start that?
SP: I think with Vanishing Point - this is another one of, from our stand point, Elan's mantra to us - "This is a really good puzzle but it's not quite fun yet." Introducing that fun-factor into the puzzle; it could be really good, it could be really elegant - ignorant, I almost said - and we can be pretty proud. "Hey! Look how clever this is!" But Elan's really good at pointing out, "We're not quite there yet because it's not fun." And that really, from a player's standpoint, is tantamount. That's when I think you've got to design something carefully so it's not frustrating, that you're leading people down the path to the solution as opposed to a "red herring" path.
EL: Be careful when you talk about that though, because the creative process is not me saying, "Go do it again."
SP: No! <laughter>
KR: I can't believe you made me the moderator. <laughter>
SP: Well we get back at him also.
MB: It goes both ways for sure and one thing that Elan is really good is making sure that there's a great ARG. Whereas when in the beginning - let's take Vista for example, Vanishing Point - our puzzles start very, very simple within a set of puzzles and then they got very difficult toward the end. But we didn't know what the mix of that was going to be at the start, right? We did make this mistake: we designed the first set of puzzles first where we should have designed the second set first and then went back, because we got better as we went on. So I don't think that we're going to make that same mistake. I mean, as that was pretty heavy.
SS: I don't know. I think we'll keep making them. Elan will reasonably cordon us off.
EL: Yeah, but for me, I started out in regular video game design and one of the things you learn is you never design level one first because that's the first thing people see, and by then you want to be really good at whatever you're doing. In the first panel, Adrian brought up the term, "Just In Time Delivery System." We live and breathe the "Just In Time Delivery System." What that unfortunately means is that the very first things you see were often designed minutes before you see them and it's brutal.
MB: There's no playtesting too, outside of ourselves and that comes back to what you said: "Why don't they know," which is very, very difficult. Which is why one of the puzzles actually changed after they had gone live, because it was unsolveable. How we could solve it when it was unsolveable is beyond me. <laughter>
SP: We're really good. <laughter>
EL: Sean gave me a sort of look there, was there something you wanted to add?
SS: <shakes head> No! <laughter> The aura of quiet professionalism, I think, we're supposed to be exuding--
EL: Oh yeah.
SS: And that's great.
KR: Would you like me to throw it out to questions?
EL: Yeah! Who has got a question?
KR: Who's got a question?
Q&A
Playtesting and Prototyping
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Mike, you pretty much just started what I wanted to ask about with playtesting and prototyping, you seem to be developing pretty complex games and really enjoy some prototyping to make sure the puzzles work together. Do you not do any of that?
EL: <pushes microphone in front of JS> <laughter>
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Do you not have time?
SP: Well, it depends, we have. Sometimes yes and sometimes no, right?
JS: Ye-- no. <shakes head> <laughter>
Since day one. Yeah, it just doesn't happen. Realistically, in order to get to the kind of complexity and the quality that we need, there's just literally no time for that stage in the process. Which gives me no end of ulcers and all manner of maladies.
SP: Live testing is kind of the point but with Vanishing Point - especially with the live events - the comment was, "How many tries did it take you to launch your show?" And our answer was, "Yeah, that. One." That's all we had. When it goes live, we're all biting our nails because you couldn't do it ahead of time.
SS: This is sort of drearily technical but some of the projects we've done for large clients where we have more money to spend, the fiscal cycle by which those clients are allowed to cut checks means that they never have money to spend a year in advance. They come to us asking for certain things but it's always, by their standards, a long way out and by our standards, "Oh my god! You want it when?!" So we don't have as much leeway. When I'm writing a novel, it can take the time it takes, and I can start it when I want to start it. With these things, our development cycle - and sometimes the people we're working with, their development cycle - is out of sync. We live in a world where it would be really nice to have six months out to build something, and that is not a world that interfaces [with our clients]. That's not always the only limiting factor but it's a factor.
EL: Brian started to speak about this earlier. The larger industry doesn't really know what to do with us yet. They're not sure, are we part of marketing, are we a stand-alone project. We get a tiny percent of ad-spend and because they try to shoehorn us into this bizarre-shaped box where, "Hey, that's how much it costs to build a website, so take it and build a website, call it an ARG, and we're done." <laughter>
It's really, really challenging and the schedules usually suck but it's the reality. When you deal with these large companies that are very used to doing things a certain way, that is the reality of the world you live in. Things like testing, unfortunately, get prioritized much lower than register the URL and put up content.
MB: Well there's a leak problem too, right? I mean if we go and have people play these puzzles, they're going to go out and give answers to people, before we want them to give answers to people.
SS: The other thing is - and I'm sure you're all aware, having thought this through - it's very difficult; you cannot give three people a problem and have that model a thousand people looking at the same problem. Not only are those different audiences but you can't get there from here. There are things that we do test. We test individual web pages, we test individual systems as early as we can, which is sometimes not nearly enough. In terms of the behavior of the whole system, that's dead reckoning.
My belief is the single larges contributing factor to our success has been Elan's ability to guess what that system is going to look like and where people are going to go or want to go. Because honestly I think the rest of us - on every project we've done - if Elan had not been there enough, the rest of us would have made enough bad decisions to kill us. <laughter>
EL: No pressure on me or anything. <laughter>
Recycled Material
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Have you ever done it in reverse? Like usually, it's the company stepping to you and asking for an ARG. Have you ever thought of making a blueprint and then going to a company and saying, "Hey, look. We have this blueprint. You'll all benefit."
