Video of Sid Meier's Keynote

[Ginger_Ale]

Following up our earlier coverage of Sid Meier's keynote address at the 2010 Game Developers' Conference, we have come across a video of Meier's entire talk on Gamespot.

The 54-minute video is also available in high definition, though there is no transcript.

Note: The GDC will again be held in San Francisco next year, starting February 28, 2011.

 

[subanark]

There are a few points I really don't agree with from Sid. In particular the load/save, cheating, randomness.

One of the things as a game developer you have to realize is that you are trying to help the player enjoy your content. If the player wants to cheat by save scumming, restarting until an ideal location is present, taking a peek behind the curtains, or simply giving themselves resources you need to let them. The only penalty for doing so, is that the player is not recolonized for performing a task they did not succeed in (achievements for not cheating).

Another point that should be made clear is, do not reward failure (or mask it if you have to). If you are building a game, and the player goes over their head, make sure there are ways to bypass the current challenge other than simply failing at it x number of times.

 

[President]

Sid Meier is obviously a very smart man and shows that he cares about the most minute details in his games for the player, but I do disagree with him on some points. The main thing I disagree with him is options. He said that modding is good, and it is indeed. Why is it good though? It goes back to the human thrive for control. We want control. We want to play a world that we want. However, he contradicts that in saying that we'd think the developers lazy, if they gave us too many options. I can assure him that, whenever I encounter a large array of options, the last thing I'd feel is contempt for the efforts of the game developer. If everyone had the ability, they'd be modders themselves. The only reason they aren't is because of an inability to do so; therefore, they'd be inclined towards the options within the game or the market for those mods.

The players want control over their own game -- in what the universe they play will be like -- and, while the options in the Civilization games aren't necessary because of the market for mods the game has, the mods would still not be a special case for the psychology of the human condition. I also believe that a primary point of his lecture is the cynicism of human beings, and I do admit that there is some truth to it, but I don't believe that Sid Meier has to appeal to it at all. For example, I was playing a mod of Civilization IV and I had this battle before me. I was having my Special Forces, who was equipped with a Great General -- my only one at the time -- take over Cuba, south of my country, the United States, and my opponent had only one infantry left. The odds for my winning was, as the screen showed, 99:1, but, if you could've guessed already, I actually lost that battle, and my Special Forces.

Now, there was indeed a moment that I thought that the game was somehow messing with me, but I ultimately was inclined to put back on my suspense of disbelief, because something like that happening is not too far-fetched. History is filled with battles like that happening. Armies have always defied the odds. Now, this isn't true for the majority of the games in the world. However, for games like the Civilization series, the world it is trying to have us have an affinity is the real world. This is the same for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 1 and 2. In that respect, Sid Meier has a higher obligation to accentuate realism in the game, because the player is supposed to be imagining the game's realism. It's what makes Civilization or the Railroad games so great. Sure, we may be cynics and think that the game is glitching, if something unbelievable happens to us in the game, but, ultimately because Civilization's purpose is to resimulate history in the physics and workings of the real world and its history as its foundation, the player will typically put back on its suspension of disbelief, as long as the events in these games are at least plausible, had it happened in real life.

Now, some of you may be unsure of what I mean about these fictional, historical events having an obligation towards being plausible in real life. It's actually what Aristotle basically alludes to in his book, Poetics. Whatever a poet writes in poetry doesn't actually have to have happened in real life. What actually happens in that poem, however, has to be plausible, had it happened in real life. It's because of the human drive for the imitation of action. Now, as I said, this isn't true for games like Little Big World or Dragon Ball Z games. In them, you expect the lack of realism. You don't expect the worlds therein to imitate our world. However, in games like Call of Duty or Civilization, you expect those worlds to imitate our real world. In that respect, one of the conditions of the suspension of disbelief would be that my expectations of a resimulation of human history, as that would be the assumed purpose of such games, would be met, or else I would believe that the game developers did not meet my expectations. While Sid Meier is trying to accommodate these gamers whose suspension of disbelief is broken by cynicism, he is not accommodating those whose suspension of disbelief is broken by actual, legit shortcomings from the developers, and I am sure that latter outweighs the former.

 

[Camikaze]

It's also on youtube, so can be embedded:

Link to video.

 

[Mustakrakish]

Ain't it funny how many of the comments on the video source site and here point out that sid is wrong about that and this and how they disagree with him on that etc. It only proves his point, we are all egomaniacs. We all KNOW we know better.

 

[TheDS]

I don't think anyone denies we're all ego-maniacal to some degree.

I have a counterpoint to his 3:1 odds argument that'll wipe some of the smugness off his mug, though.

If you have 3 guys looking to beat you up, and this happens every day, how many days can you expect to beat them up instead? Are you really going to beat them up 1 out of every 4 days? Of course not. Assuming you don't have any special powers over them, you'd have a 50% chance of beating one particular individual. If you have to beat 3 of them, if they come one at a time, and if you never lose any of your ability to fight, you've got a 1 in 8 chance of beating all three of them. But since they're not going to come one at a time, they're going to beat you more often than that, and since you're not likely to still be at full strength after each fight, unless you can find some way to fight them each individually and get an advantage over each of them, you're going to lose every time.

You win that fight by having something they don't. You outsmart them by finding a way to take them on individually, or better yet get them to fight each other. You overpower them by having a weapon and the training to use it. You overwhelm them by having a gun when they don't, plus the range to use it before they can get close enough to hurt you.

In a battle, there's a lot going on, and generally you need 6:1 odds to be assured of victory, with things like better supply, better weapons, and total surprise making up a large percentage of that. If you can wipe out half the enemy before they can even fight back, you've just doubled your strength and therefore your odds.

But in a war, you'll see the same dynamic as the street fight. Against three contestants with the same power as the loner, the loner will lose nearly all the time. So you have to change the situation. Fight on terrain that favors you, have better weapons, have superweapons, get the enemy to fight amongst himself, and so on.

That's why we expect to win a 3:1 fight. A 3:1 fight is not a 75% odds fight.

The other side of the coin is, I'm the hero of the story. We see heroes overcoming great odds all the time. If I win a 1:3 battle once in a while, I know it's luck, but in the same way that once in a while a goody hut pops a tech, I see it as a gift. If I was winning them all the time, yeah, I'd start to think something was up.

I think it's interesting to note that he said something about how the code now takes into account the results of previous battles so you don't have two high-odds battles losing in a row. This flies in the face of all the defenders of the RNG saying there's nothing in the code that changes the results. WRONG! There's something in the code that makes it so you win more than you should. (Or at least there will be at some point.)

This hate of losing two high-odds battles in a row can also be illustrated a different way. Say you've got a 6-disc CD changer and you load it with 6 different bands, then set the machine to play on random, so it can pick any song out of the 6 discs. At some point, you're going to hear two songs in a row by the same band, and then someone'll complain that the RNG sucks because it's not random enough. Even though there's a 1 in 6 chance of hearing the same band twice in a row, somehow the machine is messed up.

That's like rolling a pair of dice and complaining if you get doubles. No one does that, do they? (Ok, it's actually more like rolling a single die, then rerolling it and getting the same number, and then complaining. There's actually a difference in people's minds.)

I say it's all the more reason to just set up all the battles and then resolve them all at once. As a side-effect, it allows simultaneous play without too much difficulty.

Overall, though, I'd say it was a very informative talk, and everyone should listen to it at least once before they complain about the way a game is made or why everyone hates their great idea.