full interview_richard lemarchand_1.mp3
Richard LeMarchand [00:00:00] My name is Richard LeMarchand, I'm lucky enough to have been a professional game designer nearly all my adult life and I'm now an associate professor in the USC Games program here at the University of Southern California.
Speaker 2 [00:00:13] Wonderful, thank you. So we're going to start stupid simple, because there's people who may have never picked up a video game. They don't know anything about this world. Can you just sort of classify what is a video?
Richard LeMarchand [00:00:27] What is a video game? Well, I worked in the mainstream of the game industry, the commercial game industry for 20 years or so before becoming a professor. And so for me, I guess I could answer that a video games is a kind of piece of interactive entertainment. Something that involves the kinds of traditions of games and play that we've had for thousands of years. Competition, chance, systems of logic and number, where we're working towards outcomes. But I've also always seen video games as a storytelling form. I think even games that only have a little bit of story in them actually have quite a powerful narrative mechanism at work. Our minds are narrativizing mechanisms, right? We make sense of the world by telling stories about it. And so I think it's the braid between these two things, you know, the kind of rules-based, gamey games, and then the opportunities that games have for telling stories, that I think make up the big tent that we now see video games as.
Speaker 2 [00:01:38] So it's kind of easy to assume that a video game is sort of born after like board games or more analog games, I guess you'd say, but it sounds like you're saying there's more to it that elevates that from those.
Richard LeMarchand [00:01:51] Yeah, I think board games, card games, other kinds of analog games, they're part of the ancestry of video games, but they don't quite tell the whole story. One of the things that led me to become a professor more than a decade ago now was my interest in the emerging indie game scene, which was interested in breaking outside of some of the traditional ideas we'd inherited about games as these game-y systems, maybe shifting the focus more to narrative. I'm also really interested in other kinds of interactive entertainment, you know, the themed entertainment of the Disney Imagineer designing a theme park, the kinds of immersive experience created, well gosh, by VR designers, but also by escape room designers and people working in interactive theater. I think all these things are kind of blending around the edges, mixing up experience design with various kinds of digital technological design. To create this great breaking wave front in this wonderful new art form.
Speaker 2 [00:02:54] Um, so, so talking about that history a little bit, you know, and again, this could be a 10 hour answer. So we're just looking at a very high level here.
Speaker 3 [00:03:02] Mm-hmm
Speaker 2 [00:03:02] But starting with like Pong and Atari and those days, how did we get to the massive industry that it is today that is just innovating like crazy?
Richard LeMarchand [00:03:17] Well when i think about the early days of games and how they traveled from action video games running on massive room-size computers in universities through to those pong machines of the early seventies that our parents brought home uh... You know from the department store and then to the cartridge game revolution of the nineteen eighties where we could now plug and play different games. And have them coming at us through our television screen and speakers, but be able to take part in the unfolding adventure. I think this is something that captured the imaginations of young and old alike. I often think it comes back to parents telling kids stories and manipulating the outcome depending on what the children were excited about. There's a sort of cultural anthropology argument to be made that we've been doing that exact same thing around the village hearth. Millennia. I suppose that as computing power increased exponentially, you know, more than doubling each year for a long time, that just gave creative people countless new opportunities, often around graphics but increasingly around the programming power that we use to drive the artificial intelligences that we use in our games. To do more complex things with adaptive music that responds to the way the gameplay events are unfolding. And yeah, that's just made things shoot through the roof in terms of innovation and creativity.
Speaker 2 [00:04:54] Touch on a few things we're gonna get back to in a minute, but place yourself in that history. Talk about that drive. Maybe you were that kid who ran to the arcade and loved to play the game. Just tell me what you love about it, being a part of that history?
Richard LeMarchand [00:05:12] Well, as a tiny kid, I was drawn to the cathode ray tube. I love these fantastical images that I saw on our television. And I had this epiphany the first time my parents took me to what we call in the UK an amusement arcade, when I was just five years old. And that love for games lasted all throughout my childhood and into my teens. You know, we were lucky enough to get a home computer that I did some academic things with, but mainly played with before and after school. As an older teenager I kind of shifted my attention for a while towards novels and films and pop music and I actually think that enriched my game design practice later on. We often say here in the USC Games program that video games are kind of a meta art form. Anything that you do in another art form can enrich your game design practices. So when I was lucky enough to get a job in the game industry soon after I graduated College. I was excited about the games that I had played. I knew about virtual reality from Howard Reingold's famous book, and I was excited to see where all this stuff was going to go. I guess that's how I got into this.
Speaker 2 [00:06:31] So, going back to that mindset, what was the first game you played where it wasn't just spending an afternoon at the arcade, it really blew your socks off and you said, wow, this is an arch. This is something more than just a passing.
