Games Writing

I've been playing videogames since age seven, and thinking, talking and writing about them for years. I recently started doing it professionally. Which is one big box ticked on the 'Stuff to do before I die' list. Very few games mags put their content online, so I've reprinted the stories below. Copyright belongs etc.

 

Game for a laugh

(Play Gamer Magazine, 31 March 2011) 

 

Sonic Team's Takashi Iizuka on how Sega is changing its game

(Wired, 17 February 2011)  

 

Let the music play

(Play Gamer Magazine, 18 February 2011)  

 

Pedal to the metal

(Play Gamer Magazine, 1 January 2011) 

 

Very special effects

(Play Gamer Magazine, 1 December 2010)  

 

Getting in character

(Play Gamer Magazine, 4 November 2010)   

 

Cheats always prosper

(Play Gamer Magazine, 18 September 2010)   

 

Charity case

(Play Gamer Magazine, 7 August 2010)    

 

Art of the matter

(Play Gamer Magazine, 7 July 2010)     

 

Just rewards

(Play Gamer Magazine, 22 May 2010)     

 

This is what it sounds like…

(GamesTM, 10 March 2010)     

Game for a laugh

Games can make you feel sad, angry or excited. But why don't they make you laugh? Rob Boffard explores one of the trickiest bits of making games. First published in Play Gamer Magazine on 31/03/11)

When was the last time you laughed? And not a chuckle, a giggle or a snort, but a full-out belly-laugh. We're talking a gut-busting, impossible-to-breathe, face-screwed-up wheezing wonder. Perhaps it was last night at the pub, a few beers down when your mate told that story. Or over Christmas, when Granny had too much brandy butter and fell over. 

But a game making you laugh? We'd put good money on it being a long time ago.

One of the last genuinely funny games - as in, a game that set out to make you laugh and succeeded - was Sheep, Dog 'n' Wolf, back on the PS1. Playing as Loony Tunes' Ralph E. Wolf, you had to steal a sheep from Sam The Sheepdog and bring it to the exit zone. That was it. And yet, in that simple premise, developer Infogrames took all the wacky humour of the cartoon series and translated it beautifully to a gaming environment. Sheep, Dog 'n Wolf was absolutely hysterical.

Games have got a bit more powerful since then, and it would seem logical that developers would use the beefy hardware to take more risks and experiment with comedy a little bit more. But this isn't the case. Humour and jokes remain rare, and most games remain decidedly po-faced, the odd wisecrack being the sole concession to humour. The question is: why?

The answer, at least in part, is that comedy is hard. While explosions or checkpoints or power-ups are universal, and easy crowd-pullers, making people laugh remains one of the hardest tricks in the book. 

The wonderfully-named Ed Fear is production associate at Curve Games, and helped develop the PSN title Explodemon. Reviewers haven't been too complimentary about the old-school platformer's gameplay, but there's no doubt that it scores huge marks in the humour department, poking fun at the cultural gap between Japanese and Western games. "Comedy is naturally divisive," says Fear. "There are very few comedians or shows that appeal to absolutely everyone. The closest we have in TV is something like Friends or The Simpsons, which try to meld different styles of comedy together to cover all of the bases, but even then I know people who dislike both of those. And the thing with comedy is that, if it's the type that doesn't appeal to you, it completely ruins the experience - it's really hard to get past that."

Fear and his team ran into several challenges while trying to make Explodemon funny. For starters, they not only had to make sure that they didn't alienate people with humour that only certain players would get, but they had to ensure that it didn't get in the way of actually playing the game. If it's too risqué or too out-of-place, it can alienate an audience.

"Tim Schafer said recently that he thinks comedy in games is being censored by the developers themselves, and that's definitely true," says Fear. "There were some great lines in Explodemon at one point that got cut out because you worry about how it might affect the age rating, or whether you'll get in to trouble for it. At other times, we had to really fight to keep other lines in."

It's appropriate that Fear mentions Schafer. The latter is the big cheese over at Double Fine games, and creator of some of the funniest games of the past ten years. Psychonauts, Brutal Legend and Costume Quest have all raised many a laugh at Play Gamer Towers, and with their new entry Stacking - a whimsical puzzler involving stackable Russian dolls - Double Fine are doing their best to continue this. If anybody knows how to do funny, it's these guys.

Lee Petty is the project lead on Stacking. He says that although humour is something that has to be carefully integrated, it's no different to fine-tuning story or character development. "It's hard for me to imagine developing a game's mechanics separately from its mood and feel," he says. "I think these things only get in the way of playing the game if the overall creative direction doesn't feel consistent in some way. In those cases, these elements might feel tacked on."

This doesn't, however, answer the fundamental question. You can fine-tune things until you're sick of hearing the jokes. You can make your characters do silly things and have enough playful animations, fart gags and witty interludes to make a comedy club explode. But games are developed by small teams, and playtested by a select group of people. Developers never know if, when they release their games to the public, their jokes are going to work or fall completely flat. Comedy isn't just hard to do - it's hard to know if you've done it right until it's too late.

This is not something that has a readily available answer. Fear says that he quite simply doesn't know if something will be genuinely funny ("Sometimes it works, sometimes nobody gets it"). Of course, more often than not, games that set out to be funny usually strike a chord with gamers, but it is humour, more than anything else, that takes the biggest risk with individual players' tastes.

This isn't to say that developers don't have a few techniques they can use. A good balance between written comedy and physical comedy allows them to cover all bases. Imagine if, in Valve's superb puzzler Portal (one of the most subtly funny games of this generation) the evil AI GLAdOS had told the player what to do through the use of bouncy hand-puppets instead of utterly mad monologues. It wouldn't have worked. But without the presence of elements like the cute, bouncy machine-gun turrets or the silent-but-fun Companion Cube, GLADoS' taunts would have sounded hollow and ineffectual. Like so much else in games, it's a tough balancing act to pull off.

"Stacking has a lot of physical comedy as well as scripted comedy," says Petty. The dolls themselves do a lot of really funny and charming animations when you use the various abilities. In addition, most of our story telling is done with…pantomime and gesture based humor." Fear goes deeper, saying that part of getting the balance right is controlling the pace of jokes. If Explodemon rammed comedy down your throat, it would get very annoying, very quickly. In developing the script, which was put together by "four or five" different writers, one of the initial problems Fear and his team faced was that there were just too many punchlines. "It just felt like it was too dense. If you have a great joke and then it's followed a few seconds later with a substandard one, it sours the experience; it makes you think less of it overall. There's nothing worse than someone trying to be funny, right? So I went through it, picked out the best ones, and mercilessly cut the rest - without trying to replace every single one of them."

Interestingly, the rise of downloadable console games has seen a huge increase in games with the guts to take things less than seriously. Petty says that you can't design humour by committee, and the bigger the committee, the less funny something is likely to be. A huge developer working on a big title is going to find it harder to sneak jokes in and make players laugh: when everything has to be approved by several people, eventually someone isn't going to get it. But with PSN titles like Explodemon, Stacking and Hothead Games' excellent Deathspank - typically developed by smaller teams - there is far more leeway to try to be funny. "I think one of the advantages of downloadable games is that you are more likely to be able to take creative risks, since the projects have smaller budgets. And I think that includes humor," says Petty.

Of course, if you like your games to take things a little less seriously, then this is good news. Because as smaller games grab a larger slice of the pie and PSN downloads continue to grow, there are more and more gently humourous games being released. 

There's yet to be a genuine belly-acher on the PS3, but when it comes to being funny in games, things are looking up - just before getting a custard pie in the face.

Gaming's funniest moments

Sheep, Dog 'n' Wolf (Infogrames 2001)

We're going to give it up to Ralph Wolf here. The sheep-hunting canine never said a word, but his range of movements led to some of the finest physical comedy in gaming. Our pick is the moment he runs off a cliff, screeches to a halt, looks down, waves goodbye and plummets. Think it was funny on TV? It's even better when you do it yourself.

Portal (Valve 2007)

It took ages to get to PS3, but once it did (in the form of Valve's excellent Orange Box package) players got to experience GLADoS for themselves. Beat a couple of tests and the mad AI is singing your praises: "Unbelievable! You, [Subject Name Here], must be the pride of [Subject Hometown Here]." Priceless.

Brutal Legend (Double Fine 2009)

It's not laugh-out-loud funny, and you do really have to like Jack Black, but Tim Shafer's first PS3 entry is packed full of great lines. Direct your forces during battle, and Black will shout "Everything in that general direction must die!" Our sentiments exactly.

The Simpsons Game (EA 2007)

The Simpsons have always had their own games, but this is arguably the best yet. The show's humour is all here, and the top bit is the Grand Theft Scratchy level. Marge recruiting an army of dogs to stop a violent video game being released on Springfield (of course) is a highlight of a game filled with side-splitting, genre-baiting levels.

Dead Rising (Capcom 2006)

If games were comedians, then Dead Rising would be the one telling fart jokes and angering The Daily Mail. Killing zombies has never been more hysterical, but the game's prize moment is surprisingly simple: smashing a massive ceramic flowerpot over a zombie's head. We could watch that again and again and again.

Laughing at, not laughing with

Humour might be rare in games, but games are often unintentionally hilarious. Forget glitches or spectacularly bad Japanese-to-English translations (Resident Evil gets the wooden spoon on that one, with its infamous Jill Sandwich remark) - the real howlers are when bad voice acting combined and poor design choices meet a completely overblown situation.

Case in point: Alone In The Dark. Not only was the much-hyped PS3 version a truly awful game, but it had a script that defied belief. "Give me my stone!" yells the possessed evil guy. "I don't have your stone…and f**k you anyway!" retorts hero Carnby. And as Crysis 2 is about to come to the PS3, we'll give it a mention for the face enemy soldiers made when you grabbed hold of them in the original game. It's the bug-eyed, toothy stare of death.

Pedal to the metal

There's nothing quite like zooming down the highway at top speed, and then hitting the boost button to make things go real blurry. Rob Boffard gets behind the science of speed in games. First published in Play Gamer Magazine in January 2011.

You're coming out of a massive drift though a huge, wheel-screechingly long corner, and the first thing you see is a long, clear straight. The only instinct right now? Smash the accelerator as far as it will go, and push that speedometer into triple digits. Every racing game, no matter what bells and whistles are tacked on, only has one goal: go as fast as humanly possible for as long as humanly possible.

The sensation of speed is a fundamental part of the gaming experience, and if it is done well, it can be one of the most thrilling. But behind the illusion of lightning speed is a huge amount of knowledge, technical trickery and sleight of hand. Developers spend a huge amount of time trying to get the sensation just right, and it's no coincidence that some of the best racing games of all time are the ones that really go out of their way to make you feel special whenever you hit the gas.

Broadly speaking, you can split racers into two categories: arcade games, and simulators. Even the slowest car in the realistic Gran Turismo probably feels a lot faster than it would if driven in real life, but there is no question that simulators don't have the freedom that arcade games have to show off their speed. Huge graphical effects would look out of place, and so these games are often restricted to slightly more low key effects and numerical feedback like speedometers to indicate massive speed. But if you really want to get the sensation of breakneck pace, arcade games not bound by reality are where you'll really feel what it's like to go a million miles an hour.

