https://www.chrishecker.com/api.php?action=feedcontributions&feedformat=atom&user=CheckerChris Hecker's Website - User contributions [en]2026-04-21T17:42:41ZUser contributionsMediaWiki 1.36.1https://www.chrishecker.com/index.php?title=My_Liner_Notes_for_Spore&diff=2682My Liner Notes for Spore2022-09-07T00:20:13Z<p>Checker: /* Creature Animation */</p>
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<div>This page is intended to be a sort of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liner_notes ''liner notes''] for my contributions to [http://www.spore.com Spore]. It's a place for me to write up miscellaneous development comments about the parts of the game I worked on, while they're still fresh in my mind. I think the game had over 80 people working on it towards the end, and it was in development for more than 5 years, so basically everything in the game was touched by more than one person and was a team effort. Given that, I will strive for inclusion and accuracy, and I will only talk about systems to which I made substantial contributions. If I've left somebody out or made a mistake, I apologize; please email me and I'll correct it immediately. <br />
<br />
'''A Brief Note on Game Credits'''&nbsp;&nbsp;This page could be seen as augmenting the game credits<ref>An online copy of the Spore credits, presumably taken from the game, are [http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/spore_/credits here].</ref>, like what you'd get if you could click on the names to get more information. I think credits are very important for game developers, our industry, and the art form<ref>I have much more to write about this topic in the future. It's a controversial topic even amongst developers. I find it interesting to contrast the way we as an industry handle game credits with the ways other art forms handle credits, but more on that later.</ref>. Although assigning credit is a bit tricky because large-scale game development has a lot of subtle, overlapping, and often blurry responsibilities, I still think it's interesting to have rough descriptions and color commentary of the major things each person worked on. This is my attempt at this for my contributions, before I forget the details. I hope more developers put up pages like this for the games they work on.<br />
<br />
{|align=right<br />
|__TOC__<br />
|}<br />
<br />
Almost all of my contributions center around the creatures, and helping to bring them to life for players. My favorite moment in the game is when you first attach a leg or arm or mouth to the torso in the creature editor, and your creature comes alive and turns to look at its new limb or roars with its mouth. It's great to watch players be delighted by something they just created.<br />
<br />
In most cases I'm limiting my discussions to the specific code and tools that I contributed to directly, which leaves out descriptions of a lot of the incredibly important and groundbreaking work other people did on neighboring code, whether higher level, more player facing aspects of the code, like user interface and gameplay, or lower level systems stuff like resource management, threading, rendering, and the like. It also leaves out the contributions of the awesome artists who used the [sometimes cantankerous] tools and systems.<br />
<br />
These sections are in rough chronological order of my contributions. <br />
<br />
===Creature Skin Mesh===<br />
<br />
The first thing I worked on when I started on Spore (in October, 2003) was the creature skin. Unlike games with fixed characters, like a James Bond or Lara Croft game, or games with parameterizable meshes, like the Sims or City of Heroes, Spore has to generate the entire mesh on the fly as the player makes the creature. While a typical game's fixed or parameterizable character mesh might be worked on for days in a 3D modeling tool like Maya by a professional game artist, Spore needs to regenerate the skin in real-time as the player deforms the torso and attaches and detaches limbs. I chose a blobby implicit surface (sometimes called ''metaballs'') to represent the skin. <br />
<br />
<center><br />
[[Image:skinproto-meta1.png|150px]]<br />
[[Image:skinproto-meta2.png|150px]]<br />
[[Image:skinproto-meta3.png|150px]]<br />
<br />
[[Image:skinproto-meta4.png|150px]]<br />
[[Image:skinproto-meta5.png|150px]]<br />
[[Image:skinproto-meta6.png|150px]]<br />
</center><br />
<br />
Implicit surfaces are interesting because they are very topologically robust, yet they lack "local control". This lack of control compared to modeling with triangles directly (called a boundary representation, or b-rep) is one of the reasons implicit surfaces haven't really ever gained traction for regular 3D modeling&mdash;when you're making James Bond, you want to get his nose just right. However, the topological robustness is actually more valuable to Spore than the local control, since we have a higher level user interface on the creature creation. We don't let the player manipulate at the polygon level anyway, both because we would end up with an interface as complex as Maya, but also because we need to keep the "recipe" for the creature very small so we can transmit it over the wire to and from the [http://spore.com/sporepedia Sporepedia]. The deltas for per-polygon editing get big, fast. Robustness, on the other hand, is vitally important, because we let the player have so much control over the creature morphology, and the skin always needs to flow smoothly over the skeleton of the creature.<br />
<br />
Here are some images of the first "creature" I built with the metaball skin system, showing the skin, wireframe, the metaballs, the voxelization, and a 3D print of the creature.<br />
<br />
<center><br />
[[Image:squid-skin.png|200px]]<br />
[[Image:squid-mesh.png|200px]]<br />
<br />
[[Image:squid-metaballs.png|200px]]<br />
[[Image:squid-cubes.png|200px]]<br />
<br />
[[Image:squid-print.jpg|150px]]<br />
</center><br />
<br />
The incredibly awesome [http://www.linkedin.com/in/henrygoffin Henry Goffin] took over this code after he joined the team and did almost all of the hard work of getting the skinning system into the creature editor and game.<br />
<br />
Some interesting details:<br />
<br />
* We use a 4th order polynomial in the squared distance from the sample point to the center of the given metaball for the implicit surface, similar to [http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.1.6296 Triquet, Meseure, and Chaillou]. They use a 2nd order polynomial, but we square the main term again to get more continuous derivatives to avoid lighting discontinuities. The actual equation is:<br/><center><math>f_i(p)=s_i[\frac{(p-c_i)^2}{R_i^2}-1]^4</math></center><math>c_i</math> is the metaball center position, <math>R_i</math> is the metaball radius (the function is defined to be 0 outside this radius), and <math>s_i</math> is the scale factor for the metaball, affecting its goopiness.<br />
<br />
* When I started the skin work, the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marching_cubes ''Marching Cubes''] patent was still in effect, so to work around the patent<ref>I hate software patents. They stifle innovation and waste work.</ref> I tessellate the surface into triangles using an ear clipping algorithm. The patent expired before we shipped, but I never went back and tested whether using Marching Cubes would have been faster or slower.<br />
<br />
* We did not have time to implement ''metaball groups'', which means the skin is one big implicit surface. This allows the skin on limbs to join together, forming webbing between the limbs as they move independently. We intended to fix this, but players have used this as a feature to create [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUKFXZauMoA bat wings], and other special effects. Since players found it valuable and it's easy to work around while editing by simply moving the limbs apart if you don't like the effect, we probably won't change the current behavior. I sum up this slightly odd chain of events with:<br/><center>'''''Bugs + Player Creativity = Features'''''</center>Random tidbit: some people internally called this the "flying squirrel bug".<br />
<br />
* A lot of naive implicit surface tesselation algorithms generate poor quality triangle meshes with lots of slivers. We avoid this by using the amazingly awesome technique from ''Compact Isocontours from Sampled Data'', Moore and Warren, in Graphics Gems III. There is a tech report version of this available online: [http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.49.5214&rep=rep1&type=pdf ''Mesh Displacement: An Improved Contouring Method for Trivariate Data'']. My friend [http://mollyrocket.com Casey Muratori] introduced me to this paper a while back, and it is the secret to high quality implicit surface tesselations. Few people seem to know about this technique, but it's trivial to implement and generates perfectly uniform meshes as you can see in the screenshots above&mdash;highly recommended!<br />
<br />
* We only use spherical metaballs, and we distribute them along the limbs and torso using a neat bit of math that calculates how close they need to be to form a smooth shape based on the implicit surface parameters. I'll write this up at some point if people are interested. Ellipsoidal metaballs would be cool and allow a wider range of shapes, but they seem like they'd be significantly slower to evaluate because they're orientation dependent, and evaluation speed is crucial to keeping the creature editor snappy.<br />
<br />
* We generate bone weights for the vertices based on which body parts generated which metaballs. This works well for limbs, but sometimes big spine segments don't generate smooth weights, and the torso on fat creatures can shear. Fixing the torso skin vertex weights is relative easy and Henry and I prototyped a solution right before ship, but dealing with any torso-attached parts is harder, so we had to punt. We hope to fix this at some point when we work out the details.<br />
<br />
* For the "parts" of the creature, we use pre-authored Maya models called ''Rigblocks'', with lots of parameterized deformation handles to change the shapes. [http://andrewwillmott.com Andrew Willmott] presented [http://www.andrewwillmott.com/s2007 a SIGGRAPH 2007 Technical Sketch] on them, and Art Director [http://oceanquigley.com Ocean Quigley] put up [http://oceanquigley.blogspot.com/2009/04/spore-early-rig-block-experiments.html a post about the earliest mockups for rigblocks].<br />
<br />
<br />
===Creature Texturing===<br />
<br />
'''a.k.a. Skin Paint'''<br />
<br />
Again, constrasting Spore with games that use fixed character assets is illuminating for the various challenges we faced when texturing the creatures. <br />
<br />
All of this skin paint development was done in tight collaboration with Spore's Art Director [http://oceanquigley.com Ocean Quigley]. We worked closely to figure out which degrees of freedom we needed to expose to give the creatures convincing organic skin, and how we'd fit it onto existing 3D hardware. Ocean has a [http://oceanquigley.blogspot.com/2009/04/spores-creature-skin-painting.html detailed post about the skin paint system] on his blog, and one of [http://www.andrewwillmott.com/s2007 Andrew's SIGGRAPH 2007 Technical Sketches] discusses skin paint as well.<br />
<br />
'''Texture Charting'''&nbsp;&nbsp; As mentioned above, for a normal game, the character mesh is fixed early in the process, and that mesh is then ''charted'' (also called "uv'd" in reference to the use of 'u' and 'v' for texture coordinates) to create texture coordinates for all the triangles in the mesh. The final set of texture coordinates is called a ''texture atlas''. Intuitively, we flay the 3D mesh apart, like skinning an animal, until it lays flat on a plane. There are mathematical theorems discussing the difficulty of doing this with minimal distortion, and the plethora of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map_projections map projections]<ref>My favorite map projection is the [http://people.clarkson.edu/~chengweb/faculty/taylor/maps/pierce1.html Pierce Quincuncial Projection]; it's beautiful aesthetically and mathematically.</ref> shows there's no "best" way to do this, and so artists will adjust and tune the mapping while the character is being created, until they're happy with the result. This might take a few hours or a day.<br />
<br />
By contrast, Spore needs to create a texture atlas almost instantly, because the player can modify the mesh and then go into the editor's Play Mode or Paint Mode and see the results immediately. I wrote a very simple but optimized charter that does a really crappy job compared to a professional artist, but it does the job in 10 milliseconds on our minspec platform. Here's an example of an atlas produced by the charter:<br />
<br />
<center><br />
[[Image:frog.jpg|200px]]<br />
[[Image:frog-diffuse.jpg|border|200px]]<br />
</center><br />
<br />
Notice all the individual triangles at the bottom, and the wasted space. You can probably determine the algorithm if you look closely at the two images. The code starts on a random uncharted triangle, then floods outward as it finds neighboring triangles facing in approximately the same ''cardinal direction'' in 3D (meaning down the +x, -x, +y, -y, +z, or -z axes). When it can't find any more uncharted triangles attached to the current group and facing the same direction, it projects the group flat onto the plane of the current axis. This guarantees bounded distortion. After charting all triangles, it packs the charts into the texture atlas by sorting them by bounding box size, and then packing the bounding boxes of the charts in 2D texture space in a zig zag manner.<br />
<br />
Constrast the frog above with this Oliphant texture from Battle For Middle Earth<ref>I stole this image from [http://www.adigitaldreamer.com/articles/video-game-texture-mapping.htm this page], not sure where they got it from, but it's a perfect example, so thanks to them for finding it!</ref>: <br />
<br />
<center>[[Image:bfme-oliphant.jpg]]</center><br />
<br />
This texture atlas is incredibly well packed and distributed; all of the texels are used with no wasted space. Ocean once quipped that he'd fire any artist who made a texture atlas as bad as that frog's map. I replied that it was indeed a poor quality atlas, but it was maybe only 10 or a 100 times worse than a human might make, and it was created about 36,000 times faster, so my code is still ahead by a factor of 400 or so! Plus, it's quite difficult to squeeze a professional texture artist into each shipping game box. That said, the poor packing does have some impact on the final result, because wasted texels means less apparent texture resolution for a given amount of texture memory used, and lots of texture seams means both slightly bigger meshes because of lack of texture coordinate sharing and potential for visible seams on the skin. It turns out we didn't need the charter to be quite as fast as it currently is, so Henry and I mused about how to trade off a little bit of speed for better charting and packing, but it was unclear how to do this in the development time we had left. The high end techniques in most graphics research papers about texture charting take far too long for our use case, usually on the order of seconds or minutes<ref>For example, see [http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.57.8731 Least squares conformal maps for automatic texture atlas generation].</ref>.<br />
<br />
The key difference between a Spore creature's texture atlas and a fixed game character's atlas is a human artist will paint into the latter, so it has to be made from recognizable pieces and it has to be coherent; individually charted triangles make no sense when you're painting into a map directly in Photoshop. Because Spore uses a procedural paint system, only the computer ever needs to paint into the texture maps for Spore creatures, so as long as the code can figure out where things belong, it's okay.<br />
<br />
'''Lowlevel Texture Painting'''&nbsp;&nbsp; At the lowest level, the paint system renders multi-channel brush textures into the creature's 2D texture map. The initial prototype for the skin paint system was a "3D paint" system, allowing artists to use the mouse or graphics tablet to paint directly onto the creature mesh with a palette of brushes. At the time I was developing this code, all the existing 3D paint applications, like Maya and ZBrush, used really clunky projections that just didn't feel right. I took what I thought was the simple approach: raycast the mesh to find the brush's hit location, flood fill out on the mesh using the brush size to collect all the triangles hit by the brush application, and then render into the texture using the uv coordinates as the draw coordinates, the 3D coordinates as the texture coordinates, and the brush as the texture, while the texture matrix set up the brush's angle in 3D. I also generated "skirt polygons" around the actual mesh triangles in both 3D and texture space, and these were added to the collection of hit triangles if necessary. This avoided seams while painting, since a chart edge would have data beyond it when the texture resampler fetched neighboring texels for bilinear resampling<ref>Henry ended up disabling the skirts for performance reasons in the final shipping version, and simply dilating the texture. You can see the seams in the editor when the paint scripts are running, but then they disappear when the painting has finished.</ref>. Finally, the texture was dilated so mipmaps would not show seams. All of this was hardware accelerated, of course, so it was silky smooth. It worked great, felt completely natural, and the artists loved it. Since then, most of the professional paint apps have adopted similar approaches as well, thankfully.<br />
<br />
One cool thing about our paint system is the brushes could write into multiple channels simultaneously. In the prototype, we supported ''diffuse'', ''specular exponent'', ''gloss'', ''emissive'', and ''bump'' channels, with alpha masks for each. The bump channel was differentiated into a normal map after every paint application. You could have a brush that only wrote into the specular map without touching the other channels, for example, to make some parts of the skin look wet. We used the Photoshop PSD library I wrote for the [http://indiegamejam.org Indie Game Jam] to load the multi-channel brushes directly, so you could pack all them into a single Photoshop file, which was great for workflow.<br />
<br />
<center><br />
[[Image:brushpsd.png|200px]]<br />
</center><br />
<br />
Once the 3D paint prototype was up and running, our phenomenal artist [http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,111149/ John Cimino] did a bunch of testing with it to prove out the system.<br />
<br />
<center><br />
[[Image:TreeFrog2.jpg|200px]] <br />
[[Image:Rhino.jpg|200px]] <br />
[[Image:Turtle.jpg|200px]] <br />
<br />
[[Image:RedOgre.jpg|200px]] <br />
[[Image:Lizard.jpg|200px]] <br />
[[Image:Beetle.jpg|200px]] <br />
<br />
[[Image:Intestisaur.jpg|200px]]<br/><br />
<div style="max-width: 300px;"> <small>This last one is a creature called the ''Intestisaur'', created by intern [http://users.design.ucla.edu/~mflux/ Michael Chang] in an early version of the creature editor, and painted by John. I've put a high res version with alpha [[Media:Intestisaur-alpha.png|here]].</small></div><br />
</center><br />
<br />
'''Particle Paint'''&nbsp;&nbsp;After the 3D paint prototype proved out the core technology, we needed to make it procedural, since we couldn't figure out a way to ship Ocean and John with each copy of the game. The ''lingua franca'' for data-driven procedural systems at Maxis is [http://andrewwillmott.com Andrew Willmott]'s ''Swarm'' effects/particle system. I wrote a plugin for ''Swarm'' that hooked up the paint system to the particle behavior, so Ocean and the other effects artists could write scripts to try to paint creatures. This hookup was interesting because I exposed the 2D mesh surface to the effects system as a constraint surface, and the particles were actually simulated in barycentric coordinates on the mesh itself. This allowed the particles to move arbitrarily fast, and they would zip right around the mesh with no gaps.<br />
<br />
Here's a video of the skinpaint system at work in the prototype on a test mesh:<br />
<br />
<center>{{#widget:YouTube|id=7lz8pK3U4n8|width=640|height=505}}</center><br />
<br />
As you can read about in [http://oceanquigley.blogspot.com/2009/04/spores-creature-skin-painting.html Ocean's blog post], this system proved out the concept, but more work was necessary. Henry took it from here, and replaced the ''Swarm'' hookup with a custom system that allowed the scripts to reason about the morphology of the creature, doing things like giving the particles limb-relative coordinate systems, etc. Henry also ported all the lowlevel paint code from the [[OpenGL]] prototype to the RenderWare/Direct3D game engine, and made it run in the background, a thankless and difficult task!<br />
<br />
<br />
===Creature Animation===<br />
<center><br />
{|<br />
|[[Image:E3_Creature_A_small.jpg|120px]]<br />
|[[Image:E3_Creature_D_small.jpg|120px]]<br />
|[[Image:creature_14_small.jpg|120px]]<br />
|[[Image:E3_Creature_C_small.jpg|120px]]<br />
|-<br />
|[[Image:creature_11_small.jpg|120px]]<br />