Richard LeMarchand [00:06:52] So when I think about my formative, artistic game design experiences, there's a little cluster of them. Some more game-like, some more related to storytelling. A big revelation for me came with the LucasArts scum system games of the late 80s and early 90s. There was a game called Sam and Max Hit the Road, two popular indie comic book characters. That featured in what we called a point and click adventure game. It had really good puzzle design, really great storytelling that was both funny and quite moving by turns, and that was also a kind of cultural survey of the United States in a way. Seen through the lens of roadside attractions, you know, giant balls of yarn and dinosaurs at gas stations. And I think it was that game, along with Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and Day of the Tentacle that were also similar kinds of games, that made me think, oh wow, look how artfully that gaminess is being combined with storytelling. What else could we do with this?
Speaker 2 [00:08:10] Is there a distinction for you when you see a game of, you know, this is just whatever, a money maker or just to kind of fill an hour and this is really something to behold?
Richard LeMarchand [00:08:23] So maybe because of my background as someone who, as I came into myself as a person, I got more and more interested in the novel as an art form, you know, as this highly psychological poetic exploration of the human condition. I think I developed some highfalutin ideas about art in that time. You know, it coincided with my interest in indie filmmaking. Think as the years have gone on I have increasingly found art in transcendent craft and I get some of these ideas from my friend Amy Hennig, the well-known game director that I worked with for many years on the Uncharted games and another game series before that. It was Amy who pointed out to me that if we pursue our craft with dedication, if we try to bring the best of ourselves to If we try to hone our craft by just getting better at the basic skills that we use to do what we do, then that typically leads to something that has that sort of transcendent value, that exploration of the human spirit that my favorite artworks had. So these days I tend to try and avoid being too picky, too snobby maybe. And I see great art everywhere I look in the world of video games, both commercial and those which are framed as, you know, more artistic.
Speaker 2 [00:09:59] Very diplomatic, and of course you have to be. I'm just saying. So you mentioned it. Let's talk about your life as a game designer. First of all, what does it even mean to be a game
Richard LeMarchand [00:10:13] So the question, what does it mean to be a game designer is one that has been of great interest over the last 30 years. When I was first hired as a game design, I don't think anyone really knew the answer to that question, in honesty. I think that's partly why I was able to luck my way into a role in the game industry. Today I would say that the two great skills of a game designers are an understanding of human psychology and an ability to do what we call systems thinking. So I think the psychological aspect of it is obvious. It's the same kind of appreciation to psychology that any great storyteller needs. What makes a human being tick? How are we driven by our desires? And maybe how are we motivated by the things that are deeply buried shortcomings in us? And how do we grow and develop over the course of our lives? Game designers need to understand a lot about theories of. Perception, cognition and action. You know, our games are interactive systems. If we're not showing something clearly on the screen in the way that the player can respond to well in an intentional way, then we're failing in our jobs. The systems thinking part comes from the fact that our games, are these very rich systems of logic, space, number, often highly symbolic. Uh... And systems a complex right we know from the study of systems dynamics that they made up of feedback loops that create these kinds of steady state uh... Which can transform really easily from uh... Low-energy state to a high-energy states or vice versa you know you think about the economy in a game that has resources uh... There are lots of different ways of looking at video games as systems so i think it's those too understandings of the world. That are really what a game designer does, in essence.
Speaker 2 [00:12:13] When you describe it like that, it sounds incredibly Da Vinci-ian. I mean, you are truly thinking with both art and science minds at once, is that fair to say?
Richard LeMarchand [00:12:24] Yeah, I think that every game designer at least has an interest in Leonardo da Vinci. And the way that as, you know, perhaps the archetypal renaissance person, he was thinking with both sides of his brain. He was using his rationality to systematically investigate the world around him, but he was also drawing on his creativity and intuition to lead him in promising directions.
Speaker 2 [00:12:49] I want to talk about this challenge specifically as a game designer, so you have an artistic vision. Maybe that's where you start. Or do you start with, I have a system, I sort of have a gameplay mechanic or something, and I have to build a whole world and a story to support that. How does that begin?
Richard LeMarchand [00:13:10] Well, as a game designer, I'm often asked the question, where do you start with story or gameplay, with creativity or rationality? In the world's, oh, blah, blah. Sorry. As a game design, I am often asked the question where do start with a game design, are you led by game mechanics or story? Do you start with rational inspection or with creativity? In the words of the great outsider, American philosopher, Charles Ford. One measures a circle beginning anywhere uh... And i think that uh... Both approaches are legitimate you know uh... Uh... I think uh... It doesn't really matter whether you start with an idea that's just very reform nebulous and follow it somewhere or whether you have a really clearly defined rational idea about what you want to do you will inevitably find yourself jumping back and forth between these two different modes of thinking as you go about designing whatever it is you're working on.
Speaker 2 [00:14:13] Can you talk about some of the unique challenges that a game designer faced? And feel free to draw on your own experiences with Uncharted.
Speaker 3 [00:14:22] Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 [00:14:22] Anything else you want to reference. I'm thinking things like map, you know, the end of the map. Oh yeah, yeah. You want somebody to do a certain thing but they don't want to do that. That's a very unique game design.
