Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Lecture 3 Video Games
Games. [sound] So, this is again, one of
those demystification lectures in which
the goal is to explain to you how things
work and many of you, how many of you, just
as a sense, play video games and love them
and want to know how they work? Look at this,
the whole room is raising their hand,
that's awesome. That's 250 people saying
go video games. So ah, [inaudible] I
rounded it up, it rounded it up, it was running from 100 to
250, okay. So um, how about novel interaction
techniques? I always do a computer
technology in the news. You now have a, a
Wii remote, which lets you kinda move, and
be with a bow and arrow and some other
stuff and it knows where it is in three
dimensional space. You have this for the
PlayStation 3. You have other devices
that let you do kinda cool interactive
things. How about controlling your video
games with thought? The Emotiv System is a
commercial system and you can watch the
videos on there online in which a player
puts the headset on, it reads the
brainwaves, translates those to a
pre-mapped set of actions. So, it memorizes
your brainwaves. It says, okay, think,
move to the right. And so, my, I close my
eyes or I open my eyes, and I think, move
to the right. I don't move it yet. I, I, I
don't, I just think move to the right. I'm
thinking move to the right. And I do that,
like, ten times. And then, think move to
the left. And memorize, remember those ten
things. Okay? Think, move forward. Think
move back. Think, you know, action or fire
or whatever. And then, when you're playing
the game, you want to go to the right. And
so, you go, okay, move to the right and you
don't move your body but you think and it
says, okay, of the five things you recorded,
which one is that new signal closest to?
Oh, it's closest to move to the right.
Guess what? Automatically, you're thinking,
it record brainwaves, it matches in a
signal processing way with all the five
brainwave models it has from the five
things you've done before, the average of
all those.
And it moves to the right. And you
didn't move your body. And you move to the
left in your brain and your character
moves to the left. It is like science
fiction. And it works and it's incredible.
So, we're excited possibly for getting a
copy of one of these things for CS10. I think
that would be a rock, that would rock my
world. If I was, if I were able to control
my slides by saying next. [inaudible]. And
it just worked.
>> [laugh]
>>So, I'll put my hands behind my back.
I, next, ah. Very good.
>> [laugh] >> So in today's lecture, talking
about video games, we are going to give you a
history, with some overview, it's good to know
the history people don't, sell, sell them,
reflect on the history of where, of what got them to they are. We'll look at
the design um, of, of video games, 2D and 3D
graphics, motion capture AI, we've seen
motion capture before. I'll show you some more
of that. We'll talk about the good and
the bad and the ugly. Now, that you built
a video game, what is, what is its
analysis of it? The future of video games.
And then I have a guest speaker, who is
Glenn, our head TA, who actually was a
video game designer. And we'll talk about
his experience in the industry. So, I want
to make sure to give him enough time.
That often is one of the favorite lectures
of the class. So, we'll jump right in. So,
as a background, there's a lot of
wonderful movies about video games and
documentaries of the history. I
particularly want to recommend the Play
Value series, remarkably entertaining, 10
to 15-minute videos. We're going to add that
as recommended videos to watch on the
webpage so you can just click on the
webpage. It's a YouTube channel. Just
watch all the videos. They are really
fascinating and they really captured the
history of how we got to where we are.
It's really, really fun um, and well done.
So, the first video game really, that
caught on, there was a video game before
that, which was kind of a Pongy thing.
This, tennis, this is the first video
game that really caught on. This is called
Space War. And we, Luke and I were showing
this before class. Here's a video um,
both of these ships have gravity that
pulls them into the center. And they shoot
at each other, and they can go into
hyperspace. And in fact, it made a very
popular translation to the Atari Space
War, and other variants on shooting each
other in space and kind of a science fiction with video games was very real. The people
doing it and building the games ah, were
people who were just in science fiction,
who were researchers at MIT. So, that is a
picture of Stephen Russell and he's one of
the key authors of this. And in fact,
what's so cool is they took the original
code, wrote an emulator for the machine it
ran on, a working PDP, and ah, there is
actually a working PDP machine in the
Computer History Museum which is CHM.
There's a Java version available running
on an emulation that you can actually
play, which means you can actually play
the actual game bit for bit that they
invented in 1961. That's so cool. Um, and
inspired a lot of folks and this really is
the first time that people play games. But
it wasn't games in the traditional sense.
It was a game on a machine that only
universities have. These really high end
machines, which is a PDP 1 at the time
was not something that everyone had access
to. So, it was a very limited set of people
who were playing this, but it was widely
distributed around. So they passed it all
around to each other ah, other people who had
PDP 1s, they passed it around so basically
the whole world of engineers and
researchers had this game and were playing
it. It was very, very popular and as I
said, were widely ported to many different
systems. More in the history of two names.