|[[Image:E3_Creature_G_small.jpg|120px]]<br />
|[[Image:E3_Creature_H_small.jpg|120px]]<br />
|[[Image:E3_Creature_E_small.jpg|120px]]<br />
|}<br />
</center><br />
I've written and lectured a lot about the creature animation system, so I'll just point to those resources here:<br />
<br />
* [[Real-time Motion Retargeting to Highly Varied User-Created Morphologies]], the SIGGRAPH 2008 Technical Paper about the Spore Animation System. Very detailed and technical. Includes videos of ''Spasm'', the animation tool.<br />
<br />
* [[How To Animate a Character You've Never Seen Before]], the [[Game Developers Conference]] 2007 lecture on the system. Much more accessible, less detailed.<br />
<br />
I tried to include a cute video of an animation John Cimino did of Spore creatures singing the [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTXyXuqfBLA Mahna Mahna] song, but YouTube flagged it as copyright infringing. Damn you, DSP algorithms!<br />
<br />
===Behavior Tree AI===<br />
<br />
<center><br />
[[Image:654px-Behaviortree2.png]]<br />
</center><br />
<br />
Early in production we were running into trouble with our existing Artificial Intelligence (AI) system for creatures, so [http://www.linkedin.com/pub/2/329/168 Tom Bui], [http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,325087/ Lauren McHugh], and I did a bunch of research and decided to switch to a Halo-style ''Behavior Tree'' (BT) system. [http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/Damian_Isla Damian Isla] documented Bungie's system at GDC 2005, and it was [http://www.gamasutra.com/gdc2005/features/20050311/isla_pfv.htm reprinted on Gamasutra]. I spent a lot of time talking with Damian, [http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/Max_Dyckhoff Max Dyckhoff], and [http://www.igda.org/breakingin/profile_chris_butcher.htm Chris Butcher] about their system, what worked, what didn't, and how they'd change it, and ended up creating our BT system as a kind of "version 1.5" of theirs. I'm trying to get permission to release it to the public domain, but for now, here is the main chunk of the documentation, which can be read as a sequel to Damian's article linked above.<br />
<br />
* [[/Spore Behavior Tree Docs]] The first part of a kind of pseudo-literate-program describing how our system works.<br />
<br />
* Lauren gave a [https://store.cmpgame.com/product.php?cat=76&id=2083 lecture at the 2008 GDC] on our system as well, but I believe only the audio is available right now.<br />
<br />
'''What are Behavior Trees?'''&nbsp;&nbsp;Various people have asked me where I think Behavior Trees fit into the taxonomy of game AI techniques. I characterize them as still firmly in the Finite State Machine category. The magic of Behavior Trees is not that they're a new technique, but that they have such good development process properties&mdash;meaning the friction for using them is very low&mdash;that they allow you to scale your AI complexity far beyond the other FSM representation methods I've seen, including switch statements, objects for states, graphical node editors, etc. In effect, they allow you to put off the (inevitable?) transition to real planning with all of its implementation and debugging issues, by allowing you to continue to use FSMs for more and more advanced AI. BTs have limits as well, and I do think game AI will be planning based in the future, but putting off dealing with an opaque planner is a good thing. I liken it to hotloading data files: hotloading is just a process improvement; it doesn't change your data or code much; it doesn't directly make your game better. But, it's such a massive process improvement it becomes a revolution in productivity by allowing you to [[Advanced Prototyping|iterate faster]]. BTs are the same kind of thing for AI. They're so simple to use and debug, and have such good scalability characteristics (avoiding the <math>n^2</math> issue as mentioned in the [[/Spore Behavior Tree Docs|docs]], etc.), that they allow you to vastly increase your AI's complexity without running into a wall.<br />
<br />
<br />
===Design===<br />
<br />
Early in Spore's development I was involved in prototyping designs for the creature game, and eventually ended up co-leading the creature team for a year or so with [http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,99820/ Alex Hutchinson], before giving that up to focus on the animation system for the last year and half of the project. Most of the prototyping work was centered around finding cool ways to use the creature animation system.<br />
<br />
Here's a fun video of an early prototype:<br />
<br />
<center>{{#widget:YouTube|id=xut9cOlX9DA|width=640|height=505}}</center><br />
<br />
'''Cute vs. Science'''&nbsp;&nbsp; Since it just seems to keep reanimating like a really bad zombie movie, even though it's been called nonsense by [[Do Your Job Well, Please|me]], [http://forum.spore.com/jforum/posts/list/165/8555.page#128787 Executive Producer Lucy Bradshaw], and [http://forum.spore.com/jforum/posts/list/11211.page Will Wright], I will simply state clearly that at no point did I try to steer the game towards a simplistic, shallow, or casual design. ''Sigh.''<br />
<br />
<br />
===Conclusion===<br />
<br />
Helping to make Spore was a blast, and I'm really proud of our work on the project. The number of problems we had to solve that cut across design, aesthetics, user interface, and technology was unprecedented in the history of game development, I think. This page is really long, but it only covers the stuff I touched, and so even in spite of its length, it represents a small subset of all the amazing problems the team as a whole solved. Keep an eye on [http://oceanquigley.com Ocean's blog] as he digs up more stuff from his development archive, and we're constantly releasing new stuff at [http://spore.com spore.com] as well.<br />
<br />
And, of course, the best way to look into these technologies is to play Spore or [http://www.spore.com/trial download the free Creature Creator] and make some creatures!<br />
<br />
There have been [http://spore.com/sporepedia zillions of amazing creatures] created in Spore, and I've used many of them in my lectures around the world, but here is my all-time favorite creature, made very early on by a contributor to the [http://forums.somethingawful.com Something Awful Forums].<br />
<br />
<center>{{#widget:YouTube|id=hfbicNG2XNI|width=640|height=505}}</center><br />
<br />
When you're making games, and struggling with technology and design and people and all the rest, it's things like this that make it all worth while.<br />
<br />
<references/><br />
<br />
[[Category:Games]]<br />
[[Category:Programming]]<br />
[[Category:Design]]</div>Checkerhttps://www.chrishecker.com/index.php?title=No_One_Knows_About_Your_Game&diff=2680No One Knows About Your Game2021-09-22T02:48:06Z<p>Checker: </p>
<hr />
<div>My [[Game Developers Conference|GDC 2013]] Indie Game Summit soapbox<ref>Which is like a rant, but nicer!</ref> was titled ''No One Knows About Your Game''. It's a spiritual sequel to my 2011 soapbox, [[5 Minutes Worth of Observations about AAA Indie Games]], and it's about how even if you think you have a lot of press and awareness, for all practical purposes, no one knows about your game.<br />
<br />
<center>{{#widget:YouTube|id=ueJkbQin-wk|width=640|height=385}}</center><br />
<br />
This audio was from a rehearsal, not the actual IGS version of the talk, but that was on somebody else's laptop, so I didn't record it.<br />
<br />
One key point from this talk is the following theory of mine, partially based on analyzing what happened with [[My Liner Notes for Spore|Spore]]:<br />
<center>'''You cannot overhype a game, you can only underdeliver.'''</center><br />
This is just a theory, however, and several indie developers I respect disagree with it. In the talk I quote [https://twitter.com/PHIL_FISH/ Phil Fish] talking about overhyping ''Fez'', and I had a slide with a shot from ''The Stanley Parable'' blog showing how to hype without spoilers, but then a couple years after this talk, [https://twitter.com/HelloCakebread Davey Wreden] released his next game, ''The Beginner's Guide'', as a complete surprise with no hype at all. <br />
<br />
Another observation I discuss in the talk is the '''Cheng Infinity Hypothesis''', which is the name I've given to [https://twitter.com/biiigfoot Jamie Cheng]'s theory about how indie-scale games effectively have an infinite number of potential players who might buy them, meaning you can always do more marketing, mess up a PR pitch or a patch and then fix it, and never have to regret too much a missed opportunity; you will never run out of potential customers. Obviously if you're making ''Call of Duty'' or ''The Sims'' you might run out of customers at some point because you're trying to get all of humanity to buy your game, but at indie scale this is not an issue.<br />
<br />
[http://twitter.com/nothings Sean Barrett] tweeted this in response to my announcement of this post:<br />
<br />
<center>[[Image:Nothings.png|link=]]</center><br />
<br />
<references/><br />
[[Category:Opinions]]<br />
[[Category:Lectures]]</div>Checkerhttps://www.chrishecker.com/index.php?title=No_One_Knows_About_Your_Game&diff=2679No One Knows About Your Game2021-09-22T02:47:41Z<p>Checker: </p>
<hr />
<div>My [[Game Developers Conference|GDC 2013]] Indie Game Summit soapbox<ref>Which is like a rant, but nicer!</ref> was titled ''No One Knows About Your Game''. It's a spiritual sequel to my 2011 soapbox, [[5 Minutes Worth of Observations about AAA Indie Games]], and it's about how even if you think you have a lot of press and awareness, for all practical purposes, no one knows about your game.<br />
<br />
<center>{{#widget:YouTube|id=ueJkbQin-wk|width=640|height=385}}</center><br />
<br />
This audio was from a rehearsal, not the actual IGS version of the talk, but that was on somebody else's laptop, so I didn't record it.<br />
<br />
One key point from this talk is the following theory of mine, partially based on analyzing what happened with [[My Liner Notes for Spore|Spore]]:<br />
<center>'''You cannot overhype a game, you can only underdeliver.'''</center><br />
This is just a theory, however, and several indie developers I respect disagree with it. In the talk I quote [https://twitter.com/PHIL_FISH/ Phil Fish] talking about overhyping ''Fez'', and I had a slide with a shot from ''The Stanley Parable'' blog showing how to hype without spoilers, but then a couple years after this talk, [https://twitter.com/HelloCakebread Davey Wreden] released his next game, ''The Beginner's Guide'', as a complete surprise with no hype at all. <br />
<br />
Another observation I discuss in the talk is the '''Cheng Infinity Hypothesis''', which is the name I've given to [https://twitter.com/biiigfoot Jamie Cheng]'s theory about how indie-scale games effectively have an infinite number of potential players who might buy them, meaning you can always do more marketing, mess up a PR pitch or a patch and then fix it, and never have to regret too much a missed opportunity; you will never run out of potential customers. Obviously if you're making ''Call of Duty'' or ''The Sims'' you might run out of customers at some point because you're trying to get all of humanity to buy your game, but at indie scale this is not an issue.<br />
<br />
[http://twitter.com/nothings Sean Barrett] tweeted this in response to my announcement of this post:<br />
<br />
<center>[[Image:Nothings.png|link=]]</center><br />
<br />
I'll put some additional thoughts here soon... Right now I have to prepare another lecture!<br />
<br />
<references/><br />
[[Category:Opinions]]<br />
[[Category:Lectures]]</div>Checkerhttps://www.chrishecker.com/index.php?title=Real-time_Motion_Retargeting_to_Highly_Varied_User-Created_Morphologies&diff=2678Real-time Motion Retargeting to Highly Varied User-Created Morphologies2021-09-22T02:24:02Z<p>Checker: </p>
<hr />
<div>__NOTOC__<br />
<center><br />
[[About/Me|Chris Hecker]]<ref>''checker'at'd6.com'', Maxis/Electronic Arts</ref>&nbsp;&nbsp; Bernd Raabe<ref>''braabe'at'ea.com'', Maxis/Electronic Arts</ref>&nbsp;&nbsp; Ryan W. Enslow<ref>''renslow'at'ea.com'', Maxis/Electronic Arts</ref><br>[http://john.deweese.com/ John DeWeese]<ref>''jdeweese'at'ea.com'', Maxis/Electronic Arts</ref>&nbsp;&nbsp; Jordan Maynard<ref>''jordan.maynard'at'gmail.com'', Trion World Network</ref>&nbsp;&nbsp; [http://kees.cc Kees van Prooijen]<ref>''keesvp'at'gmail.com'', Total Immersion Software</ref><br />
<br />
{|<br />
|[[Image:E3_Creature_A_small.jpg|120px]]<br />
|[[Image:E3_Creature_D_small.jpg|120px]]<br />
|[[Image:creature_14_small.jpg|120px]]<br />
|[[Image:E3_Creature_C_small.jpg|120px]]<br />
|-<br />
|[[Image:creature_11_small.jpg|120px]]<br />
|[[Image:E3_Creature_G_small.jpg|120px]]<br />
|[[Image:E3_Creature_H_small.jpg|120px]]<br />
|[[Image:E3_Creature_E_small.jpg|120px]]<br />
|}<br />
''[http://www.siggraph.org/s2008/ SIGGRAPH 2008] Technical Paper''<br />
</center><br />
<br />
===Abstract===<br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
''Character animation in video games&mdash;whether manually key-framed or motion captured&mdash;has traditionally relied on codifying skeletons early in a game's development, and creating animations rigidly tied to these fixed skeleton morphologies. This paper introduces a novel system for animating characters whose morphologies are unknown at the time the animation is created. Our authoring tool allows animators to describe motion using familiar posing and key-framing methods. The system records the data in a morphology-independent form, preserving both the animation's structural relationships and its stylistic information. At runtime, the generalized data are applied to specific characters to yield pose goals that are supplied to a robust and efficient inverse kinematics solver. This system allows us to animate characters with highly varying skeleton morphologies that did not exist when the animation was authored, and, indeed, may be radically different than anything the original animator envisioned.'' <br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
===Materials===<br />
<br />
This is the final submitted draft of our paper on the [http://spore.com ''Spore''] procedural animation system. It's a pretty long paper, barely squeezing into 11 pages, and it still leaves out tons of details, but hopefully it gives a reasonable overview of both the authoring system, using our custom OpenGL animation tool ''Spasm'', and runtime playback system. If you have questions about something in the paper, just email and ask, and I'll update the [[#Frequently_Asked_Questions|FAQ]] section below.<br />
<br />
* The [[Media:sporeanim-siggraph08.pdf|paper (PDF, 3.8MB)]]. Most of the embedded images in this PDF are at full resolution, so you can zoom way in to see details that are hard to see at print resolution. Yay, computers!<br />
<br />
* The BibTeX entry. This is currently incomplete since the proceedings have not been published yet, but I will update it when I get the ISBN, DOI, and page numbers. I wish more authors would put pre-made BibTeX entries up next to their papers, it is quite handy when you're trying to cite related work! And, it is inexcusable when one of these '''lame''' paywall protected journal sites<ref>Oh boy do I have a huge rant brewing about these sites.</ref> doesn't at least have a free BibTeX entry on the teaser page.<br />
<blockquote><br />
<pre class="small"><br />
@inproceedings{sporeanim,<br />
author = {Chris Hecker and Bernd Raabe and Ryan W. Enslow and <br />
John DeWeese and Jordan Maynard and Kees van Prooijen},<br />
title = {Real-time Motion Retargeting to Highly Varied User-Created Morphologies},<br />
booktitle = {Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH '08},<br />
note={\url{http://chrishecker.com/Real-time_Motion_Retargeting_to_Highly_Varied_User-Created_Morphologies}},<br />
year = {2008} }<br />
</pre><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
* The videos. Here are the videos from the paper submission. They're quite rough...we were close to the submission deadline so I just turned on FRAPS and winged it. It shows! There are two videos, both available in Xvid avi and QuickTime mp4. The mp4 is higher quality in each case:<br />
** The first video shows generalization and specialization across a bunch of creatures and different animations. [[Media:sporeanim-siggraph08-1.mp4|mp4 (27mb)]] or [[Media:sporeanim-siggraph08-1.avi|avi (26mb)]]<br />
** The second video shows the jiggles secondary system and the gait system. [[Media:sporeanim-siggraph08-2.mp4|mp4 (29mb)]] or [[Media:sporeanim-siggraph08-2.avi|avi (27mb)]]<br />
<br />
* My related 2007 [[Game Developers Conference]] lecture on the same topic, [[How To Animate a Character You've Never Seen Before]], including an mp3 recording and slides. The lecture is much less technical than this paper; it's only an hour and gives a very high level overview.<br />
<br />
===Frequently Asked Questions===<br />
<br />
====Why are there no frequently asked questions?====<br />
<br />
Because I haven't even hit submit on this page yet. But, if you're reading this, that means I finally did, and you should ask some.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<references/><br />
<br />
[[Category:Articles]]<br />
[[Category:Physics]]<br />
[[Category:Programming]]</div>Checkerhttps://www.chrishecker.com/index.php?title=About/Me&diff=2677About/Me2021-09-22T02:22:22Z<p>Checker: </p>
<hr />
<div><blockquote style="color:#f00;"><br />
'''''Very important: The material on this website represents my personal opinion, not that of my employer, my family, my friends, my coworkers, or anybody else. Please do not represent me as anybody but "Chris Hecker" if you're going to quote from these pages. Thank you.'''''<br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
===Contact Info===<br />
{|align=right<br />
|__TOC__<br />
|}<br />
<blockquote><br />
'''Chris Hecker'''<br><br />
http://chrishecker.com<br><br />
checker 'at' d6.com<br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
I get a lot of email. I try to read it all and respond, but it takes time, and it seems I'm increasingly short of time. Sorry about that.<br />
<br />
===Professional Bio===<br />
Here's the bio I use for [[:Category:Lectures|lectures]], [[:Category:Articles|articles]], conferences, and whatnot:<br />
<br />
'''Chris Hecker'''<br><br />
'''''[http://www.d6.com definition six, inc.]'''''<br />
<br />
Chris focuses on solving hard problems at the intersection of gameplay, aesthetics, and technology. He is an outspoken advocate for pushing the current boundaries of design and interactivity, in the hope that games will eventually reach their full potential as a medium. To this end he helped organize the [http://www.indiegamejam.org Indie Game Jam], the [http://www.experimental-gameplay.org Experimental Gameplay Workshop], and [[The Depth Jam]], and his recent work on [[My Liner Notes for Spore|Spore]] centered on using proceduralism and artificial intelligence to enhance player creativity and agency. Chris has been on the advisory board for the [[Game Developers Conference]] for many years and is a regular speaker at the GDC, Siggraph, and other conferences. A frequent contributor to Game Developer magazine, Chris was the technical columnist for the magazine for two years and the Editor-at-Large for three, and was on the editorial board of the computer graphics research publication, [http://jgt.akpeters.com The Journal of Graphics Tools]. He has worked at both ends of the development spectrum, as a one-man indie game developer with his company [http://www.d6.com definition six, inc.] and on a hundred-person team at [http://www.maxis.com Maxis/Electronic Arts]. His professional goal is to help games become the preeminent art and entertainment form of the 21st century. His current project is [http://spyparty.com SpyParty], an indie game about subtle human behavior and deception.<br />
<br />
=== Headshots ===<br />
<center><br />
{|width=200px <br />
|align=center|<br />
[[Image:Checker-gdc10.jpg|Chris Hecker|200px]]<br />
<br />
<small>Here's one from the [http://www.flickr.com/photos/officialgdc/4425421495/ Official GDC 2010 Flickr set]. I like this one, please use it.</small><br />
|}<br />
<br />
{|width=200px <br />
|align=center|<br />
[[Image:Checker-headshot-closed.png|Chris Hecker|100px]]<br />
<br />
<small>Here's the boring and goofy headshot I used to use.</small><br />
|}<br />
<br />
{|width=200px <br />
|align=center|<br />
[[Image:Checker-migs.jpg|Chris Hecker|200px]]<br />
<br />
<small>Here's an ''action shot'' of me lecturing in Montreal in 2007.</small><br />
|}<br />
<br />
{|width=200px <br />
|align=center|<br />
[[Image:Checker-old-headshot.png|Chris Hecker|100px]]<br />
<br />
<small>I kinda like this really old one. It's less boring than the first headshot, but perhaps even more goofy, since I was hiking near Crested Butte, CO.</small><br />
|}<br />
</center><br />
<br />
=== Personal ===<br />
<br />
I'll write some more general stuff about me here at some point. For now, you get my bio and headshot.<br />
<br />
[[Elvis Has Left The Building|Until recently]], I was a ''Technology Fellow'' at [http://www.maxis.com Maxis/Electronic Arts]. I'm not sure what the title meant either. A friend once quipped I was higher ranked than a ''Technology Chap'', but lower ranked than a ''Technology Gentleman''.<br />
