Develop:Five - Rhianna Pratchett

Every week, we ask some of the best game development minds five questions in a feature we are calling Develop:Five. This week, Rhianna Pratchett answers our five question blog feature. 

1. What’s your earliest memory of playing video games?

Playing Mazeogs on the Sinclair ZX81. I was six. Dad said I was frightened of the monsters at first, but once I realised you could pick up a sword and fight them, it started a long-term love affair with games.

2. What are you most excited or annoyed about in the games industry today?

I think there's too much hand holding that goes on with players these days. Developers get so worried that player won't know where to go for 10 seconds and pepper games with aggressive hinting. But getting lost and working out what to do is all part of playing games.

3. Tell us about a life-changing or special moment you've had at Develop:Brighton in the past

It’s been a great place for the game writers of the UK to meet up. We’re still quite a small group, but we’re always supporting one another and sharing war stories!

4.  What are you most looking forward to at Develop:Brighton 2017?

More meet-ups with industry friends.

5. Which game developer would you most like to meet and why?

I've met a lot of them over the years. I'd love to meet Roberta Williams (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberta_Williams). I'm a great fan of her games and I'm sure she'd have some good stories about being one of the earliest high profile women in the industry.

Rhianna Pratchett is an award-winning, eighteen-year veteran of the games industry. She has wrestled the wild beasts of narrative on titles such as: Heavenly Sword, Mirror's Edge, the entire Overlord series, Tomb Raider and Rise of the Tomb Raider. Rhianna is regularly named as one of the most influential and recognised women in games. 

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Find out more about Develop:Brighton here

Guest Blog: Kate Russell

I’ve been writing about gaming and technology since 1995, the year the dot-com boom started. Back then, less than 1% of the global population was connected to the web – today that figure is around 40%. There are 6.5 billion mobile connections globally – almost one for every person on the planet.
Today’s gamers live in a hyper-connected online world where community and the ability to play together, and against each other, are often at the heart of enduring success for a game. The human desire to connect, be social, be part of the creation process, to interact and not be restricted by narrative or geography, manifests today in the phenomenon of live streaming on platforms like Twitch. 

I am one of over 13k streamers who earn a living playing games for others to watch. Last year Twitch had half a million average concurrent viewers devouring 459,366 years’ worth of video, with viewers on average watching over 7 hours of content per month. Those kind of sticky numbers are metrics traditional broadcast and entertainment producers can only dream of. And they are liquid, trackable gold to the advertising industry.

More and more indie game studios are approaching influencers on these platforms to tap into their audience for up and coming games, getting their support for crowd funding campaigns by providing early release download codes to whip the audiences up into a storm that often raises hundreds of thousands of dollars.

If you’re in the process of developing a game or looking for funding and support, you’d be a fool to overlook these avenues. But it’s not just shouting about your vision and hoping people will hear. ‘If you build it they will come,’ does not always work. Building a strong online community is a real art form that begins by understanding your audience and finding ways to relate to them.

You’re going to need to be friendly, interesting, honest and transparent. You’re going to have to involve your fans in conversations about the development process and as a result will likely be put under constant pressure to get it right. And you’re going to have to learn to take criticism on the chin. 

But get it right and you stand to gain a rock solid army of supporters, promoters and friends behind you, who are personally invested in seeing you succeed; emotionally as well as financially.

And that is a pretty good engine to build the success story of your future on.

I’m going to be talking more about this in my upcoming Develop keynote in Brighton on 14th July. During the session I’ll be revealing some of the tricks I’ve learned along the way - having successfully ran my own crowd funding campaign and being a partnered Twitch Streamer for almost a year. I’ll also be suggesting a few ways you can structure your own community activities to increase engagement and motivate your fans to campaign on your behalf. 

If you have a game to promote or get funding for, I hope to see you there.

Journalist, reporter and author, Kate has been writing about technology and the Internet since 1995. Appearing regularly on BBC technology programme Click she is also a partnered Twitch streamer and speaks at conferences and lectures in schools and universities inspiring the next generation of technologists. Her website, KateRussell.co.uk , won the 2015 UK Blog Awards for best individual digital and technology blog, and in June 2016 she was voted the Computer Weekly 13th most influential woman in UK IT. Her debut novel was published in 2014 under official licence to space trading game, Elite: Dangerous, the childhood passion that inspired her love of technology. As part of the licensing deal she got to name a planet in the latest release, Elite: Dangerous. She called it Slough.

GUEST BLOG: Go With the Flow - A Fresh Look at Old Concepts

I suspect that some of you reading this will think “Why talk about something as obvious as flow when everybody in the industry understands the concept and gets it right?”

Well, believe it or not, there’s way more to flow than people in the industry might imagine.

Only the other week, Keith Stuart talked in The Guardian about the concept of flow as one of the reasons people find games like Candy Crush so compelling (http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/21/candy-crush-angry-birds-psychology-compulsive-casual-games-mobile-flappy-birds).

When players are so completely engaged with a game, to the extent that they don't even hear you when you call them or acknowledge you when you talk to them, there’s a very good chance that they’re experiencing flow in the game play. And when an individual is experiencing flow, they’re completely fixated on the task of playing the game, and you’ll find it pretty hard to break their concentration.

I remember late last year consulting at a large game developers studio and the fire alarm went off - it was lunchtime and a few employees were playing a game in the games room during their break. Despite the piecing sound of the alarm, they didn’t even look up from their games and the boss of the company had to literally go in and drag them out.

So you can see how flow, the state of utter engagement in gaming, can certainly account for how compelling video game playing can be.

A really great piece of work that I would recommend to developers is by Boyle et al (2012) – ‘Engagement in digital entertainment games: A systematic review’ - who initially uncovered a staggering 20,000 papers related to engagement, and then drilled this number down to 55 key papers to review.