One of the things that I do in this class
is ask you on exam, do you remember the name of
some people? I usually do it in kind of a
match thing. Here's some names and here's
what they did, and match them. So, it's
kind of easy, I don't ever just throw a name and
say, what do they do. But, when I have a name
of a person, you want to remember that name.
So, Stephen Russel is the first name you've
seen so far. Um, these are a few people you
want to know. These are people who, at
least in the US market, which is where
video games actually started, really were
founding fathers. Ralph Baer and Nolan
Bushnell, both entrepreneurs. Ralph Baer
had Odyssey and Nolan Bushnell was famous
for Atari. Nolan Bushnell lives about an
hour from here, folks. So, all this was
happening in Silicon Valley, which is
really exciting. So, Ralph Baer, here he is
receiving the Congressional Medal of Honor
from President Bush. Nolan Bushnell, his
Atari company, if you look at the history,
had much more commercial success than the
Odyssey, but the Odyssey came out first.
You have to given them both props for
that. Odyssey for its initial machine, and
then the Atari on how to do it right and
how to translate it to video arcade
experience with Pong as the first game.
Here is a picture of Nolan Bushnell with
his Pong game. And there's a story of the
first Pong game, which they put it in one
of the Silicon Valley, like Santa Clara,
pizza parlors. And then they sat there and
ate pizza and watched what happened.
Imagine this, right. If you're the
inventor of this and you get to kind of
just watch as your invention gets used by
people eating pizza, drinking beer. Like,
what is this? Put a quarter in, wait, oh
my gosh. And then they didn't stop playing
it. And they wait, went home, and they
came back and the guy complained. He said,
what's wrong, did it break? No, it's
filled up with quarters and we have to get
you to empty it more frequently than once
a day. Like, like it was more success than
it ever imagined. You say ah, maybe $10.
It was making hundreds of dollars a day. It
was incredible. So, that was the first
machine in the, in a, in a ah, setting
that wasn't a video game arcade, it was in
a pool, I think it was in a Pizza Hut. And
the Atari video game system was one of the
first console systems that became very
popular. On the back set of your slides,
you'll see a whole set um, the last set
of slides I'm not going to talk about is the
more history of the consoles. But I'll
just let you read about that if you're
curious about that. Here's an artist you
really need to know about. Shigeru
Miyamoto. How many of you know about
Shigeru Miyamoto? Yes. Good stuff. I'm
glad that you guys are well read in that.
This is the chief game designer at
Nintendo, and responsible for almost
every big video game for about a twenty
year period. Look at the list of games
that he invented and was principal
designer for. It's the most creative work,
possibly by one person. You know, he really
is in the video game industry, the Walt
Disney. With the vision to have worlds
to explore and technology to explore and
he's exploring 3D in 64 bit games. An
incredible, an incredible artist. Really,
really a visionary in the field. Very
famous. And we thank him for all of the
enjoyment we've had playing those games
that you see on the list. Now, let me tell
you about design of a casual video game.
One of the most popular is Angry Birds, so
let's talk about that. There are two
worlds. There's a core video game world
and a casual video game world. In the
casual space, it's really what you're
probably used to now, because many of you
have smartphones, and many of you are
playing probably more casual games than
core games nowadays. The casual games are
the games you play on your commute to
work. They're not the games that you sit
down with your fancy high-def screen and
your PS3 and your Xbox 360 and all that
stuff and play. And you're paying $60 a
game. These are games you pay $1, $2,
even free. It has fundamentally changed
the market for games. It has undercut,
people are saying, how are we going to be
charging $60 for a big Xbox 360 game when
you get a really good immersive experience
with an iPad and a full screen with a
headphone and the whole feeling of it. So,
there's a whole, and, and a $9 game or
a $6 game, how are we charging 60 for
the same rough game? So, many people have
had to reduce the price that they charge
for these games and that cuts into their
business model. Right now, the iPhone and
the iPad and the iOS really dominates
the field although the Android folks are
coming back with having some really fun
games, and really good stuff here. But,
for the most part, the big gamers who are
in this field are building it for all
platforms, for all the tablets, and all
the, all the, all the personal, all the
phones and the smartphones. The time to
completion is only a couple of months.