<br />
Here's my old "About Me" blurb from my original webpage, '''which is out of date''' (i.e. do not use it as my bio, see [[#Professional Bio|above]]), but has the rough outline of my life in it (Parsons -> Microsoft -> d6 -> Maxis):<br />
<br />
<blockquote><i><br />
I'm Technical and Art Director of definition six, inc., the small startup game company three friends and I founded in 1995. The Technical Director side of me worked at Microsoft for three years doing various game and graphics programming. The Art Director side went to Parson's School of Design in NYC to be an illustrator. I realized that, while the school has a great reputation, in my opinion it was severely lacking on the education front. I dropped out during sophomore year and studied independently with some of the professors there, sitting in on their life drawing classes and whatnot. One day I made the mistake of buying a computer magazine and it got me interested in programming. The best thing about the game industry is it mixes totally different disciplines, like art and programming, so it gives me a chance to exercise both sides of my brain equally! There's no other industry like it.<br />
</i></blockquote><br />
<br />
=== PGP Public Key ===<br />
Also available at [https://keyserver.ubuntu.com/pks/lookup?search=checker%40d6.com&fingerprint=on&op=index Ubuntu's PGP keyserver] and it's Key ID 0xD8DE7218.<br />
<blockquote><pre class="small"><br />
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</pre></blockquote></div>Checkerhttps://www.chrishecker.com/index.php?title=A_Game_Developer%27s_Wish_List_for_Researchers&diff=2676A Game Developer's Wish List for Researchers2021-09-22T02:12:46Z<p>Checker: </p>
<hr />
<div><blockquote>''"If we aren't just about to fail, but not failing, we could have made the game cooler."''</blockquote><br />
<br />
Today I gave a short talk at the [http://graphics.cs.umass.edu/i3d2011/program.php 2011 ACM Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games] titled ''A Game Developer's Wish List for Researchers''. <br />
<br />
Here's the abstract:<br />
<br />
[[Image:titleslide.jpg|300px|right]]<br />
<blockquote>''Game developers have always turned to academic research for inspiration and to find approaches to technical problems. In the past, games were persona non grata in the research community, and so game developers reading research papers had to be content with merely consuming the available information without having much influence on the direction of research, or on its presentation. That has changed in recent years, with games growing in importance as a target and even a vehicle for academic research. Now that we have your ear, this lecture discusses a variety of ways researchers could make their work more useful to game developers. Some of these will be simple formatting suggestions, and some will be completely different ways of thinking about research topics, with various stops and detours in between.''</blockquote><br />
<br />
The talk was part of the Industry Session at the conference, where two invited speakers, myself and [http://www.linkedin.com/pub/daniel-baker/4/b78/699 Dan Baker from Firaxis], spoke about how academic research gets used (or doesn't get used, as the case may be) in the game industry.<br />
<br />
My talk focused on a few different characteristics researchers need to think about if they want game developers to use their research. <br />
<br />
First, I pointed out that contrary to the belief that ''performance'' is the single overriding factor in the evaluation of research by game developers, the most important factors are, in this order:<br />
<br />
# '''robustness'''<br />
# '''simplicity'''<br />
# '''performance'''<br />
<br />
Then I went into each of these in detail, talking about the various ways in which these characteristics are important.<br />
<br />
<div><center>[[Image:simplicityslide.jpg|600px]]<br/><br />
<div style="width: 80%; text-align:justify; line-height:1em;"><small>''If you're doing art and entertainment, you want&mdash;as a rule&mdash;to be right up against the systemic complexity that breaks the camel's back. So, taking on a new piece of straw is dangerous and has to be clearly worth the risk.''</small></div></center></div><br />
<br />
I also talked about why researchers releasing source code for their algorithms would be a huge boon to the game development community in evaluating research, and how that's not because we're lazy and we don't want to write the code ourselves. I make a case that the source code is actually more rigorous than the paper in a lot of important ways. <br />
<br />
I then talked a little bit about what kinds of things to research, although not about anything specific in this area; I mostly just provided some constraints to keep in mind for various areas like graphics, AI, and animation. I encouraged researchers to look into ''perceptual metrics and models'' more, because I see these as a way of formalizing and understanding some of the hacks we all do to get images on the screen. I think it's actually risky for researchers to look to game developers to suggest research topics, since we are often necessarily short-sighted.<ref>I'm reminded of the time when even John Carmack was telling 3D hardware manufacturers to not work on Z-buffers because they were too expensive. Luckly, Gary Tarolli ignored him. Also, memory prices dropped through the floor. That helped too.</ref> I think it may be better for researchers to actually ''understand and play games'', and then come up with their own topics, although that's not a hard and fast rule, obviously.<br />
<br />
Finally, I talk about a laundry list of small topics, including:<br />
* '''Researchers should not patent their work if they want game developers to use it''', and authors should be required to disclose any IP encumbrances at the top of the paper so readers can avoid tainting themselves.<br />
* I rail against the plethora of academic paywalls, and urge researchers to put both their new papers and their older papers on their websites. I will write more on this topic in the future, believe you me.<br />
* I discuss the importance of reporting ''negative results'', and tell researchers to follow in the footsteps of medical researchers, who recently launched the [http://www.jnrbm.com/ Journal of Negative Results in BioMedicine], saying if existing publishing channels won't publish them, then put them on your websites.<br />
* I talk about how the peer review process for [[Real-time Motion Retargeting to Highly Varied User-Created Morphologies|our SIGGRAPH paper]] forced me to cut a lot of the negative results and caveats, and how this shows the existing peer review system is broken.<br />
* One topic I touched on, and then came up again during Q&A, and then again at lunch was the difficulty of attaining real data from games. I told people the problem they're running into is asking for the developers to provide the data to them, rather than simply using the millions of PC game modding tools to rip the data themselves, and then simply asking for permission to use it in their presentations. Game developers don't have time to package the data up, but I think most would be happy for researchers to use their levels as "real-world" datasets. As usual, [http://valvesoftware.com Valve] is way ahead of everybody here, and occasionally provides L4D maps to researchers (including two of the three shadow talks right after our session!). [http://www.alice.org/index.php?page=sims_announcement/sims_announcement EA provided the Sims 2 assets to CMU's Alice program, as well.] So, it is possible to get real data from games, and I hope more researchers do this.<br />
<br />
And more. Here is the synced slideshow. I start by commenting on a question from the end of the previous session, so it sounds like it's starting in the wrong place, but it's not.<br />
<br />
<center><br />
{{#widget:MyPlick|id=3Wi0ndv7Hl9|width=600|height=514}}<br />
</center><br />
<br />
And here's the [[Media:acmi3d11-WishList.ppt|ppt]] and [[Media:acmi3d11-WishList-96kbps.mp3|mp3]] if you can't view the fancy flash presentation above.<br />
<br />
This talk is a sibling to ''[[My AIIDE 2010 Lecture on Game AI]]''.<br />
<br />
===Acknowledgements===<br />
I'd like to thank [http://oceanquigley.com/ Ocean Quigley], [http://radgametools.com Jeff Roberts], [http://valvesoftware.com Jay Stelly], [http://nothings.org Sean Barrett], [http://idsoftware.com John Carmack], [http://number-none.com/blow Jonathan Blow], and [http://cbloom.com Charles Bloom] for helping me brainstorm for this talk (several of the ideas in the talk are stolen directly from emails they sent me), and also these fine people on Twitter, who kindly responded to [http://twitter.com/checker/status/35421699377733632 my request for ideas]:<br />
<small><br />
* http://twitter.com/AiGameDev/status/35422235816624128<br />
* http://twitter.com/charlesrandall/status/35422775090876417<br />
* http://twitter.com/plushapo/status/35424046195675136<br />
* http://twitter.com/bkaradzic/status/35424937162313728<br />
* http://twitter.com/MikkoMononen/status/35425667340451841<br />
* http://twitter.com/ginsweater/status/35426934762512385<br />
* http://twitter.com/ginsweater/status/35427500528119808<br />
* http://twitter.com/jeffatrad/status/35446390612033536<br />
* http://twitter.com/ivanassen/status/35448445942767616<br />
* http://twitter.com/noel_llopis/status/35458062454099968<br />
* http://twitter.com/tom_forsyth/status/35478508130009088<br />
* http://twitter.com/twoscomplement/status/35479640847945728<br />
* http://twitter.com/zoombapup/status/35483951405600768<br />
* http://twitter.com/Allagash/status/35497053568114688<br />
* http://twitter.com/mike_acton/status/35560792472428544<br />
* http://twitter.com/renderwonk/status/35562804408745986<br />
* http://twitter.com/mike_acton/status/35563546553090048<br />
* http://twitter.com/mike_acton/status/35563814653132800<br />
* http://twitter.com/mike_acton/status/35564217822093312<br />
* http://twitter.com/codeandrew/status/35643602747006976<br />
* http://twitter.com/zoombapup/status/35653439153373184<br />
* http://twitter.com/zoombapup/status/35653752614699008<br />
* http://twitter.com/pervognsen/status/35780949362999296<br />
* http://twitter.com/JurieOnGames/status/35820313908346880<br />
* http://twitter.com/keyvanacosta/status/35833606194593793<br />
</small><br />
<br />
<references/><br />
<br />
[[Category:Lectures]]<br />
[[Category:Opinions]]</div>Checkerhttps://www.chrishecker.com/index.php?title=No_One_Knows_About_Your_Game&diff=2675No One Knows About Your Game2021-09-22T01:39:59Z<p>Checker: </p>
<hr />
<div>My [[Game Developers Conference|GDC 2013]] Indie Game Summit soapbox<ref>Which is like a rant, but nicer!</ref> was titled ''No One Knows About Your Game''. It's a spiritual sequel to my 2011 soapbox, [[5 Minutes Worth of Observations about AAA Indie Games]], and it's about how even if you think you have a lot of press and awareness, for all practical purposes, no one knows about your game.<br />
<br />
<center>{{#widget:YouTube|id=ueJkbQin-wk|width=640|height=385}}</center><br />
<br />
This audio was from a rehearsal, not the actual IGS version of the talk, but that was on somebody else's laptop, so I didn't record it.<br />
<br />
One key point from this talk is the following theory of mine, partially based on analyzing what happened with [[My Liner Notes for Spore|Spore]]:<br />
<center>'''You cannot overhype a game, you can only underdeliver.'''</center><br />
This is just a theory, however, and several indie developers I respect disagree with it. In the talk I quote [https://twitter.com/PHIL_FISH/ Phil Fish] talking about overhyping ''Fez'', and I had a slide with a shot from ''The Stanley Parable'' blog showing how to hype without spoilers, but then a couple years after this talk, [https://twitter.com/HelloCakebread Davey Wreden] released his next game, ''The Beginner's Guide'', as a complete surprise with no hype at all. <br />
<br />
Another observation I discuss in the talk is the '''Cheng Infinity Hypothesis''', which is the name I've given to [https://twitter.com/biiigfoot Jamie Cheng]'s theory about how indie-scale games effectively have an infinite number of potential players who might buy them, meaning you can always do more marketing, mess up a PR pitch or a patch and then fix it; you will never run out of potential customers. Obviously if you're making ''Call of Duty'' or ''The Sims'' you might run out of customers at some point because you're trying to get all of humanity to buy your game, but at indie scale this is not an issue.<br />
<br />
[http://twitter.com/nothings Sean Barrett] tweeted this in response to my announcement of this post:<br />
<br />
<center>[[Image:Nothings.png|link=]]</center><br />
<br />
I'll put some additional thoughts here soon... Right now I have to prepare another lecture!<br />
<br />
<references/><br />
[[Category:Opinions]]<br />
[[Category:Lectures]]</div>Checkerhttps://www.chrishecker.com/index.php?title=No_One_Knows_About_Your_Game&diff=2674No One Knows About Your Game2021-09-22T01:39:11Z<p>Checker: </p>
<hr />
<div>My [[Game Developers Conference|GDC 2013]] Indie Game Summit soapbox<ref>Which is like a rant, but nicer!</ref> was titled ''No One Knows About Your Game''. It's a spiritual sequel to my 2011 soapbox, [[5 Minutes Worth of Observations about AAA Indie Games]], and it's about how even if you think you have a lot of press and awareness, for all practical purposes, no one knows about your game.<br />
<br />
<center>{{#widget:YouTube|id=ueJkbQin-wk|width=640|height=385}}</center><br />
<br />
This audio was from a rehearsal, not the actual IGS version of the talk, but that was on somebody else's laptop, so I didn't record it.<br />
<br />
One key point from this talk is the following theory of mine, partially based on analyzing what happened with [[My Liner Notes for Spore|Spore]]:<br />
<center>'''You cannot overhype a game, you can only underdeliver.'''</center><br />
This is just a theory, however, and several indie developers I respect disagree with it. In the talk I quote [https://twitter.com/PHIL_FISH/ Phil Fish] talking about overhyping ''Fez'', and I had a slide with a shot from ''The Stanley Parable'' blog showing how to hype without spoilers, but then a couple years after this talk, [https://twitter.com/HelloCakebread Davey Wreden] released his next game, ''The Beginner's Guide'' as a complete surprise with no hype at all. <br />
<br />
Another observation I discuss in the talk is the '''Cheng Infinity Hypothesis''', which is the name I've given to [https://twitter.com/biiigfoot Jamie Cheng]'s theory about how indie-scale games effectively have an infinite number of potential players who might buy them, meaning you can always do more marketing, mess up a PR pitch or a patch and then fix it; you will never run out of potential customers. Obviously if you're making ''Call of Duty'' or ''The Sims'' you might run out of customers at some point because you're trying to get all of humanity to buy your game, but at indie scale this is not an issue.<br />
<br />
[http://twitter.com/nothings Sean Barrett] tweeted this in response to my announcement of this post:<br />
<br />
<center>[[Image:Nothings.png|link=]]</center><br />
<br />
I'll put some additional thoughts here soon... Right now I have to prepare another lecture!<br />
<br />
<references/><br />
[[Category:Opinions]]<br />
[[Category:Lectures]]</div>Checkerhttps://www.chrishecker.com/index.php?title=Homepage&diff=2673Homepage2021-09-22T01:01:13Z<p>Checker: </p>
<hr />
<div>__NOTOC__<br />
<h2 style="clear:none;">Chris Hecker's Homepage</h2><br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
[[Good Enough|<center>''"The good-enough is the enemy of the excellent."'' - John Miles</center>]]<br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
{{simplerecentchangesrighttable|num=5}}<br />
<br />
Welcome to my website. Here you'll find my writing, programming, design, art, and other miscellanea usually, but not always, relating to game development. <br />
<br />
I made my original website in 1997, and then proceeded to not update it for 9 years. I finally got around to making this new one, and I'm really happy with the way it's turning out. I use [[About/Website|MediaWiki]] as the engine for the site, and I'm excited to use tons of amazing Web 2.0 technology to create a website that looks exactly like my old hand-coded site, made with [[emacs]] and raw html, 10 years ago! Now ''that'' is progress! If you're interested in the gory details, you can [[About/Website|read more about it]].<br />
<br />
I hope you enjoy my work. Most of the material on this site is from my [[:Category:lectures|lectures]] at the [[Game Developers Conference]] and other conferences, my [[:Category:articles|articles]] in [[Game Developer Magazine]], and my exploration of game technology and design. I went to the trouble to set up this fancy database-driven website so I could put original material up more frequently, so we'll see how that goes. <br />
<br />
I believe it's incredibly important for game developers&mdash;and everybody, really&mdash;to openly share information about their craft, whether you're an artist, programmer, designer, musician, business person, or whatever. I've always had an amazing return on investment from sharing information...the more I share, the more I get back in terms of goodwill, learning new information from others, and meeting interesting people. But, more importantly, sharing information moves our [[Games|art form and industry]] forward faster, which benefits us all.<br />
<br />
=== Navigating ===<br />
<br />
{{navigate}}<br />
<br />
Thanks for stopping by!</div>Checkerhttps://www.chrishecker.com/index.php?title=Homepage&diff=2672Homepage2021-09-22T00:49:59Z<p>Checker: </p>
<hr />
<div>__NOTOC__<br />
<h2 style="clear:none;">Chris Hecker's Homepage</h2><br />
<br />
{{simplerecentchangesrighttable|num=5}}<br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
[[Good Enough|''"The good-enough is the enemy of the excellent."''<div class="quotesig" style="text-align:right;margin-right:25em;">- John Miles</div>]]<br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
Welcome to my website. Here you'll find my writing, programming, design, art, and other miscellanea usually, but not always, relating to game development. <br />
<br />
I made my original website in 1997, and then proceeded to not update it for 9 years. I finally got around to making this new one, and I'm really happy with the way it's turning out. I use [[About/Website|MediaWiki]] as the engine for the site, and I'm excited to use tons of amazing Web 2.0 technology to create a website that looks exactly like my old hand-coded site, made with [[emacs]] and raw html, 10 years ago! Now ''that'' is progress! If you're interested in the gory details, you can [[About/Website|read more about it]].<br />
<br />
I hope you enjoy my work. Most of the material on this site is from my [[:Category:lectures|lectures]] at the [[Game Developers Conference]] and other conferences, my [[:Category:articles|articles]] in [[Game Developer Magazine]], and my exploration of game technology and design. I went to the trouble to set up this fancy database-driven website so I could put original material up more frequently, so we'll see how that goes. <br />
<br />
I believe it's incredibly important for game developers&mdash;and everybody, really&mdash;to openly share information about their craft, whether you're an artist, programmer, designer, musician, business person, or whatever. I've always had an amazing return on investment from sharing information...the more I share, the more I get back in terms of goodwill, learning new information from others, and meeting interesting people. But, more importantly, sharing information moves our [[Games|art form and industry]] forward faster, which benefits us all.<br />
<br />
=== Navigating ===<br />
<br />
{{navigate}}<br />
<br />
Thanks for stopping by!</div>Checkerhttps://www.chrishecker.com/index.php?title=No_One_Knows_About_Your_Game&diff=2671No One Knows About Your Game2021-09-22T00:40:38Z<p>Checker: added more cheng infinity hypothesis stuff to text from the lecture</p>
<hr />
<div>My [[Game Developers Conference|GDC 2013]] Indie Game Summit soapbox<ref>Which is like a rant, but nicer!</ref> was titled ''No One Knows About Your Game''. It's a spiritual sequel to my 2011 soapbox, [[5 Minutes Worth of Observations about AAA Indie Games]], and it's about how even if you think you have a lot of press and awareness, for all practical purposes, no one knows about your game.<br />
<br />
<center>{{#widget:YouTube|id=ueJkbQin-wk|width=640|height=385}}</center><br />
<br />
This audio was from a rehearsal, not the actual IGS version of the talk, but that was on somebody else's laptop, so I didn't record it.<br />
<br />
One key point from this talk is the following theory of mine, partially based on analyzing what happened with [[My Liner Notes for Spore|Spore]]:<br />
<center>'''You cannot overhype a game, you can only underdeliver.'''</center><br />
<br />
