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LEVEL WITH ME will return in January 2018

December 22, 2017, 12:53 pm
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Hey viewers -- sorry if you're waiting for the next installment of Level With Me. You're going to have to wait for a while, since I'm on holiday / traveling, and lugging around my streaming setup is going to be impractical. But we'll be returning in January 2018 on a new day and time, so watch out for that.

In the meantime, I encourage you to check out the entire Level With Me archive on YouTube if you still need your regular dose of lighting complaints and texturing nitpicks.

Be good, and see you next year!
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"Level Design Workshop: How to Light a Level" at GDC 2018

December 27, 2017, 10:00 am
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Hey there. I'll be returning to GDC in 2018 with a talk called "How to Light a Level"... Here's the blurb:
Lighting is traditionally one of the most computationally expensive parts of game rendering, as well as one of the most crucial design tools for setting mood and readability in a game world. And yet, level designers and environment artists often lack the language and theory to collaborate effectively on lighting design. What does light do for games, and how can developers use lighting to facilitate certain experience goals for games? This session begins with a brief cultural history of lighting, before moving on to an overview of practical lighting design theory as well as various case studies.
I'll be presenting alongside many other amazing folks as part of the Level Design Workshop, run by Joel Burgess, Matthias Worch, Clint Hocking, and Lisa Brown.

This year, the roster includes:
We're basically a "tutorial" mini-track that, I believe, will run all-day on Tuesday. Traditionally, we also do portfolio reviews during the lunch break. If you'll be around, come check us out. (And if you won't be at GDC this year: it's fun, but don't worry, you really aren't missing that much.)
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Postcards from Unreal, pt 2

December 30, 2017, 8:00 am
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My Unreal Tournament 4 deathmatch map "Pilsner" isn't really done. But as an exploratory project, I've fulfilled my goals to learn the basics of building 3D spaces in Unreal. I also reached the point where I needed an actual player base to confirm how the map plays, or at least tell me that it's total shit -- but it looks like I can't even get a denunciation when Unreal Tournament 4 seems to have a grand total of like 5 players!

I appreciate all the pre-configured art content and basic gameplay structures implemented in the game already, and it has been really helpful for me to learn how to configure my assets and work in Unreal projects -- but this experience has also convinced me that I shouldn't try to teach level design to my students with this half-finished basically-dead game.

It was also questionable how well this was going to run on our students' laptops, because half of them use Macbooks with small hard drives, and very little room for a Windows partition and an additional 50 GB for UT4 and the UT4 editor. This leads me to one of the original reasons why we stopped running a level design course: there are simply no popular first person multiplayer games with modern level editor suites that were easily deployable on our students' computers. (Given how long it takes to make games, computer labs are impractical.)


It seems that there's currently no popular "bread and butter" type of multiplayer shooter with an accessible level editor, anywhere in the industry. UT4 is dead; Quake Champions is struggling; Source Engine games like Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive both still enjoy fairly active player bases and level design communities but present other problems with teaching -- TF2 maps require high player counts and CS:GO has a steep learning curve. There's also the problem with learning how to debug BSP leaks, which is mostly an arcane practice that isn't relevant to modern game development or level design anymore.

Unity / Unreal have drastically changed how people make games, but level design hasn't really changed in the last 10 years. Some cross-platform engine-agnostic editors like Sledge and TrenchBroom serve their communities well, but they're still very much rooted in their respective Goldsource / Quake histories. (The Russian CS map community even made their own Hammer replacement, "J.A.C.K")

I wish there was a free open-source cross-platform cross-engine 3D editor equivalent of Tiled that let you model / texture / export simple world geometry to OBJ / FBX, and/or setup simple entity bindings for specific engines... but that will continue to be my wish.


If multiplayer shooters can't act as the bread and butter of teaching level design, then I guess that means I'm turning to single player. This pivot requires a new technical strategy. Right now my plans for teaching level design fundamentals are looking more like:
  • use the stock Unreal Engine 4 editor (with blank project template, no starter content)
  • give students a package of basic modular static meshes (in 100uu / 500uu tile sizes)
  • teach them how to make their own basic first person controller Pawn using Blueprints
  • focus on generalist mechanics of walking and looking (don't lean on shooter-specific topics like ammo placement, cover, etc)
  • let them make their own simple local multiplayer splitscreen games (but avoid teaching networking / replication / UI, which should not be the focus of a level design course)
There's a very real danger that this will end up turning into an Unreal development class instead of a focused study on level design. My other concern is that the material will have to be extremely formalist / abstract, because there won't be a bunch of existing assets to play with, nor a set of defined game mechanics to consider.

But I think this context is still better than the technical hell that teaching with UT4 would've been!


So for January, I'm going to be engaging in a small 2 week exploratory project in UE4. It's going to be very generic and game-y so that I teach myself how to do typical game-y things in the engine.

Wish you were here,
-- R
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Resolutions, 2018

January 8, 2018, 4:42 pm
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In keeping with tradition, here's some resolutions that I resolve to uphold for this new year...
  • Keep blogging for 2018, at about the same rate as 2017?
  • Don't die from all the travelling I'll be doing in 2018.
  • Finish and release three projects: Radiator 3, MachoCam, and Medusa.
  • Update some of my technical dev skills: get proficient with Unreal Engine 4, learn about compute shaders
  • Update some of my game art skills: do some more sculpting, get better with Substance Painter and Substance Designer
Sure, the new year is an arbitrary passage of time that has no real significance -- but that doesn't mean it's not fun to re-assess and wonder about where you're at.
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"Coast Guide" for PC Gamer UK 0310

January 11, 2018, 8:00 am
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cover of PCGUK 310
A while ago I wrote about the process of importing Half-Life 2 levels into Maya -- but I didn't divulge why I was doing that work: because PC Gamer UK commissioned a design analysis feature from me, to complement their big Half-Life 2 retrospective / Black Mesa feature for their November 2017 issue (PCGUK 0310). (Thanks to editor Phil Savage for the opportunity.)

At the top of this post, you can see the "blank" overview map of Half-Life 2's d2_coast03. That's basically what I submitted to them for publication, along with some accompanying box-out text and images for their layout artists to use. Stylistically, it's similar to what I previously did for a PC Gamer UK retrospective on Half-Life 1, when I diagrammed the Black Mesa Inbound chapter and the "shark cage" setpiece in the Apprehension chapter.