Richard LeMarchand [00:14:37] So there are a lot of really unique game design challenges related to this. In the early days of the game industry, we used to try and think our way through to the end of a design problem quite far along before we would start implementing the game. It used to take us a really long time to put things together in code. Eventually, we learned that if we spent too much time thinking, we would just waste a lot time. Because usually you implement something. You do a playtest and you immediately discover that half your ideas are wrong about what was going to work and what wasn't and then you have to rework a load of stuff. That's why we use the kind of play-centric game design processes that my friend Tracy Fullerton advocates for in her book Game Design Workshop and which we use here in the USC Games program. We want to do just enough thinking to be able to build something and then we need to start playtesting it right away. We playtest, we just watch, we don't interfere in the playtest. We see what players naturally figure out to do, what they're drawn to have fun with, what they ignore or seemingly don't perceive at all, and then we iterate on our design from there.
Speaker 2 [00:15:49] You know failure is something we talk about in this series and the value of that yeah so this sounds exactly like that that you really value failure as a learning
Richard LeMarchand [00:15:58] I think game designers really do value failure. My friend Jesper Juhl points out to us that video games are one of the few areas in our lives where we fail over and over and again and seemingly enjoy it. And I do think there's something about, you know, as Huizinga coined the term the magic circle, you now, the special place that we enter when we're playing a game, which is a little bit divorced from reality, not completely. But where we are free to experiment and goof around, try something, have it not pan out, try something else, and learn in the process. As the game designer Raph Kosta says, fun is the emotion that accompanies learning. And I think that's full of insight.
Speaker 2 [00:16:44] When is a game done? I think now more than ever a game is updated even after you buy it So how do you decide that you put the final stroke?
Richard LeMarchand [00:16:56] This question of, when is a game done, has bedeviled game developers since the beginning of the industry, I think. We always want more time to work on something. I think the bigger, more commercial project you're on, the more you are beholden to very rigid milestones that mark the end of a project. Normally, there's a big publicity and marketing effort around the release of a new game and everything needs to be coordinated in time. Wasn't it Leo? Wasn't it Leonardo da Vinci who said, a work of art is never finished, only abandoned. And I think that's something that every developer has to kind of embrace. I think, that's why we need good processes, good production and design processes that make sure that we're always polishing as we go along, so that whenever we run out of time, we have something that we are happy to release into the wild. Things have gotten a little blurry in the last few years, though, as games have been increasingly distributed purely digitally. And I think today it's a little easier for a developer to release something in an unfinished state, and then to continue to work on it as the audience for the game engages with it and finds new things to do with it, potentially.
Speaker 2 [00:18:15] If the play testing continues in real life a little bit.
Richard LeMarchand [00:18:17] Exactly. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 [00:18:19] I want to get really into the idea of creativity and if you talked about the kind of mind that it takes to be a game designer and throwing all those balls in the air at once and keeping them there when you create a game, what to you, I know you have a diplomatic answer, but what to make a great game designer, what makes a true artist from the perspective balancing all of those.
Richard LeMarchand [00:18:54] So, to my mind, something at least of what makes a great game designer is a person who really sees other people in a deep way and a diverse way as well. We're all the same because we're all unique. We've all had unique life experiences. We're united broadly by our biology. You know, there are broad ways in which we... See and think about and act in the world in similar ways, though that can really be perturbed by the cultures that we grow up in, right, I think that a good game designer understands all of this. So that when they devise the potentially very small sets of rules that we make up as game designers, they're putting those rules into a field of human experience that will draw good things out of people. And for me, those good things are a cluster of ideas around what's pleasurable for human beings. Teaches human beings how to be well in the world, how to thrive and how to make sure that others are thriving as well. I mean, I have the values that I grew up around. I would like for the world to be a more peaceful and just place. For me, the game designers that I think are the most artistic probably share those values. I think the same is true for all of us in our understanding and appreciation of art, right?
Speaker 2 [00:20:44] You know, it strikes me that games more than any other art form require that you harness the uniqueness of the audience that is also participating in it. You know a composer picks the notes, painter picks the paints, those are finished products. Games have to leave some amount of space for you the player to fill. And it sounds like you're saying sort of there in lies. The beauty of it, the uniqueness of each person playing it, filling that gap.
Richard LeMarchand [00:21:17] Right so because games are interactive they are participatory the player is inevitably drawn into the way that the game unfolds you know uh... Whether that's a traditional kind of win-lose scenario or whether it's the multiple endings that a piece of interactive fiction might have right uh... From Star Trek The Next Generation is an interesting one. I think a lot of game designers were really inspired by that idea, the idea of a piece of interactive entertainment that you could select an array of scenarios from whatever you were interested in experiencing that day, but which would adapt itself to you, to whatever you needed in that moment from the art that you're experiencing, right? I think a lot of game designers still hold on to that idea. If we could create a game that for any person that approached it could teach them what they needed to learn. Look at the actions they were taking in the game and give them the right moral at the end of the story to get them through that piece of their life, that's certainly kind of the holy grail for me as a game designer.
Speaker 2 [00:22:40] So is it, and I know it's hard to speak broadly in some sense because there are so many different kinds of things, different intentions, but is some of the idea, you know, tricking a player into thinking that they have the free choice, but really you've sent them down a moral path or a certain lesson to be learned or to really give them that space to be that evil, good, whatever they want.