EL: Indirectly, yeah - sorry if anyone wants to jump in here - the reason I say indirectly is because it has always been that the companies come to us and we think of ideas. And then what happens, is once we've thought of the ideas, the companies cancel the projects. So we have this huge bag of ideas that we've had that we didn't use for anything. So when new companies come around, we can go, "Oohh, here's this brand new thing!" <makes finger quotes> <laughter>
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Just for you!
SS: Well that should work but in fact - your question is so good, that it's covered by NDA. <laughter>
Visual Design
AUDIENCE MEMBER: When would you have - your games, the visual sense of that, the detail, it's really amazing. I was wondering how do you fit that part. How do you deal with that kind of line. Like for Last Call Poker you had all different artwork <indistinct>?
EL: Yeah, that's Mike. <audience laughter>
MB: It's always halfway through the project that we're saying "Why did we go this far? Why are we doing this six times as difficult --" But at the end it winds up being exactly what we needed to do. I can speak for Vista perfectly that it just so happened that I really liked magic, and magic posters. So of course the whole first and second set was all magic stuff. It created a really great look and feel for it and was just what everybody loved. It came together and was the master effect of that particular section. And for Last Call Poker, like you mentioned, our VP of creative is addicted to poker, much like Jim is <audience laughter> and always wanted to build a better poker game. And what better way to do that than to use human avatars rather than cheesy 3-D avatars? So the painstaking process that went into actually building that became so worth it, because nothing -- even still -- holds a candle to that. Does that even touch on your question? It's just about loving it.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: <indistinct> How much of it is about your love for it getting translated--
MB: All of it.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Because I think that players really feel that, and when we're talking about players really loving characters in their game <indistinct>
MB: I think it's all the way through, from the writing, to the design of the puzzles themselves, to the feel -- it's because these guys live it and love it, they wake up and taste it, that it comes out in these things.
EL: I think everyone on the team really loves puzzles. I do a lot of real-world puzzle hunt games where you run around and solve puzzles against other teams, and the puzzles are very creative but the implementation always sucks. I mean, they're puzzle designers -- they're like me, I can't draw, I can barely sign my name. <audience laughter> It's really an incredible process to work with people like Mike, when you write out a puzzle idea -- and in Vanishing Point, it was such a great opportunity because we didn't have to disguise anything. It was "This is a puzzle. Solve it as a puzzle." And being used to, okay, there's going to be some ASCII art, or some random doodling, to hand it to someone like Mike, who's so passionate about it, who says, "People are going to enjoy this if it looks stunning" and can really take it to a level that I've never seen in a puzzle game, and I've seen a lot of them.
SP: It's just great from a design standpoint to be able to have such talented artists and writers, to be able to say "Here's what we're concepting, here's this idea," and these artists send back stuff that is just gorgeous. Same thing with the writers, Sean and Maureen -- we'll say, "We need a little paragraph here, we need a little blurb that will basically--" One from Last Call Poker comes to mind. We said, "We need a little intro to this live event puzzle. Just write something about World War II during the Blitz. Something like that." Or no, it was Westminster Chapel. "We just need a paragraph for introing the Westminster Chapel thing." He comes back with this just beautiful -- it was just art. The whole narrative he wrote about going in and seeing the different stained glass on the sides. And it's just like, "Yeah, I am so worthless." <audience laughter> You know, I was going, "I could probably write this, but I'll ping Sean." And the same thing with the book with the instructions for the card trick. You get great stuff back.
EL: I think one of the things that's really revealing about 42 is that everyone wears many hats. The reason that people are able to be so passionate about these things is yeah, Sean is a writer but he's also a designer. And he's also our video director. And the same thing with Mike. He's an artist but he's also a puzzle designer. There's always this concept of oh, we'll throw it over the wall to the other department and see what comes back. There are really very few walls at 42 because everyone does so many jobs that we're able to be passionate about our work and everyone else's work and we understand how our piece ties into everything else. I think that's really where a lot of the quality comes from.
SS: To just add on one last thing, 42 is not much like what I understand a production house or an ad agency to be like. It's exactly what I understand a band to be like. <audience laughter> It's just like playing in a band. And in fact the music we make together is different from the music -- I have a solo career, as do numerous people who work at 42 in various ways. I was a novelist for many years before I worked here. But the work I do in the band sounds as different as solo McCartney sounds from the Beatles albums. There is a really nice synergy there.
And the last thing to say about passion is -- anyone here ever publish freelance science fiction novels? <raises hand> <audience laughter> So the multiple of people who have read my freelance science fiction novels compared to the number of people who have read my robot propaganda from the future? Way more people reading robot propaganda from the future. <audience laughter> It'd be a shame to waste the platform. But that puts it a little more narcissisticly than it really is. The single most interesting factor about ARGs as a platform, to me, as someone whose background is in the arts and who thinks of it as an artform, is the audience construction. There is no analogue in any other artform that I'm aware of. The audience is constructed essentially like the audience for 18th century science, rather than for art. It's a bunch of amateur investigators all over the world, passionately committed to finding a truth and communicating with one another and building a community. That's the Royal Society; that's not really what you get when you walk into the Cineplex.
Because there is that passion, I will work till midnight to do something that I am paid to do and I want to do really well, and I'll work till 2 or 3 AM because I don't want to let these people down. The amount of energy and passion that the audience puts into these things just seems like it would be a terrible thing to betray. There are things that we have not been able to get to our desired level because we ran out of time, or for whatever reason, but I am so much more careful about this audience than I am even the audience for my novels. I try really hard when I'm writing books, but I do not feel the intense obligation not to let the audience down that I do with an ARG. And I think I speak for most of us when I say we cannot let people spend 30 hours a week trying to decode cereal boxes <audience laughter> and not really work hard. <audience laughter>