Blazej Krakowiak is the international brand manager for Techland, developers of the quad-bike racer Nail'd. He might have a weighty, corporate title, but Krakowiak knows an awful lot about speed. Despite having worked on racing games before - the company developed Pet Racer and Xpand Rally Xtreme for the PC - Techland are best known for games like Call of Juarez: Bound In Blood. Judging from their latest project, however, they should probably be doing more racing games. Push the accelerator in Nail'd, and within half a second you're a tiny dot on the horizon. It's blisteringly fast.

"All racing games need to be fast unless it's snail racing and you want to rub it in," says Krakowiak, beginning with the bleeding obvious. Staying with that theme, he says that the first thing any developer has to do to give the illusion of speed is to have things around the player moving very quickly. "In street and road racing games lane markings, milestone posts and road signs can serve that purpose," he says. "Off-road games, especially ones with as much wild scenery as Nail'd boasts, are more tricky in that regard. We used rocks, stones, bushes, grass, branches and other natural objects which belong on our tracks and around them."

But that's only the start. Ultimately, the main goal of speed in a game is to get from point A to a very distantly visible point B. But unless you've got a swanky new 3D TV, this all happens on the 2D plane of your screen. To create the illusion of distance, which more than anything else gives the appearance of speed, developers have to play with the camera. Specifically, the field of view.

Krakowiak explains "Field of view lets us add extra depth to the scene, while increasing and decreasing it strengthens the perception of acceleration and deceleration. As an added benefit, field of vision affects the perceived distances which can help make those jumps in Nail'd even more intimidating." Combine that with some subtle colour saturation to suggest an increase in speed (think things blurring together) and a whole bunch of debris flying towards the camera, and…well, you're halfway there.

As any F1 driver will tell you, speed is nothing without control. It doesn't matter how fast you can move a car in a particular direction; if you can't change that direction quickly enough you'll crash and then, in all probability, explode. Balancing speed with fine control is incredibly time-consuming, and huge amounts of playtesting are needed to get it right.

Step forward then, Criterion. As developers behind the Burnout series and the more recent Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit, they're the recognised masters of all things that go vroom. Techland have a pretty strong entry with Nail'd, but these guys are the ones to beat. Burnout 3 - one of the fastest games ever made - wouldn't be half as revered if it didn't allow for such ease of control at high speeds.

"Control is something that either feels right or wrong," says Craig Sullivan, the company's creative director. "There's no middle ground, it's just something you feel in your gut in the first five seconds of picking up the controller. We spend the entire project tweaking and polishing the controls of our games so they feel right and allow the player to immerse themselves in the game without thinking about what their hands are doing." 

The secret to this, says Sullivan, is that there isn't one. They just play the game until it's perfect. "We get as many people as possible to play it, from highly skilled players to people who've never touched a videogame before, and we make sure that they're all having fun and can get the car to do what they want when they want. If you mess up and feel like it wasn't your fault, then it must be the game and the game needs changing."

And although a game can reward you with flashier cars, new tracks and new weapons, everything is always geared towards making you crank up the speed. The faster you go and the better you drive, the more tools you get to push that accelerator up. Speed, it would seem, is its own reward. Sullivan calls it a fundamental aspect of all racing games.

"If I drive well I go faster, if I drive poorly I go slower," he says. "In Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit and Burnout we gave the player the ability to go faster by driving dangerously, giving them a simple risk-reward mechanic that lured them into driving at the edge of their comfort zone. When you've got layers of mechanics that work together to give the player lots of choice and room to express themselves you're off to a good start."

And the ultimate reward for driving on the edge of control? For pushing the vehicle to the limit and being the fastest one out there? It's the driving game equivalent of a screaming orgasm: boost.

In arcade racers at least, boost - or nitrous, if you're trying to be Need For Speed street cool - has become one of the ultimate reasons for driving fast. Build up enough juice on the bar and smash the boost button, and you're likely to get some even more out-there graphical effects. Flames spew out the exhaust. The car leaps forward as the depth of field leaps back. The surroundings blur into mush as the speedometer needle redlines. Boost has become such a central feature in the arcade racing landscape that when it's not there (as in the otherwise excellent Split/Second) it's sorely missed.

Boost is all about taking the graphical and audio effects the game already has in place, and pushing them further. For Krakowiak, it was all about giving the boost a real kick that would signal to the player that something special just happened. "For most people even the regular plain driving in Nail'd is barely controllable at first," he says. "The balance between speed, control and fun helps them adjust to the relentless pace of the game. Then they activate the boost and it all happens again."

But boost also has another effect - one which is, perhaps, unintended. It might be tougher to control the car while boost is activated, but once you've drained the boost bar and things return to normal, it's often a little easier to control the game. By pushing things to very limit and surviving, the player becomes a better, more controlled driver at the game's regular speeds - even if those speeds are still brutally fast.

"Of course, all those tricks are just tools," explains Krakowiak. "The real challenge is making them all work together without getting in each other's way and without feeling artificial. The truth is that most games, even those much closer to simulations, appear to be much faster than reality. Nail'd had to be significantly faster than that and it took a lot of prototypes and iterations to get where we are."

 

Speed freaks 

Racing is not exactly a genre short on competitors, but there's no doubt that some games are faster than others. Here's a full grid-worth of games that really put the pedal to the metal…

Burnout 3 (Criterion)

Top speed: 209mp/h

Subsequent Burnout entries have been good, but few have been quite as speedy as this one. Also gets the prize for quickest deceleration, which occurs when car meets brick wall at full boost.

Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit (Criterion)

Top speed: 241mp/h

In real life, the Bugatti Veyron clocks out at 253mp/h. In NFS: Hot Pursuit (easily the quickest NFS yet), we've got it to 241mph. How quick is that? We'll tell you: very.

Gran Turismo 2 (Polyphony Digital)

Top speed: 295mp/h

Yes, it's old. Yes, it's a by-the-book racing sim. But get behind the wheel of the odd-looking, astoundingly fast Pikes Peak Escudo, and that all disappears. In a massive cloud of dust.

Nail'd (Techland)

Top speed: There's no speedo, but we'd guess in excess of 300mp/h

It's just ATVs and bikes, right? How fast could it possibly be? I mean, it's not as if you push the boost button and WOAHDEARGODBUDDHASHIVAHOLYHELL!

Sonic Unleashed (Sega)

Top speed: 500mp/h

We know it was a rubbish game. But when it stayed away from the Werehog and gave Sonic some space to move, it was also one of the fastest. Also one of the easiest, given that you didn't have to move him around corners…

Wipeout HD (SCE)

Top speed: 990mp/h

 The Wipeout series has always been blisteringly quick, but the HD update for PS3 was pretty intense. The idea? Automatic acceleration, at all times, with no brakes. Cue mind-melting speeds that nudge the sound barrier.

Let the music play

Composing music for games is very different to composing it for film or TV. And as Rob Boffard discovers, it's attracting some seriously big names. First published in Play Gamer Magazine on 18/12/10.

"Music is the most powerful form of sound we know of, because of its instant associations," says Matt Harwood. "Just imagine the Jaws theme playing in the dentist's chair, and you get the idea."

Indeed. And he would know - not necessarily because of any past dental trauma, but because of his professional role. Harwood is the Audio Director at Kaos, the New York studio responsible for the upcoming Homefront. The game depicts the aftermath of a Korean invasion of the USA, and Harwood is responsible for making sure that the orchestral and acoustic music that accompanies the campaign is as evocative as the imagery.  "[It's] a mixture of hope, desperation, resolve, anger and fear," he says. "That's really the core of the game to me.  How would I feel if this were to happen, what would I do to protect my family? The music that I composed is result of that thought process."

Game music is a crucially important but often underrated part of the game design process. While the design of sound effects can be more complex and labour intensive, it's arguably the music that will have the biggest impact. A crucial scene or set piece can be made memorable - or be ruined - by the musical choices that get made. And in the past few years, this has become even more important. Game budgets have got bigger and technology has got better. Not only are games targeting a wider audience more used to lush film and TV soundtracks, but they also now have the capacity to provide those soundtracks.

One of the biggest changes has been the nature of the composers themselves. Gone are the days when soundtracks were created by anonymous programmers beavering away in tiny studios. Nowadays, it's commonplace to see big-name producers attached to games. Legendary Hollywood composer Harry Gregson-Williams stepped in to provide the score for the Metal Gear Solid series. Symphony orchestras like the Prague Philharmonic are frequently commissioned to perform for game audio. And closer to home, storied producers like Nitin Sawhney have been asked to step in to lend the music a little bit more class.

Sawhney, whose work takes in classical, jazz, electronica and traditional Asian music, was asked by Ninja Theory to provide the soundtrack for their PS3 launch title Heavenly Sword - and more recently for it's spiritual follow-up Enslaved: Odyssey To The West. When Sawhney started, one thing became immediately apparent: he was going to have to produce a lot more music for Heavenly Sword than he thought. 

"In the initial stages, I was quite shocked by how long everything was going to be," he muses. "Actually pacing the music and getting a sense of trying to make sure that it builds and has drama and is moving with everything…It's a big jump to go from doing an hour and a half of something to doing four or five hours of continual orchestral music."

 And this isn't just music in one long stretch; it doesn't exist in isolation. Rather, it's got to be written in such a way that it can bend around the game and the way it's played. While the actual creative side is largely the domain of the composer, the process of integrating the music into the game is a hugely challenging process which demands as much collaboration between composers and programmers as it does technical tricks.

 To begin with, games are non-linear media. Unlike film, the actual timing and pacing of a game is largely down to the player. This means that sophisticated programming routines have to kick in to ensure that sound effects play at the right time and don't overwhelm each other. This applies to music as well, to some degree, but far more important is making sure that the transition between different pieces of music is smooth and natural. To do this, designers and composers have one important weapon in their audio arsenal: key.

A piece of music's key refers to its 'root note': a central tone around which it is based. If a collection of tunes are all in the same key, they will sound right together.  "The first choice I made during pre-production [of Homefront] was that I was going to compose the game in the key of D," says Harwood. "The tunes will modulate and change keys or be slightly ambiguous of what key they are in during the course of a composition, but the pedal of the music is D. This is so that when a transition piece…is needed to interrupt the current composition, it could crossfade cleanly into that next tune and feel like it's all one line of music."

If the different pieces of music in the game can fade cleanly into one another without sounding jarring or out of place, then the audio designers have won half the battle. The real challenge - and one which has to be worked through by both the designer and the composer - is making sure that the music, sound effects and voiceovers sound good together and don't clash. Think about all the sounds in a typical game: explosions, machine-gun fire, grunts, shouts, electronic bleeps. Imagine trying to mesh all that with a huge, soaring soundtrack.

