Will Wright over Cute versus Science discussie

Ik heb in dit blog al aandacht besteed aan de hele Cute versus Science discussie die de laatste tijd op het Amerikaanse Spore forum speelde en had toen al zo een vermoeden dat de hele aanval op Chris Hecker nergens op gebaseerd was, zie ook deze blogberichten.

Will Wright heeft nu in deze post gereageerd en, nadat ook Lucy Bradshaw eerder al had gereageerd, ook weer wat feiten gegeven in plaats van al de onzin die er de laatste tijd online is gekomen:

I’ve just recently tuned into this thread on the forums. I usually try to keep more up to date but I’ve been traveling way too much lately. Wow, there’s some rather intense discussion here I see about the design decisions we made in Spore. I think it’s really important for me to jump in and clarify a few things from my point of view.

First let me say a few things about the “Cute” vs. “Science” perspectives in Spore. It is true that during most of the design process we had team members on different sides of this debate. While I was officially on the science side at the same time I always saw this as a crucial tension that I wanted to foster, in other words I didn’t want the science side to win, I wanted to make sure both sides were represented in the game to some degree.

Two of the Chris’ on our team (Chris Trottier and Chris Hecker) were the most vocal representatives of what I started calling the cute team but they were by no means the only ones, they represented quite a large portion of the team. And their agenda in our design process was most certainly not to dumb-down the gameplay but rather to foster emotional engagement with the players in the game experience. An early example of this was the decision to add eyes to the cell game which in no way changed the gameplay, but we found for certain players made the cell experience more humorous and personal.

I see that many of the criticisms about the depth of play in Spore seem to be personally directed to Chris Hecker in particular. This is both ironic and incorrect. Chris was the leading talent behind the voodoo math of the procedural animation system in Spore, the system that brings the creatures you design to life. As the author of this system Chris was quite aware of how flexible and also how unpredictable it could be. I had many discussions with him in particular about how much of the players design decisions would affect the actual performance of your creature in the game world.

To take a quick tangent let me use the creature design vs. performance as an example. We had competing issues to face. First, we wanted the creature’s design to impact its in-game performance. Second, we wanted the economics of the editor to be simple and understandable and connected to performance. Third, we wanted a high amount of aesthetic diversity. We didn’t want there to be one ultimate design direction that the simulator was forcing all the creatures into. In other words if to be fast you had to have long legs that would have met the first goal, conflicted with the third goal and made the second much more complex.

As the lead designer my goal through most of the project was to make sure the gameplay didn’t end up too complex, which resulted in simplifying many of the level dynamics and editor consequences. I felt like we were already asking quite a bit from the players as we took them through the various level genres. This was totally my judgment call and not even part of the agenda of the “cute” team, and certainly not the fault of Chris Hecker. So to make a long story short I’m the one to be blamed for any faults in the gameplay, that’s my job on the team.

Chris is one of the most talented people I’ve ever had the pleasure to work with in the game industry and he takes his craft quite seriously. So it’s been very disturbing for me to read how he has been unfairly vilified for what were in fact entirely my design decisions.

A genre-spanning game like Spore is almost by its very nature experimental. Not only do we not have an existing game to learn design lessons from, we also don’t initially know what the demographic of our players will be (and hence their expectations for complexity and depth). As we move forward with the franchise we plan to listen closely and learn. Our plans for the first Spore expansions are already revolving heavily around what we’re hearing from our players so far.

I want to personally thank everyone who’s playing Spore, especially for the countless, wonderful creations that have been posted to Sporepedia. And I also want to give thanks and encouragement for the discussions here on our forum that will help us make Spore a cooler experience for everyone.

-Will Wright

Nieuwe rel rondom Spore

Er is weer een nieuwe rel aan het ontstaan rondom Spore en dit maal is Chris Hecker, Spore devolper en Animator, de man die nogal onder vuur ligt.

Hij wordt er van beschuldigd te hebben gezorgd dat Spore een stuk simpeler & schattiger is geworden dan Will Wright wilde maar dat hij het team dat aan Spore werkt overtuigd heeft dat het spel een stuk simpeler moest worden en minder 'wetenschappelijk'.

De hele rel is begonnen in een topic op het US Spore forum met de veelzeggende titel We Found Who to Tar and Feather! En het gaat er hard aan toe. Schijnbaar waren Will Wright en Art Director Ocean Quigley voor een meer wetenschappelijke benadering van Spore waar bijvoorbeeld de plaatsing van ledematen een veel grotere invloed hadden op het gedrag en de bewegingen van wezens dan ze nu in Spore hebben. Een bewering die Michael Chang, die schijnbaar nu weg is bij Maxis, onderschrijft.

Chris Hecker was bezorgd over deze 'te wetenschappelijke' benadering en heeft het Spore team overtuigd een 'leukere' versie van Spore te maken die een breder publiek zou aanspreken en het Spore team is toen gaan werken aan een versie die niet meer de wetenschappelijke, Darwiniaanse invloed had die Will Wright voor ogen had. Cute versus Science, zie ook dit artikel op Seed Magazine.

Op zijn beurt heeft Chris Hecker weer gereageerd in dit topic op Quarter to Three en gezegd dat dit hele verhaal onzin is en dat hij een manier zoekt om op al deze wilde verhalen te reageren. Hij kan natuurlijk niet alles zeggen en zal nu wel met de PR afdeling van Maxis aan het overleggen zijn hoe te reageren op deze nieuwe Spore rel. De discussie negeren in de hoop dat het overwaait is schijnbaar niet gelukt.

