Romero, Santiago, Lemarchand on thinking outside the game

In a GDC Next session presented by John Sharp and Colleen Macklin, professors from Parsons The New School for Design, four developers shared their non-game influences, the ones that profoundly impact their work on games.

"We forget that games are part of a much larger universe," said Sharp, by way of introduction. "What about all the other things we can learn from, be inspired by," asked Macklin, with a twinkle, "like film, music... spelunking?"

Sharp's ultimate advice was this: "Go back and think about something that isn't a game that is meaningful in your work, and how you can bring that into the process, how that can help change you and make you better as a developer."

Macklin and Sharp, ultimately, didn't do much talking. They left that instead to USC educator and former Uncharted developer Richard Lemarchand; Journey developer Kellee Santiago; The Unfinished Swan 's Ben Esposito, and veteran developer Brenda Romero.
Richard LemarchandOthers spoke of very specific individuals who influenced them; Lemarchand spoke of realism.

"I'm very interested in realism in video games. In terms of my talk today, I don't mean 'realism' in the sense of improved physics or better lighting, though I am interested in these things too. I mean in the sense of the Realist artistic movement."

Realism was originally in painting, to move the artform from depicting kings and religious icons to ordinary people shown without sentimentality or exaggeration.

And games could do this too, he argues. Most are based on genre fiction (sci-fi, fantasy) but Lemarchand says that " if you're really paying attention to the world around you, real life is even more interesting than these fantasy worlds."

"Many of the films I liked best, which had the deepest emotion, and which are most helpful to me in figuring out what life is all about, were set in the real world and were about the extraordinary situations we encounter in everyday life."

He recommended several classics, including Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion, Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves, and Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows.

But more recent films, also inspire him:

Ratcatcher, a 1999 film showed Lemarchand "that you can always find new things to do with an artistic form if you work at it" thanks to its unconventional cinematography. 2006's Red Road follows a woman who monitors closed circut security cameras. Lemarchand notes that "voyeurism has been touched on by games," but a film like this could "push us forward."

2011's Weekend, says Lemarchand, is "a very powerful and moving film about a couple who hookup on a Friday night... as their relationship unfolds over the course of a weekend, the film manages to explore big issues like intimacy and commitment, as well as leading a political discussion on what life is like for gay people in modern society."

"As game storytelling matures i think we'll see these kinds of techniques coming more to the fore in various kinds of cinematic games," says Lemarchand.

Most recently, he saw Wadjda, the first Saudi Arabian film ever directed by a woman. "It's a groundbreaking film set in a part of the world we don't often get a clear view of," Lemarchand says, "a really understated and subtle movie, and really funny and moving."

"They make me long for more realist games," he says, of these films and more. "More games about our day-to-day lives and experiences." These films are also largely "about women, young people, children... these people don't usually receive nuanced portraits in film or games."

He pointed to games like Dys4ia, Cart Life, Gone Home and I Get This Call Every Day as examples of games "about regular people struggling with the circumstances of their lives, and that's what makes them valuable works of art."
Kellee SantiagoThe Journey developer's influence was less high-minded but for that, no less compelling. "This artist has been with me as long as I can remember," says Santiago. "His work has resurfaced again and again. While it remains somewhat the same, it evolves along with me. That must mean it's a really deep ingrained part of myself."

That artist is Jim Henson, creator of The Muppets.

His art, she says, has helped her find "the guiding principles that I bring to my work." Here they are:

1. It is About the Journey, Not the Destination

"Goals are awesome and drive us to challenge ourselves and one another," says Santiago. "But you can't gloss over those spaces in between deliverables."

"I don't believe the ends justify the means," she says. Henson strove to create "a working environment for his artists just as enjoyable to work in as the material they were working on." She says that "the experience you have while creating work impacts the emotions felt through that work," and while she truly believes in the potential of the medium for art, "at the end of the day we work on fucking games, and there's nothing about that, and what we do, that's worth hurting ourselves, hurting one another, hurting the ones we love."

2. To Be Creative, You Have to Take Risks

And creative risks can only be taken in a culture that allows people to thrive, not compete, argues Santiago. She describes "this notion in which everyone performs better in a competitive, hostile environment" as "one of the biggest mistakes I see happening in our industry," saying "I think it's why we drive a lot of brilliant creative people away from making games professionally."

3. A Great Team is a Diverse Team

A lesson learned from the cast of The Muppets itself, Santiago says that "once I've decided to work with someone, I give them enough rope to hang thesmselves with. You want people to push and challenge one another because they come from different backgrounds. That's how you get the best ideas."

Extending on her previous point, she says that you do not get good ideas "by pitting a homogenous group of people against one another."

4. You Want to Work with the Right People

Making games is difficult and time consuming. "The people you work with you might as well be dating," says Santiago -- "you're in a totally committed relationship."