But for this new illustration, I wanted to be more accurate and import the actual level geometry as a base. It ended up being rather time consuming to do all the test renders in Maya and iterate to that finished state, especially since I'm not used to working in a pre-rendered mode. I also didn't really know what kind of look I wanted? I knew I was partial to a sort of digital papercraft look, but I also struggled with keeping everything readable.

In print, the whole thing looked a little bit like this:

"Coast Guide" from PC Gamer UK 0310
I ended up using two main tricks to finish it up:

(1) I scaled-up landmark objects (boats, Combine equipment) by about ~200% so the shapes would read better when zoomed-out like that. Unfortunately I couldn't figure out how to enlarge the houses without redoing the terrain geometry, so the resulting scale doesn't really make much sense, but video games have always used unrealistic scaling factors anyway. What matters is consistency.

(2) I gave up and I just opened the damn render in Photoshop and painted over whatever was missing... namely the water and terrain transitions. I liked that the layout artist sort of read into my painterly touches, and added grunge-y smudges along the bottom of the page. I think it works.

from "notes on extracting and visualizing Half-Life 2 levels in Maya"
Doing these maps for a magazine fits into two of my lifelong ambitions: making game design criticism accessible, while exploring new ways of performing criticism beyond an essay.

I'm not under any illusions that they'll make history or anything, but I think they're small competent pieces that do what they set out to do... and it's also satisfying to finish something within a few days, for a change.
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LEVEL WITH ME, Winter / Spring 2018 schedule: Tuesdays 2 PM EST

January 15, 2018, 8:00 am
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I've completed my winter hibernation and I'm gearing up for a new season of Level With Me, my livestream show where I play video games and talk about what I think the level design is doing.

Since I work as a teacher and I get a different schedule each semester, I have to change my broadcasting schedule every few months. Now for this first half of 2018, the new time will be Tuesdays, at around 1 or 2 PM EST (GMT-5). (Sometimes I start late.)

If you can't make it for the live broadcasts, then you can always check out the YouTube archive over here.

Before the hiatus last year, we were a few hours into BioShock 1. In the game, we had just gotten a shiny new camera, and we were taking fun photos of bloodthirsty monsters. My current plans are to try to get as far as Fort Frolic at least, and then re-assess my interest in continuing. See you soon!
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CFP: Queerness and Games Conference 2018 at Concordia University in Montréal

January 17, 2018, 8:00 am
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photo of Tanya DePass speaking at QGCon 2017
The Queerness and Games Conference (or QGCon) is running again in 2018, this time in beautifully affordable Montréal. Here's the call for papers, panels, and talk submissions, copy and pasted from the website, emphasis added by me:
The Queerness and Games Conference is now accepting submissions for presentations at its fifth annual conference, which will be held on September 29-30, 2018 at Concordia University in Montréal, Canada! Proposals for conference talks and other sessions are due March 1st, 2018 (details and instructions below).

QGCon is an annual event that brings together developers, academics, educators, and activists to explore the intersection of LGBTQ issues and video games. Proposals for talks, pre-constituted panels, workshops, roundtables, and post mortems are welcome. Speakers from all backgrounds are encouraged to submit. Because QGCon is a community-oriented event that seeks to foster dialogue across areas of expertise, we especially value sessions that engage a broad and diverse audience. Please note that, since QGCon attendees come from across academia, industry, and beyond, different speakers may bring different ideas about what constitutes a “talk” or a “panel.” QGCon values these differences and kindly requests that, as per the submission guidelines below, prospective speakers describe the approach they hope to take to their proposed session.


Though the focus of QGCon is LGBTQ issues, the conference takes an intersectional approach to queerness. Issues of race, ethnicity, gender, disability, neurodiversity, socioeconomic class, and other forms of identity, inclusion, and marginalization are central to our understanding of queerness and games. Given the exciting new location of the 2018 conference, the QGCon organizers are particularly eager to receive proposals that explore the international context of queerness and games, as well as proposals that address the French language or Canadian-American relations. Other topics that the organizers are interesting in seeing represented at QGCon 2018 include futurity in queer theory (such as Afrofuturism, alternative futures, or indigenous futures), and affect theory (including such “public feelings” as depression, anxiety, and optimism, as well as affective/emotional labor and other ways that emotion and feelings are political and part of power relationships).

For those who are new to the QGCon community and are interested in learning more about the types of conversations that take place at the event, the conference organizers encourage you to look at talk topics and recorded videos from pastyears’ conferences, which can be found on the QGCon website.

A note on travel: After four years in sunny California, QGCon is moving to Montréal for its 2018 conference, where we will be hosted by Concordia University. Accepted presenters traveling to the conference from outside Québec will be eligible for a limited number of travel grants, as well as other opportunities for reducing the cost of attending.
I attended the first and second QGCons, back in 2012/2013 at UC Berkeley, and I had a lovely time.

While QGCons are usually hosted by large academic institutions, please do not assume you have to be an academic to attend or participate. If you have something to say about games, play, identity, and politics, then I'm sure they'd love to have you.

Submissions close on March 1st, which means you have about a month and a half to submit your proposal. Hurry!
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On wikipedia-ing games culture and history

January 19, 2018, 8:00 am
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The other day, someone wrote to me but confessed they didn't know much about me, and that they had only played my games Intimate, Infinite and The Tearoom.

This felt like a really strange pairing of games to me. The Tearoom is a recent game that got a lot of press coverage, while Intimate Infinite is a much older, somewhat obscure game of mine that's mostly remembered only by some literary art game folks. What the heck is going on?

My suspicions were confirmed when I found out that I had a Wikipedia page as of July 2017, and that this page highlighted those two games with their own subsections. It made me realize that (a) people google me, and that (b) Wikipedia might be their first or second impressions of me. And yet, that page is still missing so much information about me; my dabbling in level design, my love of sandwiches, and so on.

When I whined on Twitter about having a Wikipedia page, boy genius game designer Michael Brough confessed his envy. I was shocked. How can Michael "Broughlike" Brough not have a Wikipedia page? I immediately sought to correct this injustice, and began writing a Wikipedia entry for Mr. Brough.


But getting Michael Brough onto Wikipedia proved to be a bit of a challenge. I knew I had to prove Michael's "notability", to show that he deserved to included within this accumulation of all human knowledge, so first I wrote about all his IGF nominations and all the glowing praise heaped upon him. However, this quickly made the editors suspicious. It sounded like an "advertisement", and anyway, why hasn't this Michael Brough guy actually won any awards yet? (Ah, the cruelty of outsiders.)