Another observation I discuss in the talk is the '''Cheng Infinity Hypothesis''', which is the name I've given to [https://twitter.com/biiigfoot Jamie Cheng]'s theory about how indie-scale games effectively have an infinite number of potential players who might buy them, meaning you can always do more marketing, mess up a PR pitch or a patch and then fix it; you will never run out of potential customers. Obviously if you're making ''Call of Duty'' or ''The Sims'' you might run out of customers at some point because you're trying to get all of humanity to buy your game, but at indie scale this is not an issue.<br />
<br />
[http://twitter.com/nothings Sean Barrett] tweeted this in response to my announcement of this post:<br />
<br />
<center>[[Image:Nothings.png|link=]]</center><br />
<br />
I'll put some additional thoughts here soon... Right now I have to prepare another lecture!<br />
<br />
<references/><br />
[[Category:Opinions]]<br />
[[Category:Lectures]]</div>Checkerhttps://www.chrishecker.com/index.php?title=About/Me&diff=2670About/Me2021-09-19T10:10:07Z<p>Checker: /* PGP Public Key */</p>
<hr />
<div><blockquote style="color:#f00;"><br />
'''''Very important: The material on this website represents my personal opinion, not that of my employer, my family, my friends, my coworkers, or anybody else. Please do not represent me as anybody but "Chris Hecker" if you're going to quote from these pages. Thank you.'''''<br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
===Contact Info===<br />
{|align=right<br />
|__TOC__<br />
|}<br />
<blockquote><br />
'''Chris Hecker'''<br><br />
http://chrishecker.com<br><br />
checker 'at' d6.com<br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
I get a lot of email. I try to read it all and respond, but it takes time, and it seems I'm increasingly short of time. Sorry about that.<br />
<br />
===Professional Bio===<br />
Here's the bio I use for [[:Category:Lectures|lectures]], [[:Category:Articles|articles]], conferences, and whatnot:<br />
<br />
'''Chris Hecker'''<br><br />
'''''[http://www.d6.com definition six, inc.]'''''<br />
<br />
Chris focuses on solving hard problems at the intersection of gameplay, aesthetics, and technology. He is an outspoken advocate for pushing the current boundaries of design and interactivity, in the hope that games will eventually reach their full potential as a medium. To this end he helped organize the [http://www.indiegamejam.org Indie Game Jam], the [http://www.experimental-gameplay.org Experimental Gameplay Workshop], and [[The Depth Jam]], and his recent work on [[My Liner Notes for Spore|Spore]] centered on using proceduralism and artificial intelligence to enhance player creativity and agency. Chris has been on the advisory board for the [[Game Developers Conference]] for many years and is a regular speaker at the GDC, Siggraph, and other conferences. A frequent contributor to Game Developer magazine, Chris was the technical columnist for the magazine for two years and the Editor-at-Large for three, and was on the editorial board of the computer graphics research publication, [http://jgt.akpeters.com The Journal of Graphics Tools]. He has worked at both ends of the development spectrum, as a one-man indie game developer with his company [http://www.d6.com definition six, inc.] and on a hundred-person team at [http://www.maxis.com Maxis/Electronic Arts]. His professional goal is to help games become the preeminent art and entertainment form of the 21st century. His current project is [http://spyparty.com SpyParty], an indie game about subtle human behavior and deception.<br />
<br />
=== Headshots ===<br />
<center><br />
{|width=200px <br />
|align=center|<br />
[[Image:Checker-gdc10.jpg|Chris Hecker|200px]]<br />
<br />
<small>Here's one from the [http://www.flickr.com/photos/officialgdc/4425421495/ Official GDC 2010 Flickr set]. I like this one, please use it.</small><br />
|}<br />
<br />
{|width=200px <br />
|align=center|<br />
[[Image:Checker-headshot-closed.png|Chris Hecker|100px]]<br />
<br />
<small>Here's the boring and goofy headshot I used to use.</small><br />
|}<br />
<br />
{|width=200px <br />
|align=center|<br />
[[Image:Checker-migs.jpg|Chris Hecker|200px]]<br />
<br />
<small>Here's an ''action shot'' of me lecturing in Montreal in 2007.</small><br />
|}<br />
<br />
{|width=200px <br />
|align=center|<br />
[[Image:Checker-old-headshot.png|Chris Hecker|100px]]<br />
<br />
<small>I kinda like this really old one. It's less boring than the first headshot, but perhaps even more goofy, since I was hiking near Crested Butte, CO.</small><br />
|}<br />
</center><br />
<br />
=== Personal ===<br />
<br />
I'll write some more general stuff about me here at some point. For now, you get my bio and headshot.<br />
<br />
[[Elvis Has Left The Building|Until recently]], I was a ''Technology Fellow'' at [http://www.maxis.com Maxis/Electronic Arts]. I'm not sure what the title meant either. A friend once quipped I was higher ranked than a ''Technology Chap'', but lower ranked than a ''Technology Gentleman''.<br />
<br />
Here's my old "About Me" blurb from my original webpage, '''which is out of date''' (i.e. do not use it as my bio, see [[#Professional Bio|above]]), but has the rough outline of my life in it (Parsons -> Microsoft -> d6 -> Maxis):<br />
<br />
<blockquote><i><br />
I'm Technical and Art Director of definition six, inc., the small startup game company three friends and I founded in 1995. The Technical Director side of me worked at Microsoft for three years doing various game and graphics programming. The Art Director side went to Parson's School of Design in NYC to be an illustrator. I realized that, while the school has a great reputation, in my opinion it was severely lacking on the education front. I dropped out during sophomore year and studied independently with some of the professors there, sitting in on their life drawing classes and whatnot. One day I made the mistake of buying a computer magazine and it got me interested in programming. The best thing about the game industry is it mixes totally different disciplines, like art and programming, so it gives me a chance to exercise both sides of my brain equally! There's no other industry like it.<br />
</i></blockquote><br />
<br />
=== PGP Public Key ===<br />
Also available at [https://keyserver.ubuntu.com/pks/lookup?search=checker%40d6.com&fingerprint=on&op=index Ubuntu's PGP keyserver] and it's Key ID 0xD8DE7218.<br />
<blockquote><small><pre style="line-height:1em; overflow-x:auto; overflow-y:hidden;"><br />
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</pre></small></blockquote></div>Checkerhttps://www.chrishecker.com/index.php?title=Opinions&diff=2669Opinions2021-09-19T10:06:52Z<p>Checker: </p>
<hr />
<div>This is the main directory for my opinion<ref>This category used to be called "Rants", but I recently had a not-so-great experience with ranting, so I'm going to start ''expressing my opinion'' instead of ''ranting''.</ref> articles, in chronological order, sorted by the date of the latest page update. You can see an alphabetical list of opinions [[:Category:Opinions|here]].<br />
<br />
<div id="simplerecentchanges-full"><br />
{{#simplerecentchangeslist:1000|100|Opinions}}<br />
</div><br />
<br />
<references/><br />
<br />
[[Category:Opinions]]</div>Checkerhttps://www.chrishecker.com/index.php?title=Opinions&diff=2668Opinions2021-09-19T10:05:12Z<p>Checker: </p>
<hr />
<div>This is the main directory for my opinion<ref>This category used to be called "Rants", but I recently had a not-so-great experience with ranting, so I'm going to start ''expressing my opinion'' instead of ''ranting''.</ref> articles, in chronological order, sorted by the date of the latest page update. You can see an alphabetical list of opinions [[:Category:Opinions|here]].<br />
<br />
<div id="simplerecentchanges-full"><br />
{{#simplerecentchangeslist:1000|200|Opinions}}<br />
</div><br />
<br />
<references/><br />
<br />
[[Category:Opinions]]</div>Checkerhttps://www.chrishecker.com/index.php?title=Recent_Changes&diff=2667Recent Changes2021-09-19T10:02:21Z<p>Checker: </p>
<hr />
<div>Here are the recent changes on my website. You can find a much more detailed change list [[Special:RecentChanges|here]].<br />
<br />
<div id="simplerecentchanges-full"><br />
{{#simplerecentchangeslist:100|100}}<br />
</div></div>Checkerhttps://www.chrishecker.com/index.php?title=Homepage&diff=2666Homepage2021-09-19T09:24:54Z<p>Checker: </p>
<hr />
<div>__NOTOC__<br />
<h2 style="clear:none;">Chris Hecker's Homepage</h2><br />
<br />
{{simplerecentchangesrighttable|num=5}}<br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
[[Good Enough|''"The good-enough is the enemy of the excellent."''<div style="text-align:right;margin-right:25em;">- John Miles</div>]]<br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
Welcome to my website. Here you'll find my writing, programming, design, art, and other miscellanea usually, but not always, relating to game development. <br />
<br />
I made my original website in 1997, and then proceeded to not update it for 9 years. I finally got around to making this new one, and I'm really happy with the way it's turning out. I use [[About/Website|MediaWiki]] as the engine for the site, and I'm excited to use tons of amazing Web 2.0 technology to create a website that looks exactly like my old hand-coded site, made with [[emacs]] and raw html, 10 years ago! Now ''that'' is progress! If you're interested in the gory details, you can [[About/Website|read more about it]].<br />
<br />
I hope you enjoy my work. Most of the material on this site is from my [[:Category:lectures|lectures]] at the [[Game Developers Conference]] and other conferences, my [[:Category:articles|articles]] in [[Game Developer Magazine]], and my exploration of game technology and design. I went to the trouble to set up this fancy database-driven website so I could put original material up more frequently, so we'll see how that goes. <br />
<br />
I believe it's incredibly important for game developers&mdash;and everybody, really&mdash;to openly share information about their craft, whether you're an artist, programmer, designer, musician, business person, or whatever. I've always had an amazing return on investment from sharing information...the more I share, the more I get back in terms of goodwill, learning new information from others, and meeting interesting people. But, more importantly, sharing information moves our [[Games|art form and industry]] forward faster, which benefits us all.<br />
<br />
=== Navigating ===<br />
<br />
{{navigate}}<br />
<br />
Thanks for stopping by!</div>Checkerhttps://www.chrishecker.com/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Checker-floatlinks&diff=2665MediaWiki:Checker-floatlinks2021-09-19T09:16:50Z<p>Checker: Created page with "[http://twitter.com/checker <small><b>@checker</b></small>] [http://twitter.com/checker https://chrishecker.com/skins/Checker/resources/images/twitter.png]<br/>[http://spypart..."</p>
<hr />
<div>[http://twitter.com/checker <small><b>@checker</b></small>] [http://twitter.com/checker https://chrishecker.com/skins/Checker/resources/images/twitter.png]<br/>[http://spyparty.com <small><small><small>MY NEW SPY GAME</small></small></small><br/><small>'''SpyParty'''</small>]<br />
<br />
[http://twitter.com/spyparty https://chrishecker.com/skins/Checker/resources/images/twitter-small.png]<br />
[http://spyparty.com/feed https://chrishecker.com/skins/Checker/resources/images/rss-small.png]<br />
[http://facebook.com/spyparty https://chrishecker.com/skins/Checker/resources/images/facebook-small.png]</div>Checkerhttps://www.chrishecker.com/index.php?title=Henna_Tattoos&diff=2661Henna Tattoos2021-09-19T04:43:23Z<p>Checker: </p>
<hr />
<div>The most excellent [http://www.orangedoorproperties.com/ Corey] [http://www.myspace.com/toychestra Weinstein] introduced me to [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henna Henna tattoos] at a school function one day, and I was instantly hooked. They're mesmerizing to have done on you<ref>I once had a one-on-one lunch with [http://aboutus.ea.com/executive-sectionofficers.action#jr John Riccitiello] with my hands covered in henna tattoos courtesy of Corey.</ref>, and they're a lot of fun to do on other people. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsMtEi2rNgo This is an excellent video] of some really awesome henna artists at work.<br />
<br />
Kids and parents alike love them. Henna tattoos are really great for kids because they have to hold still while you're doing it, they have to be careful with it while it sets, they get to see it change over the first day<ref>After you remove the dried henna (after waiting as long as you can with it on your skin, preferably a couple hours), the tattoo is a pretty orange, and it turns a beautiful dark brown over the next 24 hours.</ref>, and on an active kid's hands they last about a week, so it's just the right amount of commitment for a 4+ year old to get their head around, and they get to feel a sense of ownership and pseudo-permanence, but not too much<ref>Like, say, a real tattoo, or pierced ears.</ref>. Then it's gone!<br />
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Here's my masterpiece, an octopus with a tentacle down each of Clementine's five fingers, so when she grabs something it looks like the octopus is holding it:<br />
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<center><br />
[[Image:Henna-octopus-pre.jpg|300px]]<br />
[[Image:Henna-octopus-post.jpg|320px]]<br />
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This one turned out so well, I'm a little worried my henna career is all downhill from here. Here it is eating a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_fish swedish fish], which is obviously the primary food source for henna octopi:<br />
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<center>{{#widget:YouTube|id=aQAoFh29htM|width=320|height=265}}</center><br />
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Here it is about to eat a marinated squid, a secondary source of nutrients for the wild henna octopus:<br />
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<center>[[Image:Henna-octopus-squid.jpg|300px]]</center><br />
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===Other Work===<br />
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Here are some other tattoos I've done recently. <br />
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[[Image:Henna-handsnake.jpg|left|300px]]<br />
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This was a snake with some vines and abstract designs. The cool thing about henna, [http://images.google.com/images?q=henna&hl=en as you can see from searching the net], is that any kind of intricate pattern just looks fabulous. I didn't get a picture of this one after the henna was removed, but it came in rather nicely.<br />
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[[Image:Henna-oakland.jpg|right|300px]]<br />
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This is the old and awesome [http://www.oaklandnet.com/ City of Oakland] logo. I did this on the leg of Clementine's 12-year-old cousin the night before she returned to Jersey. Her friends apparently loved it. No word on what her parents thought.<br />
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[[Image:Henna-armsnake.jpg|left|300px]]<br />
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This snake was the first tattoo I ever did myself. It wrapped all the way around Clementine's arm. I forgot we were going to a wedding in St. Louis, Missouri the next day and she was wearing a sleeveless dress! It was quite the attraction. ''"Look at that little girl's arm, she's from California."''<br />
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Here's a bunch from a school fund raising fair:<br />
<center><br />
<gallery><br />
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<references/><br />
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[[Category:Art]]</div>Checkerhttps://www.chrishecker.com/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Mainpage-nstab&diff=2660MediaWiki:Mainpage-nstab2021-09-17T00:30:26Z<p>Checker: Created page with "Homepage"</p>
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<div>This is another test page.</div>Checkerhttps://www.chrishecker.com/index.php?title=Column_vs_Row_Vectors&diff=2658Column vs Row Vectors2021-09-13T08:18:37Z<p>Checker: </p>
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<div>When you're doing math for graphics, physics, games, or whatever, you should use column vectors when you're representing points, differences between points, and the like.<br />
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Symbolically, you should do this: <math>\mathbf{v} = \begin{vmatrix} x \\ y \\ z \end{vmatrix}</math><br />
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and do matrix-times-vector like this: '''v' = Mv''', ''not'' '''v' = vM''' (which would use a row vector, <math>\mathbf{v} = \begin{vmatrix} x & y & z \end{vmatrix}</math>).<br />
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===Math===<br />
<br />
Getting your matrix and vector shapes correct is vital to doing more advanced mathematics, especially if you're referring to published mathematical materials, all of which will use columns for vectors, and reserve rows for gradients, differential forms, covariant tensors, and the like. My [[Vector Calculus|lecture on vector calculus]] gives a ton of examples of why it's important to get your matrix shapes correct, and why a vector must be a column, not a row. Here is a single simple example...<br />
<br />
Say you have a scalar function of a vector:<br />
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<center><math>\alpha = f(\mathbf{v})</math></center><br />
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This might be something as simple as a dot product with a constant vector, <math>f(\mathbf{v}) = \mathbf{c}\cdot\mathbf{v}</math>, or something really complicated. If you differentiate this symbolically, you get:<br />
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<center><math>d\alpha = \frac{\partial f}{\partial \mathbf{v}} \mathbf{dv}</math></center><br />
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The shape of '''dv''' is the same shape as the vector '''v'''. But, what is the shape of <math>\textstyle \partial f/\partial \mathbf{v}</math>? It is to the left of the vector, and their adjacency (multiplication) produces a scalar. Note that this is simple adjacency, there is no implicit dot product or wacky operator between the partial and the vector, they are just multiplied times each other left to right using normal linear algebra rules. So, what does this say about the shapes? Either the vector is a column, and the partial then must be a row, so the adjacency is the simple matrix product of an 1 x n matrix (row vector) times an n x 1 matrix (column vector), which produces a 1 x 1 matrix (a scalar), or, if you insist that '''dv''' is a row vector, then tensor insanity ensues and you are forced to come up with some object that when placed to the left of a row vector can multiply it to produce a scalar. That way lies madness, while if you just make sure you are using vectors as columns, and forms as rows, it all just works trivially (until you get to differentiating vector functions of vectors, and then you sometimes have to involve 3-tensors or finesse the notation no matter what you do, but that's a separate topic).<br />
<br />
Using column vectors is not at all controversial in the fields of mathematics and physics, but in graphics, due to historical reasons<ref>My understanding of the history: The 1st edition of the classic graphics text book by Foley and van Dam used row vectors and vector-times-matrix. Iris GL followed suit. They both later realized their mistake relative to all of "real" mathematics and physics, and switched to column vectors and matrix-times-vector, as God intended. F&vD switched in their 2nd Edition, and when [[OpenGL]] was created from Iris GL it was switched notationally as well. However, since SGI wanted to keep binary matrix layout compatibility between OpenGL and Iris GL, they decided that the OpenGL matrices would be specified in Fortran column-major order instead of C row-major order, prolonging the pain and confusion.</ref>, it's still an issue. In fact, it's probably true that most of the game math libraries out there do '''v' = vM''', which saddens me greatly, but hopefully this is changing.<br />
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===Code===<br />
<br />
Be careful when coding up vector libraries, however. It's often tempting to try to use the type system of your language to differentiate between column and row vectors, but I think this is rarely worthwhile. You can do it fairly easily, but it's often more trouble than it's worth&mdash;I've found the knee of the complexity/utility curve is to just have a vector type, and do matrix-times-vector as '''v' = Mv'''. If you want to do a vector-times-matrix multiply with a row vector, use a named function call instead of an operator, because it's a much less common situation. Often 90% of them are from '''v<sup>T</sup>Mv''' operations, in which case you can express this as <tt>DotProduct(v,M*v)</tt> easily.<br />
