Ron Gilbert's Maniac Mansion postmortem from GDC 2011

[GarageGothic]

I'm currently watching this with great enjoyment, and thought someone else might be interested to hear Ron's hour-long postmortem on the creation of Maniac Mansion from this year's Game Developer's Conference.

There are post mortems from a bunch of classic games like Elite, Doom, and Prince of Persia. But personally I think the one I'll watch next is Eric Chahi's Another World talk.

Edit: ...and since I rarely find a good occasion to link to it, here's my favorite game design-related lecture of all time, "How I Dumped Electricity and Learned to Love Design", Brenda Brathwaite's immensely inspiring talk on her board game Train from GDC 2010.

[Anian]

Thanks for the link. And I did not know about cutscenes originating from this game.

Edit: ...and since I rarely find a good occasion to link to it, here's my favorite game design-related lecture of all time, "How I Dumped Electricity and Learned to Love Design", Brenda Brathwaite's immensely inspiring talk on her board game Train from GDC 2010.

Ron Gilbert, Romero and Eric Chaci were fun to listen to, but Brathwaite's presentation is just very interesting on concpet level. Around part 9 She talks how to explain slavery and and slave trade to a 7 yo thorugh a game, it's just amazing.

It's also a really strange concept of no need for games to be fun...and the comparison is drawn to films. And I think that's partially correct, but I think games, as an interactive medium, do have to be at least engaging, because unlike other "passive" media like movies or books, you have to keep "doing" something (pressing buttons, solve puzzles etc.) besides having an emotional response and in fact interactions are an added emotional triggers...in fact it's a really nice advantage even though it makes creating pacing, emotinal responses and such, harder to implement and design.
I'm not really arguing with her ideas, but I thought she sort forgot about that part, but a lot designers and game makers make that mistake.

[cianty]

Thanks a lot for the links! Just finished Mr Gilbert's talk so I have yet to watch many more.

[LUniqueDan]

Tx Garage! I appreciate.

[JD]

Thanks for the links, this is great stuff. I really enjoyed the one with Jordan Mechner about PoP. I knew he did the rotoscoping with his brother, but it was fun to see the actual footage. And I immediatly recognized the fighting animation when he showed the Robin Hood bit. I always find it interesting to see how they start working on a game and then the process it goes through; the early graphics, features being added/removed, etc. Like how PoP wasn't going to have any combat at all at first. Or Diablo starting as a turn-based, claymation RPG.

[Dualnames]

Thanks a lot GG, this is truly treasure for me, I've currently seen 2 of them and going

[edmundito]

You can hear someone I know ask one of the questions at the end of the talk...

[GarageGothic]

You're very welcome, guys. I'm happy to see that other people are also getting something out of these. I've been away for a few days, so I only got to watch the Gilbert and Chahi lectures so far, but Def's mention of Prince of Persia whets my appetite to hear the Jordan Mechner talk next.

@anian: I think we shouldn't read to much into Brathwaite's comparison between games and movies - to me it seemed she was mainly using the parallel to point out how our obsession with games being fun - whatever that means - is limiting the themes we address in games. Personally I'd much rather aim for games being "meaningful" than stick to some vague definition of "fun" - not only would such a shift allow us to treat themes currently outside the normal scope of games and make it easier to transition from mere entertainment to actually emotionally and intellectually challenging and rewarding endeavors.
(I don't want to get into the games vs. art debate, so I refrain from saying "artistic" - but in any case I think the idea of meaning and personal impact is much more important than whether something can be defined as art). But speaking in terms of meaningfulness could perhaps also be one way of getting over our self-delusion that what we spend most of the time doing in games is really all that "fun" in the first place (i.e. MMORPG grinding, shooting generic Nazi soldier no. 439, or your average adventure game item-combination puzzle).

Chris Hecker touched some of the same topics in his GDC 2011 rant "Potential Unreached" (ca. 10 minutes long). In case you haven't seen it already, you might also find Jonathan Blow's lecture "Video Games and the Human Condition" interesting. The first hour is a bit long-winded, but it's still well worth watching - and if you get fed up with hearing about Farmville, just skip to the 60 minute mark . (Weird coincidence - I've been going around telling people that Alan Moore quote for ages, hearing Blow use it makes me really curious about The Witness despite its inspiration from Myst).