What's so great about Michael Brough? Well, he's a great dancer. He has a wonderful sense of dress and colors. His games are really good. He has a very kind mother who gave me ice cream one time. it was frustrating to try to read Wikipedia's fussy pedantic mind. Jake Eakle's help with navigating the process / bureaucracy was utterly instrumental here; when an editor proposed to "speedily delete" our poor little draft after only a few days and I was preparing to berate them for their impatience, Jake helped contest the deletion and save the whole project, while maintaining a calm and polite conversation with the editors.

Annoying or not, the whole process did make me realize that I had to think more like an encyclopedia somehow. I recalled a talk that Michael gave back in 2013 where he talked about his approach to roguelike design, and laid out some of his theory and criticism. I re-watched some of the video, paraphrased a paragraph or two, and then re-submitted the draft. With this "substantial content", the article was finally deemed acceptable and encyclopedic enough, and accepted! Michael Brough (game designer) was now real.


How will we be remembered? But more importantly, how do we make our ideas and histories accessible to future newcomers, who aren't already immersed in this inside baseball of experimental game design and art games?

Bennett Foddy doesn't even have his own Wikipedia page. As of this time of writing, his name page currently redirects to the entry on Getting Over It. He's released one of the weirdest (yet commercial successful) games of 2017 and he still doesn't deserve his own profile? That coy redirect won't tell you about how he used to perform as part of the band Cut Copy, or how he was an Oxford professor of bio-ethics and argued that performance-enhancing drugs are awesome (well, I haven't read his papers, but I'm assuming he said that, I wish some sort of free online encyclopedia would tell me if it was true?), or all these other Things That Are Important To Know About Bennett Foddy.

Extend my hysterical concern to the rest of non-mainstream non-AAA game culture. I just saw that Stephen Lavelle's Wikipedia page implies that he's only made 2-3 games of note, as if that's all there is to know about Stephen Lavelle. Imagine not knowing anything about Stephen Lavelle and then reading this utterly disappointing 25 word Wikipedia page -- you'd just close the tab and shrug "oh well", instead of playing his amazing works like Slave of God, Opera Omnia, or Worst Guest.

Maybe no one else is going to do this for us. If we don't write each others' histories, then we're letting institutional forces erase all the work we're doing.

However, it also occurs to me that some people don't want to be remembered / don't want a Wikipedia page, and they prefer having a "Google shield." These people certainly have the right to be forgotten and have a right to privacy. Maybe when we write each others' histories, we should also make sure that people consent to having their history recorded too.

So let this be my affirmative consent: as much as I love being known as a Borges-reading pervert, please feel free to add to my Wikipedia page.

And when you cite this post, here's a handy pre-formatted citation tag: {{cite web|title="On wikipedia-ing games cultures and history"|website=Yang's personal blog|url=http://www.blog.radiator.debacle.us/2018/01/on-wikipedia-ing-games-culture-and.html}}
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Watch and/or Read "GDC 2015: Level Design Histories and Futures"

January 24, 2018, 8:00 am
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GDC finally uploaded my talk from 2015 on level design history and futures... and already, the conservative gamer-gestapo is whining about how I have the gall to talk mention racism and sexism in a design history talk.

This prompted me to review my slides and notes from 2015, and I was surprised -- usually I hate whatever I write, but this time I was surprised by how the material mostly holds up. (I was also surprised by how much I anticipated the whiners' critiques and put disclaimers everywhere.) Really, the only thing I have to work on is, um, the frequency that I say "um", but you know, I'm working on it.

Personally, I dislike watching videos and vastly prefer reading talks, so for your convenience I've also uploaded my complete slides in a double-length PDF. The first half of the PDF has the talk slides, and the second half of the PDF has my speaking notes as well... here's also one last reminder, that I've edited / condensed this stuff into a shorter talk called "local level design."
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It's all about how you use it: on NSFWare, by Pierre Corbinais

January 26, 2018, 8:32 am
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This post is SFW-ish (somewhat Safe For Work, depending on your workplace)

Pierre Corbinais has a long history of making short poignant games about relationships and intimacy. (Before I had played this game, my personal favorite had been Tiny Soccer Manager Stories.) His choice of tool, Adventure Game Studio, is especially interesting -- this tool is very much not designed for Corbinais' abstract staging and gestural interfaces, but he makes it work anyway.

NSFWare, then, is a joyous and colorful collection of simple reflex-based games in an engine that is constantly trying to destabilize it. (When you press ESC, the quit menu confesses that it doesn't know whether the game is broken or not.) Corbinais' use of low-res neon pixel art is extremely effective here for several reasons: the bright nonrealistic color choices help soften the politics of porn, limited use of animation helps draw your attention to specific sex acts no matter how "small", and the chunkiness also helps mask how the engine wasn't designed for animated sequences like this at all.

Combined with the catchy minimalist beats and the retro-style rotoscoped animation handpainted in the Paint of Persia tool from diverse footage at Pornhub, this game makes a strong case for sex as craftsmanship: it's not how impressive or advanced your tool is, it's more about how you use it.



(sound is pretty important for the brief video embedded above, by the way)

This attitude bleeds into the game design; the vague instructions are part of the fun of figuring out how to use your limited gestures to perform the requested action. You only have a few keyboard buttons, but it's all about how you use it! And tellingly, I still haven't successfully completed the "FINGER" stage... what the hell am I supposed to do there? L2F, buddy...

Other stages, like "EDGE", have a helpful meter to show you when the character is going to climax. But when the game becomes this clear and readable, I have to resist the urge to "lose" on purpose and make him climax all over this face -- to teach him a lesson, of course -- because I decide when he's finished, and no one else.

(It also reminded me of how I relied on on-screen meters in The Tearoom to wordlessly communicate a similar concept of intensity, tension, and escalation. Maybe we've both struck upon a useful sex game design pattern here?)


But I think NSFWare's best quality is its upbeat tone and its relentless sex positivity. The synchronization with the music and flat backgrounds evoke a music video aesthetic, and the randomness of the sequences injects some welcome uncertainty. Here, sex is playful, knowing, and surprising, a particular intersection of pleasures.

Sex is also a series of moments where failure is frequent, expected, and not really a big deal. When you fail a certain sequence (often because you don't know what to do), then you lose a heart (you begin with three hearts) -- but you're also treated to a rather detailed animation of someone fumbling, and you only spend a few seconds dwelling on this failure anyway. The penalty feels minimal and playful.