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The same advice goes for keeping vectors and points separate types. There are just too many circumstances when you want to convert between points and vectors, or take transposes to convert between rows and columns. You still want to keep rows and columns separate in your notation and your variable naming, I've just never seen it pay off when trying to enforce it in code with the type system in your main game programming language, like C++. This is definitely a coding style issue, and so it's subjective, of course, and I'm sure some people have found it's useful. For mathematical programming languages and systems, like [[Mathematica]], I definitely do think it's a good idea.<br />
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Some people argue that SSE and other vector floating point units make it so using a column major layout is more efficient, but that has nothing to do with your notational conventions, both on paper and in code. Yes, you might end up storing matrices in column-major (Fortran) order if you're really concerned about this, but you should still do '''v' = Mv''' in code, or else risk going insane as you use more advanced math.<br />
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===Links===<br />
Some other pages on the topic:<br />
* http://steve.hollasch.net/cgindex/math/matrix/column-vec.html<br />
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<references/><br />
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[[Category:Math]]<br />
[[Category:Opinions]]</div>Checkerhttps://www.chrishecker.com/index.php?title=The_Depth_Jam&diff=2657The Depth Jam2021-09-13T08:09:04Z<p>Checker: </p>
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<div>Last week&mdash;May 17<sup>th</sup> through 20<sup>th</sup>, 2012, to be precise&mdash;[http://the-witness.net/news/ Jonathan Blow], [http://www.ludomancy.com/blog/ Daniel Benmergui], [http://marctenbosch.com/miegakure/ Marc ten Bosch], and [http://www.spyparty.com I] spent four days in a rented house in [http://g.co/maps/n9hqr Stinson Beach, California], at an event we called the ''Depth Jam''. During these four days, we talked about, playtested, designed, and programmed our video games in alternating timeslots, went to sleep, and then woke up and did it all over again the next day. <br />
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[[Image:DSCN0848.jpg|right|350px]]<br />
As the name suggests, our goals for the Depth Jam were to go deep into the design of a specific part of each of our games, answer a specific design question, or solve a specific design problem. It was fun, educational, inspirational, and exhausting. <br />
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We also ate too much catered food. Daniel said we should have called it the Breadth Jam.<br />
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In this article, I'm going to discuss our experiences at this first Depth Jam, what motivated us to do this, what we hoped to accomplish, and how we set it up&mdash;both logistically and conceptually&mdash;in the hopes that other game developers will be interested in running a Depth Jam for their games.<br />
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=== Why Depth Jam? ===<br />
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<div style="float:right;margin-left:10px;">__TOC__</div><br />
In a most excellent coincidence, 2012 is the 10<sup>th</sup> anniversary of the [http://indiegamejam.org Indie Game Jam], one of the first "get a bunch of people together in a room for a long weekend and make some games" events. Over the past decade, game jams have become more and more popular, and a wide variety of folks put on game jams in every setting, from schools to large corporations, basically anywhere game developers want to be inspired and work on something wacky and short-term.<br />
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As game jams grew in popularity, Jonathan and I started having some reservations about them and their influence on the industry, on game development culture, on games, and on the art form itself. These thoughts and discussions culminated in my 2010 [[Game Developers Conference]] rant, [[Please Finish Your Game]].<br />
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In some important ways, the Depth Jam is a reaction to the idea and execution of game jams in the game industry today. Game jams are shallow by design. You come in, you make some games, you're done. Maybe you polish your jam game a bit afterwards and throw it up on the web, but it's enough of a challenge just to get code executing in four days,<ref>I shudder every time somebody talks to me about doing a three- or even two-day game jam, at least if they're hoping for interesting experimentation as opposed to just a fun hang-out.</ref> and trying to do real thoughtful exploration in that amount of time in a new codebase is almost impossible. Sometimes you luck out and get something amazing from a game jam, but in a lot of ways the structure is directly working against that.<br />
<br />
Let me point out that a lot of people like to do game jams simply because they like to hang out with other people making games. That's great, and I think the more people making games, the better, but it's become clear to me game jams are not really pushing game design forward anymore.<br />
<br />
So, we started talking about deeper alternatives during the summer of 2010, and a few things became clear:<br />
* First, your focus has to be on a game you're already working on, where you know the code inside and out and can change it to test new ideas quickly, where you have solved the easy stuff already, and where the game is already interesting and deep, or has the clear potential to be deep with some good design decisions. Of course, the game shouldn't be so far along that you can't make potentially large changes to it.<br />
* Second, it has to be kept to a small number of people. Game jams these days can get really huge, involving tens of people in the same area working...that is not a recipe for thoughtfulness.<br />
* Finally, it has to be a retreat, away from employees, bills, family, and the other distractions of normal life.<br />
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After talking a bit more about it at [http://www.indiecade.com/ IndieCade] in October of 2010, Jonathan and I started to make a concrete plan. We decided the first Depth Jam would include [http://www.spyparty.com SpyParty] and [http://the-witness.net/news/ The Witness] obviously, and we'd invite [http://marctenbosch.com/miegakure/ Miegakure] and [http://thatgamecompany.com/games/journey/ Journey]. At the time, all of these games were early enough in their development that change was still possible and welcome, and we knew all the designers and thought the mix would work well. <br />
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Everybody was interested and excited by the idea, so naturally we got busy and completely dropped it for a year.<br />
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When we finally picked the idea back up at the 2011 IndieCade, it was too late in its development for Journey to benefit from the Depth Jam, so we started thinking about an appropriate replacement game. We thought about just doing three games, but four games in four days seemed like the right number for the first jam. Around the same time, Jonathan and I were talking to Daniel Benmergui about his game [http://www.ludomancy.com/storyteller.php Storyteller], and I invited him to come to Oakland from Buenos Aires for an extended work trip, where he'd hang out with us and develop his game. Once he decided to do this, and we scheduled it for the three months after GDC 2012, it was clear the Depth Jam should take place in the middle of his trip, and that Storyteller should be the 4<sup>th</sup> game.<br />
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=== How to Depth Jam ===<br />
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Since this was the first Depth Jam, we basically had to make it all up ourselves, so there may be better ways to do it, and we'd be delighted to hear if you try a Depth Jam yourself and change some things for the better.<br />
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There were a bunch of different aspects of the Depth Jam to consider, and since the jam itself was about depth, we figured it was worth thinking somewhat deeply about these issues as well:<br />
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* '''The Location''' &nbsp;&nbsp; We knew it had to be a place away-from-it-all, but there are about a billion of these places in California, so we needed to narrow it down. First, we decided to do it in a vacation rental house, as opposed to a hotel or a conference center. Everyone being together in the same space seemed important, so a hotel was out, and since we were only four people, any conference center or retreat destination would almost certainly have other groups staying at the same time as us. However, hotels and conference centers serve food as part of their packages, so now we needed to handle that. Cooking is fun, but it takes time and energy, so we decided to have professional caterers bring lunch and dinner for the entire stay, and just have some simple snacks and breakfast cereal around for the mornings. Finally, we had to decide where to look for the rental house, because there are lots of those too. We knew we wanted it somewhat isolated and beautiful, and differentiated from our daily routine. To narrow things down, we used "woods versus beach" as a razor, and decided beach was better because it allowed quicker escapes&mdash;a hike in the woods takes more time than a quick walk to the beach to think about a problem. We rented the house for five nights so we had four full days, meaning we came in on a Wednesday evening and left on a Monday morning.<br />
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* '''The Format''' &nbsp;&nbsp; Four games, four days; simple, right? Well, not really. There are a lot of ways to split up a day, and after thinking about it for a bit, it seemed unwise to give one day to each game, since people get tired of thinking about the same thing, plus that would prevent people from making requested programming or tuning changes and then retesting their games. We eventually decided on doing all four games each day, with two hour slots, then free time after dinner to program or just stare at a blank wall. These two hour slots quickly hit the wall of reality on the first day, when the scheduled 15 minute breaks in the afternoon weren't long enough to recharge after an intense session, so we rejiggered it a bit more on site. We settled on a two hour slot each morning between breakfast and lunch and shorter 1.5 or 1.75 hour slots in the afternoon with longer breaks in between, then dinner. The morning slot tended to be the freshest since people were rested, and each timeslot had a slightly different feel to it, so we made sure the games got one of each.<ref>We actually violated this once due to some code changes not being ready, but we tried to give each game each slot.</ref> We also allowed the last slot to happen after dinner if a good discussion started in the afternoon, or people felt like they needed more of a break. However, the quality of the conversation definitely dipped as the day wore on, and if the sessions leaked into the after-dinner period then it meant less time to implement the day's ideas. We also found it important to take real breaks from the games, and not let the the discussions bleed into breaks...Daniel and I played some intense frisbee on the beach every afternoon, Jonathan did t'ai chi and kung fu on the patio, and Marc read.<br />
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* '''The Questions''' &nbsp;&nbsp; The biggest thing to decide is what exactly each of us were going to think deeply about at the Depth Jam. We all started thinking about ideas a couple months before the jam, making sure we each played all the games during this period, and then finally decided on and introduced the ideas to the others at a pre-jam meeting in Oakland. We hammered on the ideas a bit during discussion, pointing out problems with the questions and alternatives, but in the end each person set his own agenda for his game. The questions we each posed were quite different, and we'll all write in more detail about questions on our individual game blogs at a later date. Here are short descriptions of our questions as concrete examples to give an idea of the kinds of topics we investigated:<br />
** '''SpyParty''' &nbsp;&nbsp; My question was a very specific one about advanced Sniper play and deductivity with the highlight/lowlight mechanic. I currently have two levels of highlight and two levels of lowlight, but in the beta I've observed some very good Snipers using the levels to count different actions, to the point where instead of using the highlight for suspicion and lowlight for lack of suspicion, they were using all the levels as a 5-counter for different activities in the world, like number of times a character would go to the statues. This was an interesting discovery, but felt like it was getting too deductive for the gameplay aesthetic I wanted, so I was considering nerfing the mechanic down to just one level each of highlight and lowlight. There was some concern during the pre-jam meeting about this question being too specific, or the Depth Jam attendees not having a high enough skill level at SpyParty to help answer the question, but I was convinced I'd get some useful data from the jam. On-site, we tested it pretty thoroughly, including going the complete other direction and having the game automatically put counters for activities over every character's head, so we could see what the other end of the deductivity spectrum felt like. In the end, the nerf feels right, so I'm going to put it in the next beta build. As a bonus, we redesigned the Inspect Statues mission and hopefully fixed some of its flaws. I'll post more detail on these questions and decisions later on the [http://www.spyparty.com SpyParty blog].<br />
** '''Storyteller''' &nbsp;&nbsp; Daniel has been making huge changes to the internals of his game since [http://igf.com/2012/03/fourteenth_annual_independent_.html winning the Nuovo Award at the IGF]. He was faced with a hard decision about which direction to take the game, whether towards a more freeform interpretive plot based game, or a more tightly constrained character puzzle game, and so he decided figuring out which way to go would be his question. He implemented multiple puzzles and new mechanics for us to test on the run-up to the jam, and then modified the game at the jam in response to feedback. He'll elucidate his chosen direction on [http://www.ludomancy.com/blog/ his Storyteller blog].<br />
** '''Miegakure''' &nbsp;&nbsp; Marc led discussions about whether leaving the outside of the levels up to the imagination of the player was in fact the best way to visually represent the compact levels the gameplay requires. We also playtested and discussed two series of levels involving specific late-game mechanics. Watch the [http://marctenbosch.com/miegakure/ Miegakure blog] for more information.<br />
** '''The Witness''' &nbsp;&nbsp; ''[http://the-witness.net/news/ (undisclosed)]''<br />
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Again, your decisions regarding some of these issues might be different, but they all matter in more and less subtle ways, so be thoughtful about them as you're setting up your Depth Jam.<br />
<br />
=== Outcome and Thoughts ===<br />
<br />
This article has gone from a high concept about deeply exploring game designs to advice on how to pick a caterer, which is kind of like the Depth Jam itself. At the end of the day, it was about making concrete forward progress on our games, using the deep conceptual thinking and discussions in the process, but always ending up in low level code and level design. That's as it should be.<br />
<br />
We haven't done the official Depth Jam post mortem meeting yet, because we wanted time for it all to sink in,<ref>I'll update this post once we've done that.</ref> but I think the vibe afterwards was generally positive, but not just a bit exhausted. I would say I had ''very'' high expectations and it met them or slightly exceeded them, but it did not completely blow my mind, possibly because my expectations were already so high, or maybe because the takeaway from the Depth Jam is a complex and subtle addition or modification to a large body of thoughts I already had about my game, rather than something completely new and different. I would definitely do it again, and it was valuable both for SpyParty, and for me as a game designer. The caliber of conversation was at a level that's hard to get on a regular basis, so having four straight days of that was awesome.<br />
<br />
The big problems with the Depth Jam, as I see them, are:<br />
* Cost - Because of the various decisions we made regarding location and food, the Depth Jam was expensive: it cost about $5000 USD, around $1500 for the catering and $3000 for the house rental. You could obviously save money in a lot of ways, like cooking yourself or only catering dinner and making PB&J for lunch, renting or borrowing a cheaper place, etc., but we wanted to make the probability of success as high as possible this first time, so we tried to make choices that eliminated distractions and energy sinks. So, you could definitely do it cheaper than we did, but I would be wary of skimping on things that end up causing more non-design cognitive load.<br />
* Scalability - It's a shame, but there's no way the Depth Jam idea is scalable in the way a game jam is. I think you could do a three or a four person Depth Jam, but that's about the range. My hunch is having other designers there who aren't asking a question about their own games but who are just engaged in the discussions and playtests with the three or four chosen games wouldn't work very well, but we didn't try this so I can't say for sure. The Depth Jam also obviously works best when the attendees can make any required changes to their game, which means they have to be programmers. I changed the network protocol for SpyParty to test a theory during jam...that is not something you can easily put in a tuning file and make accessible to non-programmers.<br />
* Endurance - It may sound awesome to hang out with three of your friends on a beach talking about video games for four days, but you are really working hard and smart the whole time, and the schedule becomes oppressive. Even the food was oppressive, since it came at a specific time and we had to eat it even if we weren't hungry yet. It's much harder to Depth Jam than it is to game jam, or work four regular work days. Also, there is much more preparation before the jam, since everyone needs to play all the games, and think deeply about all the questions to get the most out of it.<br />
<br />
So, there you have it, the report so far. Will Depth Jams catch on like game jams did? I [[Please Finish Your Game|hope so]], but I don't know, and that's largely up to you. We'll almost certainly do another one at some point in the future, but it seems Depth Jams are most valuable at specific times in a game's development cycle, so it doesn't feel like an every-year type thing for us. Time will tell, and keep me posted on your Depth Jams if you do them. Also, feel free to ask questions and I'll try to update this article with answers.<br />
<br />
Daniel wrote about the jam [http://www.ludomancy.com/blog/2012/05/25/depth-jam/ here].<br />
<references/><br />
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[[Category:Design]]<br />
[[Category:Games]]</div>Checkerhttps://www.chrishecker.com/index.php?title=Game_Object_Systems&diff=2656Game Object Systems2021-09-12T02:37:31Z<p>Checker: </p>
<hr />
<div>Designing object systems for games interests me a lot, and I've interviewed a number of developers about how their object systems work. Eventually I'll write up some stuff here. In the meantime, at a conference in Seoul, Korea that Casey Muratori, Jon Blow, Doug Church, and I put together years ago, we collated some of the information we'd gathered from other developers, and Doug gave a talk about his experience with the Thief object system. <br />
<br />
You can see the PowerPoint [[Media:ObjSys.ppt|here]]. <br />
<br />
This page is mostly a placeholder so that ppt has a place to live while I fill in my site.<br />
<br />
{{todo}}<br />
<br />
[[Category:Programming]]<br />
[[Category:Lectures]]</div>Checkerhttps://www.chrishecker.com/index.php?title=About/Me&diff=2655About/Me2021-09-03T11:39:59Z<p>Checker: </p>
<hr />
<div><blockquote style="color:#f00;"><br />
'''''Very important: The material on this website represents my personal opinion, not that of my employer, my family, my friends, my coworkers, or anybody else. Please do not represent me as anybody but "Chris Hecker" if you're going to quote from these pages. Thank you.'''''<br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
===Contact Info===<br />
{|align=right<br />
|__TOC__<br />
|}<br />
<blockquote><br />
'''Chris Hecker'''<br><br />
http://chrishecker.com<br><br />
checker 'at' d6.com<br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
I get a lot of email. I try to read it all and respond, but it takes time, and it seems I'm increasingly short of time. Sorry about that.<br />
<br />
===Professional Bio===<br />
Here's the bio I use for [[:Category:Lectures|lectures]], [[:Category:Articles|articles]], conferences, and whatnot:<br />
<br />
'''Chris Hecker'''<br><br />
'''''[http://www.d6.com definition six, inc.]'''''<br />