Sawhney's knowledge of the technical side of sound certainly helps with this. "We have a real sense of where we're going to be in the frequency spectrum. For example, if I create something with loads of bass, and what Tom [Colvin, audio lead at Ninja Theory] has some kind of scene with a huge amount of bass rumble coming from a giant robot, then they're going to clash - and you don't want two clashing frequencies. You need to get a sense of what the sound designer is doing, because if you don't, you may compose something which doesn't work - even though it works by itself!" A play-through of Enslaved shows that both Sawhney and Colvin paid attention to this. The face-off between Monkey and the ravenous Dog mech combines low pitched growls and rumbles from the robot with scary, screeching, high-pitched strings.

Although Harwood composed the music for Homefront himself, making this process a little easier, Sawhney had to work very closely with Colvin to make sure that everything sounded right. External composers don't really have a chance to play the finished product while they are making music for it, relying instead on unfinished levels, storyboards and, above all, working back-to-back with the person responsible putting their music in the game.

"Quite often Tom would come over with bits of the game, and he would play them next to me while I watch what he's doing," says Sahwney, "and then I might write music to it - I've got my hands free to be able to play stuff. I'll get into the vibe of what's going on. I might play a bit of it if it's something I can do at that stage." Most of Sahwney's recording took place at his favoured studio, The Dairy in Brixton - home to Florence And The Machines and Jamiroquai.

One of the things that this process helps with, besides giving the composers something to work off, is to set the pace of the music. In-game audio has as much to do with the pace of the game as the visuals, and developers spend a long time making sure that it's exactly right - including figuring out which bits to not put any music into at all. 

"Sometimes you want to telegraph to the player what is about to happen so they can be ready for it, or you want to give some foreshadowing." Harwood explains. "For example, in Homefront's opening scene you're in a bus, escorted off in a very harsh and unpleasant manner.  The entire scene is loaded with uncertainty and trepidation.  Towards the end of that scene there is a massive event that is rather exciting, and in this case the music slowly turns more intense, revealing more percussion and more momentum until this event occurs. It's the foreshadowing and the build of excitement that lends itself, in this case, to be a good choice. There are moments in our game where no music was the right choice.  Because of music being so powerful, it can take away form something you want the player to hear and connect to."

One of the biggest changes in game music is that it - and the people behind it - are starting to become as big as the games they work on. On the advertising material for Enslaved, Sawhney's name was front and centre, along with writer Alex Garland. Game soundtracks are starting to put up huge numbers themselves (The soundtrack to Halo 2, annoyingly, is the biggest seller, at over 100,000 copies), and there are companies - like Sumthing Distribution - who specialise in marketing them. Not only are soundtracks getting paid more attention from publishers as a revenue stream but, Sawhney says, the genre is attracting some great new talent. Game music, he thinks, has a very bright future.

"Videogames have flourished - it's a lot harder to pirate a [Playstation] game than it is to pirate a CD or an MP3. From that point of view, a lot of musicians have become more interested in diversifying and trying new things out. Composers are seeing that there is a possibility of working for a game developer, and it's a very lucrative industry."

 

Stem theory

A composer making music for a game doesn't just create a bunch of tracks. Rather, they'll create shorter sections of instrumentation - called stems - which they can use as a base to create multiple different pieces. Imagine a short drum break, then think about where it can go. It could become a pounding rock track, a swooping, epic orchestral finale or a basic 'sting' for when a character beats a mission.

Sawhney sees stems as a good way of creating cohesion in his music. "It's almost like creating kits of possibilities. You compose music, and then you allow that music to be torn apart and put back together in other parts of the game. There's a lot of flexibility." 

 

All things being equal

Equalisation, or EQ, is one of the most powerful weapons that any composer has. It allows them to raise or lower certain bits of the frequency spectrum to emphasise or remove different bits of the sound.

Frequency is a way of measuring how high or low the pitch of a sound is. The sound waves of violin are close together, and so will hit your ears far more frequently than those of a bass drum, which are farther apart. In Bioshock 2, for example, the old-time music that plays at certain parts could be heightened by cutting the extreme high and low frequencies, leaving a slightly tinny sound resembling an old gramophone. 

Very special effects

Without the efforts of environmental artists and lighting designers, your games would look very dull indeed. Rob Boffard caught up with some of them to find out what goes into making game worlds as believable as possible. First published in Play Gamer Magazine in December 2010.

Take your favourite game. Now start taking things out of it. Imagine removing all the explosions, the puffs of dust thrown up as your character walks around, the drops of rain speckling the camera. Take away the sun and the moon. What you're left with won't look much like a game at all - certainly like nothing from the PS3. For the most part, environmental effects are quite literally part of the scenery; but if they weren't there, all you'd have is Tetris.

Environmental effects refer to any graphical elements that make the game world a more believable place. They can take in localised effects like explosions, or can affect the world globally in the form of lighting and day-night cycles. They can be weather, lava flows, the luminescent quality of an iceberg - anything, in short, which shapes the world around you. A good environmental effect will draw you into the game without you really even realising that it's there - and developers will often expend a huge amount of time and resources getting it right.

The first stop on the journey to great environmental effects is lighting. Nothing will kill the atmosphere of a game faster than badly-designed lighting; get it right, however, and suddenly the game world will make sense. Developers often employ specialised designers to work specifically on lighting, ensuring that it is as believable as possible. The scorching-bright sunlight of Enslaved: Odyssey To The West and the flat, dull tones of the opening snowy mountain level of Modern Warfare 2 took trial, error and a huge amount of hard work to get right.

Effects artists are the archetypal game designers: detail-obsessed technical wizards who work behind vast banks of screens and heavy-duty computing machinery, control pad close at hand. David Witters is one of those guys. He's the lead lighting artist for Naughty Dog - it is his work that you can see in Uncharted 2's warmly-lit Tibetan villages and stark ice caves. Witters is part of a team of three artists who, alongside a programmer, have the full-time job of making sure that the environmental effects in Naughty Dog games are up to scratch. 

Getting the lighting right in-game - and making sure that it changes believably from level to level - is a hugely complex task. For the most part, it comes down to playing with colours: getting the balance and tone right to ensure that the lighting is as believable (and as unobtrusive) as possible. "It comes down to good variation and range with the intensity of the light values that illuminate the environment and distributing good colour," says Witters. He's enthusiastic about his role, delving deep into the technical aspects of it. "Ideally the colours used in the lighting also need to be harmonious with the texture colour palette. The war torn version of the village uses deep depressing greens with really soft nearly neutral salmon-pink daylight in very low contrast as compared to the pre-war village that uses high contrast daylight with golden bounce light teasing blue shadows." 

Balance the colours and brightness with exposure and contrast, and make sure that the light scatters believably across the objects in the level, and you're halfway there. Of course, it's a lot tougher when you're relying on a single light source: the sun. And if you think it sounds tough creating soothing golden daylight on a Tibetan mountain top, imagine creating believable lighting when the environment itself is completely unbelievable.

Red Faction: Guerrilla, the first entry of the series onto current-gen consoles, took place on Mars. As hero Alec Mason rampaged around the Martian colonies breaking things with his oversized hammer, it was Tim McMahon- a senior lighting artist at Volition - who made sure that Mars looked right. McMahon couldn't simply make the lighting red - it would be like wandering around someone's intestine. And of course, he had to rely on the sun (closer to Mars than it is to Earth) to get his lighting right.

"Making anything look good with a single light is challenging and we had to rely more on things like coloured fog and tinting everything a certain colour," says McMahon. "Night-time might have had a less bright light, and then we'd change the fog and sunlight colours to a cool pallet.  With such a limited system almost everything relied on picking strong colour pallets to make the world look different from earth." The new edition in the series, the upcoming Red Faction: Armageddon, takes the game underground, and sacrifices one big light in the sky for thousands of individual lights - all of which can be turned on or off at any time to create different effects.

Of course, all of this fantastic lighting is meaningless if, at ground level, things don't look right. For although a huge amount of time is put into getting the lighting just so, the more localised effects are just as important - and often extremely tricky to get right. Effects artists spend a lot of time fine-tuning particles - the tiny graphical dots that make up the small details of the explosions, showers of sparks, falling snow and dust, and working out how they react with both the players and other objects in the level.

One of the toughest environmental effects to get right is water - so much so that some games (like the otherwise forgettable Hydrophobia) make a selling point out of it when they feel it looks really good. Uncharted 2 is one of the few games to really nail the look and behaviour of water, as a small shower late in the game becomes a full-blown tempest which turns ancient ruins into a flooded nightmare.

"Rain is a particularly difficult effect to composite correctly and pull off as an experience," says Keith Guerrette, the lead visual effects artist at Naughty Dog. "It affects everything, so it can't be added into the scene as an afterthought. Knowing from the start that we wanted to transition to a flash flood and rainstorm for this area was key - the environments and characters needed to look wet…but we really wanted to sell the scene more, adding details like water rushing down the walls, building into puddles on the ground, and the ripples/splashes running through them.

 "The rain itself needed to seemingly collide with everything, including the characters, creating splashes across every possible surface.  The sound, ever under-appreciated, needed to imply everything you could see - from variations in the wind affecting the rain, down to the subtle but constant splashing all around you.  Throw in some lightning, and we had a decent feeling rainstorm. Of course, it took several iterations across the studio to hit the point that you see in game."

Dave Samuel works alongside McMahon at Volition, and his role as a senior visual effects artist is much the same as Guerrette's. He says that creating a believable local effect is as much about what happens around it as what it actually is. The flow of lava in Red Faction: Armageddon would be rather dull if it wasn't for the subtle distortion effect applied to the camera when the player gets close, which mimics the waves of heat rising off it. "Along with that camera effect we have lava spurts, lava bubbles, and shooting geysers of lava," explains Samuel. "[One level] focuses more on simple dust particles in the air for the camera effect, while other areas have more water, as in waterfalls, dripping water, water trickling down the wall, sitting water. Surface areas focus more on dust, lightning, and meteors that add up to a post-apocalyptic mars."

However, effects artists have an additional problem. To put it bluntly, some effects in-game have to be designed differently from real life. Firing bullets blindly at enemies in a warehouse in Killzone 2 will cause sparks to fly as bullets ricochet off metal pipes. The next time you get involved in an industrial firefight in real life (Yes, we know it's unlikely, but work with us here), try firing at a metal surface and see what happens. Chances are, you'll get a tiny puff of smoke and a small entry hole. 

"This just doesn't work in games," says Samuel, "because the player needs to have some sort of obvious visual feedback, otherwise, it may seem as if he didn't actually hit the metal. Add in multiple enemies, lighting, environment effects and such - with all these other factors, unless the hit effect is in your face, you will completely miss it. So when I create the effects, I want them to look over the top, sparks shooting off, a hot glow at the point of contact, something that you just can't miss."

Guerrette goes further, breaking effects down into two categories: ones which give the player a sense of feedback, and ones which purely provide ambience. "Each of those answers requires us to flex reality in slightly different ways," he says. "In the case of explosions, they usually fall into the first category…So while gas tanks don't actually explode when shot, and gasoline burns up in a slow impressive fireball, we need to make something that pops, giving the player an immediate and powerful reaction to his or her input. Almost anything involved with the weapons also require these considerations - blood, tracers, muzzle flashes, bullet hits."