Richard LeMarchand [00:23:06] So there's an interesting question here of whether game designers can and should trick the player into thinking they have a choice when in fact they're being led down a particular path, or whether the player has genuine choice in the system of the game to arrive at this or that ending. I would say that's up to the game designer. Both of those are legitimate strategies. My colleagues and I have used both of those strategies in the games that we've made. And I think It's just a tool like any other and you could use it for good purposes or for ill.
Speaker 2 [00:23:43] Is the player sort of a co-author of the experience?
Richard LeMarchand [00:23:46] I think it's true to say that the player of a game is a co-author of the experience, but then I'm the kind of post-Walter Benamine person who thinks that the audience for linear kinds of media, stories, films, they also are kind of co-authors, because they bring all of their values, perceptions, all their ideas, whether right or wrong-headed, to the work. And, yeah, I've always thought... That this is a function of art. Art acts as a kind of reflecting mirror for us. I think that's why when we approach the same piece of art over and over again in our lives, for me it's a Mark Rothko painting in San Francisco MoMA, the painting is different each time because we are different each we approach it. And I think the same we'll find is true for games. I have a different relationship today. With the games I played when I was a teenager, which is no less rich, but just different.
Speaker 2 [00:24:53] Really beautifully said. I love the way you said that. May I change the battery? Please do, yeah. We can cut moments.
Richard LeMarchand [00:25:00] I'll drink some water. These are really great questions Chris.
Speaker 2 [00:25:03] Some really great answers. Thank you.
Speaker 4 [00:25:04] This is a super fascinating interview
Richard LeMarchand [00:25:08] Oh, I'm glad.
Speaker 5 [00:25:09] All the way around. Are you getting that broken? I'm sorry, did you both cut? Yes, yes, yes.
Speaker 2 [00:25:18] Yes, yes, yes.
Richard LeMarchand [00:25:21] They're often really social, really literary experiences. I think parents often overlook that. Yeah.
Speaker 5 [00:25:28] It with him.
Richard LeMarchand [00:25:29] Yeah, yeah
Speaker 2 [00:25:31] to mark the notes I'd share your genuine
Speaker 3 [00:25:36] Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 [00:25:39] So just to pick up on the sort of player as the co-author touching on that.
Speaker 3 [00:25:46] Oh, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 [00:25:47] The other half of that equation, so to speak, is, and I just want to talk about this very briefly, but the idea of the AI algorithm component in the game that you are interacting with. Can you tell us a little, is there a short way to explain to a layman audience what exactly is happening under the hood with what is an algorithm, what is AI?
Richard LeMarchand [00:26:12] Well, when I'm trying to explain to people what kinds of algorithms, what kind of artificial intelligence, in air quotes, is at work in video games, I often fall back on explanations that revolve around the kinds of toys that I played with as a kid, kind of pre-digital toys mainly, and also on the idea of those automata that they built in the Victorian era. You know. The way that I always thought about the games I was working on was that I was trying to stage little dramas, often quite complex, sophisticated hopefully, using mechanisms. And it is very rules-based, it's like, if this happens then do this, if the player does that then do that other thing. And you don't need to create too many of these rules before, actually the situation it's quite complex. And you can account for a large number of different outcomes. It's also very interesting when you set up one rule over here and another over here and then bring them into conjunction with one another, you often get a third, fourth, fifth kind of thing happening. That's where the play testing that we have to do comes in because the third and fourth things that happen might be good, but the fifth thing might break everything, so. But yeah, they're like these mechanisms that are rich with drama. The drama of the sports game, right? Where we're vying in competition to reach a certain kind of outcome. I wanna get more goals than you do. But also the drama of lovers reunited or former friends becoming enemies. That's, all these things are interlaced. My ideas about the role of machine learning have began, my ideas about... The things I've learned about machine learning have begun to transform this kind of mechanistic view I have of algorithms and AI in video games though. I think that the things that we are seeing now as we are using machine learning to create imagery and to generate text by feeding large numbers of images and a lot of text into these learning models is producing new and unexpected effects. Um... But i haven't really anticipated to be frank and i think within the next decade we're going to start to see that stuff making its way into uh... The game designers toolkit and that blows my mind who knows what's going to happen who knows the new ways that we're gonna be able to engage with machines in real time where the outcomes are even less predictable by either designer or in.
Speaker 2 [00:29:11] But ultimately, as you serve Intimated, it is part of a toolkit, right? I think AI is probably overstating it now, it sounds like. But it's really just a result of the designer's creativity. Thank you.
Richard LeMarchand [00:29:26] Well, I've always quibbled with the use of the term AI in a game design context, at least for the games that we've had in the past, because I know from my studies in philosophy that general intelligence is probably a long way off when we think about the kinds of things that machines are going to be able to do. And we might discover that we just can't do general intelligence of the kind that you and I have on silicon at all. We might need to. Make those mechanisms wet, we might need to bioengineer them to have a true artificial intelligence. So, yeah, I think that interesting things happen when a mechanism becomes sufficiently complex, right? I'm still kind of boggled by how a mechanical watch works to steadily sweep that hand around, and we have the same thing to the nth degree in a video game, so.