<br />
Chris focuses on solving hard problems at the intersection of gameplay, aesthetics, and technology. He is an outspoken advocate for pushing the current boundaries of design and interactivity, in the hope that games will eventually reach their full potential as a medium. To this end he helped organize the [http://www.indiegamejam.org Indie Game Jam], the [http://www.experimental-gameplay.org Experimental Gameplay Workshop], and [[The Depth Jam]], and his recent work on [[My Liner Notes for Spore|Spore]] centered on using proceduralism and artificial intelligence to enhance player creativity and agency. Chris has been on the advisory board for the [[Game Developers Conference]] for many years and is a regular speaker at the GDC, Siggraph, and other conferences. A frequent contributor to Game Developer magazine, Chris was the technical columnist for the magazine for two years and the Editor-at-Large for three, and was on the editorial board of the computer graphics research publication, [http://jgt.akpeters.com The Journal of Graphics Tools]. He has worked at both ends of the development spectrum, as a one-man indie game developer with his company [http://www.d6.com definition six, inc.] and on a hundred-person team at [http://www.maxis.com Maxis/Electronic Arts]. His professional goal is to help games become the preeminent art and entertainment form of the 21st century. His current project is [http://spyparty.com SpyParty], an indie game about subtle human behavior and deception.<br />
<br />
=== Headshots ===<br />
<center><br />
{|width=200px <br />
|align=center|<br />
[[Image:Checker-gdc10.jpg|Chris Hecker|200px]]<br />
<br />
<small>Here's one from the [http://www.flickr.com/photos/officialgdc/4425421495/ Official GDC 2010 Flickr set]. I like this one, please use it.</small><br />
|}<br />
<br />
{|width=200px <br />
|align=center|<br />
[[Image:Checker-headshot-closed.png|Chris Hecker|100px]]<br />
<br />
<small>Here's the boring and goofy headshot I used to use.</small><br />
|}<br />
<br />
{|width=200px <br />
|align=center|<br />
[[Image:Checker-migs.jpg|Chris Hecker|200px]]<br />
<br />
<small>Here's an ''action shot'' of me lecturing in Montreal in 2007.</small><br />
|}<br />
<br />
{|width=200px <br />
|align=center|<br />
[[Image:Checker-old-headshot.png|Chris Hecker|100px]]<br />
<br />
<small>I kinda like this really old one. It's less boring than the first headshot, but perhaps even more goofy, since I was hiking near Crested Butte, CO.</small><br />
|}<br />
</center><br />
<br />
=== Personal ===<br />
<br />
I'll write some more general stuff about me here at some point. For now, you get my bio and headshot.<br />
<br />
[[Elvis Has Left The Building|Until recently]], I was a ''Technology Fellow'' at [http://www.maxis.com Maxis/Electronic Arts]. I'm not sure what the title meant either. A friend once quipped I was higher ranked than a ''Technology Chap'', but lower ranked than a ''Technology Gentleman''.<br />
<br />
Here's my old "About Me" blurb from my original webpage, '''which is out of date''' (i.e. do not use it as my bio, see [[#Professional Bio|above]]), but has the rough outline of my life in it (Parsons -> Microsoft -> d6 -> Maxis):<br />
<br />
<blockquote><i><br />
I'm Technical and Art Director of definition six, inc., the small startup game company three friends and I founded in 1995. The Technical Director side of me worked at Microsoft for three years doing various game and graphics programming. The Art Director side went to Parson's School of Design in NYC to be an illustrator. I realized that, while the school has a great reputation, in my opinion it was severely lacking on the education front. I dropped out during sophomore year and studied independently with some of the professors there, sitting in on their life drawing classes and whatnot. One day I made the mistake of buying a computer magazine and it got me interested in programming. The best thing about the game industry is it mixes totally different disciplines, like art and programming, so it gives me a chance to exercise both sides of my brain equally! There's no other industry like it.<br />
</i></blockquote><br />
<br />
=== PGP Public Key ===<br />
Also available at [https://keyserver.ubuntu.com/pks/lookup?search=checker%40d6.com&fingerprint=on&op=index Ubuntu's PGP keyserver] and it's Key ID 0xD8DE7218.<br />
<blockquote><small><pre style="line-height:1em"><br />
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</pre></small></blockquote></div>Checkerhttps://www.chrishecker.com/index.php?title=Homepage&diff=2654Homepage2019-08-25T10:12:55Z<p>Checker: </p>
<hr />
<div>__NOTOC__<br />
<h2 style="clear:none;">Chris Hecker's Homepage</h2><br />
<br />
{{simplerecentchangesrighttable|num=5}}<br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
[[Good Enough|''"The good-enough is the enemy of the excellent."''<div style="text-align:right;margin-right:25em;">- John Miles</div>]]<br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
Welcome to my website. Here you'll find my writing, programming, design, art, and other miscellanea usually, but not always, relating to game development. <br />
<br />
I made my original website in 1997, and then proceeded to not update it for 9 years. I finally got around to making this new one, and I'm really happy with the way it's turning out. '''''(Well, except right this instant because I had to update some server stuff and that broke everything including my fancy skin so now it looks like my first wiki...)''''' I use [[About/Website|MediaWiki]] as the engine for the site, and I'm excited to use tons of amazing Web 2.0 technology to create a website that looks exactly like my old hand-coded site, made with [[emacs]] and raw html, 10 years ago! Now ''that'' is progress! If you're interested in the gory details, you can [[About/Website|read more about it]].<br />
<br />
I hope you enjoy my work. Most of the material on this site is from my [[:Category:lectures|lectures]] at the [[Game Developers Conference]] and other conferences, my [[:Category:articles|articles]] in [[Game Developer Magazine]], and my exploration of game technology and design. I went to the trouble to set up this fancy database-driven website so I could put original material up more frequently, so we'll see how that goes. <br />
<br />
I believe it's incredibly important for game developers&mdash;and everybody, really&mdash;to openly share information about their craft, whether you're an artist, programmer, designer, musician, business person, or whatever. I've always had an amazing return on investment from sharing information...the more I share, the more I get back in terms of goodwill, learning new information from others, and meeting interesting people. But, more importantly, sharing information moves our [[Games|art form and industry]] forward faster, which benefits us all.<br />
<br />
=== Navigating ===<br />
<br />
{{navigate}}<br />
<br />
Thanks for stopping by!</div>Checkerhttps://www.chrishecker.com/index.php?title=Chris_Hecker%27s_Website:About&diff=2653Chris Hecker's Website:About2019-08-25T07:05:37Z<p>Checker: Redirected page to About/Website</p>
<hr />
<div>#REDIRECT [[About/Website]]</div>Checkerhttps://www.chrishecker.com/index.php?title=Sandbox/Test2&diff=2652Sandbox/Test22019-08-24T22:15:17Z<p>Checker: </p>
<hr />
<div>major edit creation.<br />
<br />
<math>\textstyle R^n \Rightarrow R^n abcdefgh \int_a^b</math><br />
<br />
[[Image:Test3.svg]]</div>Checkerhttps://www.chrishecker.com/index.php?title=Going_Against_The_Grain&diff=2649Going Against The Grain2019-08-21T18:53:56Z<p>Checker: </p>
<hr />
<div>__NOTOC__<br />
I think art forms have a ''grain'', much like a piece of wood. Going with this grain when making works in the form is easy, and going against the grain is hard.<br />
<br />
Unfortunately for those of us who want games to earn a place in the pantheon of important and emotionally compelling art and entertainment forms&mdash;alongside film, literature, music, and visual art&mdash;I think the grain of games and interactivity is in some sense running the ''wrong way''; it leads us away from this goal.<br />
<br />
What do I mean?<br />
<br />
===Film===<br />
<br />
'''What's the easiest film to make?''' <br />
<blockquote><br />
It's pretty obvious when you think about it: you stick a camera in a room, and you or your friends sit down in front of it. And you talk to each other or the camera.<br />
<br />
<center><br />
[[Image:youtube-engaged.png]]<br>[[Image:termsend.jpg]]<br />
</center><br />
<br />
The most important characteristic of the resulting footage is that it's about people, and because you are not a beautiful and unique snowflake, it most likely covers issues about which everybody else who might watch it can relate and empathize. It's drama, or maybe comedy, and it probably speaks to the human condition (poorly, if you believe [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law Sturgeon's Law], but no matter). <br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
'''What's the hardest film to make?'''<br />
<blockquote><br />
Again, an easy answer: it's probably something with tons of special effects about spaceships and aliens and explosions, happening on distant planets. You need to hire Industrial Light and Magic to make this movie, and they're expensive.<br />
<br><br><br />
<center>[[Image:Battle of Endor.jpg]]</center><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
===Games===<br />
<br />
'''What's the easiest game to make?'''<br />
<blockquote><br />
This answer too is obvious: you draw two triangles on the screen and let the player move one of them around, and then if the player pushes a button, you draw a dot that comes out of the front of his triangle. If the player's dot touches the other triangle, that triangle disappears and the player wins.<br />
<center>[[Image:spacewar-crop.png|350px]]</center><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
'''What's the hardest game to make?''' <br />
<blockquote><br />
A game where the core interactivity is about a bunch of normal people sitting in a room talking about emotionally deep things is incredibly difficult to make at all<ref>See Andrew Stern's [http://grandtextauto.gatech.edu/2005/08/09/a-few-facade-post-release-comments Post Release Comments] about [http://www.interactivestory.net Façade].</ref>, and currently completely impossible to make in such a way that the interactivity is deeply emotionally compelling, in my opinion<ref>I think Façade was a noble failure. It is really truly great that they tried, but I don't think it succeeded in being emotionally compelling. I'll write about it in detail at some point</ref>.<br />
<center>[[Image:facade.jpg]]</center><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
===Going Against The Grain===<br />
<br />
If you buy this argument, it was basically inevitable that film would become an important art and entertainment form: it is ''relatively'' easy to make movies that matter to people.<br />
<br />
By contrast, the exact opposite is true of games. It's quite easy with games to appeal to the tried and true [[Power Fantasy|power fantasy]], frustration, and exploration, but getting people to experience deeper emotions via interactivity (as opposed to merely in cut scenes) is just incredibly hard, and we don't really know how to do it right now. Worse yet, people don't work on it as much as they should because it is actually difficult ''to work on''. In other words, not only do we have the challenges that all art forms face of making something truly meaningful, but just making something that ''could be'' meaningful is hard in our form. The very act of making it is more painful, because our grain keeps pushing us back towards putting a gun at the bottom of the screen and a score at the top.<br />
<br />
According to Scott McCloud, comics went through a very similar phase when color printing first appeared, and it basically screwed them for 50 years.<br />
<br />
<center>[[Image:mccloud-color.jpg]]<br/><br />
<div style="width:70%; text-align:justify; line-height:1em;"><small>''To counteract the dulling effects of newsprint and to stand out from the competition, costumed heroes were clad in '''bright, primary colors''' and fought in a '''bright primary world!'''''</small></div></center><br />
<br />
===Are we doomed?===<br />
<br />
Whether all this means we're doomed to fail at getting into the aforementioned pantheon depends a lot on what we as developers do every day. Some people hope that "middleware" will save the day, by abstracting away all the difficult stuff, and basically changing the direction of the grain. I think that's possible in the very long run, but for the next 10 to 20 years we need to be discovering the building blocks of interactivity that will let us communicate with players on an emotional level. There will of course be some bits of the problem that can be wrapped and lifted up to a higher level, like some rendering and physics, but the core algorithms of the game will need to be custom to explore this new ground, because those algorithms ''are'' the interactivity and the gameplay, as I will write about in another article.<br />
<br />
So, for the time being, we have a very tough row to hoe. We need to consciously take the hard route and go against the grain if we're going to make games that matter.<br />
<center>[[Image:sims2.jpg|300px]] [[Image:ico-hands.jpg|289px]]</center><br />
<br />
===Related===<br />
<br />
* Chris Crawford mentions going with the grain when developing games when it comes to making technical design decisions in [http://www.vancouver.wsu.edu/fac/peabody/game-book/Chapter4.html Chapter 4 of The Art of Computer Game Design]. He uses hexgrids versus rectgrids for wargames as an example.<br />
<br />
* Rod Humble briefly mentions the concept of a grain to the form, or at least a grain for the process of developing games, in his page for his game [http://www.rodvik.com/rodgames/ The Marriage]. He talks about going with the grain during the game's development, but the game is about how it feels to be married, which is very far away from my Spacewar example above and is the direction in which I think we need to go, which I find interesting.<br />
<br />
* Michael Brough talks about the grain of games from a development and artistic expression standpoint in his post [http://mightyvision.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/do-something-to-videogames.html "do something to videogames"]. Here's the video of the lecture where he talks more about his thoughts on this, titled [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYXInr3N5UQ Going With The Grain].<br />
<br />
* [http://vectorpoem.com/ JP LeBreton] sent me this delightful link, [http://ludusnovus.net/2011/08/15/why-so-few-violent-games/ Why So Few Violent Games?] It's a great read, a perfect piece of satire, and it actually calls into question a bunch of the assumptions about the grain of our form I've made here. A must read!<br />
<br />
<references/><br />
<br />
[[Category:Opinions]]<br />
[[Category:Design]]</div>Checkerhttps://www.chrishecker.com/index.php?title=Widget:MyPlick&diff=2648Widget:MyPlick2019-08-16T21:23:44Z<p>Checker: </p>
<hr />
<div><noinclude><br />
This widget allows you to add MyPlick player to your wiki page.<br />
<br />
It was created by [[About/Me|Chris Hecker]].<br />
<br />
== Using this widget ==<br />
For information on how to use this widget, see [http://www.mediawikiwidgets.org/YouTube widget description page on MediaWikiWidgets.org].<br />
<br />
== Copy to your site ==<br />
To use this widget on your site, just install [http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Widgets MediaWiki Widgets extension] and copy [{{fullurl:{{FULLPAGENAME}}|action=edit}} full source code] of this page to your wiki as '''{{FULLPAGENAME}}''' article.<br />
</noinclude><includeonly><center><b><i>Welp, the web service I was using for the slide syncing died, so I'll have to redo it on youtube I guess.</i></b></center></includeonly></div>Checkerhttps://www.chrishecker.com/index.php?title=Widget:MyPlick&diff=2647Widget:MyPlick2019-08-16T21:22:02Z<p>Checker: </p>
<hr />
<div><noinclude><br />
This widget allows you to add MyPlick player to your wiki page.<br />
<br />
It was created by [[About/Me|Chris Hecker]].<br />
<br />
== Using this widget ==<br />
For information on how to use this widget, see [http://www.mediawikiwidgets.org/YouTube widget description page on MediaWikiWidgets.org].<br />
<br />
== Copy to your site ==<br />
To use this widget on your site, just install [http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Widgets MediaWiki Widgets extension] and copy [{{fullurl:{{FULLPAGENAME}}|action=edit}} full source code] of this page to your wiki as '''{{FULLPAGENAME}}''' article.<br />
</noinclude><includeonly><center>'''''Welp, the web service I was using for the slide syncing died, so I'll have to redo it on youtube I guess.'''''</center></includeonly></div>Checkerhttps://www.chrishecker.com/index.php?title=Help:Editing&diff=2646Help:Editing2019-08-16T21:21:36Z<p>Checker: Created page with "https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Formatting"</p>
<hr />
<div>https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Formatting</div>Checkerhttps://www.chrishecker.com/index.php?title=Widget:MyPlick&diff=2645Widget:MyPlick2019-08-16T21:20:37Z<p>Checker: </p>
<hr />
<div><noinclude><br />
This widget allows you to add MyPlick player to your wiki page.<br />
<br />
It was created by [[About/Me|Chris Hecker]].<br />
<br />
== Using this widget ==<br />
For information on how to use this widget, see [http://www.mediawikiwidgets.org/YouTube widget description page on MediaWikiWidgets.org].<br />
<br />
== Copy to your site ==<br />
To use this widget on your site, just install [http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Widgets MediaWiki Widgets extension] and copy [{{fullurl:{{FULLPAGENAME}}|action=edit}} full source code] of this page to your wiki as '''{{FULLPAGENAME}}''' article.<br />
</noinclude><includeonly><center>Welp, the web service I was using for the slide syncing died, so I'll have to redo it on youtube I guess.</center></includeonly></div>Checkerhttps://www.chrishecker.com/index.php?title=Widget:YouTube&diff=2644Widget:YouTube2019-08-16T20:52:08Z<p>Checker: </p>
<hr />
<div><noinclude><br />
This widget allows you to add YouTube video player to your wiki page.<br />
<br />
It was created by [http://www.mediawikiwidgets.org/User:Yaron_Koren Yaron Koren].<br />
<br />
== Using this widget ==<br />
For information on how to use this widget, see [http://www.mediawikiwidgets.org/YouTube widget description page on MediaWikiWidgets.org].<br />
<br />
== Copy to your site ==<br />
To use this widget on your site, just install [http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Widgets MediaWiki Widgets extension] and copy [{{fullurl:{{FULLPAGENAME}}|action=edit}} full source code] of this page to your wiki as '''{{FULLPAGENAME}}''' article.<br />
</noinclude><includeonly><iframe width="<!--{$width|escape|default:425}-->" height="<!--{$height|escape|default:355}-->" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/<!--{$id|escape:'urlpathinfo'}-->" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe></includeonly></div>Checkerhttps://www.chrishecker.com/index.php?title=Widget:Vimeo&diff=2643Widget:Vimeo2019-08-16T20:47:18Z<p>Checker: </p>
<hr />
<div><noinclude>__NOTOC__<br />
This widget allows you to embed '''[http://www.vimeo.com/ Vimeo]''' on your wiki page.<br />
<br />
Created by [http://www.mediawikiwidgets.org/User:Sergey_Chernyshev Sergey Chernyshev]<br />
<br />
== Using this widget ==<br />
For information on how to use this widget, see [http://www.mediawikiwidgets.org/Vimeo widget description page on MediaWikiWidgets.org].<br />
<br />
== Copy to your site ==<br />
To use this widget on your site, just install [http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Widgets MediaWiki Widgets extension] and copy [{{fullurl:{{FULLPAGENAME}}|action=edit}} full source code] of this page to your wiki as '''{{FULLPAGENAME}}''' article.<br />
</noinclude><includeonly><iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/<!--{$id|escape:'urlpathinfo'}-->" width="<!--{$width|default:400|escape:'html'}-->" height="<!--{$height|default:300|escape:'html'}-->" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; fullscreen" allowfullscreen></iframe></includeonly></div>Checkerhttps://www.chrishecker.com/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Header&diff=2642MediaWiki:Header2019-08-13T07:19:09Z<p>Checker: </p>
<hr />
<div>[//chrishecker.com/Special:WikiFeeds/rss/recentarticlechanges <small>RSS</small>]<br />
[[File:Rss.png|link=//chrishecker.com/Special:WikiFeeds/rss/recentarticlechanges]]<br />
<br/><br />
[http://twitter.com/checker <small><b>@checker</b></small>]<br />
[[File:Twitter.png|link=http://twitter.com/checker]]<br />
<br/><br/><br />
[http://spyparty.com <small><small><small>MY NEW SPY GAME</small></small></small><br/> <small>'''SpyParty'''</small>]<br/><br />
[[File:Twitter-small.png|link=http://twitter.com/spyparty]]<br />
[[File:Rss-small.png|link=http://spyparty.com/feed]]<br />
[[File:Facebook-small.png|link=http://facebook.com/spyparty]]&nbsp;</div>Checkerhttps://www.chrishecker.com/index.php?title=File:Facebook-small.png&diff=2641File:Facebook-small.png2019-08-13T07:17:30Z<p>Checker: </p>