[blueskirt]

Thanks, GG! I just watched Maniac Mansion and Prince Of Persia while playing Minecraft. Fun times, I'll probably watch more if I have the time.

POP Post Mortem Spoiler:

Spoiler

The part where it switched from Robin Hood footage to the final fight with Jaffar was totally priceless.

[close]

Anian: Two years ago, there was this whole debate over the web about whether games had to be fun. The debate was bogus as both sides were using a different definition of the word "fun":
Games have to be fun (i.e. engaging, compelling to play)
Games don't have to be fun (i.e. meaningless, escapist, power trip fantasies)

Games are sets of interesting rules, goals and decisions, fun is an emergent aspect of making decisions and accomplishing goals through sets of rules. A game can be meaningful, thematically sad, depressing or dead serious or touches touchy subjects, if the rules, goals and decisions are interesting and engaging, players will have fun and will keep playing.

A common mistake some art game makers do is to not make their games engaging enough or remove rules, goals and decisions entirely then blame the cold reception their games receive from the non-art-gamer crowd on the lack of escapist theme, gunfights and explosions, saying they just want mindless fun and shit blowing up when the problem is not the presence of a deeply serious theme or the lack of gunfights and explosions, but the lack of engaging mechanics to keep the player interested.

[edmundito]

Fun is an interesting word with a messed up meaning in game design, and the meaning can sometimes be confused with being engaging, being playful, feeling intuitive to play, etc.

Games that look fun, in the traditional meaning that they're entertaining and pleasurable, do get a lot of attention because consumers are trained to buy something that gives them pleasure and makes them happy. For example, to the general public, Angry birds is fun, adventure games are not. Are they right? A lot of people loves the games we make here, but it doesn't mean that just because the loudest audience feels they want to be easily amused, then it doesn't mean that we're all going to make these kinds of games. When you work at a games company for the most part the one thing you'll hear over and over and over is that "this has to be fun" with "like <this one game that everyone's playing>" added sometimes. The games industry is plagued with this nonsense, and I think she's talking about that.

[Dualnames]

I'm done with all of them, I totally think they're all somewhat interesting and totally worth their time. Except for Pitfall that goes a bit technical for my tastes.

[Kweepa]

I watched most of them. The most interesting for me were Jordan Mechner and Eric Chahi - both quite similar talks in some respects in that they were in their early 20s just out of college, pretty much had as long as they wanted to complete the game, and had very artistic perspectives. I was particularly surprised by the Prince of Persia talk as I had no idea that the game was originally for a 64k Apple II!
David Crane's Pitfall talk was a disappointment, partially because there wasn't much new in it (as I'd read Racing the Beam) but mostly because he didn't seem to have any enthusiasm for the subject. Perhaps he was nervous and it came off as apathy (my public speaking is like that), but I don't think so.
Nice avatar, duals.

[Dualnames]

Elite was also quite great imho. 

[Tarantula]

These are really, really great. Thanks for sharing the link, GarageGothic! I only wish there were more 'cause I'm soon running out

[jetxl]

The best part is the creator of Another World and his infinite fax story.

[Dualnames]

The best part is the creator of Another World and his infinite fax story.

Yeah, personally I've seen like 6-7 interviews and documentaries before seeing this GDC, but that story is still awesome. 

[OneDollar]

Working my way through them. Peter Molyneux's story about how he started developing software was pretty crazy. Ron Gilbert's talk answered a question I've wanted to know the answer to for a long time - why did LucasArts never make a Star Wars adventure game?

Thanks for the link GG, fascinating stuff.

[Matti]

Yeah, thanks for the link. I really enjoyed Eric Chahi's talk and Gilbert's was quite interesting too, especially as I've never played Maniac Mansion before.

[Technocrat]

Sometimes it's important to be stupid enough not to know that something's impossible.

I am so using that as my philosophy.