Combine this tone with the rotoscope animation with an abstracted pixel art style, and I think it helps make this game feel iconic as well as human / life-like. The message is that sexual pleasure is universal and human, and sexual failure is universal and human, and maybe even inevitable.

If difficulty and skill aren't necessarily the main focus of this game, then maybe it's not even about "how you use it." Maybe it's more about how you feel about it, how you approach it... and how you live with it.

9/10

NSFWare is available for Windows and Linux. (No Mac OSX version? Is that an AGS problem? Hmm, maybe tools do matter...)
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Video killed the video star: on "Un Pueblo De Nada" by Cardboard Computer

February 2, 2018, 9:14 am
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This post spoils Un Pueblo De Nada as well as a few parts of Kentucky Route Zero.

The newest Kentucky Route Zero interlude Un Pueblo De Nada is a "transmedia" narrative consisting of a 30 minute live action movie styled like a public access TV broadcast, a functioning real-life phone hotline to call, and a short tie-in narrative video game. I think it works as a transmedia narrative because it's so deeply concerned with this technology, especially the old deprecated media technologies like broken radios, rusty switchboards, forgotten overhead projectors, and dusty VHS cassette tapes.

A lot of transmedia narratives tend to focus on modern computing or the internet... but here, we're asked to imagine a vast archeaology of decaying technology. The iconic KRZ flat vector style evokes an era of older VGA games like Another World, the live action WEVP-TV broadcasts are styled as low resolution transfers from analog tapes, and I believe even the real functioning phone hotline seems to have extra static layered onto the voice recordings. Which is absurd, landlines used to be a vital communication technology... but to a filthy millennial like me, now it's just a salvaged material for making art. (As I dialed the phone number, I thought to myself, "how fun and quaint to dial a phone number on my phone!")


For long-time KRZ players, Un Pueblo De Nada is particularly tragic. It features three frequent KRZ characters, Emily, Ben, and Bob, who have appeared in every installment of KRZ (even the interludes like Limits and Demonstrations or The Entertainment)... and it essentially kills them off with a thunderous flood at the end. In KRZ, we're briefly told the entire WEVP station had been wiped away in a flood, as a sort of throwaway backstory thread, and now we finally get to witness the moment.

Of course, this means that every time we've seen Emily, Ben, and Bob throughout KRZ, then they've definitely been ghosts who died senseless deaths, and they've already been dead for a long while. I used to think each of their musical climaxes represented a sort of melancholy reflection / commentary on in-game events, but now it feels more like a foreboding sense of doom.

Before she was part of a ghostly chorus, Emily was just a local volunteer TV producer / archivist who feels overwhelmed by the precarity of their whole situation. The roof is leaking; the tapes are constantly lost and disorganized; no one else seems to care enough to really help her make everything work. I felt like her (off-screen) death ends up being a bit of a release for her, out of this impossible and stressful situation.


Un Pueblo De Nada means "town of nothing" or alternatively it could refer to a "people of nothing" ("pueblo" can also loosely refer to a particular group of people who live in a pueblo) -- or "pueblo" can be understood in the sense of Pueblo architecture from the Southwestern US. Either way, there's a sense of space and community, of a people and culture being wiped out and reduced to nothing.

Un Pueblo De Nada is also a short film within the short film, the documentary produced by the WEVP-TV host Rita. (You may remember her from previous WEVP-TV broadcast Night Noise / Static Between Stations.) She introduces the segment with several disclaimers about how old it is, how it's OK that the local video art culture is dying out, and how she's totally over it and everything:
RITA: This is an old one, it's one of my mine, but maybe you haven't seen it -- or if you've seen it, maybe it's been a while, so you've forgotten. This is one I made several years ago, back when I was really into history -- local history... the history of this place... here. So, in it, I share some of my research and some of my thoughts about some people that lived here a long time ago -- but before the company, before the airstrip, like over a hundred years ago. OK? So I hope you enjoy it... Ready, Emily?

The documentary consists of several photo slides of some woods, an old ruined wood shack, as well as a handsome cat. Historical information is narrated in somewhat stiff-sounding (?) Spanish (presumably by Rita?) with old school yellow-y English subtitles at the bottom.
NARRATOR: The "People of Nothing" arrived by horseback in October, and their first experiment was to free the horses.

They had come from Florida. Before that, somewhere in Central America. But none of the particular people who arrived here had ever themselves lived in Central America. The community had reconstructed itself, person-by-person, in the intervening years. The People built dozens of structures in their time here. The only one of those structures still standing is what we call the Video Databank, which they built as a library. Even that building has been extensively modified and repaired. Probably none of the structure now is original. The only structures the People built were all torn down and recycled during their time here.

The only reason we know about those structures or anything else about the People is because of the exhaustive notes they recorded, sealed and preserved in the library. This was their creed: "everything is an experiment." They were a scientific community. They believed that human behaviors -- physical, social, psychological, emotional, spiritual -- all these behaviors were phenomena that could be shaped by their environment. They changed their environment, observed the effects on their behavior, then made more changes, and so on, experimentally.

So all they kept were notes. They had to be willing to let go of anything, at any moment, either because their data supported a change in their environment, or just to see what would happen.

We don't know what their final experiment was, the one that undid them, because nobody was left to take notes. It was more likely a moral catastrophe than any failure of health or safety. If they had experimented with a new recipe, or a new structure, and it had poisoned or buried them, surely one of those scientists would have scrawled out some record just before dying, so firm was their commitment to the process. No, it must have been something that undermined their faith in the project, completely.

The story is clearly an oblique response to whiners like me, who've been lamenting about how much darker and sadder that Kentucky Route Zero has become, especially in Act IV -- traditionally the site of a "falling action" in a classical tragedy. Cardboard Computer has two characters Maya and Rita comment on the story afterwards, and drive the point home:
MAYA: Uh, I didn't catch the ending. What happened to them?

RITA: Oh, right. Um, we don't really know! That's sad, right? Do you think that's sad?

MAYA: Oh, well, no I don't think so... In fact, I think it's rather common. When a society collapses, everything gets very muddled, I think. Nobody remembers to write everything down.

RITA: Right, they might have bigger problems.

MAYA: Or, historically, I think, they might've conquered? Conquerers don't usually preserve their subjects' records.

RITA: Oh, right! Wow. [beat]

MAYA: Well, do you think it's sad?

RITA: Yeah.

MAYA: Why do you think so?

RITA: Oh, I don't know. I'm sentimental. [smiles] [beat] Oh hi everybody, this is our guest, Maya...