In recent years, graphics have got so good and effects so believable that the challengers for designers have shifted. According to Guerrette, it's no longer about creating more and better particles and pixels to allow for more detailed effects. Rather, the challenge is how they use them: how they take what they already have and apply increasingly finer techniques to it to create even more believable environments. "You can see it clearly in the quality of fire being produced in games these days," muses Guerrette. "Smooth, unique motion, unachievable by old techniques, is becoming common place." 

Day and night

One of the toughest effects to get right in any game is the day-night cycle. Transitioning bright sunlight to blackest night is not quite as simple as dimming the sun in the sky and bringing up the stars - it takes quite a bit of time and effort to get right. 

According to Samuel, one of the most effective weapons he has in his arsenal is a Dynamic Skybox - a programming routine which adjusts the gradients for certain times of day and blends them with the clouds. In addition to this, things have to happen at ground level to make the transition believable: houselights have to come on, smoke from factory chimney stacks has to stop. If it's dawn, the rising sun has to beam its light from behind low trees and buildings, and audio effects - such as twittering birds - have to be brought into play.

And if that wasn't complicated enough, all of this will have a direct effect on the particles that make up environmental effects at ground level. "The key to blending the environment effects, and dynamic gameplay effects," says Samuel, "is to have a global tinting system for particles…This will allow the smoke to seem to light and tint certain particles during the day, and have another colour and value during the night. This is essential to have particles blend into the scene, and not stick out." 

Getting in character

The Playstation has often struggled with mascots, and with putting a recognisable face to its machine. But as Rob Boffard finds out, creating a great mascot isn't as easy as it sounds. First published in Play Gamer Magazine in November 2010.

Sony may have the best games. It might have the most powerful machine and the most talented developers. But what it does not have - at least not yet - is a face: a Sonic or Mario equivalent that can represent the console. Over the years, there have been plenty of characters that have eagerly been proclaimed as mascots for Sony's machine, with some notable successes - including LittleBigPlanet's Sackboy, which is the closest the PS3 has come to having a 'face' - but for the most part, mascots on the system have had a tough time of it.

Of course, if creating a mascot was as simple as churning out a cute, marketable character and sticking him in a decent game, then things might have been a bit easier. But mascots take time, energy and, crucially, a large amount of luck to create - and the process of designing one often runs completely counterintuitive to traditional thinking about game design. There are certain things that need to be kept in mind by any developer wishing to create a character, and it is when these are ignored that characters fall - and fall hard.

The most successful developer when it comes to mascot creation - the one that followed all the rules, if you like - is Naughty Dog. The Santa Monica-based development house is responsible for creating several challengers to the Playstation mascot crown, including Crash Bandicoot, Jak and Daxter and Nathan Drake of the Uncharted series. Crash and the duo of Jak and Daxter (Drake came along later) were the creation of Jason Rubin and Andy Gavin, Naughty Dog's founders. It's arguable that they know more about creating a mascot than anybody else working on Playstation games today.

Media Molecule's ultra-cute Sackboy might be the current king of the hill, despite not being the chart-topper Sony wanted it to be, but for a long time the bouncy Crash Bandicoot was the closest thing that the PlayStation had to a face. Crash came into being while Rubin and Gavin were driving cross-country, on the way to California to set up their development house under guidance of Universal Studios. They decided - right there, in the car - to create a mascot for Sony's new system; something that would rival Sonic and Mario, that would put Sony's fledgling system on the map.

It was ridiculous for us to even try. We should have had our sanity checked," says Rubin. He's one of the industry's most outspoken members, and left Naughty Dog in 2004. "It's amazing how simple it sounds in retrospect, but these were things which took months and months for us to do…I went out and bought a book on Tasmanian marsupials, because our target was more Sonic than Mario at that time. We wanted to do something that competed, and I don't know why, but I had this idea that Tasmania marsupials were the way to go. 

"The book had a hedgehog in it, it had an echidna in it, wombats, bandicoots, Tasmanian tigers, devils, all these different characters that had become big. If you came from Tasmania, you couldn't fail. Now, when someone says Road Runner, you think of the colourful birds from Warner Bros. You don't think of the boring, brown rodent. We would take something that people recognize, so it sounded real, and came from a real animal, and create a look that had nothing to do with the real animal. We would hijack the name in the same way that [Sonic did]."

In designing their bandicoot, Rubin and Gavin and their studio discovered one of the strangest aspects about mascot creation: the less personality a mascot has, the more successful it will be. It's why - or at least part of the reason why - Sackboy has become such a phenomenon. He has no personality other than that which you give him; you control his arm movements, his clothing, even his facial expressions. He is an entirely blank canvas, able to take the personality of any player. It's why, Rubin says, Crash was so successful: he may have had a slightly kooky demeanour, able to express emotions through oddball facial expressions and sounds, but he was still largely what the player made him.

Rubin explains, comparing Crash and Sackboy to Mario: "You have this thing with a massive nose that is a full third of the height of his face, and you could barely tell it was a plumber. If they haven't told you, you would have thought it was this weird gnome-gremlin. It has a look, but Mario has zero personality… Let's say that Mario is getting a parking ticket. How would Mario react? You have absolutely no clue. Mario has no personality! He's still stuck in that. Sonic had a little bit more of a personality, because he was fast. He was a one-dimensional character, and you knew that whatever happened to him, he would be fast. He would run, he would talk quickly, he will be fast. But how would Sonic do monologue from Shakespeare? You can't really picture that." 

It's also why Jak and Daxter have fizzled out, while Crash is still around. Both had excellent games - Jak II and Crash Bandicoot: Warped in particular - but one persisted, while the other did not. "In the original [Jak and Daxter], you were allowed to kick Daxter, and he'd shut up for a while," says Rubin. "These are your characters, you are playing as them, but they might say something you don't like, which you think is kind of dorky. That's why Jak didn't talk in the first Jak and Daxter. I didn't want him to have a personality because having a personality gave you the ability to hate him. You can't hate Pacman!" In addition, there's another aspect to this: universality. If a mascot can be successful in both eastern and western gaming, then they will endure. Of Jak, Rubin says, "didn't look Japanese enough for the Japanese, and was oddly too Japanese to be a foreign character. In the United States, he didn't look like this cool character that was designed for an American audience; he looked like this hyper-Japanese thing." 

Of course, while lack of personality and cross-cultural appeal might be a good thing for any potential mascot, it's certainly not a hard and fast rule - and there are plenty of examples that ignore it entirely. Take Ratchet and Clank. They've been around since the early days of the PS2, and are still going strong. More importantly, they are packed with personality, and are as far from the mute Sackboy and the gurning Crash as you can get. By the rules of mascots, they should have stopped existing long ago.

The furry lombax warrior and his metallic companion were developed by Insomniac Games. Chad Dezern, director of Insomniac's North Carolina studio, thinks that this is down to several factors - and one of them is the environment that the characters can play in. 

"I think the characters have tremendous cross-cultural appeal," Dezern says. "They're iconic and funny, and they contrast well with each other. More importantly, even after seven Ratchet and Clank games we have more ideas than we can ever hope to execute. That's because [they] have the whole universe to explore. There are always new planets, new weapons, new enemies, and new characters to develop."

The PS3 has seen far less focus on mascots (in the traditional sense) than Sony's previous systems. This brings up the question: does the console actually need a mascot in the traditional sense? After all, the characters that are the most successful - in terms of number of games sold - are mature, adult characters like Nathan Drake, Kratos and Solid Snake. Add this to the fact that there are far less console-exclusive games than there used to be, and you have a compelling reason why it's harder to identify a single character with a single system.

Dezern thinks that is an evolution of the character action genre: "Single-mascot consoles are a relic of previous generations; with increased game sales, there are more hits these days. Gamers tend to be older, savvier, and more diverse in their tastes, and they're more inclined to be familiar with the full line-up of titles. I associate current consoles with a rotating cast of characters that fluctuates with the intended audience." Rubin echoes this, albeit in slightly more blunt terms: "Everything's gotten much more serious, much more real. The fun cartoon stuff has gone away."

There is an additional problem, namely how a character makes the jump from being, well, just a character to being a fully-fledged mascot. While some characters certainly start out with the idea of becoming potential mascots, like Crash, there are others - Sackboy among them - who only later became massive ambassadors for the console. Rubin thinks that the slightly alchemical quality that helps characters make this jump is down to the audience for games. It is they, not the games companies themselves who decide whether a character will be a mascot or not.

"If you look at the interviews with [Playstation development supremos] Kaz Hirai, with Ken Kutaragi, none of them ever called Crash a mascot. In fact they went out of their way to say Crash was the most successful game, give or take Tomb Raider in the US, but they made very sure to say, this was not a mascot. Sony wasn't operating under the mascot theory from the beginning. It just so happens that the most popular game tends to personify the hardware." Rubin goes onto say that it was the mainstream media - particularly the New York Times - who, swept up in the brave new world of 3D gaming, proclaimed Crash a mascot.

Of course, it may just be down to time for bold new characters like Nathan Drake and Kratos to become as well-known and as identifiable as Crash and Sackboy. But for the moment, the PS3 remains without a single face for its experience, and the process of designing a mascot remains a tricky art.

Cheats always prosper

Cheat codes are dead: long live cheats codes. But as Rob Boffard discovers, level select and infinite lives might have been left out in the cold, but gaming cheats are still very much alive. First published in Play Gamer in September 2010.

Think about the last time you entered a cheat code in a video game. We'd bet a good deal of money it was quite some time ago - possibly even back in the days of the Sega Megadrive or original Playstation. The fact is, gamers seem to have rather a lot to get on with these days without worrying about level selects, infinite ammo codes or invincibility. As open world games have become more prevalent and more complex, and multiplayer has become highly accessible, cheats seem to have left the party, closing the door quietly behind them.

But this is not always the case. The thing is, cheat codes haven't really gone anywhere. They've simply changed, mutated and become more subtle over time. They haven't vanished, merely adapted to the rapidly changing circumstances. And in many ways, this reflects the changes that videogames as a whole have undergone. One could even go as far as to label cheat codes a kind of litmus test; the changes they've undergone reflect the changes taking place in the wider industry.

So while you're unlikely to find things like the infamous Konami Code floating around, you're still highly likely to find codes that let you change the game landscape and enhance your experience. These might not give you infinite ammo, but they'll give you alternate costumes, mirror worlds, access to extra content like concept art and unique levels. Cheats are no longer about helping you beat the game, but rather about helping you experience it in different ways. Of course, there are plenty of diehard fans of retro games that wouldn't be unhappy to see traditional cheat codes making a comeback - especially now that distinctly old school games like Sonic The Hedgehog 4 and Plants Vs Zombies are becoming more popular. 