That's what's so encouraging. From the
point of view of, of the students, point
of view of you listening to this lecture,
there is no more exciting space than the
casual video game. You come through this
class, Beauty and Joy of Computing. You
then graduate, take a couple of classes in
maybe Graphic Design, maybe partner with
some folks in graphic design. Maybe take a
couple of more classes in Algorithms and
Mobile Development. And you're making a
game that's making money. So, the potential
to take you from where you are now, just
beginning to learn about computing, to
able to be making money on something. Only
with the release of the casual video game
has that been possible. Normally, you need
to finish four years of graduate, of
undergraduate. Then you go and get a job,
and after four years, you can probably
start making some real money. Maybe have
an internship in the middle. But I'm
talking about real money if you just have
yourself and a couple of other developers, doesn't take a lot of people to make a
really successful game, if you have a
great idea and some good artistry and good
game play, right? It really could be
interesting. So, think about that if you
are at all entrepreneurial in nature about
thinking about the space of doing game
design. It's real an exciting space. It's
crowded, the field is very crowded, But
it's an exciting space if you like games
and you'd like to take it up, right?
Would, I never had that opportunity. When
I was coming up, you had to be involved
with a big company to do this. Now, you
and three other friends can actually make
a company and make some money. It's pretty
exciting, and pay for tuition and all that
stuff. So, core video games are the other
side of the coin. They are the heavyweight,
you know, in the spectrum the lightweight
is a small app that caught, written by one
person that was free. On the high walk, the
heavy side of it is the core video game
which is the traditional console based
game. You're going be paying 50, $60
when it's new. You're going to expect
to have immersive high definition
graphics. You're going  to expect to have the
game play and the quality, the production
value, as they talk about in movie terms.
The production value of 60, it better be
worth your $60, right? That better be
incredible. So, that involves a hundred
person team. That involves a team of
artists doing animation and modelling and
game design and, and level design. That
involves a lot of work for marketers and
lot of work engaging with, you know, the
PlayStation, the distribution networks, the
PlayStation online, and the, the GameStop
stores. It involves a big team of folks.
It involves 10 million dollar budgets, which is
a really big deal. Which means there are
not lot of those. There are not a lot of
these big houses. You might have a couple
of those folks in a crowded market for, in
this particular case, the SOCOM Franchise,
the, you know, the combative market. And
it's a really crowded market for not a lot
of money. The goal is, by the way, to make
that up. So, your hope to win back at least
10 million, to at least pay your
bills. But in the best case, you're hoping
to get 20, 30, 40 or 50 million.
That's the numbers I've been hearing from
my friends who, who work in this space, is
that the 10 million dollars expenditure, with the
hope to reap at the top end 50 million.
Pretty big deal. The interesting piece of
this is Lucas Film, who, people who are
creating content, people who are making
movies, like Sony Pictures and Lucas, and
George Lucas with ILM. They're looking to
combine their assets. If you're doing
motion capture for Lord of the Rings, and
you want to have a Lord of the Rings video
game, why can't you be using all those
assets? Write that word assets, that means
kind of the collection of images and
motion libraries and textures and all the
things we've talked about in the 3D
graphics lecture. Can you reuse those for
your video game? So, they're talking about
that and there's always papers in C
Graph, the National Conference in Graphics
about how to do that, how to reuse assets
and how, not have to redo the whole thing
when you're working on your video game
after your movie's done. Pretty good
stuff, exciting stuff. Alright. So, how do
video games work? So, let's now do some
demystification, and leave enough time for
Glenn to talk about how, what life is like as a
video game designer. So, this really is
very similar, and I'm so pleased that I
get to tail ah, tailgate off of my lecture on 3D
Graphics, because that's almost exactly
the same. I was talking a lot about in
that lecture how to do um, Pixar level, where
you get hours per frame. And this is, a
really key thing is, you now remember as
you are a video game person, whatever you
do, you only have a thirtieth of a second
to do all the computation for that frame,
which is all the AI calculation of what
the creature should do, it's all the
reflectance models of where the light
should fall, it's all the geometry
transformations for all the things
creatures should move, there's hundreds of
thousands of polygons that are changing as
you're punching me in this video game,
this is Fight Night  3, my friend, one
of my best friends worked on this and told
me all the things he did and all the, he
worked in for Dreamworks making movies.
And they hired him to take all the movie
effects and put them in the video games.
He said, well, that's really hard,
because I used to have hours per frame to
generate realistic skin and realistic
sweat on the skin. They said, no, no. You
have now, 1/1000th the time to do the same
thing. What can you give me in 1/1000th of
the time? And look at that. There's
glistening of sweat on the, on the, on
the, on the fighter. And as they fight
more, there's more sweat. And it beads,
and it rolls down. As you punch, you can
see there's, like a blood. There's a little, it just got,
but it's a little bit of a, a fluid,
flowing, a fluid simulation with that. It
looks like ah, it's incredible
what they're able to do. What with the
hacks. It's really a hack, just as long as
it works, as long as it looks good, we
don't care how it's done. It's literally
as hard coded and as ugly code as
possible, just get it working. So, these
are complete hacks sometimes. But
sometimes there's really incredible
research breakthroughs, where they
realize, you know, this model of doing
fluid simulation is technically right if
you have hours and hours per frame, but
you can get 99% of the way there
with this particular optimization, and
this particular optimization. And those
are research breakthroughs for people to
be able to say, look 99% of the way
there for 1/1000 of speed is a big deal.