What ups the stakes here is that the Video Databank is clearly a reference to the Art Institute video archive of the same name, which no doubt provided a lot of source material for many WEVP-TV segments. Even the actor for the radio caller Geoff, Drew Ackerman, runs an actual podcast called Sleep With Me where he tells long rambling stories intended to put you to sleep. In general, KRZ has a rich tradition of real-life referents and inspirations.

Are all these artistic traditions doomed to return to dust? Should we all just make peace with how we're all going to die and be forgotten?... Oh, I don't know. I'm sentimental.

RECENTLY RELATED: On wikipedia-ing games culture and history.
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Postcards from Unreal, pt 3: on spaghetti monsters

February 8, 2018, 8:00 am
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Unreal Engine 4
We're now a few weeks into the Unreal level design class, and things seem to be going OK. Our students have enough familiarity with Unity that they're able to digest a lot of the 3D workflow without too many problems. People are happily grayboxing here and there, and we recently did an intro to Blueprint scripting.

In the past, I've been pretty skeptical of teaching visual programming methods to students. Teaching a specific visual scripting tool always felt like we were locking students to that toolkit, versus learning how to code in C# or Lua or JS, which is a generalized language useful across multiple engines and multiple industries. Visual programming was considered a relatively niche practice, where you might mock-up an art installation in MaxMSP but not much else, and even Unreal used to confine visual programming to its Kismet level scripting system. (The precursor to Blueprint.)

However, that criticism of visual programming is gradually losing its power as this type of practice becomes more common in the game industry. Many Unreal Engine 4 devs (as well as Epic themselves) make heavy use of Blueprint for making games, a lot of Unity devs rely on the third-party Playmaker plug-in, and even upstart engines like Godot support a visual programming workflow. AAA texture generating darling Substance Designer also has a heavy node-based workflow. It's everywhere!

Substance Designer
So to me, some of the benefits of teaching something like UE4's Blueprint vs textual programming seem like:
  • Working with text is hard: indenting things, maintaining white space and cases, fighting with the auto-correct when you forget to close scopes, etc. are often frustrating and annoying for beginners. Imagine trying to learn the logic behind defining a computational procedure while wrestling with spelling "transform" correctly ("no, not Transform, but transform!")
  • Data-types feel better: you can't link a square red wire to a yellow round pin, and that distinction feels intuitive to beginner developers. Or even if you did drag a "float" output wire onto a "string" input pin, UE4 will automatically add an intermediate node that transforms the float into a string. This is both more explicit and more helpful to a beginner than invisibly calling "ToString()" in Unity C#. ("Wait but why is it ok to put a float for a string, but not a string for a float? Well, in Javascript...")
Godot Engine
However, some of the big workflow problems of teaching BP stem from its abdication of text...
  • Complexity is still overwhelming, and now it's definitely your fault. If you visually program spaghetti code, your node networks will literally resemble spaghetti. It'll literally be difficult to read and parse what is going where. Which is funny. But still not great. This isn't really a problem for beginners, who would likely scope their projects to be small, but learning how to arrange your networks to be legible is like another separate skill you have to develop when doing visual programming. It's almost like you need to be a good graphic designer in order to visually code any larger projects.
  • Can't copy and paste / difficult to search. There's no easy way to google a problem on StackOverflow or whatever, because there's no easy way to copy and paste snippets of BP. Instead, people usually post screenshots of their BP networks from the editor, and you have to methodically recreate everything yourself. There's a free third-party service BlueprintUE.com that lets you visualize BPs in a web browser and copy / paste, but it's not supported by Epic and it's unclear how many people actually use this / how long the service will exist.
MaxMSP
Lastly, it's unclear how much this really does fix the core problem of learning how to code: it's hard to internalize how to structure data and formalize procedures for a computer to understand. If you still can't "think in code" when typing, there's still a good chance that using BP or visual programming tools will still be hard, because it's basically the same thing and even mirrors the same API structures. It's important to try to make tools accessible, but it's also important to counter any hype that any given technology is a magic bullet that will finally make coding easy for everyone.

Stay warm,
-- R
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Submit your impossible demands to #ManifestoJam by February 13

February 11, 2018, 5:41 pm
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Just a brief note that a bunch of folks are doing a "Manifesto Jam" (which is maybe possibly inspired by my survey of manifestos in games blog post from last year) and there's about 1-2 days left to participate.

I even participated myself, writing a short screed called "KILL UNITY; WE ARE ENGINES." It was fun to try to figure out a specific aspect of games that I cared about, and to try to distill that into entertaining hyperbole. Remember: no nuance, no relativity, just pure belief! Go ahead and let your flag fly, and perch it on the swollen corpse of the old world order!

Here's the inspiring blurb, copy and pasted from the itch.io page:
THIS JAM IS FOR COLLECTIVELY UNCORKING OUR UTOPIAN ENERGY IN 2018

In times of crisis, uncertainty, conservatism and even just standard personal disappointment people overwhelmingly retreat to saying “be practical!” This doesn’t necessarily imply a way that is meaningfully better than any other but instead coerces you to chirpily go along with the way others are already comfortable doing it, or comfortable with you doing it, and keep and alternatives or resentments on priv.

Manifestos are important precisely because they are impractical. Whether positive or negative, whether embracing potential worlds or outright rejecting the one you’re in. They are visionary, they demand, they refuse. Manifestoes can be of any scale, defining your personal aesthetic or how to fix the entire world, but they cannot be satisfied.

Is it too prescriptive to start a manifesto jam with a manifesto? When a manifesto asks a question, you know it is always rhetorical and the the author has already made up their mind. Putting all the cards on the table about why I’m doing this is why I’m doing this.

The jam form, in videogame creation, has gone from its borrowed musical roots in collaboration and impulsivity to become almost the opposite. Ratings, prizes, and the implication of making portfolio pieces over the possibility of genuine experimentation, which comes with genuine failure, are all connected to the runaway capitalist dream of quantifiable outcomes over all else. The push onward that shuts down the possibility for crafted writing or critique, that sees critique as functional only, to moderate public trust in the output of giant corporations, to laud and demystify rather than to converse, complicate, and imagine alternatives. Of course there are only jams for making games, not writing about them, because writing, in this cosmology, is not valuable in itself but only so far as it creates cultural clout for a medium that, even when it’s not being made by all-consuming tech monstrosities, is still highly directed by their boring-ass ideas of what is marketable and therefore desirable and therefore good.