Speaker 2 [00:30:22] The great comparison. Talking about creativity, broadly, can you put your finger on it? What is that? What is creativity?
Richard LeMarchand [00:30:34] Sometime in my early 20s, I started saying, I think all humans are innately creative. I think it takes a phenomenal amount of creativity to walk across a kitchen and make a cup of tea. That multi-stage process with all the things that could go wrong along the way requires a lot of us, right? It requires us to always be inventing new ways of doing things. It requires this to, always be finessing what we're doing, right? I think the cup of tea example is a good one because it's something that many of us have done a lot. I think that's partly why I'm focused on craft as an aspect of creativity. There are a certain number of things, a large number of thing that we end up doing over and over and again in the course of making a video game. Whether that's placing an invisible volume that when the player crosses into it, triggers an event to happen somewhere else in the world. Whether it is designing game mechanics that have certain underlying patterns that have been proven to work very well over time. So, yeah, I do think that we are all innately creative. I think that creativity comes from our psychology and in part from our biology. We are these agents who have to navigate an unpredictable world. We have to get certain of our needs met on a- time-sensitive mission-critical basis. That's driven us towards certain modes of engaging with the world. I recently read a fascinating book by Annie Murphy-Paul, the well-known pop-science author, called The Extended Mind. And in this book, she talks about extended cognition. She does a great survey of both the science and philosophy of this emerging field of cognitive science. The way in which we literally think, using our bodies, using the places and tools in which we exist, and relying on other people as well to kind of outsource our cognition. I think this is an area that's interesting when we're discussing creativity. It's like, how am I inspired by my workspace to come up with ideas? And we're always encouraging our students to arrange their workspaces. So that they do become more creative, whether it's because there's a row of post-it notes on their monitor reminding them to do things, or maybe because there is a plant on the desk in front of them and the green leaves are soothing and kind of help put them into a creative zone. I think there's lot here to discuss around creativity.
Speaker 2 [00:33:24] An enormous subject. Bigger than games maybe. We can't do it all, but I'm curious if it's sort of qualitatively.
Speaker 3 [00:33:31] Mm.
Speaker 2 [00:33:32] Feel that there's a similar creativity or not to coding something working on a technical problem versus say designing a character
Richard LeMarchand [00:33:46] I do think there are probably, at the end of the day, more similarities than differences between different modes of game development, whether it's engineering, art making, animation audio design, or the design of the whole game. I think we are all using skills that we've acquired, which are quite procedural, quite kind of process or step based. And as we work through these steps, we are forced to make big decisions that could lead us in one direction or another. It's an engineer choosing to use a certain programming pattern that they learned on another project to make this one easier. Or it's an artist gesturing with a brush in a certain way to create a pattern of light and shade in an image. Yeah, I do think there is a lot that unifies human creativity. That we sometimes lose sight of in the creative process, because on the surface of it, drawing a picture and writing a piece of code looks very different, right? I think it's part of the game designer's role is to find ways to unify these seemingly disparate disciplines. I think that's why a lot of people who have the phrase game designer in their job titles are Renaissance people. They're people who've grown up loving both science and art. Drawing and writing and writing a bit of code or loving physics or chemistry or whatever. It's our role to draw every person together in this creative practice, to get people talking to each other across disciplines, helping them find common ground where you need to, and that's where the real magic starts to happen.
Speaker 2 [00:35:35] As a professor, as an educator, you know, how do you feel about what I think you could say is a siloing of teaching art and teaching science, technology, engineering, etc., having those be separate in an institution, not just in the game lab, but just generally speaking.
Richard LeMarchand [00:35:58] I think... My stomach's room.
Speaker 2 [00:36:08] Have some water, please, if you need.
Richard LeMarchand [00:36:11] I think I was quite young in school when I realized that it was a mistake to separate out the arts from the sciences. I'm quite a visual learner, so I learned most of what I know about science through looking at pictures and copying them out myself. As an adult, I feel very strongly that it's a great mistake to silo the arts and the sciences. And it's been a great mistake anywhere in the world. Secondary or higher education around the world where arts education has gotten sidelined or even completely defunded in some cases. The arts are crucially important to the kinds of creative thinking that we need in science and technology. It's where we learn to think in those extra... Kind of curveball ways that lead to the great innovations that we've seen throughout ancient and modern history in science and the arts. So as a professor in the USC Games program, one of the things that I love most about our program is that we are, I think, unique in the world in that USC Games is situated equally across both an arts school and an engineering school. I'm appointed in the USC School of Cinematic Arts, the second oldest film school in the world, and half the students I teach are from the Viterbi School of Engineering, our partners. And we offer degrees in both these schools. We also serve students from schools all across the university. And by bringing folks with these different backgrounds together, we create really rich educational experiences for everyone. In truth, the professors increasingly can't tell the difference between the engineering school kids and the cinema school kids. They are all Renaissance people, right? They all have grown up coding, making art, doing sound design, and they all have so much to bring to the table.
Speaker 2 [00:38:23] How do you begin to teach, then, from your perspective? And what is the goal in your class is like the one we're going to see this afternoon?