So, that's a really big deal, that's
really cool. So, motion capture, we talked
about a little bit before, but the
difference in video games is, you have to
dynamically generate the motion of your
creature or the thing you are or creating in
real time. So, you might have a football
player running straight ahead and you
might have a football player running
straight ahead and making a right turn.
But then the video game player, this young
kid, goes forward and runs a slant, which
is like a 45 degree turn. You don't have that
in your motion library. You have straight
ahead and you have right turn. So, what do
you do? You cheat. You take the right
turn, and you turn the feet so the feet
kind of slide, so the person's like,
turning to the right, but then you're
sliding the feet so by the time they're
done turning, they only turned 45 degrees
rather than 90 degrees. You see that? So,
you kind of cheat with the foot sliding to
reuse motion libraries to make it look
like whatever direction you want to go,
the creature, the guy's doing the right
thing. And if it's mostly straight ahead,
it's mostly straight ahead. You just kind
of cheat the legs, cheat the feet so the
sliding and turning your creature as
you're turning your character, turning
your football player as you do that.
Pretty cool. A lot of cheats. But motion
libraries and motion synthesis, first of
all motion joining, now they run straight
ahead. And then they want to stop and join
another motion, which is pre-recorded. But
how do you make that seamless so it
doesn't just go boop? And then all of a
sudden the, the arms and the rigs at the
rig goes pop as they do something else, right? Let's say, I have a motion library
catching a football, but I have no motion
library running to catching. How do you
have that smooth automatic interpolation
from this motion of my hands to this
motion of my hands? So, there is some
automatic interpolation that's used. But
you have to be really careful not to have
things pop. Just all of a sudden, running
around, and poof. That just doesn't
feel realistic. I move my hands too fast.
So, there is synthesis, which is making up
new motions, as well as motion joining.
And there's a lot of research at Berkeley to do the turns legally, without, without changing
the feet, doing some other things. How you
can interpolate between the running
straight ahead and the right angle with
clever analysis of the motion libraries,
people will have a more generalized path.
Pretty cool stuff, a lot of UC Berkeley
research, if you're interested in that.
James O'Brien and his crew of folks here
at UC Berkeley are interested, talk to them if you're
interested. Artificial intelligence is a
critical part of games. You have to have
enemies and enemies have to have
intelligence. So, there is kind of the very
low level which are simple heuristics,
just don't run into the wall and don't
fall of the edge off the cliff. But
there's also quite a bit of intelligence
if you add on layers of sophistication of
the AI. We'll talk a lot more about AI
later in the semester. But you want to be
able to have, you want to feel like you're
playing against a real, another person.
But in fact it's computer driven, but
someone's who's, kind of, be nuanced with
you, which is someone who might grow with
difficulty over time, a character which
might, as you get better, get better with
you. A character which is going to relate
to your ability. So, that character needs
to um, the AI involved in that is, is
part of it is a learning one which might
learn what you do and react to it that's
true, we'll talk a little bit about that as
well. You might in racing games they often
cheat. I've seen racing games where if
you're really far ahead, they always make it
close and fun. If you're blowing past the
person, what they do is they let the car
behind go at, like, a million miles an
hour. So, [sound], and they're behind
like wait, there's no way they could
catch up to me. I was driving a Ferrari.
They had a Ford with one wheel that was
broken. [laugh] But how are they behind me still
for after 70 miles. Something's
wrong here. So, they do some cheating in
there, and that's totally fine. Um, but
here, here is a long term path finding
versus short term steering ideas. So, short
term steering might say okay I'm looking,
[inaudible] I'm the character and we're
having this automated robot move forward,
it might be playing portal or
something and I, I don't want to run
into a column. So, at least don't hit the
column in front of you. That's the short
term steering. Plus long term planning, I
need to get from where I am to around the
corner, down in the cafeteria cause that's
where my goal is. How do I get there
fastest? And so that might be some path
planning to find the fastest goal
there. So, in the short term, don't hit the
wall, and also long term
eventually point me downstairs to the
cafeteria. Pretty cool stuff. Pretty
sophisticated. Pretty cool. Again, all has
to happen in 1/30th of a second. So, really
you're trying to find the best day out you
can get for the not much time you have per
frame to make these decisions. One of your
reading assignments was Games With a
Purpose, and now we're talking about
social implications and how can you have
games make a difference and that's why I
think this is a really powerful piece of
body of work that this researcher Lewis
von Ahn has worked on and I really support
that, I think it's great stuff. The idea
is many people like to play games already.