Mij valt het in ieder geval op dat de negatieve sfeer die op het US Spore forum hangt nu wéér de overhand begint te krijgen en je kunt er nog nauwelijks iets zeggen zonder dat dat hele topic (bijvoorbeeld nieuwe screens) weer gaat over dat Spore wat tegenvalt of over de SecuRom in Spore. En deze hele hype is weer koren op de molen van al die EA en Spore haters die nu op de officiële US Spore forum de dienst uitmaken. We hebben het al eerder gezien met de hele SecuRom - DRM discussie.

Verder kan Chris Hecker misschien wat ongelukkige uitspraken hebben gedaan over zijn invloed op hoe Spore uiteindelijk geworden is maar het lijkt me sterk dat 1 persoon in zo'n groot team, waar niet de minste games makers inzitten, dat team zo kan manipuleren dat Spore een heel andere kant op gaat dan Will Wright en dat team willen.

Ik krijg sterk het gevoel dat er gepraat wordt over 2 verschillende games: Spore dat ooit gepresenteerd is op de GDC 2005 en de hype die erna over Spore is onstaan (vaak gebaseerd op wat mensen zouden willen zien in Spore en niet op feiten) en Spore zoals het uiteindelijk is geworden: misschien inderdaad wel Science versus Cute?

We zullen het moeten doen met wat we hebben en misschien valt dat wat tegen, maar als ex Sims 2 speler weet ik dat ook een game als Spore meer diepte kan krijgen door packs en uitbreidingen.

Iemand onder de kop 'We Found Who to Tar and Feather!' zo afmaken wetende dat Spore erg gehyped is (ook door Spore fans) en dat Chris zich ook niet kan verdedigen zonder te overleggen met Maxis is erg laag bij de grond.

Lucy Bradshaw over rol Chris Hecker bij maken Spore

Gisteren heb ik een vrij lange post gemaakt over de 'onder de gordel' aanval op Chris Hecker, Spore devolper en Animator, op het Amerikaanse Spore forum en op andere sites.

Lucy Bradshaw, Executive Producer, heeft gereageerd en maakt even goed duidelijk dat Chris een waardevol Spore team lid is en dat de hele 'Science versus Cute' discussie binnen het hele team werd gevoerd, met Will Wright erbij die de uiteindelijke beslissingen over welke kant Spore op moest zelf nam:

Hi all. I wanted to weigh in on this thread. I appreciate the comments and the open discussion about the game, the look and everyone’s expectations. I think that this type of dialog is a healthy exchange of ideas. We get a lot out of it and I’m not interested in shutting that down. However, I do think that the aspersions toward any individual member of the Spore team are unwarranted and are getting out of hand here. The concept of Spore that Will presented at GDC 2005 was the guidepost for the development and execution of the game. Will very much remained the visionary and design leader throughout the development of Spore. He worked collaboratively with the team when opinions differed but decisions were definitely in his domain.

The cute vs. science debate within the team had more to do with the concept of accessibility, character and aesthetic than it had to do with the underlying gameplay. Some of this was driven by the simple reality of a very unique and rather cutting edge approach to animation. Procedural animation is just one of the incredible contributions that Chris Hecker made to this game. It was a huge area of focused work and learning for us as the animation engineering team developed this system. One thing that we learned is that setting an expectation of very realistic looking animations that, for instance, captured the discrete differences of movement of a cat vs. the movement of a dog would be off target. Moving away from an aesthetic that set such expectations was a well considered decision on our part. I’m personally amazed at what the animation team was able to achieve. Will set a goal for the team that we be able to hit a mark, in terms of creative breadth, that reached from Pixar to Geiger. The aesthetic, physical and placement constraint decisions that we made regarding the Creature Creator were held to our tenets of unconstrained creativity and accessibility for the creators.

Chris contributed so much in the way of innovations for Spore and deserves to be recognized for his work. While we have no interest in stifling conversation on the Sporum about Spore from anyone, I request that people show respect for others and refrain from outright defamation and threats.

Thanks,

Lucy

Chris Hecker over de technologie achter Spore

GameSpy heeft Chris Hecker (Spore Developer) geinterviewd over de technologie achter Spore en het resultaat is een 3 pagina's lang artikel.

GameSpy: What features did you cut from the design of the game this time around that you hope to revisit in the future? Clothing? Fur?
Chris Hecker: We had fur for a while, so I'm sure that'll come back at some point. Some early skinpaint prototypes supported emissive textures as well (meaning the creatures could light up at night like a firefly), which was cool and I hope will make a comeback. Maybe if we bring underwater civilizations back...glowing fish creatures would be cool!

Hecker en Roarty over de techniek achter Spore

Op deze pagina van Animated World Magazine een uitgebreid interview met Chris Hecker (animator) en Morgan Roarty (senior producer) over de technische kanten van het bouwen van een spel als Spore en dan met name de animaties.

Hecker notes that Spore has been planting the seeds of the next generation of animators. "Creators are being inspired to do 3D modeling and to create videos," Hecker says. The YouTube generation is creating original content, including videos featuring scenarios like dancing Spore creatures."