Jonathan Lavigne, however, isn't sure. A genial Canadian developer, he's the designer of Scott Pilgrim Vs The World, a distinctly retro beat-'em-up on the PSN network that echoes Streets Of Rage and Double Dragon (and which contains some cracking cheat codes of its own, like one which gives you access to a zombie mode). He's subsequently left Ubisoft, where he worked for several years, in order to develop his own ideas. Although he says that he'd welcome the return of traditional cheats, he says it won't happen until games get as hard as they were when Megaman was getting shot down a bottomless pit before he'd even climbed his first ladder.

"Games got easier with time," says Lavigne. "Games you play nowadays, you almost cannot fail; you rarely see a game-over screen…In older games, you couldn't save your game so you had to have pass codes or cheats to go back to a point where you were. You had to really work to get to a certain point in the game, so cheat codes will help you get there more easily. Some games were almost impossible without that. But now, the difficulty curve in the game is such that you should always feel like you are progressing. You shouldn't be stuck at some part in the game."

This isn't the only reason behind the way cheats have changed. Just as games have gone increasingly online, so too has information about them proliferated via the Internet. That means that instead of having to wait until the end of the month to pick up a copy of a cheats magazine at the newsagents, they were suddenly immediately available online - as were guides and walkthroughs of how to beat the tricky bits in any game. Suddenly you didn't need traditional cheats, because detailed step-by-step guides were at your fingertips. Lavigne talks (perhaps with a tiny bit of nostalgia) about how traditional cheats used to have an almost mythical aspect, especially when no-one seemed to know exactly what they did or how to find them.

"You had to search for it and find what it was exactly," says Lavigne. "But now when you want to see what cheats there are, you just go online and it's right there. It kind of killed that magic. I think that's another part of it. Maybe in the old days, developers use cheat codes to help them, like for example the level select when testing the game. They then left it in the game when they released it and make it accessible to players." Lavigne is at pains to stress that he still enjoys modern versions of cheats - he appreciates it, he says, when developers insert easter eggs or ways to change the dynamic of the game. 

But while Lavigne puts the changes in cheats down to the development of online gaming and the fact that games are no longer soul-crushingly difficult, there are others who are decidedly more cynical. Al Amaloo is the man behind Gamewinners.com, a cheats website featuring everything from cheats for classic 16-bit games to the most recent releases. He's a lifelong gamer, having began in the days of the Atari 2600, and established the website in 1995 to chronicle, as he puts it, "every aspect of video games strategy, codes and hints." And when it comes to modern cheats, he's convinced that the reason that they've changed so much has a lot more to do with good old fashioned capitalism.

"To put it bluntly," he says, "I think that companies have realised that they can make a profit from payable, downloadable content to get bonuses that were previously unlocked by cheats. For example, back in the PlayStation 2 days, have a game that might have some bonus characters that were unblocked through in game achievements or through a cheat code. Now you can find an unlockable character on the Playstation store. The companies have seen how people like to get extra content through cheat codes and add some longevity to their titles through that. They want to make a profit through that, and DLC is how they're doing it."

Amaloo is reluctant to pinpoint any specific time when this happened - it's not, he says, something which happened overnight - but he does say that he's seen this transformation in cheats take place over the years on his site, which has content submitted by users. Less information on level select codes and more information on trophies, unlockables and ways of getting unique content. There is still far more available in games as standard than there is available on any downloadable content, but it can't have escaped the notice of developers that a costume pack which might have been unlocked by beating a game could make a lot more money for them if they had the ability to sell it separately. It certainly goes some way to explaining why modern cheats are the way they are. "Before, you'd have a bonus level that would be unlockable in game through some cheat code or convoluted method," says Amaloo. "Now [the developers] say, let's add a little more content in addition to just the level, we'll put it on the store and have it available for purchase. That even goes for pre-order bonuses now, too. Costumes that you get through pre-orders from Amazon or GameStop are costumes that you might have unlocked with cheat codes in the past."

Of course, this hasn't stopped developers from being crafty. There might not be much call for traditional cheats anymore, but that hasn't stopped them from inserting things like easter eggs and other cheeky references in their games. And we're not just talking about something hidden in plain sight, either. Batman: Arkham Asylum had been out for months before anybody discovered the hidden wall in the villainous Quincy Sharp's office. The breakable wall didn't show up on Batman's detective vision, and required a concerted effort with explosives to smash down. Behind it was a map labelled 'Arkham City' - a direct reference to the recently announced sequel of the same name. This was a piece of content that nobody except the developers knew about - and it was only unlocked because someone was eventually dedicated enough to find it.

Perhaps this is the best indication of the kind of future that cheats have, where certain game content is only revealed to those who are prepared to go looking for it. It's even possible to speculate that there are several games out right now with content that simply hasn't been found yet, although of course we'll never know until somebody actually comes across it or the developer reveals the secrets. Amaloo, for one, thinks that this is the case, saying that he believes a lot of games have currently undiscovered areas.

And this raises the question of the wider future for cheats. These are all changes that have come about incredibly rapidly, happening within a few years. As games become less and less traditional and more focused on online and open world experiences, what else can we expect to see?

Neither Lavigne or Amaloo know for sure. Lavigne says that he hopes that traditional cheats make something of a comeback to accompany the current trends for Easter eggs and downloadable content, particularly as 2D games like Scott Pilgrim are beginning to reach a new audience. "I think they will always be there because there's a marketing value to it," he says, "but for games that are retro…I think we'll see more of them. It'll grow again as 2D games and older genres make a comeback." Cheat codes will never vanish entirely, but like so much else in gaming, it's difficult to say where they'll end up.

Charity case

Videogames and charities aren't usually mentioned in the same sentence, but there are several organisations that are working hard to change that. Rob Boffard shows his good side. First published in Play Gamer Magazine in September 2010.

Bill Donegan's lab is a console modder's dream. Scattered across the various trestle tables are patchbays and switch units, old-school joystick controllers, a customised Dreamcast console and several eye-tracking cameras. There's also something you won't see in a mod workshop: several large, brightly coloured, plastic buttons hooked up to the consoles. The yellow and blues ones in front of us are labelled left and right.

"The idea is to really simplify the controls," says Donegan, letting us take charge of the luge section of Vancouver 2010. "All you have to do is steer using the left and right buttons. You can tap this one" - he points to a slightly smaller red button in the centre of the table - "to push yourself off at the start."

If you're used to a standard pad, the big buttons aren't easy to deal with. If you've got limited movement and can't get precise body control, however, then it's heaven.

Donegan's lab is the nerve centre of SpecialEffect, a charity with the goal of bringing videogames to disabled people who can't play them through normal means. Donegan spends his time working out how to customise and adapt both the controllers and the games themselves to work around people with everything from carpal tunnel syndrome to full quadriplegia.

Videogame charities are not a new invention, but as the industry has grown bigger they have become more widespread. More importantly, while most do not generate enormous amounts of money on the scale of behemoths like the Red Cross or Marie Curie Cancer Care (and are unlikely to send out representatives to ask you for money in the street) they are beginning to make a real difference, using gaming as a conduit to raise money for a huge variety of worthy causes. 

Like many of these charities, SpecialEffect is a young, small and agile company, often working directly with individuals rather than corporations. Unlike many, it's a family business: Dr Mick Donegan, Bill's father, is the charity's director. In their small Charlbury offices, Donegan, an affable university academic and former special needs teacher, explains why he started the three-year-old organisation. "There wasn't a specialist charity focussing primarily on access to games technology, and I think the reason is that a lot of people in the field of assisted technology feel that you can bolt games on afterwards. Find a way into the computer, and games will follow. And that's not the case: it's much more complicated than that." The charity not only loans out equipment to individuals and hospices, but also brings in patients to play in their lab.

Any charity takes a lot of work, and both Donegan Senior and Junior have invested an enormous amount of time into SpecialEffect. While Bill handles the R&D, Mick and his team organise roadshows, liaise with patients, plan fundraising events and generally keep things ticking over. Donegan speaks with pride about the charity's successes, including customising a Wii controller and making it lighter so that a patient with spinal muscular atrophy would be strong enough to swing it.

SpecialEffect, however, are a very small part of a much larger picture. One of the organisations that they've worked closely with is GamesAid. As in many charity fields, umbrella organisations have arisen to assist and mentor smaller outfits that may not have the connections or the level of donations to get things done. GamesAid (formerly the Entertainment Software Charity) is one of these organisations, an entirely non-profit group, run by a board of trustees, that works to direct donations to specific small charities. 

Andy Payne, GamesAid's chairman, explains that the organisation works specifically with small-scale charities like SpecialEffect, and are a way for the wider industry to reach out to them. "Anyone who is in the games industry can join up to GamesAid for free…They can nominate a charity of their choice, which gets put forward to the members for consideration."

Due to the public perception of videogame charities (of which more anon) and the high costs that these charities can incur, it becomes crucial to gain access to relatively large donations early on - and working with blanket charities like GamesAid can really help. Last year, Payne says, they raised over £50,000 in total donations, and have already doubled that for 2010.

"It was decided by my fellow trustees and me that what we should do is focus on smaller charities," says Payne. "All of the charities we supported have all come back to us and showed us what has happened [with the money]. The idea with GamesAid is to ensure that it isn't a charity which ever becomes a business in its own right. Because each of these charities is a business. Every pound we raise, we want to make sure we pass that on to worthy causes."

Of course, one might reasonably ask whether it's always so small scale. After all, games routinely pull down millions of pounds in sales - not to mention the earnings from subsequent merchandising. Small scale charities might be the norm, but there are certainly those publishers and developers who are willing to put some work in for a good cause. And while some might purely set aside a portion of their budget for a standard donation to a good cause - Payne calls it their corporate social responsibility budget - there are people who go a little bit further. People like 'Spider' Marks. Or, to give him his full title, Army Brigadier General James A. Marks, USA-Retired. 

Marks works with a group called CODE - and it's quite an ambitious undertaking. CODE stands for Call Of Duty Endowment. It's an organisation - set up by Activision Blizzard - designed to channel a large endowment from the company to help veterans from the military to find employment and, as Marks puts it, reintegrate into civilian life. Marks, a thirty-year career soldier, is a member of CODE's advisory board, which provides insights into how the initial endowment of $1m from Activision Blizzard will be put to use. So far, they've allocated $475,000 to different small charities, all of which deal with the problem of unemployment for those leaving military service - which, in the United States, stretches to around 20%, nearly double the national average.

"We are active in the vetting of those charities to determine what we would call the bang for the buck," says Marks, "Based on a grant of X number of dollars, what is the impact? How many service members will be touched? Of those that are touched, how many will be employed? What is the average wage of that employment? What is the sector within the economy where they're working? It's completely transparent - we know everything that's going on."

Marks talks warmly - albeit with a distinct use of military terminology - about the causes that Call Of Duty and its endowment has helped. In particular, he singles out the Paralyzed Veterans Of America which, he says, has been instrumental in helping combat-damaged vets find work. "The PVA was the first organisation to receive a charitable grant from CODE, and as a result of that charitable donation they have in fact expanded a facility up in Boston that integrates the paralyzed veterans. These are individuals that have had catastrophic injuries, who are being fully integrated back into the workforce. That's absolutely wonderful."