Right? Most of you raised your hand when
you said you like to play games, you want
to, to learn about them. He said, why
don't I take all those wasted like, I say
wasted cuz he was thinking about the
game, the World's Solitaire, when the
whole world back in, you know, the 2000s, were
just playing solitaire on those Windows '95
boxes, right? That's all they were doing,
playing solitaire. And he calculated
something like a billion hours in a year
that everyone in the world was
playing solitaire. What if some fraction of that,
of those hours could be spent
computing and doing real work that
meant something to the world? And they
were still having fun. So, you're playing a
game, that as the result of playing the
game, some work gets done. That's as a
benefit to society. Wouldn't that be
amazing? And so, that's what his project
was about. So, he takes different takes on
it. And so, what he really is trying to
attack is, what problems are easy for
humans, could be made fun for humans, but
have an AI based, or have some benefit?
For example, the ESP game is a game in
which two players are given, two random
people are, are, are connected online. So,
I log in, and all of a sudden, I'm paired
with some other random player. I don't who
their names, who they are. And all I can
do is, I get an image, and I type words.
So, I see an image. It's of a beach scene,
and there's a boat, and there's a bird
flying. So, I might type beach, bird, sand,
sky, bird, okay? And I'm basically
describing the image. And the moment the
word that I say matches the word that my
opponent says, bing, I get credit, and I
get a new image up. And I try to do as
many of these images by having a match
with what I'm thinking of, and what the
person's thinking of as fast as possible.
And then, as you proceed, you get badges
and ranks. And it, you know, you feel,
like, oh, I'm doing it. I'm already a
double lieutenant, lieutenant ESP player!
And you, you know, it, it scratches that
OCD rub. You know, that, that scratch that
you have. It's, you know, scratch that
little itch you got, the OCD itch. So,
part of it is what's the, what's the
benefit to society? Image labeling is
useful, why? Oh, I don't know. You go to
a search engine. You type beach and you just
click on images and guess what? Here's a
picture of a beach scene. How did it know?
How did the system know it was a beach?
Did some smart AI image processing person
ah, vision person, say, oh, I calculated
this frequency of blue, and this pattern
of sand quality, and the degeneration of
the, no, what happens is the result of
the ESP game was that that image, has
words associated with it. And now, the
reverse look up is I now search for those
words and guess what, I get those images.
So, image labeling is a hard thing for
computers but fun if you can make it a
game. And he's looking at lots of things
like that. So um, his most recent work is
a fascinating, is language translation.
You're going to go and learn another language
and by learning it, you'll be looking at a
word in this language and the language you
know and you'll translate it into some
other language you're trying to learn. So,
you'll be working to learn, teach
yourself, like a free version of, who is
the, the, who is the pay per the, the
pay languagey thing.
>> [inaudible]
>> But what you said, ah, you all talked
at once. But the on, the pay version of
this that you all know about ah, it's the
equivalent of free version of that. Right, it's
the free version of a language learning.
Now, what happens as a result?
Documents are being translated. Documents
in Russian, if you learn English to
Russian, documents in Russian is the
result of you playing this game and
learning Russian and Russian people
learning English, are being translated. So
now, all of a sudden they're searchable and
readable from an English language point of
view. Isn't that wonderful? So, its the
translation of the world's documents from
their language to all the other languages,
done by people who benefit by learning a
language. It's making the world a little
smaller. Isn't that wonderful? He gave a
talk at a conference, a CS Education talk.
And other folks here will, I, l stood
up, I gave him a stand, I was, I was
almost in tears. It was so powerful how we
were going to change the world with this
gwap idea. So, I'm totally behind
him, and I want him to succeed like no
one's business. Good stuff. So, that's the
good. That's the best thing that video
games could offer. There's another best
which I don't mention which is, you can
use games in learning. Where you have a
game where you're learning something. And
playing a game and learning that like
you can make a driving simulator and learn
to drive. Yeah, I tell you, there's
learning in games as well. And you can do,
make a game out of surgery where, you
know, people are using the robotic
surgery. And see how fast you can tie a
knot. And then you can now use
laparoscopic ah ultra, you know,
laparoscopic ah, surgery remotely
because you were really fast at the game
of tying a knot. Therefore, when you're
actually in surgery, you tie a knot
faster, blah, blah, blah. Okay um, here's
the bad. Okay. So ah, the good, the bad, and
the ugly. So, the bad is you play a lot,
and you're going to possibly suffer from
RSI. And I did myself. I was an Atari
player in my day, is what there was in my
day, I'm pretty old, and I would play and
my thumb would get frozen. I couldn't move
it, I couldn't use it, and I had to, like,
hold it like this. It was really crazy.