<hr />
<div></div>Checkerhttps://www.chrishecker.com/index.php?title=File:Rss-small.png&diff=2640File:Rss-small.png2019-08-13T07:17:21Z<p>Checker: </p>
<hr />
<div></div>Checkerhttps://www.chrishecker.com/index.php?title=File:Twitter-small.png&diff=2639File:Twitter-small.png2019-08-13T07:17:12Z<p>Checker: </p>
<hr />
<div></div>Checkerhttps://www.chrishecker.com/index.php?title=File:Twitter.png&diff=2638File:Twitter.png2019-08-13T07:16:19Z<p>Checker: </p>
<hr />
<div></div>Checkerhttps://www.chrishecker.com/index.php?title=File:Rss.png&diff=2637File:Rss.png2019-08-13T07:12:04Z<p>Checker: rss</p>
<hr />
<div>rss</div>Checkerhttps://www.chrishecker.com/index.php?title=Sandbox/Test&diff=2636Sandbox/Test2019-08-13T07:01:42Z<p>Checker: </p>
<hr />
<div>This is a test of a minor edit creation.<br />
<br />
[//facebook.com/spyparty https://chrishecker.com/skins/checker/facebook-small.png]<br />
<br />
<br />
this is some inline math <math>\textstyle R^n a \dot b \ddot c \int_e^f g^{L_M} \dot \ddot a \boxdot e \hat{\ddot{\tilde{W}}} \leftrightsquigarrow \Leftarrow R^n</math> to test things out.<br />
<br />
[[Image:test.png|144px]]<br />
<br />
<math>\mathbf{hi}</math><br />
<br />
This is another test, this time of the Drafts extension.<br />
<br />
Time for another draft.<ref>Hi, this is the new Cite.</ref><br />
<br />
hello.<br />
<br />
wtf<br />
<br />
this is a change<br />
<br />
another change<br />
<br />
yet another change.<br />
<br />
changing it again!<br />
<br />
and another time!<br />
<br />
hi there, please work<br />
<br />
why isn't it working?<br />
<br />
please please please<br />
<br />
maybe this time<br />
<br />
oy vey<br />
<br />
why am I mocked?<br />
<br />
hello god, are you listening?<br />
<br />
this is never going to work<br />
<br />
die in a fire<br />
<br />
please!<br />
<br />
gzip?!<br />
<br />
maybe this one will work<br />
<br />
yay!<br />
acl test<br />
<br />
<references/></div>Checkerhttps://www.chrishecker.com/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Header&diff=2635MediaWiki:Header2019-08-13T07:01:32Z<p>Checker: </p>
<hr />
<div>[//chrishecker.com/Special:WikiFeeds/rss/recentarticlechanges <small>RSS</small>]<br />
[//chrishecker.com/Special:WikiFeeds/rss/recentarticlechanges https://chrishecker.com/skins/checker/rss.png] <br />
<br/><br />
[http://twitter.com/checker <small><b>@checker</b></small>]<br />
[http://twitter.com/checker https://chrishecker.com/skins/checker/twitter.png]<br />
<br/><br/><br />
[http://spyparty.com <small><small><small>MY NEW SPY GAME</small></small></small><br/> <small>'''SpyParty'''</small>]<br/><br />
[http://twitter.com/spyparty https://chrishecker.com/skins/checker/twitter-small.png]<br />
[http://spyparty.com/feed https://chrishecker.com/skins/checker/rss-small.png]<br />
[http://facebook.com/spyparty https://chrishecker.com/skins/checker/facebook-small.png]&nbsp;</div>Checkerhttps://www.chrishecker.com/index.php?title=Sandbox/Test2&diff=2634Sandbox/Test22013-05-22T01:19:49Z<p>Checker: </p>
<hr />
<div>major edit creation.<br />
<br />
<math>\textstyle R^n \Rightarrow R^n abcdefgh</math><br />
<br />
[[Image:Test3.svg]]</div>Checkerhttps://www.chrishecker.com/index.php?title=Going_Against_The_Grain&diff=2633Going Against The Grain2013-05-16T08:29:05Z<p>Checker: </p>
<hr />
<div>__NOTOC__<br />
I think art forms have a ''grain'', much like a piece of wood. Going with this grain when making works in the form is easy, and going against the grain is hard.<br />
<br />
Unfortunately for those of us who want games to earn a place in the pantheon of important and emotionally compelling art and entertainment forms&mdash;alongside film, literature, music, and visual art&mdash;I think the grain of games and interactivity is in some sense running the ''wrong way''; it leads us away from this goal.<br />
<br />
What do I mean?<br />
<br />
===Film===<br />
<br />
'''What's the easiest film to make?''' <br />
<blockquote><br />
It's pretty obvious when you think about it: you stick a camera in a room, and you or your friends sit down in front of it. And you talk to each other or the camera.<br />
<br />
<center><br />
[[Image:youtube-engaged.png]]<br>[[Image:termsend.jpg]]<br />
</center><br />
<br />
The most important characteristic of the resulting footage is that it's about people, and because you are not a beautiful and unique snowflake, it most likely covers issues about which everybody else who might watch it can relate and empathize. It's drama, or maybe comedy, and it probably speaks to the human condition (poorly, if you believe [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law Sturgeon's Law], but no matter). <br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
'''What's the hardest film to make?'''<br />
<blockquote><br />
Again, an easy answer: it's probably something with tons of special effects about spaceships and aliens and explosions, happening on distant planets. You need to hire Industrial Light and Magic to make this movie, and they're expensive.<br />
<br><br><br />
<center>[[Image:Battle of Endor.jpg]]</center><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
===Games===<br />
<br />
'''What's the easiest game to make?'''<br />
<blockquote><br />
This answer too is obvious: you draw two triangles on the screen and let the player move one of them around, and then if the player pushes a button, you draw a dot that comes out of the front of his triangle. If the player's dot touches the other triangle, that triangle disappears and the player wins.<br />
<center>[[Image:spacewar-crop.png|350px]]</center><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
'''What's the hardest game to make?''' <br />
<blockquote><br />
A game where the core interactivity is about a bunch of normal people sitting in a room talking about emotionally deep things is incredibly difficult to make at all<ref>See Andrew Stern's [http://grandtextauto.gatech.edu/2005/08/09/a-few-facade-post-release-comments Post Release Comments] about [http://www.interactivestory.net Façade].</ref>, and currently completely impossible to make in such a way that the interactivity is deeply emotionally compelling, in my opinion<ref>I think Façade was a noble failure. It is really truly great that they tried, but I don't think it succeeded in being emotionally compelling. I'll write about it in detail at some point</ref>.<br />
<center>[[Image:facade.jpg]]</center><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
===Going Against The Grain===<br />
<br />
If you buy this argument, it was basically inevitable that film would become an important art and entertainment form: it is ''relatively'' easy to make movies that matter to people.<br />
<br />
By contrast, the exact opposite is true of games. It's quite easy with games to appeal to the tried and true [[Power Fantasy|power fantasy]], frustration, and exploration, but getting people to experience deeper emotions via interactivity (as opposed to merely in cut scenes) is just incredibly hard, and we don't really know how to do it right now. Worse yet, people don't work on it as much as they should because it is actually difficult ''to work on''. In other words, not only do we have the challenges that all art forms face of making something truly meaningful, but just making something that ''could be'' meaningful is hard in our form. The very act of making it is more painful, because our grain keeps pushing us back towards putting a gun at the bottom of the screen and a score at the top.<br />
<br />
According to Scott McCloud, comics went through a very similar phase when color printing first appeared, and it basically screwed them for 50 years.<br />
<br />
<center>[[Image:mccloud-color.jpg]]</center><br />
<br />
===Are we doomed?===<br />
<br />
Whether all this means we're doomed to fail at getting into the aforementioned pantheon depends a lot on what we as developers do every day. Some people hope that "middleware" will save the day, by abstracting away all the difficult stuff, and basically changing the direction of the grain. I think that's possible in the very long run, but for the next 10 to 20 years we need to be discovering the building blocks of interactivity that will let us communicate with players on an emotional level. There will of course be some bits of the problem that can be wrapped and lifted up to a higher level, like some rendering and physics, but the core algorithms of the game will need to be custom to explore this new ground, because those algorithms ''are'' the interactivity and the gameplay, as I will write about in another article.<br />
<br />
So, for the time being, we have a very tough row to hoe. We need to consciously take the hard route and go against the grain if we're going to make games that matter.<br />
<center>[[Image:sims2.jpg|300px]] [[Image:ico-hands.jpg|289px]]</center><br />
<br />
===Related===<br />
<br />
* Chris Crawford mentions going with the grain when developing games when it comes to making technical design decisions in [http://www.vancouver.wsu.edu/fac/peabody/game-book/Chapter4.html Chapter 4 of The Art of Computer Game Design]. He uses hexgrids versus rectgrids for wargames as an example.<br />
<br />
* Rod Humble briefly mentions the concept of a grain to the form, or at least a grain for the process of developing games, in his page for his game [http://www.rodvik.com/rodgames/ The Marriage]. He talks about going with the grain during the game's development, but the game is about how it feels to be married, which is very far away from my Spacewar example above and is the direction in which I think we need to go, which I find interesting.<br />
<br />
* Michael Brough talks about the grain of games from a development and artistic expression standpoint in his post [http://mightyvision.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/do-something-to-videogames.html "do something to videogames"]. Here's the video of the lecture where he talks more about his thoughts on this, titled [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYXInr3N5UQ Going With The Grain].<br />
<br />
* [http://vectorpoem.com/ JP LeBreton] sent me this delightful link, [http://ludusnovus.net/2011/08/15/why-so-few-violent-games/ Why So Few Violent Games?] It's a great read, a perfect piece of satire, and it actually calls into question a bunch of the assumptions about the grain of our form I've made here. A must read!<br />
<br />
<references/><br />
<br />
[[Category:Opinions]]<br />
[[Category:Design]]</div>Checkerhttps://www.chrishecker.com/index.php?title=Going_Against_The_Grain&diff=2632Going Against The Grain2013-05-14T20:38:46Z<p>Checker: </p>
<hr />
<div>__NOTOC__<br />
I think art forms have a ''grain'', much like a piece of wood. Going with this grain when making works in the form is easy, and going against the grain is hard.<br />
<br />
Unfortunately for those of us who want games to earn a place in the pantheon of important and emotionally compelling art and entertainment forms&mdash;alongside film, literature, music, and visual art&mdash;I think the grain of games and interactivity is in some sense running the ''wrong way''; it leads us away from this goal.<br />
<br />
What do I mean?<br />
<br />
===Film===<br />
<br />
'''What's the easiest film to make?''' <br />
<blockquote><br />
It's pretty obvious when you think about it: you stick a camera in a room, and you or your friends sit down in front of it. And you talk to each other or the camera.<br />
<br />
<center><br />
[[Image:youtube-engaged.png]]<br>[[Image:termsend.jpg]]<br />
</center><br />
<br />
The most important characteristic of the resulting footage is that it's about people, and because you are not a beautiful and unique snowflake, it most likely covers issues about which everybody else who might watch it can relate and empathize. It's drama, or maybe comedy, and it probably speaks to the human condition (poorly, if you believe [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law Sturgeon's Law], but no matter). <br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
'''What's the hardest film to make?'''<br />
<blockquote><br />
Again, an easy answer: it's probably something with tons of special effects about spaceships and aliens and explosions, happening on distant planets. You need to hire Industrial Light and Magic to make this movie, and they're expensive.<br />
<br><br><br />
<center>[[Image:Battle of Endor.jpg]]</center><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
===Games===<br />
<br />
'''What's the easiest game to make?'''<br />
<blockquote><br />
This answer too is obvious: you draw two triangles on the screen and let the player move one of them around, and then if the player pushes a button, you draw a dot that comes out of the front of his triangle. If the player's dot touches the other triangle, that triangle disappears and the player wins.<br />
<center>[[Image:spacewar-crop.png|350px]]</center><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
'''What's the hardest game to make?''' <br />
<blockquote><br />
A game where the core interactivity is about a bunch of normal people sitting in a room talking about emotionally deep things is incredibly difficult to make at all<ref>See Andrew Stern's [http://grandtextauto.gatech.edu/2005/08/09/a-few-facade-post-release-comments Post Release Comments] about [http://www.interactivestory.net Façade].</ref>, and currently completely impossible to make in such a way that the interactivity is deeply emotionally compelling, in my opinion<ref>I think Façade was a noble failure. It is really truly great that they tried, but I don't think it succeeded in being emotionally compelling. I'll write about it in detail at some point</ref>.<br />
<center>[[Image:facade.jpg]]</center><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
===Going Against The Grain===<br />
<br />
If you buy this argument, it was basically inevitable that film would become an important art and entertainment form: it is ''relatively'' easy to make movies that matter to people.<br />
<br />
By contrast, the exact opposite is true of games. It's quite easy with games to appeal to the tried and true [[Power Fantasy|power fantasy]], frustration, and exploration, but getting people to experience deeper emotions via interactivity (as opposed to merely in cut scenes) is just incredibly hard, and we don't really know how to do it right now. Worse yet, people don't work on it as much as they should because it is actually difficult ''to work on''. In other words, not only do we have the challenges that all art forms face of making something truly meaningful, but just making something that ''could be'' meaningful is hard in our form. The very act of making it is more painful, because our grain keeps pushing us back towards putting a gun at the bottom of the screen and a score at the top.<br />
<br />
According to Scott McCloud, comics went through a very similar phase when color printing first appeared, and it basically screwed them for 50 years.<br />
<br />
<center>[[Image:mccloud-color.jpg]]</center><br />
<br />
===Are we doomed?===<br />
<br />
Whether all this means we're doomed to fail at getting into the aforementioned pantheon depends a lot on what we as developers do every day. Some people hope that "middleware" will save the day, by abstracting away all the difficult stuff, and basically changing the direction of the grain. I think that's possible in the very long run, but for the next 10 to 20 years we need to be discovering the building blocks of interactivity that will let us communicate with players on an emotional level. There will of course be some bits of the problem that can be wrapped and lifted up to a higher level, like some rendering and physics, but the core algorithms of the game will need to be custom to explore this new ground, because those algorithms ''are'' the interactivity and the gameplay, as I will write about in another article.<br />
<br />
So, for the time being, we have a very tough row to hoe. We need to consciously take the hard route and go against the grain if we're going to make games that matter.<br />
<center>[[Image:sims2.jpg|300px]] [[Image:ico-hands.jpg|289px]]</center><br />
<br />
===Related===<br />
<br />
* Chris Crawford mentions going with the grain when developing games when it comes to making technical design decisions in [http://www.vancouver.wsu.edu/fac/peabody/game-book/Chapter4.html Chapter 4 of The Art of Computer Game Design]. He uses hexgrids versus rectgrids for wargames as an example.<br />
<br />
* Rod Humble briefly mentions the concept of a grain to the form, or at least a grain for the process of developing games, in his page for his game [http://www.rodvik.com/rodgames/ The Marriage]. He talks about going with the grain during the game's development, but the game is about how it feels to be married, which is very far away from my Spacewar example above and is the direction in which I think we need to go, which I find interesting.<br />
<br />
* Michael Brough talks about the grain of games from a development and artistic expression standpoint in his post [http://mightyvision.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/do-something-to-videogames.html "do something to videogames"].<br />
<br />
* [http://vectorpoem.com/ JP LeBreton] sent me this delightful link, [http://ludusnovus.net/2011/08/15/why-so-few-violent-games/ Why So Few Violent Games?] It's a great read, a perfect piece of satire, and it actually calls into question a bunch of the assumptions about the grain of our form I've made here. A must read!<br />
<br />
<references/><br />
<br />
[[Category:Opinions]]<br />
[[Category:Design]]</div>Checkerhttps://www.chrishecker.com/index.php?title=Going_Against_The_Grain&diff=2631Going Against The Grain2013-05-14T20:37:45Z<p>Checker: </p>
<hr />
<div>__NOTOC__<br />
I think art forms have a ''grain'', much like a piece of wood. Going with this grain when making works in the form is easy, and going against the grain is hard.<br />
<br />
Unfortunately for those of us who want games to earn a place in the pantheon of important and emotionally compelling art and entertainment forms&mdash;alongside film, literature, music, and visual art&mdash;I think the grain of games and interactivity is in some sense running the ''wrong way''; it leads us away from this goal.<br />
<br />
What do I mean?<br />
<br />
===Film===<br />
<br />
'''What's the easiest film to make?''' <br />
<blockquote><br />
It's pretty obvious when you think about it: you stick a camera in a room, and you or your friends sit down in front of it. And you talk to each other or the camera.<br />
<br />
<center><br />
[[Image:youtube-engaged.png]]<br>[[Image:termsend.jpg]]<br />
</center><br />
<br />
The most important characteristic of the resulting footage is that it's about people, and because you are not a beautiful and unique snowflake, it most likely covers issues about which everybody else who might watch it can relate and empathize. It's drama, or maybe comedy, and it probably speaks to the human condition (poorly, if you believe [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law Sturgeon's Law], but no matter). <br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
'''What's the hardest film to make?'''<br />
<blockquote><br />
Again, an easy answer: it's probably something with tons of special effects about spaceships and aliens and explosions, happening on distant planets. You need to hire Industrial Light and Magic to make this movie, and they're expensive.<br />
<br><br><br />
<center>[[Image:Battle of Endor.jpg]]</center><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
===Games===<br />
<br />
'''What's the easiest game to make?'''<br />
<blockquote><br />
This answer too is obvious: you draw two triangles on the screen and let the player move one of them around, and then if the player pushes a button, you draw a dot that comes out of the front of his triangle. If the player's dot touches the other triangle, that triangle disappears and the player wins.<br />
<center>[[Image:spacewar-crop.png|350px]]</center><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
'''What's the hardest game to make?''' <br />
<blockquote><br />
A game where the core interactivity is about a bunch of normal people sitting in a room talking about emotionally deep things is incredibly difficult to make at all<ref>See Andrew Stern's [http://grandtextauto.gatech.edu/2005/08/09/a-few-facade-post-release-comments Post Release Comments] about [http://www.interactivestory.net Façade].</ref>, and currently completely impossible to make in such a way that the interactivity is deeply emotionally compelling, in my opinion<ref>I think Façade was a noble failure. It is really truly great that they tried, but I don't think it succeeded in being emotionally compelling. I'll write about it in detail at some point</ref>.<br />
<center>[[Image:facade.jpg]]</center><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
===Going Against The Grain===<br />
<br />
If you buy this argument, it was basically inevitable that film would become an important art and entertainment form: it is ''relatively'' easy to make movies that matter to people.<br />
<br />