Louis Irvin, a vocational rehabilitation program consultant with the PVA, said he was initially surprised at the unusual nature of the charity - but delighted at their dedication to helping out. CODE donated $125,000 to the PVA, which helped them set up a new office in Boston and further their work with the veterans. "Last week, I was speaking with one of the councillors," says Irvin, "who had met a veteran four months ago. He was injured when he was 22, paralyzed, and he's 51 now and has never worked. The councillor started working with him, and over the course of four months, started to elevate and change his expectations, and he [just] started his first fulltime job. To hear him talk about the excitement he feels about earning a wage and just his sense of self-value is an incredible thing."

Of course, working in any charity field has its challenges - and videogame charities get it in the neck more than most. One of the biggest criticisms, says Payne, is that the charities are just too small to make a difference; that small-scale teams like SpecialEffect and even smaller once-off events like sponsored gaming marathons are just never going to make an impact on the problems they opt to tackle. 

"Why do you support that charity that's too small to make a difference?" Payne muses. "Why do you support a charity that's too big? You can't win. SpecialEffect has helped around two hundred people; some would say that's not enough. I'd say: one [person] is a starting point. When you see the effect that these people have with their time and their technology, on those who have never had a chance of even playing sport, but could play FIFA against their able-bodied friends and compete on a level playing field - that's a pretty big thing for people inside a body that doesn't function properly."

There are other issues, too: negative perceptions of games in the mainstream media can often lead to unwarranted prejudice in the charities sector. Payne talks of his struggles in dealing with senior government officials, trying to convince them that games "don't destroy lives and aren't completely mind-numbing". General Marks, meanwhile, does not believe critics who would suggest that a game as violent as Call Of Duty could have positive consequences. "The risks of a bad decision in a game are nonexistent. It's rather a relaxing way to engage," he says.

Back in Charlbury, the Donegans continue to work on their equipment at SpecialEffect. Not every game can be adapted - the more complex and fast it is, the less chance there'll be that a patient will be able to play it - and some patients with severe disabilities take months to have their equipment 'calibrated' so they can play. But without the charity, they wouldn't be playing at all. Donegan Senior is characteristically upbeat: "It's a case of trying to get the word out there, and if people are interested. If anyone is going to understand what we're trying to do and is going to understand the joy you can get from gaming and the competition - the friendship you can get from it - it's gamers."

The SpecialEffect

Dale McKeown is a master Call Of Duty player, able to headshot with the best of them. He also has arthrogryposis, a disability leaving him with minimal hand movement. While his head movement is very good, his finger movement is very limited. A longtime gamer, McKeown came to SpecialEffect with a rather unusual problem: although he was quite capable of manipulating the Sixaxis thumbsticks with his mouth, he couldn't access the trigger buttons. SpecialEffect provided him with a special interface that gave him full access to the game through very lightweight buttons positioned at the side of his wheelchair, which he can control with minimal finger movement - he managed to beat Bill Donegan at the game shortly after.

 

Run the numbers

Tobii Eye-control-capable screen cost: £15,000

Total equipment value at SpecialEffect: £90,000

Money raised by GamesAid in 2009: £50,000+

Money raised by GamesAid in 2010: £100,000+

Total CODE endowment from Activision Blizzard: £1m

Total donations from original endowment so far: $475,000

COD Modern Warfare 2 sales in first five days: £550m

Amount donated to the War Child charity for every Football Manager game sold: 10p

Average money raised for War Child per year: £100,000

Art of the matter

Concept art is now a standard feature in videogames, popping up as bonus material and in special editions. But as Rob Boffard finds out, there's a lot more to creating it than meets the eye…First published in Play Gamer Magazine August 2010.

Scott Campbell uses the word 'frustration' a lot. And 'challenge'. Campbell is a career concept artist, a production designer for Tim Schafer's Double Fine who worked on Psychonauts and the more recent Brütal Legend. But it would be wrong to suggest that he's unhappy; Campbell has spent ten years at Double Fine, and it's clear that he loves his job. After all, he and his team get to decide what a game will look like before anyone else does.

"It's a fun process," says Campbell from Double Fine headquarters in San Francisco. "It's a challenge to design environments and characters that are interactive, and that you can interact with so deeply - more than any other type of storytelling. In some ways it's very frustrating, and in other ways it's very satisfying to see people responding to and experiencing your art and design in that sort of fashion."

Over the past few years, concept art has become a mini-industry in itself. As games became bigger and more complex, more and more detailed art was need to conceptualise the game before development. Pieces of artwork found themselves on discs as bonus features, and have started to be used to sell games themselves as part of special edition packages, which often contain hardcover books of concept art. And although the process of creating concept art is long, arduous and often, as Scott says, deeply frustrating, it's also a crucial cog in the design process, and one which requires serious expertise to get right.

One of the distinctive things about the concept art process is that no team will treat it the same way as another. Every art director has his or her own preferred method for marshalling a team, which can vary in size depending on how big the game world is. Campbell works with a reasonably large team, but others like Johannes Söderqvist, an art director for DICE who worked on Mirror's Edge and Battlefield 2142, work with much smaller teams.

One of the first key stages is the collection of reference material. "I collect references and then I sit down for a long time with the concept artists and talk about what I like in the photos and the drawings or whatever I find," says Söderqvist. For Mirror's Edge, he and his team took thousands of photos of urban centres like Tokyo, then sat down with main concept artist Pierre Hanna to create the look and tone of the pastel-coloured environments, inputting the ideas straight into design program Photoshop. 

Campbell, however, works differently - and is decidedly more low-tech. "My favourite thing to do," he says, "is to get the concept artists all in one room…before we paint in Photoshop or even paint it in oils or watercolours or whatever, and just try to get the basic [ideas] out by getting a lot of reference material. I'm super-addicted to lots of reference material. I get tons and tons of it, and surround myself with all the things that should inspire this world, and then everyone gets together and starts generating ideas - writing them down, drawing little sketches, lots of really rough things to get ideas out…In the beginning stages, it's very much pencils, paper, markers, anything that we can get ideas out with."

It is from this springboard that the concept art of a game begins to take shape. And it's not all about creating pretty pictures; concept artists have to work with some restrictions and constraints that other mediums don't have. To begin with, anything drawn in a piece of concept art has to be useable in the game environment -especially when it comes to items, weapons and characters. The smoke emitting from a Razor Girl's gun in a piece of Brütal Legend art has to be able to exist convincingly within game; this is not a place for indulgent artistic flourishes. 

"Certain things need to be a certain size," muses Campbell. "A chair has to be for this size person and not this size person. Everything has to be thought about. You have to exist in the environment and see it from all angles and explore it. In movies and TV, you could just set up a shot, and that's it. [But] because you're doing it this way, it's a lot more involving, and because of that it's a little frustrating. You're like, I want to put all this stuff on the table! A binder and a pile of tools! But everything is useable, so you have to be conscious about everything you put in an environment." 

These rules are relaxed somewhat when it comes to environments. While a character or weapon has to continually be in focus and fully realised, an entire level's final form is in the realm of the level designers, who are more likely to use pieces of environment art as references for the finished product rather than blueprints.  

Söderqvist and Hanna used their initial environment artwork to flesh out the bold-coloured 'runner vision' that the lead character of Mirror's Edge, Faith, uses to plan routes through the city. "You try to create a vision or a potential feeling for what the environment is. Later on, you'd probably develop restrictions of what it is feasible to do, but early on you don't really do that…for Mirror's Edge, for instance we knew we wanted to emphasise modern materials, so it was a conscious decision. The world wouldn't have a wooden park bench, it would be metal or a plastic, injection-molded seat."

In addition, artists often have to draw things from multiple angles to ensure that a coder or designer can realise it fully. This treatment, known as orthographic view, is standard procedure for key characters and units. In Brütal Legend, detailed orthographic blueprints were drawn up for each of the units available in the game's real-time-strategy segment. You can see this in the sketches of the Lightning Rod unit, which even includes measurement lines to ensure scale. Although not every piece of art undergoes 'orthos', it's an absolutely crucial tool when it comes time to actually create the characters.

The roles in the concept team are often incredibly fluid - Campbell, despite being in the leadership role of art director, didn't hesitate to jump right into the sketching himself - and their role does not end when every bit of concept art is submitted. Hideki Kamiya, a director of Platinum Games who worked on Bayonetta, says that although the concept art at the beginning of the project is the "first and purest" expression of the game, it's incredibly useful to come back to the art team at later stages. "If development proceeds smoothly," he says, "you don't have to take time out and go back to the original concept art to regain your bearings, but if the little mistakes in direction start to pile up and you lose your way, by returning to the original concept art you can reacquaint yourself with the goal you should be working towards."

Kamiya-san has a point; the sketches of Bayonetta herself were done by Mari Shimazaki (who left Platinum shortly after the game was released) and show how things like the moon symbol on her chest changed throughout development. Bayonetta herself went through, Kamiya-san says, hundreds and hundreds of different designs. "Mari struggled at first when she started with the design, and there were some designs that you wouldn't believe are Bayonetta from looking at what we ended up with; however, as we proceeded through the retake process, the details all began to take shape."

And then there's that frustration. Any job in games has its fair share of hair-pulling moments, but perhaps concept artists get them more than most - especially when a piece isn't right and has to be redone. Campbell says that one of the most important things about being a concept artist is not to be married to your work: "I find [redoing a drawing] incredibly frustrating and depressing," he groans, "but also incredibly rewarding. Tim is a perfectionist, I'm a perfectionist, and I want it to be the best it can be, so you know when you've nailed it and it's super good, and you when it's kind of there but not fully there. It can't be kind of good - people need to be losing their minds about how crazy it is or how funny it is! But there are times where you're struggling with it, and you get depressed - I can't do this, I can't make this work. It's not working! Then when you finally get it, it's very, very rewarding."

Of course, telling someone not to be too attached to their work is easy enough - but these are artists we're talking about here. "You get really into the project," says Söderqvist, when asked about the transition between games. "You're like a method actor: you take on a role and you get really into it. So during that year or years that you're working on a game, you're becoming that sort of artist. Then you change gear completely, and maybe it's a sci fi project or a fantasy project or whatever - then you change who you are and what your preferences, inspiration and focus are. It's a really interesting line of work that changes for each project and for who you work with."

And there's an additional question. Sure, the pieces of concept art will be very useful in creating the game, and will look ace as part of the bonus material. But what happens to the original artwork? The sketches, doodles and oil paintings that make up the bulk of the concept art phase?

Typically, games will have thousands upon thousands of different pieces; Brütal Legend alone had quadruple the amount of artwork that Psychonauts had. The artwork is entirely owned by Double Fine, says Campbell, and is in "different drawers" at their offices. Think of how valuable - culturally and financially - a first-stage sketch of Eddie Riggs would be ten years down the line. Is Campbell ever tempted to lift one of those thousands of drawings for his own collection? He laughs: "No, we wouldn't do that. But [the art] is very useful in chronicling it."

Clearly, the job isn't too frustrating.