And I would, you know, play for five minutes and it
would get sore again. And I had to only,
by not playing, let it go back and now its
normal. But you can really have issues of
that. Has anyone in the room had any issue
of, kind of wrist issues or thumb issues
or body issues? Look at this. I'm catching
about ten people who've had those issues.
From just video use I mean, not from anything
else. Yeah, that's what I mean. So, the
solution is certainly break timers and
rest and just don't do it again. It's like
doctor, it hurts when I do like this so
I just, well don't do this. Right, so its
a bit of a joke. So, the reality is don't
do it as much, right. If you need to do it
just take breaks, is the summary of that.
But, and I also think of alternate of interfaces. Sometimes, you know, having a Wii versus a
hit the button, maybe you can have
something where the Kinect with me moving
my body can have different , have, have health benefits
of, you know, click, click, click, click,
click, and that can be good for my muscles
and isometric exercises versus the thumb
hitting the thumb against the little
thing. Also in that is addiction. And I'm
worried a little bit about addiction.
People have seen, just like gambler
addiction is real, video game addiction is
real. And they have players who have been
diagnosed with this and when they stop
playing, they can't sleep, their hands are
jittery. It's incredible. Um, I actually had a
student who said, Dan, I failed your
class. Why? Why didn't you come to class.
Why did you miss my final? I had video
game addiction, I couldn't stop playing
this game. And they said, and I said,
you need to get help and we
called somebody and we got help for him. But
I had a student who failed my class
because of his, self-described video game
addiction. He couldn't stop playing it, 48
hours and didn't sleep, didn't sleep, and
didn't, you know, it was bad, it was bad.
There is an online Gamers Anonymous, so
there is some support groups for that and
I want to encourage anybody who knows
anybody to point them towards that, cuz
that's real. Gamer's wife is a name where
you know, I had a husband, but I guess I
don't anymore cuz we got a PS3, and that
kind of thing, where they're just, they're
in the basement playing the video games
all the time, so that's a real thing. Um, and this is the ugly. The good, the bad
and the ugly, folks. The ugly is violence,
and there was some reading about that,
that you had to, to explore. Um, there's
been an attempted connection by a lot of
folks who've tried to make a connection
between video game violence and real world
violence. Um, they did find the Columbine
killers liked to play the shooting kind of games.
And so, is that just a correlation, or is
that a source, right? So, that's why a lot
of the research question that. Um, it's still,
the jury is still out, to be honest, on
that. Um, ratings do help in terms of
giving parents some information about
that. There's, there's a movement to make
games the Folk Devil.The folk devil
means that you just blame some part of
society for all the ills. Let's blame all the, you
know, a lot, a lot of countries in Europe are
having trouble with jobs and so what are they
blaming? They are blaming the immigrants, who are trying also to get jobs, oh, let's blame the immigrants
and that's now get xenophobic because it's all the immigrants' fault that they're stealing all our jobs. It happens
a lot in this country too. I, I warn you
against that. But games are a folk devil
in some sense, just blaming them for all
the ills of society. Violence in high
schools, its games. It might not be the fact
that
parents aren't doing the right thing or
sending the kids to church or talking
about their feelings or whatever. I don't
know what it is,
right? It could be other issues but
it's easy to just blame games for this
problem if the kids play games and they're
violent and the kids are violent, too.
So now, that's it. I'm done with the
good stuff. I, I'll give Glenn the most
time he's ever had in any CS10class to talk
about his.
>> Hi um, everybody, Um, so ah, a little
bit about my background. Um, I discovered
computers when I was real young, when I
was nine years old. Um, I grew up in
Wyoming so there was skiing in the
winter, and that was pretty much it.
>> [laugh] >> So, I was lucky that um, I was
lucky that my father was, one of his
hobbies was electronics. And so, he built
some of the ah, the first personal
computers, kits. Ah, they didn't sell them
as machines yet, so he, he built kits. Um,
one of my favorite games when I was a kid
was a Star Trek game ah, on a computer
that ah, didn't have a, didn't have
audio. The way that you played audio ah,
the game audio was put a radio up
next to the computer, tune it to a station
and the interference from the
micro controllers inside the machine, would
cause sound effects. >> [laugh] >> Pretty cool
um, but um, health
risks aside I guess.
>> [laugh]. >>Um, so um, so I just started banging
around with computers when I was a kid and
that's how I learned how to program. Um, a
lot of the games that came out didn't
have all this crazy copy protection and,
and digital rights management software.
That it, that, is out today that's, that,
that is protecting a lot of the copy,
protecting or trying to copy protect
game nowadays. So, I was able to tear
them apart, go through, I guess, this
was well before motting came out. Ah, it
became popular so I just used to tear
games apart and then I started building
them myself. Um, I spent a lot of time
doing it ah, as a kid. I got a D in my
Computer Science class ah, in high school
cuz I wrote a game while everybody else
did a spreadsheet and, and typed one of
their papers in Word, Microsoft Word 0.8.