Against this, everyone is invited, to write something about how to make a videogame, how to respond to a videogame, what the field of videogames could and should be. Write a manifesto to free up your mind to move forward. I want videogames created with vision rather than received wisdom that both fail and succeed at meeting that vision. I want uncompromising, unconventional writing to respond, recover and reshape. I am done with games trying to do something right and done with essays about what they do right. We go on like this in public and then privately grow more and more dissatisfied. There must be something more urgent to write.

THIS JAM IS FOR COLLECTIVELY UNCORKING OUR UTOPIAN ENERGY IN 2018
Thanks to Emile Reed for organizing. Now go find us some spectres-haunting-Europe, and go write a manifesto!!!
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Mapping the sea floors of Subnautica

February 18, 2018, 9:13 am
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This post spoils the core gameplay and player progression in Subnautica, but not the specific story nor scripted plot events.

Subnautica is a long open world survival game set in a vast deep ocean. In it, you have to forage for food, manage your oxygen when diving into caves and deep sea trenches, and collect resources to build your own underwater base(s) and submarine(s) to find out What Really Happened Here.

Much like the other first person indie survival game The Long Dark, Subnautica features no combat, no world map, and essentially no NPCs or quests to complete for anyone. The few lethal weapons are either cumbersome and annoying to maintain (poison gas torpedoes must be crafted and loaded) or practical but anti-juicy (your knife)... but most importantly, unlike The Long Dark's focus on hunting, killing creatures in Subnautica *never* yields any reward or drops -- even when the game confusingly asks you to collect shark teeth but killing sharks never yields any shark teeth.

(Why? Well, there's a few story threads about how use of force cannot get you what you want, as well as a faint anti-capitalist / anti-colonialist message. But the smoking gun of authorial intent is in the credits: a dedication to the families of Newtown, Connecticut. The design lead has also talked about their no-gun philosophy.)

PC Gamer already did a nice roundtable about Subnautica's early climactic story moment, so instead I want to focus on Subnautica's most interesting systemic feature: its depth-based 3D level design, and implications on the rest of the game.


Without combat, Subnautica ends up feeling like a watered-down (hahaha) stealth game. Because there's so much repeated traversal across the world and no practical way to disable the strongest enemies, you have to be able to sneak past most of them without much trouble. Like most other games, the best tactic is to do what speedrunners do: just move past your enemy and ignore them, and you can easily leave their "aggro" radius before they catch up to you.

Stealth games also tend to tune their AI to be easily fooled by height differences; in dedicated sneaking games like Dishonored, walking along a ceiling pipe suspended above a guard makes you practically undetectable. This height-bias is exacerbated by console-fication in first person design, which discourages verticality because quick and accurate up-down looks are more difficult to perform with gamepads.

Now, take all these factors, and then also let the player basically fly around and change their height at will. After the initial shock of a weird creature encounter wears off, every hostile monster becomes a nuisance instead of a perpetually engaging design element. Maybe that's just the curse of stealth games?

So your real enemy is the land itself. Navigation becomes its own form of combat that threatens to kill you. Subnautica ends up being even more cruel than The Long Dark, and never provides you with any in-game world map nor any mapping mechanisms. This omission helps exploration feel genuinely dangerous and confusing, and also lets the devs sidestep the problem of legibly mapping a huge 3D terrain for player UI, but this decision has further repercussions for navigation and level design. Caves become mini-bosses; deep trenches become mega-bosses.


And when the sun sets, the world turns pitch-black and you must resort to feeling the topology of the landscape. You begin internalizing navigation strategies like, "ok there's that pointy reef and the round hill so I should turn left and keep swimming until I bump into another wall, then swim over until I can see the kelp forest, then swim down into the caves at the bottom."

As fun and mysterious it is, this darkness and heavy use of fog also means it's easy to get lost and miss important landmarks or key locations -- so in terms of level design, the designers usually have to place the key "wrecks" (broken parts of a crashed ship, with explorable interiors) in the middle of each biome, and then just pray you see it. And if you still happen to overlook it? Well, just look at your map screen and remember to come back -- oh, right... (In contrast: the extreme edges of Skyrim or Horizon Zero Dawn are often the most interesting places.)

In open world games, the map screen helps you measure the scope of the game world. It lets you say, "I'm at the northern boundary of the game world, and I need to go south-west." Because there's no in-game map here, there's no easy way to understand Subnautica's boundaries, which feels unfair when crossing into the surrounding dead zone will spawn a giant ghost monster to eat you with little warning.

(PS: it'd be nice if open world games flipped this map progression more often, to instead confine you to the safe edges and orbit toward a dangerous end-game middle. Assassins Creed Origins actually does an interesting spiral pattern here.)

The designers attempt two stop-gap solutions to ward you off from the edges: the terrain suddenly drops off with no visible floor, and your AI assistant warns you that it's very deep and dangerous, etc. but it's impossible to differentiate this dark dangerous void with any other dark dangerous void that you're actually supposed to explore, e.g. the mountains or dunes areas. Without a world map unambiguously giving me this information, Subnautica cries wolf but punishes me for not heeding its warnings. ("Don't explore this dangerous deep area!... Oh, but definitely don't explore *wink* this other *wink* dangerous deep area *wink*")

(The compromise I would've attempted in Subnautica -- put a very vague and incomplete world map poster in several ruined sea bases, and let the player take an in-game photo of it for reference.)


Some last few notes:
  • The interior level design, within various wrecked parts of the ship, is pretty cookie-cutter and disappointing. I understand they had to match the interiors of player-built bases for consistency, but it's still sad to wander these boring bland boxy plastic hallways from the same devs who fostered the geometric genius of the Natural Selection level design community. They feel like UDK levels waiting for an art pass.
  • re: player progression... for the first half of the game, new SOS beacons appear every hour or so, to gently push the player to explore different areas / give short-term exploration goals. But by the second half of the game, there's no more beacons and no more guidance. This disorientation is interesting, but more needs to be done to show that it's intentional, and maybe even script a few fallback beacons on any unexplored wrecks in the mid-to-late game. (I played for ~40 hours and apparently I missed like 1/4 of the whole game world? Again, no world map.)
  • A bit of technical analysis for Unity devs: Subnautica runs on a custom source version of Unity (according to the log file, Unity 5.6.2p4-UnknownWorlds) and their main level design tool was Voxeland, an asset store package that lets you sculpt and export 3D voxel data into sectors / cells, and process the topography into a more natural-looking marching cubes mesh. It also seems like they heavily engineered their own optimization and culling systems, especially for batching the terrain LODs together, but I've read that it's still running at like 20 FPS on Xbox One. Yikes, I think I'm never going to make an open world game...
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CFP: last week for submissions to Queerness and Games Conference 2018

February 24, 2018, 12:23 pm
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Radiator University, Summer 2018 course catalog

March 3, 2018, 3:21 pm
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Hello prospective student. We here at Radiator University would like to apologize for the hiatus -- due to circumstances Beyond Our Control, all our course catalogs (printed materials, digital copies, and all backups) for Fall 2017 and Spring 2018 semesters were dumped off the side of the New Jersey Turnpike. We were puzzled as to why absolutely zero students enrolled in any classes throughout the whole academic year, but please rest assured that we have switched to a different vendor for all our printed materials in the future, and This Will Never Happen Again.