The butt-crack principle

Every piece of concept art will not only show the subject in full detail, but will often include supplementary sketches, drawings and notes to help the designers fine-tune their creations. Mari Shimazaki's Bayonetta sketches contain dozens of supplementary notes, and Scott Campbell's Battle Nun drawing from Brütal Legend contains a little aside that the character would look much better without a butt-crack. 

Details like these, Campbell says, can often prove crucial to creating the game. "That's something that's a fine line. It's a heavy metal game, so you want to have really sexy stuff, but you also don't want sexy ladies and cramming it down people's throats, which I think happens a lot in videogames: big boobs, crazy boob technology, crazy ladies doing crazy stuff. You could be a little be more sophisticated-sexy. We don't have to show the butt crack."

Just Rewards

Online gaming and PS3 Trophies have changed the way gamers are rewarded while playing. But, wonders Rob Boffard, is it changing the way we play as well? First published in Play Gamer Magazine in May 2010.

Receiving a Trophy in-game - with that distinctive 'ding' sound and the small grey box flashing up top-right - doesn't interrupt things. You're still able to keep chopping up monsters or racing to the finish or lining up that headshot. Yet in its own small way, that little box - and everything that comes with it - has changed the way you think about gaming.

Bring a gamer from the 16-bit era forward fifteen years, and they wouldn't know what to make of this (they also wouldn't know what to make of X-Media Bars, system updates and Move either, but you get the idea). In-game achievements have come a rather long way since snapping photos of your times in Sonic The Hedgehog, or notching up high scores at the arcade. The way games reward you is different: achievements are now informed, and delivered while you play - no longer a simple "Congratulations!" screen after the Big Boss. Online gaming is no longer the preserve of the geeky PC crowd or those who could actually spare the time to fiddle with their PS2 network adaptor. With the advent of better technology, there have never been more opportunities for games to reward those who play them. But what makes gamers competitive? And with the development of Trophies, and the increasing PS3 online community, how has the psychology of winning changed? 

Gaz Deaves is someone who would certainly know, since his day job involves dealing with competition taken to its extreme. Deaves is the Editor of the Guiness Book Of World Records' Gamers Edition. This publication came into being in 2008 when the company decided it was high time to publish a set of records for what was and is a rapidly growing industry. With records ranging from the highest Xbox Gamerscore ever (a gentleman tagged Stallion83) to the fastest selling game (GTA: San Andreas, one million in nine days), the Gamers Edition is a landmark of competition in videogames.

"It's something that happens outside games as well," says Deaves of the competitive instinct among gamers. "Playing games becomes a game that you can win at, and having those sort of measurable…trophies next to your PSN ID becomes another game in itself." 

He has a point. Ultimately, how competitive you are depends on what you regard as an achievement: are you the type of gamer who uses trophies and online scores as bragging rights, or do you simply aim for that 100% completion stat on Grand Theft Auto IV because you want to extend the life of the game itself? 

Psychologists such as Cheryl Olson, of the Psychiatry Department at Massachusetts General Hospital, suggested as much in her book Grand Theft Childhood. Although the book itself wasn't strictly about the competitive instincts, one of the key points made by Olson was that human beings compete for intangible rewards all the time; think school reports, paycheques and approval from the boss.

Deaves generally deals with one type of competitive gamer. These guys don't always play games for the achievements; rather, they create their own goals and internal competitions, devoting thousands of hours not to topping online leaderboards or clocking up Trophies (although he certainly gets plenty of those record attempts) but rather for the pure challenge and to see just how far they can take a game. 

And although those who attempt records could arguably be classed as way more competitive than the average gamer, Deaves thinks this instinct goes deeper than what's going on inside the game itself, saying that these aspects of competition are prevalent in other parts of life. "That's the reason that some people use Facebook so much," he says. "There is an element of gameplay there. More friends, accruing points, developing your online persona. I think they're very closely linked-in, and it's essentially social pressure and social interest that keeps that stuff going."

 "I think it's a combination of this social factor of wanting to be perceived in a certain way by the guys on your friends list, who would probably influence you one way or the other…it's how you view the importance of your friends list on Xbox live or on Playstation network," he says.

Rene Weber and Patrick Shaw, two academic specialising in cognitive neuroscience and telecommunications respectively, classified this type of completionist in their paper Player Types and Game Qualities: A Model to Predict Video Game Playing. To Shaw and Weber, this was by far the more traditional type of gamer. Although not all of us are completionists (every diamond case in Far Cry 2? No thanks) we all have some completionist instincts within us; if we didn't, we wouldn't be playing games in the first place.

Of course, there's the other category: the gamers who reject the idea of record-breaking achievements requiring hundreds of hours, and who simply play to win. These kinds of gamers play to notch up league wins, huge Trophy collections and bragging rights. And the question of why gamers fall into the more competitive category is best answered by those who have made their life one big competition. People like Fatal1ty. 

The world's most recognisable professional gamer, born Johnathan Wendell, is in fact competing when we call - a heated golf game at the Badlands course in Las Vegas. "I think it's the same thing as being at school or at your job," he says, when asked about where the massive competitive drives of some gamers are drawn from. "You're always trying to achieve a higher rank or status. It's inevitable that you'd have the same thing in videogames. For me, I try to achieve what I can with my skill or talent. I'm not so much worried about achievements, it's more about building up my skill as high as possible, and going to tournaments and winning. Winning the trophies is an achievement."

In many ways, Fatal1ty is the absolute apex of competitive gaming, where his desire to win brings him hundreds of thousands of dollars worth in prize money from games of Quake, Call Of Duty and Painkiller. He firmly believes that the primary reason that gamers compete is to win, and only to win. "The real pros are decided at a pro tournament, not online," he says. "Online is more about bragging rights. The guy who has the most kills in Call Of Duty - how exciting is that, really? Anyone can mass-produce stats, but the most importance stat is winning tournaments." (As he speaks, he sinks his first putt of the day, leading to cries of "Good shot, man!" from his companions.)

Between Wendell, for whom competing is an end in itself, and Deaves, who deals with the more esoteric and thoughtful end of the competitive spectrum, there's someone like Michael O'Dell. Better known as ODEE to the gaming fraternity, O'Dell is the mastermind behind Team Dignitas, the massive crew that is regarded as the UK's top gaming team. O'Dell was a competitive sportsman before a snapped knee saw the end of that career. He switched to competitive gaming, and before long was trading his playing days for managing his charges. As such, he's seen just how the new developments in competitive gaming have changed the way people play. "Managing the players and nurturing them and bringing them on to go for tournaments [feeds my competitive instincts]. It's the same for me as competing. It's hard to describe. Seeing our players win tournaments is what I love."

It's not long into our conversation before O'Dell mentions addiction. Although he's not overly concerned about the impact of videogame addiction on mental health - certainly nowhere near frothy-mouthed-tabloid levels - he says that it is a factor, and that the arrival of Trophies and achievements has almost certainly had an impact on it.

"Gaming addiction is like anything: any entertainment that's fun is addictive," he says. "Some people mistake playing on the computer for endless hours as an addiction when they could be on the computer talking to their mates and being quite social."

Of course, one reason for this addiction is that rewards are now a lot easier to come by. Before the current generations of consoles, the joyous victory might only have come after hours of slogging away and memorising enemy attack patterns - as those who played Contra to death will know. Current games all but fall over each other to give players signs that they are winning, whether it be a steady stream of massively powerful weapons and items or just a huge amount of easily-achieved Trophies. God Of War 3 is guilty of this, awarding players a Trophy (bronze, admittedly, but the point remains) whenever they compete an aspect of the story - in other words, whether they beat Zeus in thirty seconds with a dizzying multi-hit combo or slog away at him for hours of hit-and-run jabbing, they still get a prize outside of the actual game itself. You even get one for upgrading a weapon for the first time.

The psychological impact of this sort of handing out of Trophies remains to be seen. O'Dell and Wendell are both convinced that winning Trophies is unquestionably a good thing, although being that both of them are professional gamers this is hardly surprising. But what's the next level of achievement? Speed runs and high score boards have been replaced by online achievements and competitions for massive prizes: what's the next logical step in the evolution of how gamers compete?

Deaves thinks that not only are professional gamers going to get more visible as celebrities, but that there will be a definable impact on average gamers themselves. "I think gamers in their own homes are going to be slightly more competitive than they would have been. I know certainly I have been looking at online leaderboards [and] there are people on my friends list and I'm sure there are plenty of gamers who are like that. I think pro gaming is going to be brought to or improved by increased coverage of that in mainstream events. If you look at the model they have in Korea, for Starcraft, there are thousands and thousands of dollars exchanging hands with professional gamers. The reason that's happening isn't online leaderboards, the reason that's happening is because it's entertaining to watch and there's a public out there that wants to watch that kind of thing."

 

Have it both ways

While most Trophies in PS3 games tend to be pitched at the majority of moderately-skilled gamers - running over five hundred people in a tank in Prototype, say - some achievements are totally off the map. 

Take Final Fantasy XIII. The most recent incarnation of the beloved series has one of the toughest achievements in recent memory, asking you to fully develop the stats on all characters to complete the Master Seal trophy. Doesn't sound so hard? That's six different characters, all needing hours upon hours of tweaking and individual battle time to max out. This, we should point out, is a mere silver trophy.

At the other end, there are some achievements that make even the most Trophy-hungry gamers stare in disbelief at the screen. Burnout Paradise, for example. Ace game, great downloadable content. But did it really need to award a Trophy for inviting a player to an online game? You don't even have to have your mate accept, you just have to have sent the invite. Come on now. 

This is what it sounds like…

Sound design in videogames is an immensely technical process that relies on a huge amount of specialist knowledge and equipment - but its practitioners seem to spend a lot of time breaking things, hunting down cuts of raw meat and perfecting the perfect pasta. Here's what it takes to create the sound you hear in a game, from start to finish. First published in GamesTM in March 2010.

Watch any online game of Left 4 Dead 2, and at some point the eerie, mournful sobbing of a witch will be heard, along with an ominous musical cue. Suddenly, things ramp up; the clawed zombie isn't even visible yet, but the team in question is already switching tactics, talking frantically over their headsets, revising their battleplan. One single sound has caused a complete shift in the pace of gameplay.

If the team in question was looking for someone to blame for their immediate terror,  that person might be Mike Morasky.

"When playtesters would stumble upon the witch and trigger her attack," says Morasky from Valve Software's Bellevue, Washington State studios, "it was generally quite devastating and left many players completely confused as to where she came from, and still unprepared to detect her in the future. We really wanted to give the players a chance to prepare and deal with her strategically." Morasky says that the mere crying wasn't enough, so they had to get creative, working the sound and adding the soft music.

Morasky is a composer for Valve. He worked in the entertainment industry for thirty years, but cut his videogame teeth working on the original Left 4 Dead when he joined Valve full-time. He - along with the rest of the Valve audio team - are responsible for making the witch among the most terrifying enemies in gaming.