[sound]. >> [laugh] >> Um, so, yes, so then
ah, so I got a little disenfranchised with
school. So, I just went right out into
working. I knew I wanted to work in
computers. And I knew video games was one
of my, was one of my big goals. So, along
the way ah, I worked at a company that
did a lot of database work. So, I learned
a lot about data structures and a lot
about moving large amounts of data around,
which actually became very helpful later
with networking. Um, I worked at a, at a
ah, aerospace um, in, industry, in the
defense industry doing machine learning,
Artificial Intelligence research. And
that was immediately applicable to video
games although at the time ah, computers
weren't fast enough to handle having
dedicated artificial intelligence that,
that was really smart along with video
games. So um, and I'll talk a little bit about
that in just a second. Um, so then, so, I worked at a
lot of different industries and then I,
ahh, I had, I was skydiving with a
buddy of mine's girlfriend and she said,
oh, you should talk to my boyfriend cuz
he does games. And I was thinking, well,
you know, okay, everybody says that they do
video games and everybody says they do
computer games and she says, have you ever
heard of something called Where in the
World is Carmen San Diego? And I was like. >> [laugh]
>> And this was when it was, this was as it
had first come out um, or just a few years
after it had first come out and was
hugely popular and was made orders of
magnitude more money than any other video
game or educational software that was out
there at the time. So, I said, can I get his
name and number maybe and ah, and we took, well, I start, I called him up that night and we talked for about
four hours, reminiscing about old games on
the Apple II computers and writing games
in machine code, which is the, the just
writing programs in numbers, just 0, 1, 8,
3, 0 um, and buildings,
building the shapes, all the graphics and
all the sound and everything was all done
at a very, very low level. Machines um, at,
through the, through the years um, stayed,
kind of trailed behind games. Games were
always kind of at the, the vanguard, were always at
the forefront of pushing technology to go
faster and faster and faster. And
nowadays, games are a large part of ah,
hardware manufacturers and their design
decisions. Whereas in the past, it was
like, we've got to be business computers
and we have to do spreadsheets and games,
yeah, all that, that's great. But, and now
you see the market is huge. >> [cough] >> And that, that
25 billion dollars is, that's the US
market, right? And it's growing to
30 billion dollars nowadays. So, games now
become much more important for hardware
manufacturers, too. So, that opened up a
world of possibilities. However, when I
then, when I started working with him and
working with his new company, um back then,
the way that, that video games were, were made, 
almost all video games were made were
exactly what Dan had mentioned. You worked
for a large publisher, that's how you did
things. You had small development houses
that concentrated on the core programming,
and the assets doing, making the art, doing the
audio, the music, all the design, the
character and back story. That's where I
worked, I worked in a development um,
software house called, called Presage
Software, it was up in, in ah, San
Rafael. And what you would do is either
you would take an idea that somebody,
somebody at a publisher had or an idea of
your own that you generated. And you would
then detail it in a document called a tech
spec, and you would detail it to death.
You would go through and trying to figure
out every single piece of art you were
going to generate, every single piece of
audio that you were going to generate, all of
the character-backed stories that you were
going to do. And then all of the programming,
the artificial intelligence, the audio
drivers, the graphic drivers, it was
intense. And you spent, probably, a good
month before you even started writing a
line of code, or generating any art. It
was all, it was all about coming up with a
document and a budget that you could
present to a, to a big name publisher,
and
hopefully get funded. You would put in
milestones. So, every, say, couple of
months you would say, here's what I'm
going to deliver to you. I'm going to deliver to
you, you know, a skeleton, a working
prototype. I'm going to deliver to you a game
in beta form. Um, back then, beta really
meant beta, not push it out to the public and
then fix the bugs and then patch it
online.
>> [laugh].
>> So now, one of, hm, hm, that's a whole
another thing. >> [laugh] >> So um, so that's what you
did. And what was really interesting at,
at that time was, was you had to go
through and you had to, you had to think
ahead and you had to, you had to decide,
you had to make design decisions that were
based on not only the current hardware but
where you thought the hardware trends were
going in the future. So, there were no 3D
graphics cards when I first started
developing games. So, there were very few
three-dimensional games. When Dune came
out, it was hugely revolutionary. It didn't
require a video card, if you remember. It
didn't require a dedicated
three-dimensional video card, if you
remember. Um, it was all done in software,
it was all done on the microprocessor. And
we'll talk about that on Friday in
discussion. Um, you had to cheat a lot of
stuff. My very first game that I did was a
game for DOS. It had to run in 640K of
memory. And we'll talk about that later,
but that's orders of magnitude less memory
than is available even in my iPhone
nowadays. >> [laugh] >> Um. It, they came out
on floppy disks and the manufacturers, the
publishers were really concerned about
costs so it had to fit on the least number
of floppy disks as possible. So, you had to
do all kinds of tricks and jump through
all kinds of hoops to get your game out
there and developed. Um, budgets were in
the range of $100,000, maybe $200,000.