Don't recruit specifically for competencies, she warns. Don't hire "the person that is perfect on paper... [who] won't actually help you get your game done because working with them is such a chore or a challenge."

In fact, skillsets are overrated, she argues: "I'd rather change some of the aspects of my game in order to incorporate a person on my team who is brilliant and I want to work with, rather than a skillset. ...Ultimately, that game is way better."

5. Sometimes You Just Have to Follow Your Gut

"Sometimes you will get that inspiration and you gotta go with it," says Santiago. "It may not make logical sense but you can feel that it's right."

Henson, she says, was "inspried to create The Dark Crystal despite its obvious departures from the work he was famous for." And when the film's distributor focus tested it, "initial tests were so bad... that he bought the film from them to distribute himself" rather than let them bury it. Box office and reviews were also bad. But by the end of its year of release, it was one of the top 20 grossing films in the U.S. -- and it "has grown in critical and financial success ever since."

She said that often people imagine that she and Jenova Chen smoothly moved "from inspiration to application in the game," but in truth, "at times it looks a lot messier than that. You kinda wake up and you see the scene, and you know that's the scene, you know that's how it's gotta be. In hindsight you can string the pieces together; in the moment, you're going on your gut."
Ben EspositoLevel designer on Sony Santa Monica backed indie game The Unfinished Swan , Ben Esposito showcased the work of legendary musician and producer Brian Eno.

Eno once said that his approach stems from "the idea to produce things that are as strange and mysterious to you as the first music you ever heard," and Esposito feels the same way about games: he wants to "to reproduce those kind of magical experiences you didn't quite understand at first."

"What's important to Brian Eno is theory over practice," notes Esposito. "There is certainly a craft to music, and a craft to developing games or any form of art." But Eno's work "is themed by a specific theory or process he wants to explore," and "even though the viewer, the listener, the player may not understand or be aware of the theory behind what they're experiencing, the fact it informed it will create an experience they would not have otherwise seen."

Eno also believes in constraints. Here's another quote: "There's a reason that guitar players invariably produce more interesting music than synthesizer players: you can go through the options on a guitar in about a minute, after that you have to start making aesthetic and stylistic decisions."

"Infinite options makes it way more difficult for you to produce anything," says Esposito. "What you need are fewer possibilities that are more interesting What he wants to create are constraints that allow you to be making aesthetic and stylistic decisions rather than technical decisions."

Eno did use technology -- but used it to leave gaps for unexpected creativity. His generative music was partially automatically produced by a complicated recording system; "video games and software does this really well," says Esposito. "We can plant the seeds and have an intention behind it, but letting the viewer take hold of what that means and how the system is affected is very important to digital works."
Brenda RomeroRomero spoke passionately about 1950s painter Jackson Pollock. "He's a huge inspiration of mine," she said. Like many people, she first heard of him as "someone who threw paint at a canvas," and referred to how many people say that his works are easily reproducible by anyone, including children.

Nope. "A real Pollock is breathtaking and can literally bring me to tears," says Romero.

And his process, she says, is much like level design: "He circles the canvas again and again, fine-tuning it. As he's moving around the canvas, so are we."

And when you see his paintings, you're not looking at a picture like so many others, but paint on canvas. "What we are looking at is not so much a painting but an artifact of the painting experience," just as a level is "a game designer's play experience."

"Pollock was all about action, it was all about the motion, movement, depth, rage and joy. You can see how he was feeling. Even when the paint is dry, even when he's long since dead, even with it hanging on a museum wall, the painting is as real, still as moving, still as alive."

Pollock was also creatively isolated -- "super alone," says Romero -- even within the Abstract Expressionist movement he was a part of. "When he was doing this, nobody else was doing these things." He was deeply criticized and "he never felt secure in his work, ever." He did get a lot of praise, but Romero suspects he much more clearly saw the derision -- because "at the peak of his fame, he walked away from it." He gave up his trademark painting style entirely.

And she can relate to that. People have said to her "stop making games, you're hurting games," she says. "The detractors seemed so incredibly loud." While she started looking at how his work could influence her work with level design, years later, at a low point she came back to his work and researched his method and experiences and drew strength from it.

"He felt about paint the way I feel about game mechanics," she says. She loves his singleminded focus on paint -- on "exactly what it is he deeply loves." She isn't currently much interested in story in games, or other things, just mechanics. "He actually got rid of names at some point in his painting," she says. Paintings had simple numbers instead. "He didn't want the names to color what that paint could possibly be," she says, leaving the viewer an experience that is "as pure as it could conceivably be."

And Romero has also felt creatively isolated: "some of my closest dearest friends are getting Game of the Year nods," while "I feel like I am outside of the actual game industry."

Instead of feeling like a provocateur, she sometimes feels isolated -- but "Pollock tells me it's okay to be there" on the margins of game design. Pollock, she says, "gives me permission to be here, or go even further if I want to." He gives her the strength "to keep going, to keep exploring, to keep doing what I feel called to do."