The authors describe flow as the most influential construct used to explain the subjective emotional experience and optimal state of pleasure experienced in video game play. They highlight how flow is actually quite a complex construct involving eight different components. They maintain that central to the concept, is that the experience is intrinsically rewarding and enables immersion in the game, and they suggest that flow as a state evokes high levels of concentration and allows the player to have a sense of control, have clearly defined goals as well as providing direct feedback.

Further to this, is the motivation to escape the real world, because flow in gaming does offer opportunities to carry out behaviours not possible in the real world!

Last year I was delighted to be asked to contribute to the Charlie Brooker documentary ‘How Video Games Changed the World’. In the documentary I talked about the concept of flow and this really hit home with many gamers who watched the programme. In the weeks after, I had loads of emails from gamers who were quite relieved to understand what was happening to them when they were in this almost altered state of mind, completely fixated on a game.

Following the programme a blogger posted the stills of my contribution about flow on tumblr and so far nearly 60,000 people have reblogged or commented. (http://senjukannon.tumblr.com/post/68759294958/gloriousbacon-cyber-psychologist-berni-goode) As a psychologist, what this tells me is that gamers really want to understand what’s happening to them when they’re engaged in virtual worlds and that they very much want developers to make games that enhance this state for them, as they garner immense pleasure and contentment from the experience.

Alex Meredith, Cyberpsychologist from Nottingham Trent University says "Developers can really embrace the concept of flow and incorporate it into the development of their games, within ethical parameters of course, and of particular interest is how flow impacts on motivation to play and the sense of self during game play and cathartic release.”

And there’s a lot more to the concept of flow in video games that psychologists like myself are still uncovering, I’m especially interested in the group flow and recently saw a great presentation by Linda Kaye of Edge Hill University who examined the extent to which group flow experiences (versus solo flow experiences) impact on post-play positive effect. The results of her work indicate that post-play positive effect was heightened in group flow, something which is particularly interesting when designing for collaborative play.

At this year’s Evolve, on the first day of the Develop Conference, as part of the psychology track, a number of leading psychologists will join me to look at what it means to develop games that enhance this flow experience, and together we’ll be offering some ethical take-away tips about how to build in strategies that evoke the flow state in gamers and really heighten the gaming experience.

Berni Good is a psychologist who specialises in Cyberpsychology, particularly in video games and is the founder of Cyberpsychologist  Limited,  www.cyberpsychologist.co.uk. This year Berni will curate the psychology track at Evolve which will see some of the leading psychologists and experts in the field of psychology in video games talk and give amazing insights and tips into how to develop games incorporating psychology to really heighten the experience for the gamer. 

@GoodBerni

GUEST BLOG: My best meeting at the Develop Conference

After returning from the Develop Conference in Brighton this week, Mike Bithell - Develop Award-winning developer of Thomas was Alone - wrote this magical blog for Develop Online about his chance meeting with an ageing coder.   

The conference, well, it kinda rocked for me this year. The volunteer stewards kept recognising me. I got to hang out with a ton of awesome journos, devs and the charming as hell Pewdie. I won a hefty award. I ate donuts on a beach. It was a good three days. But one meeting stands out.

On the Wednesday morning, I wandered into the restaurant at the conference's venue bleary eyed. It was later than I'd like, and I knew I'd missed the Cerny keynote. I was gutted. I'm a bit of a Sony fan. I queued, surrounded by holidayers and pensioners, looking around for anyone I knew to chat with over buffet scrambled eggs and single serving jam sachets. Nobody. I was, alone.

Except I wasn't. In front of me in the queue stood a short, elderly lady, politely waiting her turn to be seated. We bonded, mocking the complexity of the breakfast buffet's seating arrangements, and the manager's insistence on precision. I think the manager may have overheard my giggling, as she came over and suggested that as we were 'getting along so well, maybe we'd like to sit together to take up less room'.

And so we did. I saw a couple of chuckling industry folks as we sat down for our breakfast date (and a fair few more nodding approval at me for keeping the lady company) but we got on well.

I went through the predictable small talk list when confronted by a woman of extended years. "Do you holiday in Brighton often?", "What do your children do?", "Have you met any interesting people on the coach trip?". We had a laugh, and I grew less and less concerned about missing the keynote.

And then she asked it, the question I fear from anyone over 50, the question that instantly turns me from 'charming young man' to 'peddler of filth and innocence corruption'.

"What do you do?"

I explained that I made games, not the ones with guns, but more artsy pretentious fare. She talked about her grandchildren's love of iPad games, but how she never could work them out, despite really enjoying animation growing up (she equated games to animation, which I liked). We chatted a bit about that, but then, conversation dried up. Searching, I tried a question that I was surprised hadn't occurred to me earlier..

"What did you do before retirement? Before having a family I mean?"

"I programmed architectural simulations"

I was astonished. Turns out the woman I'd pigeonholed as an 'old lady' was creating programs to balance bridges and ensure scaffolding held up in the early 70s. She was a physics programmer. At this point, I may have freaked her out a little with my enthusiasm. We chatted more about the systems she created before marriage and children whisked her off to the gender expectations of her day. She confided the many times she'd snuck out of the office to watch Popeye cartoons in the cinema. She was a fan of two things in her early 20s, programming and animation.

I leaned in, and in a staggered whisper I murmured, "If you'd been born 50 years later, you'd be an indie game developer like me".

She chuckled at this and nodded, we then had a 10 minute conversation about how character move speeds in games are calculated. She promised to pay a bit more attention next time she watched her grandchildren playing games.

Best meeting ever. And a story to tell the next idiot who tells me women 'don't get' games programming.