That was a huge, big title back then.
$200,000 was, was an astronomically large
figure that, that you could ask for from a
publisher to design and develop your game.
Now, that's a drop in the bucket, as you've
seen. Our credits list were, could fit on
a page and it was usually about 20 to
25 people per team per game. Nowadays if
you look, it's pages and pages and pages
of credits. Um, you know, you have boatloads
of artists. That's one really
cool thing about now, nowadays is that you
can kind of, you can start to specialize
in, in, when I was developing games, you
were, when you were a programmer, you were,
you've programmed everything. You did the
graphics, you did the artificial
intelligence, you did the audio drivers, you did the game design and level
development. You wrote all the tools, you
did everything. The artists would do
package art, they would do logos, they
would do sprites, they would do icons.
They would do three-dimensional graphic
ah, like the models. They would do all the
texturing. They would do all the, they
would figure out the lighting. Um, so you,
you had to be a very well rounded
individual and, and those things
overlapped too, so you had to talk with
the artist, you had to talk with the audio
engineers because you had to get things to
fit into a certain size and to still look
good and to still sound good. There's
constant communication back and forth. So,
one of the vital team members was always
the producer, the game producer and that the
game producer wasn't just the person who
sat in their office and came up with cool
ideas and then, you know, handed it out.
There wasn't e-mail when I started,
either they threw it out on ah, you know,
on pieces of paper and said here, make my
game. The producer was responsible for the
communication and making sure that
everything stayed under budget. And if
you were going over budget, which happened
nine times out of ten um, because they
usually the publishers wanted more, they
were like, okay, this is great, but you
know, what would be really cool, in which
automatically the dollar signs would start
ringing up. As soon as you started hearing
you know what would be cool or it would
be really great if or, you know, you know
what would make this game really, really
fun, you just immediately start thinking
the dollar signs, of how much time and energy was going to go into, to modifying
your game to, to get up to their spec or
what they wanted. And you were all about
what they wanted. Um, you tried to get as
much of your design through as possible.
But you had to, you constantly had to, it
was this, kind of this back and forth with
the publisher, who was thinking more on
the business side and you were thinking
more on the pure game, you know, side. And
I don't need to be spoiled with money and
business and politics, and blah, blah,
blah. It just doesn't work like that. You, you
have to be involved with that, and you
have to make that part of your, of your
design and your decisions. Um, so, that
was, that was my model. My model was these
big, it was these large monolithic
companies. Then a huge revolution, there
was always this, this kind of home-brew
game mentality that almost everybody in
the game world worked on and/or thought
about. I started up my own development
company, had caught a couple guys from
Blizzard, some artists from Blizzard. Um,
we started up our own game, game development
company. I had an awesome technical team, had
a great design, game design team, had a
great ah, art team, and, and audio team.
The problem is, like I mentioned
previously, there, that, you get, you have
to think about the business. And we didn't
put enough time and energy into thinking
about the business pillar of the model.
And we went to E3, we went to Game
Developers Conference in which all
these shows and all these games
and all these conferences, met
with all these publishers, pitched our
designs, pitched our prototypes. Um, got a
lot of interest ah, and people ready to
fund us, but then they looked at our
business plans and looked at our business
models and said, we don't think you guys
are ready for this or mature enough as a
company to work on these huge, you know,
$200,000 titles. So, that's a really
important part of game development that a
lot of people don't think about. A lot of
people think about ah, you know, sitting
down and coming up with cool levels and
coming up with cool characters and things
like that. That's a, that's a part of it
but it, but the, the, the business model
is also really important. But, then a big
revolution happened. And that's where you
had games that could be done by two or
three people and distributed over the, the
net. And, and, and distributed in stores like
the App store iTunes, iTunes store. Um,
that was huge. Now, now, groups of, you
know, two to three people could design and
develop their games and get it out there.
It wasn't possible in the past. You had to
reserve shelf space at, at, you know, at
one of the game, at Game Depot or Game
Stop. Um, nowadays, people can do, can write
their own games which I wholeheartedly encourage you to do. To
try and see what it's like and go through
the whole process and it looks awesome on
your resume. If you can come up with
something that you can present to a
company and say, I did this, I designed
this, I followed all the way through, it, it
puts you right up at the top of the pile [sound]. Okay, I'm done. >> [applause]
>> Have a good weekend. We're a
little late. Have a good weekend folks, we'll see
you on Monday. Thank you.