Richard LeMarchand [00:38:32] So I had to start figuring out how to teach game designers to do game design early in my career, before there were any textbooks, and I guess I drew on my own learning experiences. The people who taught me, the kind of elder mentor game designers, many of whom had come from a tabletop gaming background, role-playing games, board games and so on, they taught me about both the importance of rules-based design, creating simple but richly interconnected sets of rules that would lead to lots of different interesting outcomes. They also taught me about player psychology, noticing what kinds of emotional reactions games drew out of players, and they taught me about iteration. So these were the things that I guess I had both in industry and then at our university in starting to think about how to teach students. It's always a delight and kind of reassuring to see how much skill students already have when they walk into our classrooms and how many sophomore errors they're prone to. Most every game designer in their first play test wants to start telling the player how to play the game. As Tracy Fullerton says, we have to remind them, you don't come in the box with the game, you're not gonna be in the player's house. When they're playing for the first time, you need to design your game so that it tells them how to play the game. And so that's reliably comforting that I'm going to have something to teach people.
Speaker 2 [00:40:12] And so in this class this afternoon, can you tell us just a little bit about what we'll see when we're walking through there in those sets?
Richard LeMarchand [00:40:19] So, in class this afternoon, we're going to see students who...
Speaker 2 [00:40:23] Can you just talk about Sir Bradley because we don't know, it's not a concept here.
Richard LeMarchand [00:40:27] Yeah, absolutely. So when we visit our advanced game project class this afternoon, A-G-P.
Speaker 2 [00:40:34] Yeah, sorry, we don't know what we're going to do this afternoon, so...
Richard LeMarchand [00:40:37] Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, so this afternoon we're going to visit.
Speaker 2 [00:40:39] No, no, no. Don't even mention this afternoon. Oh, gotcha. In my class.
Richard LeMarchand [00:40:49] So in our classes we do a lot of presenting our work, demoing our work right, showing games that aren't yet finished to the community of the classroom, the professor, but crucially importantly the other students in the class, to get their feedback, to hear from them what's working in this game already, what's clear, what do you understand, what isn't working yet, what is not landing right, what can you tell the designer is trying do here, but it's not really coming across. And that's what we spend a huge amount of our time doing as we iterate on the design of these games.
Speaker 2 [00:41:27] Try it, try and try again.
Richard LeMarchand [00:41:30] And it's very much a process of try, try, try again, yeah.
Speaker 2 [00:41:34] I just have a few more thoughts and then I'm going to give these guys a chance if they have anything to toss in. But just sort of jumping back to where we began a little bit about the history. Are there any specific kind of technological advancements? I love that you talked about how art is a great way to teach the mind a better way to think about scientific endeavors. Is there a technological scientific advancement that really gave designers... An ability to expand their artistry.
Richard LeMarchand [00:42:07] So I think there have been a few different technological advancements that allowed game designers to push forward what was possible with games in terms of art. One of the obvious ones is video games. The clue is in the title, it's the graphics of the game. And as games crossed these thresholds where they became first more colorful and then richly animated and then increasingly kind of photorealistic. I think those opened up new opportunities for us to do nuanced stuff in terms of the emotion or the ideas that we were trying to convey. I think sound is another area that for me was arguably even more important than the graphics. When we got the memory, the storage capacity to be able to save human voices and complex, beautiful sounding pieces of music into our games, then that hugely expanded the kind of emotional and intellectual range of games, right? There's nothing like hearing a human voice performed well by an actor, giving a well-turned line of dialog to make something land emotionally in a complex way. I think that the analog thumbstick It's a bit of a silly example, but for game designers of my generation, it's a meaningful one. When we moved away from these kind of on-off, yes-no button presses and towards something that I could hold in my hand, where I could make these nuanced gestures with my marvels of evolution, the opposable thumb, that marked a big leap forward for what game designers could do in games in expressive terms. And then, of course, as we move towards immersive technologies. Virtual reality, augmented reality, I think we're only just beginning to understand what we can do artistically with those new forms.
Speaker 2 [00:44:13] That very much separates us from the animal kingdom, our ability to play video games.
Richard LeMarchand [00:44:16] Right. Yeah.
Speaker 2 [00:44:18] Um...
Richard LeMarchand [00:44:19] Actually, not so. Some friends of mine spent many years working on a research project for video games that could be played by orangutans. Or is it orangutanz? I can never remember where the G goes. But yeah, no, primates love video games.
Speaker 2 [00:44:37] I think we might have come across that study. Yeah. So if we think about art as a sort of continuum.
Speaker 3 [00:44:47] Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2 [00:44:48] Would you say, and I think you can agree or not agree, but do you think that video games are sort of carrying on the artistry and storytelling of cinema to a new level or is there a different way to think about this continuum?
