Game Telemetry and Crowd Sourcing New Game Services: How you take over the game business

A while back, I went for a talk given by Rich Hilleman, VP, Chief Creative Director, Electronic Arts. For those who do not know him, he's the brains behind Madden Football, and many other EA Sports titles.  I don't play sports games often (since I suck at them), I first found out about Rich from an interview from Joystiq.

It shouldn't come as a surprised that a huge part of his talk focused on Sports games.  As a runner and football (or soccer, as they call it in the US) fan myself, I didn't exactly need convincing with regards to the power of sports.  Rich's theory of how Ping Pong Diplomacy kicked started the video game Pong was pretty awesome though.  Essentially, Rich believes that we have to thank Glenn Cowan for gatecrashing the Chinese Ping Pong bus for video games.  Had he not done that, the ping pong craze of the 70s would not have inspired the creation of Pong.

Sports Games are given less credit than they are due
Sports games are probably not one of the first games that new games developers would be lining up to develop. And for good reason.  Often criticized for basically churning out the same game every year, and using it as spinning money, its hard for any budding developer to be excited about the prospect of working with sports games.

Rich gave a few compelling reasons why developers should want to come to sports games:

1. Technology.  While it may be easy to assume that sports games don't bother pushing the tech, thats probably far from the truth.  Any game developer who thinks otherwise clearly has not been following the gaming news.  Animation, Motion Capture are a few of the examples where EA Sports are dealing with bleeding edge tech. Because of its reach, things like metagaming
   
   Truthfully, I have never underestimated the technical challenge of a sports game.  However, technology alone is not a big enough reason to build sports games.  I want to working on something that excites me, and the tech is pretty much moot.  I mean, its always cool to be playing with the latest tech, but thats just a means to the end.
   
   
2. Unique Development Environment and Challenges.  An annual audience is great to collect user feedback, iterate design and improve the franchise.  This data is something that any game studio would kill for, and thats what EA has for their sports IPs.  Sports faces many interesting challenges, typically UI issues.  There is a great divide between how we watch sports, how we play sports and how we play sports video games.  (e.g. a 3D football game would have too much information for a user to consume)
   
   Again, I think every single genre has its own set of unique development environment and challenges.  I think while some game developers underestimate the difficulty of sports game development, I do not believe that most are unaware of it.  Its probably not a big deterring factor against choosing sports game development.
   
   
3. Sports and culture.  Rich shared several stories where he believes that EA Sports games have influenced  actual gameplay (Scoreboard ticker used by Sky sports, a football player running along the touchdown line to run down the clock, a random gentlemen who can't figure out how to beat his son at NHL asking Rich how to do so).
   
   In an era where beating on video games because they promote "bad" values, sports game may one of the only few games out there that seem to promote "good" values.  Rich sees sports game developers as coaches, and players as athletes.  A sports game developer's goal is to teach players how to play, make the practice what they've learnt, and finally mastering the skills - sounds familiar? that's exactly how sports coaches work.
   
   I'm probably one of the last people in that room who needs to be convinced of the impact and influence of sports.  To me, this is probably the biggest draw to want to enter sports game development.  However, I don't think this resonates with most game developers.  As Rich put it, most of the game developers don't take kindly to jocks since they were the ones being stuff in lockers by jocks.

So in terms of selling sports game development to us, I wasn't too convinced.  I perfectly understand that the good work being done in sports game, but it isn't something I want to do.  However, there were many other things I took away from the talk, but I'll just the two I found most important.

Fidelity is based on the accuracy in the minds of the players.

Well, guess what, Rich is not the only one who feels this way.  "Players don't want super realistic flight simulators, they want to be Tom Cruise (in Top Gun). Similarly, players don't want to play football realistically, because they suck at it in real life."

I think at times, we get over our own heads in trying to be realistic.  Peripherals like Kinect or Wii creates  big traps to try to use the technology to be super realistic.  However, I think its good to keep in mind that as game designers, our primary role should be fun.  How many times have we seen "super realistic" games crash and burn critically and financially?

A video about Video Games and the Uncanny Valley I watched a while back comes to mind.  While not completely related, I think it ties in with the pursuit of realism and fidelity.  Perhaps accuracy is overrated, and we should start designing more to fantasy, not reality. 

Empathy for your colleagues, for your players.

This was Rich's first answer to "What do you look out for in Game Producers?", amongst other more technical requirements.  The core ingredient behind games is people.  Again, more common sense, but easily something that game designers might forget.

Empathy for players probably refers to how as designers' our job is really to make it fun for the,. and not to show that we're smarter than them.  Empathy for colleagues is probably extremely important during crunch times where tempers flare and communication breaks down.

Looking at the above ideas that Rich shared, you'll probably realised that it does not only apply to game development, but software development.

Signing off.  There are no shortage of great upcomings talks, and I'll continue to share them here.