By contrast, the exact opposite is true of games. It's quite easy with games to appeal to the tried and true [[Power Fantasy|power fantasy]], frustration, and exploration, but getting people to experience deeper emotions via interactivity (as opposed to merely in cut scenes) is just incredibly hard, and we don't really know how to do it right now. Worse yet, people don't work on it as much as they should because it is actually difficult ''to work on''. In other words, not only do we have the challenges that all art forms face of making something truly meaningful, but just making something that ''could be'' meaningful is hard in our form. The very act of making it is more painful, because our grain keeps pushing us back towards putting a gun at the bottom of the screen and a score at the top.<br />
<br />
According to Scott McCloud, comics went through a very similar phase when color printing first appeared, and it basically screwed them for 50 years.<br />
<br />
<center>[[Image:mccloud-color.jpg]]</center><br />
<br />
===Are we doomed?===<br />
<br />
Whether all this means we're doomed to fail at getting into the aforementioned pantheon depends a lot on what we as developers do every day. Some people hope that "middleware" will save the day, by abstracting away all the difficult stuff, and basically changing the direction of the grain. I think that's possible in the very long run, but for the next 10 to 20 years we need to be discovering the building blocks of interactivity that will let us communicate with players on an emotional level. There will of course be some bits of the problem that can be wrapped and lifted up to a higher level, like some rendering and physics, but the core algorithms of the game will need to be custom to explore this new ground, because those algorithms ''are'' the interactivity and the gameplay, as I will write about in another article.<br />
<br />
So, for the time being, we have a very tough row to hoe. We need to consciously take the hard route and go against the grain if we're going to make games that matter.<br />
<center>[[Image:sims2.jpg|300px]] [[Image:ico-hands.jpg|289px]]</center><br />
<br />
===Related===<br />
<br />
* Chris Crawford mentions going with the grain when developing games when it comes to making technical design decisions in [http://www.vancouver.wsu.edu/fac/peabody/game-book/Chapter4.html Chapter 4 of The Art of Computer Game Design]. He uses hexgrids versus rectgrids for wargames as an example.<br />
<br />
* Rod Humble briefly mentions the concept of a grain to the form, or at least a grain for the process of developing games, in his page for his game [http://www.rodvik.com/rodgames/ The Marriage]. He talks about going with the grain during the game's development, but the game is about how it feels to be married, which is very far away from my Spacewar example above and is the direction in which I think we need to go, which I find interesting.<br />
<br />
* Michael Brough talks about the grain of games from a development and artistic expression standpoint in his post [http://mightyvision.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/do-something-to-videogames.html "do something to videogames"].<br />
<br />
* [http://vectorpoem.com/ JP LeBreton] sent me this delightful link, [http://ludusnovus.net/2011/08/15/why-so-few-violent-games/ Why So Few Violent Games?]<br />
<br />
<references/><br />
<br />
[[Category:Opinions]]<br />
[[Category:Design]]</div>Checkerhttps://www.chrishecker.com/index.php?title=Going_Against_The_Grain&diff=2630Going Against The Grain2013-05-12T22:18:44Z<p>Checker: </p>
<hr />
<div>__NOTOC__<br />
I think art forms have a ''grain'', much like a piece of wood. Going with this grain when making works in the form is easy, and going against the grain is hard.<br />
<br />
Unfortunately for those of us who want games to earn a place in the pantheon of important and emotionally compelling art and entertainment forms&mdash;alongside film, literature, music, and visual art&mdash;I think the grain of games and interactivity is in some sense running the ''wrong way''; it leads us away from this goal.<br />
<br />
What do I mean?<br />
<br />
===Film===<br />
<br />
'''What's the easiest film to make?''' <br />
<blockquote><br />
It's pretty obvious when you think about it: you stick a camera in a room, and you or your friends sit down in front of it. And you talk to each other or the camera.<br />
<br />
<center><br />
[[Image:youtube-engaged.png]]<br>[[Image:termsend.jpg]]<br />
</center><br />
<br />
The most important characteristic of the resulting footage is that it's about people, and because you are not a beautiful and unique snowflake, it most likely covers issues about which everybody else who might watch it can relate and empathize. It's drama, or maybe comedy, and it probably speaks to the human condition (poorly, if you believe [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law Sturgeon's Law], but no matter). <br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
'''What's the hardest film to make?'''<br />
<blockquote><br />
Again, an easy answer: it's probably something with tons of special effects about spaceships and aliens and explosions, happening on distant planets. You need to hire Industrial Light and Magic to make this movie, and they're expensive.<br />
<br><br><br />
<center>[[Image:Battle of Endor.jpg]]</center><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
===Games===<br />
<br />
'''What's the easiest game to make?'''<br />
<blockquote><br />
This answer too is obvious: you draw two triangles on the screen and let the player move one of them around, and then if the player pushes a button, you draw a dot that comes out of the front of his triangle. If the player's dot touches the other triangle, that triangle disappears and the player wins.<br />
<center>[[Image:spacewar-crop.png|350px]]</center><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
'''What's the hardest game to make?''' <br />
<blockquote><br />
A game where the core interactivity is about a bunch of normal people sitting in a room talking about emotionally deep things is incredibly difficult to make at all<ref>See Andrew Stern's [http://grandtextauto.gatech.edu/2005/08/09/a-few-facade-post-release-comments Post Release Comments] about [http://www.interactivestory.net Façade].</ref>, and currently completely impossible to make in such a way that the interactivity is deeply emotionally compelling, in my opinion<ref>I think Façade was a noble failure. It is really truly great that they tried, but I don't think it succeeded in being emotionally compelling. I'll write about it in detail at some point</ref>.<br />
<center>[[Image:facade.jpg]]</center><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
===Going Against The Grain===<br />
<br />
If you buy this argument, it was basically inevitable that film would become an important art and entertainment form: it is ''relatively'' easy to make movies that matter to people.<br />
<br />
By contrast, the exact opposite is true of games. It's quite easy with games to appeal to the tried and true [[Power Fantasy|power fantasy]], frustration, and exploration, but getting people to experience deeper emotions via interactivity (as opposed to merely in cut scenes) is just incredibly hard, and we don't really know how to do it right now. Worse yet, people don't work on it as much as they should because it is actually difficult ''to work on''. In other words, not only do we have the challenges that all art forms face of making something truly meaningful, but just making something that ''could be'' meaningful is hard in our form. The very act of making it is more painful, because our grain keeps pushing us back towards putting a gun at the bottom of the screen and a score at the top.<br />
<br />
According to Scott McCloud, comics went through a very similar phase when color printing first appeared, and it basically screwed them for 50 years.<br />
<br />
<center>[[Image:mccloud-color.jpg]]</center><br />
<br />
===Are we doomed?===<br />
<br />
Whether all this means we're doomed to fail at getting into the aforementioned pantheon depends a lot on what we as developers do every day. Some people hope that "middleware" will save the day, by abstracting away all the difficult stuff, and basically changing the direction of the grain. I think that's possible in the very long run, but for the next 10 to 20 years we need to be discovering the building blocks of interactivity that will let us communicate with players on an emotional level. There will of course be some bits of the problem that can be wrapped and lifted up to a higher level, like some rendering and physics, but the core algorithms of the game will need to be custom to explore this new ground, because those algorithms ''are'' the interactivity and the gameplay, as I will write about in another article.<br />
<br />
So, for the time being, we have a very tough row to hoe. We need to consciously take the hard route and go against the grain if we're going to make games that matter.<br />
<center>[[Image:sims2.jpg|300px]] [[Image:ico-hands.jpg|289px]]</center><br />
<br />
===Related===<br />
<br />
* Chris Crawford mentions going with the grain when developing games when it comes to making technical design decisions in [http://www.vancouver.wsu.edu/fac/peabody/game-book/Chapter4.html Chapter 4 of The Art of Computer Game Design]. He uses hexgrids versus rectgrids for wargames as an example.<br />
<br />
* Rod Humble briefly mentions the concept of a grain to the form, or at least a grain for the process of developing games, in his page for his game [http://www.rodvik.com/rodgames/ The Marriage]. He talks about going with the grain during the game's development, but the game is about how it feels to be married, which is very far away from my Spacewar example above and is the direction in which I think we need to go, which I find interesting.<br />
<br />
* Michael Brough talks about the grain of games from a development and artistic expression standpoint in his post [http://mightyvision.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/do-something-to-videogames.html "do something to videogames"].<br />
<br />
<references/><br />
<br />
[[Category:Opinions]]<br />
[[Category:Design]]</div>Checkerhttps://www.chrishecker.com/index.php?title=About/Me&diff=2629About/Me2013-05-06T21:45:47Z<p>Checker: </p>
<hr />
<div><blockquote style="color:#f00;"><br />
'''''Very important: The material on this website represents my personal opinion, not that of my employer, my family, my friends, my coworkers, or anybody else. Please do not represent me as anybody but "Chris Hecker" if you're going to quote from these pages. Thank you.'''''<br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
===Contact Info===<br />
{|align=right<br />
|__TOC__<br />
|}<br />
<blockquote><br />
'''Chris Hecker'''<br><br />
http://chrishecker.com<br><br />
checker 'at' d6.com<br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
I get a lot of email. I try to read it all and respond, but it takes time, and it seems I'm increasingly short of time. Sorry about that.<br />
<br />
===Professional Bio===<br />
Here's the bio I use for [[:Category:Lectures|lectures]], [[:Category:Articles|articles]], conferences, and whatnot:<br />
<br />
'''Chris Hecker'''<br><br />
'''''[http://www.d6.com definition six, inc.]'''''<br />
<br />
Chris focuses on solving hard problems at the intersection of gameplay, aesthetics, and technology. He is an outspoken advocate for pushing the current boundaries of design and interactivity, in the hope that games will eventually reach their full potential as a medium. To this end he helped organize the [http://www.indiegamejam.org Indie Game Jam], the [http://www.experimental-gameplay.org Experimental Gameplay Workshop], and [[The Depth Jam]], and his recent work on [[My Liner Notes for Spore|Spore]] centered on using proceduralism and artificial intelligence to enhance player creativity and agency. Chris has been on the advisory board for the [[Game Developers Conference]] for many years and is a regular speaker at the GDC, Siggraph, and other conferences. A frequent contributor to Game Developer magazine, Chris was the technical columnist for the magazine for two years and the Editor-at-Large for three, and was on the editorial board of the computer graphics research publication, [http://jgt.akpeters.com The Journal of Graphics Tools]. He has worked at both ends of the development spectrum, as a one-man indie game developer with his company [http://www.d6.com definition six, inc.] and on a hundred-person team at [http://www.maxis.com Maxis/Electronic Arts]. His professional goal is to help games become the preeminent art and entertainment form of the 21st century. His current project is [http://spyparty.com SpyParty], an indie game about subtle human behavior and deception.<br />
<br />
=== Headshots ===<br />
<center><br />
{|width=200px <br />
|align=center|<br />
[[Image:Checker-gdc10.jpg|Chris Hecker|200px]]<br />
<br />
<small>Here's one from the [http://www.flickr.com/photos/officialgdc/4425421495/ Official GDC 2010 Flickr set]. I like this one, please use it.</small><br />
|}<br />
<br />
{|width=200px <br />
|align=center|<br />
[[Image:Checker-headshot-closed.png|Chris Hecker|100px]]<br />
<br />
<small>Here's the boring and goofy headshot I used to use.</small><br />
|}<br />
<br />
{|width=200px <br />
|align=center|<br />
[[Image:Checker-migs.jpg|Chris Hecker|200px]]<br />
<br />
<small>Here's an ''action shot'' of me lecturing in Montreal in 2007.</small><br />
|}<br />
<br />
{|width=200px <br />
|align=center|<br />
[[Image:Checker-old-headshot.png|Chris Hecker|100px]]<br />
<br />
<small>I kinda like this really old one. It's less boring than the first headshot, but perhaps even more goofy, since I was hiking near Crested Butte, CO.</small><br />
|}<br />
</center><br />
<br />
=== Personal ===<br />
<br />
I'll write some more general stuff about me here at some point. For now, you get my bio and headshot.<br />
<br />
[[Elvis Has Left The Building|Until recently]], I was a ''Technology Fellow'' at [http://www.maxis.com Maxis/Electronic Arts]. I'm not sure what the title meant either. A friend once quipped I was higher ranked than a ''Technology Chap'', but lower ranked than a ''Technology Gentleman''.<br />
<br />
Here's my old "About Me" blurb from my original webpage, '''which is out of date''' (i.e. do not use it as my bio, see [[#Professional Bio|above]]), but has the rough outline of my life in it (Parsons -> Microsoft -> d6 -> Maxis):<br />
<br />
<blockquote><i><br />
I'm Technical and Art Director of definition six, inc., the small startup game company three friends and I founded in 1995. The Technical Director side of me worked at Microsoft for three years doing various game and graphics programming. The Art Director side went to Parson's School of Design in NYC to be an illustrator. I realized that, while the school has a great reputation, in my opinion it was severely lacking on the education front. I dropped out during sophomore year and studied independently with some of the professors there, sitting in on their life drawing classes and whatnot. One day I made the mistake of buying a computer magazine and it got me interested in programming. The best thing about the game industry is it mixes totally different disciplines, like art and programming, so it gives me a chance to exercise both sides of my brain equally! There's no other industry like it.<br />
</i></blockquote><br />
<br />
=== PGP Public Key ===<br />
Also available at [http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=vindex&search=0x482BCCF0D8DE7218 MIT's PGP keyserver] and it's Key ID 0xD8DE7218.<br />
<blockquote><small><pre style="line-height:1em"><br />
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</pre></small></blockquote></div>Checkerhttps://www.chrishecker.com/index.php?title=About/Me&diff=2628About/Me2013-05-06T21:44:52Z<p>Checker: </p>
<hr />
<div><blockquote style="color:#f00;"><br />
'''''Very important: The material on this website represents my personal opinion, not that of my employer, my family, my friends, my coworkers, or anybody else. Please do not represent me as anybody but "Chris Hecker" if you're going to quote from these pages. Thank you.'''''<br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
===Contact Info===<br />
{|align=right<br />
|__TOC__<br />
|}<br />
<blockquote><br />
'''Chris Hecker'''<br><br />
http://chrishecker.com<br><br />
checker 'at' d6.com<br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
I get a lot of email. I try to read it all and respond, but it takes time, and it seems I'm increasingly short of time. Sorry about that.<br />
<br />
===Professional Bio===<br />
Here's the bio I use for [[:Category:Lectures|lectures]], [[:Category:Articles|articles]], conferences, and whatnot:<br />
<br />
'''Chris Hecker'''<br><br />
'''''[http://www.d6.com definition six, inc.]'''''<br />
<br />
Chris focuses on solving hard problems at the intersection of gameplay, aesthetics, and technology. He is an outspoken advocate for pushing the current boundaries of design and interactivity, in the hope that games will eventually reach their full potential as a medium. To this end he helped organize the [http://www.indiegamejam.org Indie Game Jam], the [http://www.experimental-gameplay.org Experimental Gameplay Workshop], and the [[The Depth Jam]], and his recent work on [[My Liner Notes for Spore|Spore]] centered on using proceduralism and artificial intelligence to enhance player creativity and agency. Chris has been on the advisory board for the [[Game Developers Conference]] for many years and is a regular speaker at the GDC, Siggraph, and other conferences. A frequent contributor to Game Developer magazine, Chris was the technical columnist for the magazine for two years and the Editor-at-Large for three, and was on the editorial board of the computer graphics research publication, [http://jgt.akpeters.com The Journal of Graphics Tools]. He has worked at both ends of the development spectrum, as a one-man indie game developer with his company [http://www.d6.com definition six, inc.] and on a hundred-person team at [http://www.maxis.com Maxis/Electronic Arts]. His professional goal is to help games become the preeminent art and entertainment form of the 21st century. His current project is [http://spyparty.com SpyParty], an indie game about subtle human behavior and deception.<br />
<br />
=== Headshots ===<br />
<center><br />
{|width=200px <br />
|align=center|<br />
[[Image:Checker-gdc10.jpg|Chris Hecker|200px]]<br />
<br />
<small>Here's one from the [http://www.flickr.com/photos/officialgdc/4425421495/ Official GDC 2010 Flickr set]. I like this one, please use it.</small><br />
|}<br />
<br />
{|width=200px <br />
|align=center|<br />
[[Image:Checker-headshot-closed.png|Chris Hecker|100px]]<br />
<br />
<small>Here's the boring and goofy headshot I used to use.</small><br />
|}<br />
<br />
{|width=200px <br />
|align=center|<br />
[[Image:Checker-migs.jpg|Chris Hecker|200px]]<br />
<br />
<small>Here's an ''action shot'' of me lecturing in Montreal in 2007.</small><br />
|}<br />
<br />
{|width=200px <br />
|align=center|<br />
[[Image:Checker-old-headshot.png|Chris Hecker|100px]]<br />
<br />
<small>I kinda like this really old one. It's less boring than the first headshot, but perhaps even more goofy, since I was hiking near Crested Butte, CO.</small><br />
|}<br />
</center><br />
<br />
=== Personal ===<br />
<br />
I'll write some more general stuff about me here at some point. For now, you get my bio and headshot.<br />
<br />
[[Elvis Has Left The Building|Until recently]], I was a ''Technology Fellow'' at [http://www.maxis.com Maxis/Electronic Arts]. I'm not sure what the title meant either. A friend once quipped I was higher ranked than a ''Technology Chap'', but lower ranked than a ''Technology Gentleman''.<br />
<br />
Here's my old "About Me" blurb from my original webpage, '''which is out of date''' (i.e. do not use it as my bio, see [[#Professional Bio|above]]), but has the rough outline of my life in it (Parsons -> Microsoft -> d6 -> Maxis):<br />
<br />
<blockquote><i><br />
I'm Technical and Art Director of definition six, inc., the small startup game company three friends and I founded in 1995. The Technical Director side of me worked at Microsoft for three years doing various game and graphics programming. The Art Director side went to Parson's School of Design in NYC to be an illustrator. I realized that, while the school has a great reputation, in my opinion it was severely lacking on the education front. I dropped out during sophomore year and studied independently with some of the professors there, sitting in on their life drawing classes and whatnot. One day I made the mistake of buying a computer magazine and it got me interested in programming. The best thing about the game industry is it mixes totally different disciplines, like art and programming, so it gives me a chance to exercise both sides of my brain equally! There's no other industry like it.<br />
</i></blockquote><br />
<br />
=== PGP Public Key ===<br />
Also available at [http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=vindex&search=0x482BCCF0D8DE7218 MIT's PGP keyserver] and it's Key ID 0xD8DE7218.<br />
<blockquote><small><pre style="line-height:1em"><br />
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</pre></small></blockquote></div>Checkerhttps://www.chrishecker.com/index.php?title=Depth_Jam&diff=2627Depth Jam2013-05-06T21:44:14Z<p>Checker: Redirected page to The Depth Jam</p>
<hr />
<div>#REDIRECT: [[The Depth Jam]]</div>Checker