Richard LeMarchand [00:45:06] So when I think about video games as an art form, I do think there's a kind of unbroken golden thread reaching back to the very beginnings of human self-expression through the plastic arts, you know, whether we're painting or making ceramics. I think that storytelling is a very interesting part of the history of video games. And for game designers like me, we drew a lot on our love of cinema, our deconstruction of cinematic techniques, which we really had to break apart and rebuild, not quite from the ground up, but that we had to reconfigure the language of cinema in quite a fundamental way in order to make it work well in games. Recently, I've started to think that while I do see cinema... As an important antecedent of games as an art form, I think theater is equally important. And I think as we go forwards, especially in making interactive dramas, stories for players to interact with in a very rich way that affects the outcome of the story, we're gonna look more and more to the practice of writers and designers and directors of theater. People. Who are used to thinking about perhaps a kind of closer proximity, might be the right way to put it, between audience and actors. I've seen a few productions by Punch Drunk, the interactive theater company, famous for their long running work, Sleep No More, and they have literally blurred the boundaries between audience, and performers. Mingling them in the same space and giving the audience opportunities to follow this or that performer through the explorable space in which they stage their works all the while surrounding them by uh... Richly designed and interactively controlled lighting design and sound design that shapes the emotion of the space to a really profound degree I think that we're going to perhaps... Learn as much from those folks as we have from filmmakers in the next decade of game design.
Speaker 2 [00:47:35] So if we talk about what's next down the line, higher fidelity, sure. All this technical innovation, I think you can assume. But it sounds like you're saying that the most profound one is a deeper interactivity, which is sort of unique to.
Richard LeMarchand [00:47:54] Yes, I think that... Yes, uh, oh... I think that when I think about the future of games, I am always focused on how can we create deeper kinds of interactivity, maybe a more profound kind of participation on the part of the players or audience members, where they can bring their stuff to bear on the game, whatever it is, whether that's a skill that they have, a way of thinking that they have or want to exercise. Or whether it's a way of looking at and feeling about the world that they're interested to explore some more. I think we all select the artworks that we enjoy on this basis. When I am sad in a challenging time in my life, I find solace in artworks that talk to me about sadness. I think this is part of the great opportunity that games have to continue to develop as an art form.
Speaker 2 [00:48:59] And then lastly, I just want to throw a thought at you and see if you even know about this project and have a fair thought about it. But we're going to be speaking and filming with a company called Akili that has made a project called Endeavor RX.
Richard LeMarchand [00:49:15] No, I don't know that.
Speaker 2 [00:49:16] Okay, it is the first FDA approved video.
Richard LeMarchand [00:49:19] Oh, interesting.
Speaker 2 [00:49:20] And they have already been using it to treat ADHD in kids. A dose is 30 minutes, and you are prescribed by a doctor, and it is working. And so, fine if you have never heard of it before, you know the ins and outs, but I'm just curious what you think about that, and how that might spur your brain in games.
Richard LeMarchand [00:49:44] Well, when I think about video games in the context of positive health outcomes, I get very excited. I think we've understood for a long time that games can be tremendous learning tools, right? And I'm lucky enough to be a part of several communities around educational games. Also, here at USC, we have my colleague, Marientina Gotsit's lab, the Creative Media and Behavioral Health Lab. Which is our games and health lab. And I've learned a lot from Marion Tina about the kinds of things that games can do to lead to positive outcomes for people dealing with many different kinds of health conditions. And one project that she's been involved with has been a virtual reality project to help people engage in a better way with the physical therapy they have to do when they've recently become a wheelchair user. Just as a, for example, I do think that games have a profound effect on our psychology, ultimately on our brain chemistry. So I'm always really interested to hear about people who are looking at that in detail, bringing together scientists and artists, game designers to try and create things to help people in whatever they're dealing with in life. Yeah, that's super interesting to hear about Chris, I can't wait to hear more about that.
Speaker 2 [00:51:12] Thank you.
Richard LeMarchand [00:51:12] Where are those folks?
Speaker 2 [00:51:13] They are based in San Francisco.
Richard LeMarchand [00:51:15] I'm great.
Speaker 2 [00:51:16] Do you guys have any questions?
Speaker 4 [00:51:21] So anyway, in talking about the future games, just to pick up on where you were, there are so many different kinds of games, and some of them are open, open source games, right, effectively. So the players, it's not only just exploring them, but they're reiterating the entire game, right? I mean, so how does that fit in terms of the way in which you've been talking about it? You're going to have to find Trace.
Richard LeMarchand [00:51:49] Um. So something that has always been part of the history of games and which has become part of the video games is people taking games and changing them, often in radical ways. Most games naturally evolved across the course of human history, whether that's soccer or chess, very often in ways that are hard for us to study because these cultural forms kind of metamorphosize down the years. It was quite hard to keep a track of them, although there are some very interesting histories of both those games that I've mentioned. Today in the realm of digital games, many game developers offer their audience of players the opportunity to take the game and change it, often in a radical way, whether that's by making a new map for the game to play in, or sometimes changing the code in a wholesale way to remix the game, to radically change it. I think this is a really wonderful part of game culture, it always has been, it's always going to be, let's hope anyway. I think it took some generosity on the part of developers to open up their code to players, I hope people are going to continue to do that because I know from personal experience many of my colleagues started out in this way. By remixing games for themselves, and that was what sparked their passion, and helped them develop their skill as game developers. That's a great question, I think, that's excellent.