On behalf of RU, I'd like to invite all new and returning students to quadruple-enroll in various summer courses to make-up for the lost time. Here is a sample of our Summer 2018 course offerings:

ARTM 252: SPECULATIVE GUN LAB(4 credits)
Modern assault weapons are not just controversial, but also extremely ugly. In this class, we will conduct an art history analysis of firearms as aesthetic objects to understand how it all went wrong -- and link the decline of gun aesthetics with the decline of American moral authority since World War II, or maybe even before? Students will be expected to travel every weekend to apprentice under artistanal heritage gun smiths, and as a final project, design and manufacture a new type of firearm that reimagines the gun's relationship to nationalism -- the only constraint is that this new "speculative gun" cannot fire bullets or shells. What else can a gun do or be?

Offered only at West Virginia campus. Lab fee of US$11920.87, including accidental firearm discharge insurance, will be assessed by the university bursar. Prerequisites: at least 1 semester of both METL 200: INTRO TO METALURGY as well as HIST 92B: WESTERN THEORIES OF JUST WAR.

***

MUSI 24C: MASTERS ATELIER -- PORN MUSIC(2 credits)
What does sex sound like? In this Masters Atelier, we will collaborate with various local adult and erotica studios to re-imagine the sonic landscape of pornography. We will understand pornography as a performance of movements timed to rhythm, within a long legacy of dance and theater as well as the industry convention of traditional film scoring. Students will be selected by local sex workers and performers to create original compositions and soundtracks for their work. Past students have researched Gregorian chants and blowjobs, country music cunnilingus, as well as hymen hymnals. By the end of this course, students will perceive arousal as a general problem of composition and rhythm.

Students not selected by any sex workers will be dropped automatically from the class. Students are also advised that funding for 100-piece philharmonic orchestras is strictly on a first-come basis. Prerequisites: GEND 102: INTRO TO GAZE THEORY... Also cross-listed as GEND 167D, DANCE 44, and FILM 121.

***

ECON 799A-799J: THREE YEAR SEMINAR -- EAT THE RICH(36 credits across 9 semesters)
In this long-form seminar open exclusively to second year undergraduate students, we will attempt to "eat the rich" in a process that will take approximately three years. In year 1, we will study wealth distribution and flows of capital to identify a moneyed candidate among the 15 million US$ millionaires throughout the world -- and then methodically research every aspect of their lives. Inspired by the 1997 mystery thriller film The Game, we will use year 2 to covertly embed ourselves in every aspect of the candidate's daily life, including but not limited to fictional business partnerships, romantic relationships such as marriage, and commandeering all local vendors and services surrounding their residence(s). In year 3, we will psychologically destroy the candidate by systematically isolating and devouring each of their relationships, financial assets, and memories, until the candidate doubts whether they ever existed at all. By the end of this course, the candidate will be left a quivering mass of flesh, with no monetary value nor identity nor soul to speak of. In doing so, we will argue that literal cannibalism is for amateurs.

Offered only at Wall Street campus. All enrolled students must sign over power of attorney to Radiator University, as well as relevant waivers and confidentiality agreements. Prerequisites: SOCE 201: INTERMEDIATE SOCIAL ENGINEERING.

***

We know you have a lot of choices when it comes to your education. We thank you for choosing Radiator University. Enroll now! Our accountants are standing by.

For your convenience, past course catalogs are available here.
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Level With Me, BioShock 1 (2007) complete

March 5, 2018, 8:00 am
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Last week I finished playing through all of BioShock 1 for my weekly level design let's play series Level With Me. My playthrough wasn't without its problems -- I was playing lazily and haphazardly, which means I relied on the same combat tactics all the time, and I also actively avoided exploring audio diaries / optional areas / player upgrade systems for the sake of brevity. Playing on easy mode also meant the boss encounters lost their pacing, and side areas remained unexplored instead of desperately scavenged for supplies.

Most people fondly remember BioShock for its narrative and setting, but I was consistently surprised with how much ol' fashioned game design went into it. Lots of classic hub-and-spoke level design, and several chains of fetch quests about looking for parts and materials -- remnants of an abandoned inventory / crafting system according to former BioShock dev JP LeBreton, who occasionally graced the broadcast with his presence and offered interesting trivia or context. I also played through the famous Fort Frolic chapter by BioShock 2 lead Jordan Thomas and felt strangely disappointed -- its scripted sequences and theatrical flourishes were interesting, and it made novel use of BioShock's "camera" mechanic, but the critical path overall felt a bit weightless. Again, I couldn't really play leisurely and explore the other 50% of Fort Frolic that was purely optional, so maybe also take my reactions with a grain of salt.

Instead, I found myself focusing on a lot of the environment art. I argue that a lot of the water effects and particles still mostly hold-up more than 10 years later. The distinctive area signage is still well-conceptualized and cleanly executed, where most games would just slap a flat texture onto a quad and call it a day. BioShock's use of lighting is also extremely lurid and saturated, like a surreal 1990s Tim Burton movie where everything is glowing with neon fluorescence, often from invisible light sources with no nearby fixture.

It's important to contextualize how this game basically set-off a second wave of immersive sims that died after Deus Ex Invisible War / Thief 3: Deadly Shadows / Vampire: The Masquerade all sort of flopped. In 2007, you could argue that BioShock's relative success helped convince people to fund Dishonored and a new Deus Ex reboot, and perhaps it's the reason why we're still (barely) talking about immersive sims today.