Speaker 4 [00:53:29] And can I just take you back again to first principle?
Richard LeMarchand [00:53:33] Can Tracy come in and sit down?
Speaker 4 [00:53:34] Down. Hi folks, this is Tracy Fullerton. Because you talked about, it would just be great to have a really basic statement about all of the variety of different disciplines that go into making it. You talked about it in terms of DaVinci, and I think it would be better if you did it in a much more generalized way. What you said was video...
Speaker 5 [00:53:59] From that art form.
Speaker 4 [00:54:03] It brings together this, it brings together that.
Richard LeMarchand [00:54:06] Okay, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4 [00:54:08] All of which create this whole.
Richard LeMarchand [00:54:10] I have a five-minute rant primed and ready to go.
Speaker 3 [00:54:13] I'm just teasing. It'll be 30 seconds.
Richard LeMarchand [00:54:20] There are so many different skills that go into making a modern video game from software engineering to game design, art of various kinds, 3D and 2D, animation including rigging the models in a way that makes characters move well, audio design and musical composition are huge parts of our field. Then there's the writing skill that goes into creating a game. There is quality assurance. That very important group of people who test our games to make sure they're free of problems. Then there are all of the kind of business skills, marketing, promotional sales skills that are a big part of the industry. It's a part of what I love about game development. It's so cross-disciplinary. All these folks have to come together focused on the same thing for the game to really work. And it's a very rich part of our lives as game designers.
Speaker 5 [00:55:18] When we were talking before, we talked about a lot of quality.
Speaker 2 [00:55:29] I think we did touch on that, but you can do another go.
Richard LeMarchand [00:55:32] So while you're developing a game, there are so many different balls in the air. You have to make sure that the gameplay is fun, for some value of fun, depending on what your audience think is fun. But the game design has to work. The game has to be interactive in a way that creates a smoothly flowing game experience. Game designers often talk about flow. This concept that we get from the psychology professor, Chiksen Mihai, this state of optimal performance balanced between challenge and competence. Then we have to make sure that the narrative elements of the game are working well. Are the characters clearly depicted? Are they empathetic and relatable? Do we understand the relationships between them as they unfold in real time? The environment... Beautiful and rich? Are they evoking the right kind of mood? Is the sound and the music working well together? It can be really hard to keep an eye on all these different balls. My friend Amy Hennig always used the example of that vaudeville act where you have plates spinning on the tops of bamboo poles and you have to keep running around wiggling each pole otherwise the plates will fall down. That is very much like the job of a game designer or producer. Keeping all those balls in the air at the same time. It's part of what makes game development quite stressful sometimes, but I think that again through craft, through practice, and through collaboration, cooperation, by creating rich networks of communication, when it's going well, there's nothing like the feeling of, oh look, all the balls are still up in the sky.
Speaker 2 [00:57:15] Wonderful, yeah, yeah really wonderful.
Speaker 5 [00:57:17] Another very basic... I'm sorry, I'm going to be a little bit like the odds here. That's alright, no, no. Very, very basic. Imagine you're speaking to the collective grandparents of your students. Oh, yes. They come in for class, then. Yep, yep. Okay? What is a video game? It's like played on a console, played on... On a computer, that kind of thing. Okay, yeah, yeah.
Richard LeMarchand [00:57:39] So simply put, a video game is a digital toy. It's a box that we plug into a television. And it's also got a game controller plugged into it. The player touches the buttons on the game controller. That feeds input into the computer or the games console. And then that puts images onto the screen and moves sound out through the speakers. In a way that forms a loop with the player. The player is seeing what's going on on the screen, hearing what's happening in the game. They decide what to do next, they press more buttons on the controller. I think this interactive loop is part of the magic of video games.
Speaker 2 [00:58:21] What is a box? What is sound? Anything more?
Speaker 5 [00:58:27] Yeah, yeah, yeah. I got a couple points.
Speaker 2 [00:58:29] Okay, we should we should
Speaker 5 [00:58:32] One of the barriers, I think we told you this on our first call, I'm glad you said this to all of us, I'm surprised we've met. What are the barriers to taking video games seriously in art, in the wider culture? Remember, this is public television with an older audience. They're going to be watching with an eyebrow raise.
Richard LeMarchand [00:58:52] So I think there are a few barriers to video games being taken seriously as an art form, which are connected to the history of video games. When video games first appeared, they were pretty quickly pigeonholed as a children's toy. And the kinds of narrative frames, stories, that game designers couched their games in were oriented to that audience. They were often. Science fiction and fantasy. And as games developed, I think that to compete for their audience's attention, game designers pushed their use of those genres to some extremes. And I think, that's partly where games got a little bit of their early bad reputation from. However, anyone who's been paying close attention to games will have seen for a long time in the game industry, as well as those things that people might find off putting, there was a to love. Educational games have always been a big part of the world of games, games that were not about fighting, but they were about society and human connection and culture have been with us the whole time. And so I think that I'd invite people to reconsider some of their preconceptions about games, to talk to their kids or grandkids about what they're playing and draw them out about the kinds of things that we were always getting from books, from films, from television, enriching things. That are equally present in video games.