The full archived BioShock 1 playlist is available here, and if you want to tune in to a live Level With Me broadcast and chat for a bit, I usually do them on Tuesdays 2-3pm EST. Maybe see you then!
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Apply to NYU Game Center 2018 Summer Incubator

March 8, 2018, 8:00 am
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Applications for the 2018 NYU Game Center summer incubator are now open! If you have a solid game prototype or a half-finished game, but you don't know how to finish it or how to do all that "indie biz" stuff, then this incubator might be a good fit to help you move toward release and financial sustainability.

The incubator is a 3 month period in the summer that also pays you a living stipend to come live / work in New York City, where you get mentored by faculty (such as the notorious Bennett Foddy???) as well as other local devs. In 2017, there was also a comprehensive series of workshops on how to negotiate, how to do market research, how to register as a business, and the devs even visited Kickstarter and other local partners around NYC for advice and feedback. You also get to meet a bunch of other indie devs, co-work in a friendly environment, and make new friends. (For more details, see "Incubator Curriculum")

The catch is that if you make more than $10,000 in a year from the game, then you pay 10% of the rest of your revenue back into the incubator to fund future projects. If you don't end up making money, then you don't pay anything. You still maintain ownership of your game and IP, and you can also negotiate these terms if you want -- but compared to a lot of funding deals, this is already pretty generous.

Here's some more info and rough math to help you decide whether it's a good fit for you:
  • each core team member gets $6000 USD to cover rent and living for these 3 months
  • renting a room in a Brooklyn apartment share is maybe ~ $800 a month
  • basic groceries and food are mostly the same cost as other US cities (budget $50-100 a week for food?)
  • your office space at NYU is free
  • your airfare costs would be be $100-600 for a round-trip ticket from North America / Western Europe (also factor in US visa costs, if you're not coming from "the west")
  • your subway costs are $2.75 * 40 per month (40 subway rides for commuting 20 weekdays to co-work in the office)
So if you'd be relying solely on the living stipend for all your costs, then it's maybe barely doable but not recommended. You might need to have a bit of other income or savings.

The incubator heavily encourages applicants from outside of NYC to apply; it gets money from the state government specifically to attract more people to come live and work here. Non-US applicants are also welcome to apply but keep in mind that the visa process can be difficult and unpredictable, especially if the US government does not have good relations with your country, and the incubator will reach out to selected international applicants to talk about what's possible.

Because this whole thing relies on successful projects paying back into the incubator, be advised that this program mostly has a commercial focus. It's about helping you to launch your game, and hopefully you become financially stable so that you can pay some of the money back. Less overtly commercial projects are still good and might be selected, but you'd have to have a clear plan or goal in mind -- to that end, there's now a ReFIG funded incubator slot to support a team/project aimed at social impact and improving diversity in the game industry, even if your project isn't a "traditionally commercial" type of thing.

For full details and information, or if you have other questions, visit the 2018 application page here. The deadline to apply is April 8. Good luck!

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Tips for talking to Robert Yang at GDC

March 13, 2018, 2:56 pm
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Everyone's doing a bunch of GDC advice for first-time GDC attendees on Twitter, so I thought I'd chime in with a few tips of my own. Here's a helpful tutorial for how to have a successful social interaction with me, assuming you'd ever want to:
  1. Do you see me? I look like this. Or try to sneak a peek at the name on the badge. It should say "Robert Yang" on it.
  2. Are you sure that person isn't Brendon Chung? Brendon looks more like this; we're about the same height, but he's a bit more handsome and has a deep voice, and I have larger lips and generally sound louder and shriller.
  3. If we met at some past event or party one time, and I don't regularly interact with you in-person or on Twitter, then there's a good chance I won't remember you or your name. (I'm sorry in advance.) If you want to remind me that I should've remembered your name, you can briefly mention something like "we met at GDC last year" -- but don't mention a specific number of months, days, or hours, because then it'll seem like you've been pedantically tracking our non-relationship.
  4. (For advanced users only:) I don't respond well to praise or compliments, unless you deliver the compliment in a tone that borders on sarcastic / flippant while still remaining essentially earnest. Your goal is to perform a chipper yet world-weary knowingness.
  5. If we're talking but you don't want to talk to me anymore, then just say something like "well it was nice talking to you" and walk away. If we're in a group or cluster of people, then just let the conversation naturally die down, and then turn to someone else and subtly emote that you're not paying attention to me anymore.
  6. Whatever you do, don't tell me that you read this guide.
If you're looking for a more genuinely useful primer for going to GDC, see "GDC Advice for young first-time attendees, 2017 edition"
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Dispatches from GDC 2018

March 27, 2018, 2:35 pm
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In keeping with a tradition I've done for GDC 2012 and GDC 2015, I like to try to condense general moods and topics at GDC. What happened there?...

Post-indiepocalyptic. In past years, I've remarked on the tension between AAA developers vs commercial indie devs vs non-commercial "artists" -- that tension isn't gone, but it's certainly not as big of an issue anymore. Everything everywhere is kind of terrible for everyone. So many people are making so little money that it's hard to distinguish their precarity from another precarity. Besides, a massive political shift is now underway in the form of...

Unionization. I was one of maybe 150 people who attended the unionization roundtable session. My live tweet thread is here if you want my version of what happened. Throughout GDC I heard so many stories that made me realize working conditions are worse than I imagined, and there's a shocking sense of resignation when I spoke to one AAA dev who predicted they were going to burnout with their next 100 hour workweek / 6 month crunch, like it was just this inevitable natural disaster that was definitely going to happen... As someone who trains students in game development, I guess I'm extremely concerned about throwing my students into this giant machine that will mercilessly devour them! (For what it's worth, the IGDA moderator Jen MacLean seems to have walked-back some of her anti-worker positions as a result of the roundtable.)

Generations. I don't know how a lot of other "established" indies feel, but this year when I went to a party or looked out into a crowd, I didn't recognize as many faces as I thought I would. Maybe this is just what happens in every industry, as more people burnout or find something better or in some cases even die. I spent a good amount of my GDC trying to meet new people, and that was utterly exhausting, but I'm still glad I made the effort, because this year felt...

Gayer? I met so many queer and trans people at GDC this year. And one night when I asked someone whether they were going to "the gay party", they asked me to clarify my question: "which gay party?" (!)... As always, I'm reluctant to praise diversity efforts because that implies diversity has been achieved and no more work is needed, but I did feel like there were generally more LGBTQ people everywhere at GDC, or at least more than before, and it was kind of nice.

Overall. Everyone was tired, but there was a sense that maybe it was worth staying.
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