There are two ways in which sound can be used in games. The first is purely atmospheric; think the environmental sounds you hear as you move through the jungle in Far Cry 2, or the swoosh of the net in NBA Live 10. The second is as a gameplay function, such as the noise of the witch - a piece of sound which, when heard, demands an immediate response from the player that will determine whether they survive or get clawed to pieces. This is much more complex to implement, and often quite rare.

From the start of any design process, a sound team working on a new game will work extremely closely with the coders and level designers on the project, for inspiration and direction as much as anything else. After tossing ideas around for a bit with the non-audio people in the development studio, they'll pick up their mics and go and capture what's known as foley sound, which will form the backbone of a great deal of in-game audio.

Fabien Noel explains the concept. He's the audio director for Ubisoft Montreal, and responsible for the audio on the upcoming Splinter Cell: Conviction. "When we want to do something that sounds sludgy and juicy, like a brain coming out of a skull," he says, with perhaps a little too much relish, "we use pasta. Well-cooked pasta. Put your hands in it and squelch it around. When you want a creaky-bones sound, you use raw pasta. And sometimes celery."

Noel, who has been with Ubisoft for nine years and has worked on every Splinter Cell game, says that foley sound - a time-honoured technique in sound recording named for a legendary 1930s engineer - is crucial to the design of sound in games, particularly games where heroes like the taciturn Sam Fisher are going to be hitting a lot of people. "It's funny," he muses. "When we were recording actors who get punched and scream in the game, someone said we should use a real guy, and punch him to get better sound." A pause. "We gave up with that idea."

Noel isn't the only one enthusiastic about this method of recording. Take Jordan Pedder and Nick Brewer, respectively senior sound designer and audio lead at Rebellion Developments in Oxford. They've worked together at Rebellion for nearly five years, and have worked on projects such as The Simpsons Game. Right now, they're busy working on a new version of Aliens Vs. Predator, and besides building on the franchise's already-iconic sound library, the nature of the game means they're doing a lot of destruction.

"We spent a lot of time visiting our local butchers, picking up bones and cuts they'd be throwing away," says Brewer. "We then spent a lot of time breaking them and snapping them. We moved onto wood for bone sounds, after we found that bones didn't break as satisfyingly as we fancied, and then spent some time manipulating those assets and making them as crunchy and brutal as we could, and combining them to make the sounds of bone-breaking and splitting flesh."

The problem with this sort of recording is that, as Pedder explains, veracity isn't always the way forward. Sometimes a breaking bone might not always sound like a player imagines it would - you'd get a true sound, but arguably a diminished gaming experience. Says Pedder: "When you're working in the sound industry, the real world sound isn't always the one you want to hear. To really emphasise the crunch and the pain of breaking bones and get the impact to it, you always find yourself drawing on other sounds to give it that bit of oomph…" (Similarly, Noel says that when recording urban ambience for Conviction, which is set in Washington, D.C, his team avoided picking up city ambience from that location - for the simple reason that Washington didn't really sound like you'd imagine it to sound.)

Brewer calls this problem a willing suspension of disbelief. During the recent snowfalls in the UK, he and his team went out to record the sound of snow - not for the jungle-bound AvP, but for Rebellion's vast sound library - and it wasn't quite what they expected. "The sounds that we've grown used to in our games of walking through the snow? Snow doesn't actually sound like that when you walk through it!" he says. "We tried to get these really crispy, crunchy snow sounds you get in other games, but it really sounds like you're walking on polystyrene!"

This sort of experimentation and unusual use of audio is arguably the key part of the entire sound design process. Morasky says, "We tried to use [processing effects] as little as possible to try and keep it organic and 'human' sounding, emphasizing instead human performances and natural sounding samples." 

Ah, processing. There are a staggering number of sound elements in even the most basic of games nowadays. Left 4 Dead 2 used 13000 elements, of which around 8000 were voice and 5000 are pure sound elements. That's an awful lot of sounds to mess with, and it requires some serious facilities.

Most game studios maintain their own internal studios, or set of studios. The audio team - which can range from a close-knit group of six people at Valve to a much larger team at somewhere like Ubisoft - has to take the raw sound they've collected and recorded, and turn it into something you'd hear in a game. To do that, they've got to bring their recording equipment in from the snow-bound outdoors - or in Ubisoft's case, leave their foley-room-cum-pasta-kitchen - and bring the sounds into the digital realm. Situations vary between studios, but generally each designer will have their own room specced for sound, both in terms of soundproofing, standard equipment such as a mixing desk and an audio PC, and what Morasky calls a "potpourri" of whatever specialised equipment a designer requires. That, plus a massive central studio, where designers can mix sound on massive desks wired to the ProTools audio editing software (used by the majority of the designers we spoke to) and play through the game in real time.

It is here that they take the raw foley sound and voice acting - which is, in many cases, recorded at the same time as motion-capture in specially designed rooms - and layer, twist, deform and mutate it into a falling chandelier, a free kick from Ronaldo, a nuclear explosion.

Splinter Cell: Conviction has a mechanic, new to the series, called Mark And Execute. It lets Sam Fisher select a few enemy troops from a secure position - indicated by a red marker appearing over their heads - and then quickly dispatch them. There is of course a subtle sound element involved when placing the marker - or the finger of death, as Noel calls it. "We wanted to give that feeling of removing the soul of the guy, that kind of -" he exhales heavily, like someone breathing on glass - "sound, and the feeling of the claws of a lion or panther [touching] the guy. We layered animal sounds, and whooshes…and then we processed it with a lot of layers and effects and reverbs. No one really hears you, but it's lethal and dangerous." The resulting sound, pushed through dozens of effects processors, is soft, atmospheric and decidedly animalistic.

It's not just sound elements which are processed at this stage. Music is a key part of any videogame experience, and making sure it fits with the gameplay is the job of specialist composers. Mark Rutherford, a classically trained composer who has only recently moved into game audio from a film background and who works in a separate studio from the sound team, helped compose the music for AvP. The game isn't out yet, but it is his tribal backdrop you can hear in the trailer for the Predator part of the game. "What I did to create those sounds was by drawing on my library," says Rutherford. "Finding Indian drums, African drums, South American drums, and putting them together into a big universal drum kit. I just played the footage of the Predator, and started playing the drums. I started to develop patterns and rhythms that worked with the way it moved and stalked around. I actually put some subliminal field recordings in that I made in Africa, giving it a sense of environment as well. It's not necessarily African, it's just kind of otherworldly."

Of course, this all takes into account sound as an atmospheric element designed to enhance the experience, but making a sound a part of the gameplay is a different matter entirely. Most of the sound designers we spoke to all stressed the importance of bringing sound to the forefront of the game experience, but few elaborated on how they were actually making it a part of the gameplay.

One game which managed this well is Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. In the game's multiplayer co-op mode, players with headsets had to be careful when talking to each other: their voices could alert rival soldiers to their position. Ubisoft's co-op audio lead for Conviction, Olivier Girard, says that although they're not planning to implement they dynamic for the game's retooled co-op mode, they're not "completely set" in how they're going to implement devices like headsets.

Pedder is enthusiastic about the potential for this sound in AvP, particularly with regard to an iconic series staple: the motion detector, carried by the colonial marines. "There are a lot of places throughout the game where we drop in fake bleeps on the motion tracker, to keep the players on their toes. That example is exactly what we're trying to go for." Says Morasky: "I suppose there's also a certain amount of extra effort required when integrating sound into the actual mechanism of a game. Anytime you add something to a game that can affect the way it plays, there needs to be a certain degree of direct involvement in the game's development followed by a good deal of time observing and tweaking the results."

Whether they are focussing on sound as atmosphere or sound as gameplay, the processing stage throws up a fundamental difference between a videogame sound designer and an engineer in a music studio. People like Pedder, Noel, Morasky and Brewer don't just have to record the sound; they've got to position it in a 3D, living, moving environment.

Noel explains the procees as what he calls propagation paths: the way a sound travels through an environment, and how objects in the game - windows, walls, dead bodies- will affect it. "It's imaging," he says. "I am Sam, and I'm creating a sound," he says. "An NPC is hearing the sound, the software draws the best path between Sam and the NPC, and when the path is drawn - when we know exactly where the sound is going, through a closed door [for example] - we can apply a real-time filter. We're also calculating the distance and the propagation, and when the distance is done, I'm applying a filter regarding what kind of door is the sound going through; is it closed, open? Is it a big door, small door?" Pedder explains how designers use specialised software, such as industry-standard applications Wwise and F-Mod, to locate the sounds in a dynamic, shifting environment - software which can control a sound's pitch, it's panning location, it's volume.

And there's a final, additional problem - one which every engineer acknowledges as the big challenge in creating game audio. It comes at what a music engineer might call the mastering stage: the time when the audio has been mixed, and is ready to go through final processing and tweaking.

Games are nonlinear media. Whereas a sound effect in a movie will come at a specific, predefined time - and can be mixed accordingly - in a game, there is almost no telling when an effect is going to come in, or even what other sounds are going to be playing at the time. Put simply, a sound designer for film, TV or music knows what sound is coming next. A sound designer for games doesn't.

"In a film," Brewer explains, "You'd be able to say, it would be bad if I had twenty single gunshots all firing at once, and at the same time three explosions go off over there. With us, that might be the case! We have to work stuff with a lot of forethought in case that happens, and to how we'd stop there being too many sounds playing at one time, cluttering the mix and causing havoc."

To circumvent this, designers apply intricate automation - the process of programming an aspect of the sound to automatically to raise or lower its level according to certain parameters in the game - and several mastering presets which they use to globally affect the audio in realtime. Once that problem is circumvented, the work of the sound team is done.

Girard thinks he knows what's coming next: "To me, it's going to be a matter of making sure - not just for music but sound as a whole - that we can reach interesting levels of control over our sounds, either through mixing or through score control. That's the next big thing: better control over how our environments are affected from a player perspective and making that seem seamless. Right now, a player walks into a room, and a certain music starts; we need to find ways to make it more organic and to make it fit the player's experience, so it becomes part of that experience and not just window-dressing."

 

Back to basics

There are hundreds of different ways to treat a sound element in-game, but at its absolute basic level sound design can be broken up into a few key effects which designers use to change the sound in fundamental ways.

First up is the equaliser, which even the most luddite of listeners will have encountered on a bog-standard hi-fi. It allows you to raise and lower the different frequencies of the sound distinct from others; you can turn up or cut the bass, for example, while leaving the rest of the sound intact.

The compressor is another key tool, particularly in processing voiceovers. It fattens the sound and gives it more body by, essentially, making the quiet bits louder and the loud bits quieter. It does this by lowering the volume of the sound when it crosses a predetermined point; where that point is and how much the volume is lowered by can drastically change the nature of a piece of sound. Once the volume is controlled in this way, the overall volume of the sound is raised to create that full, vibrant presence.

Reverbs work by processing the sound as if it was in a particular space - think your voice in a large, echoey cathedral - while delays do just that: delaying the sound when it's triggered until a designer wants it to come in.

There are others effects - limiters, gates, choruses and flanger units - but the above four are the ones you will find, without exception, in any sound studio.

 

Classic sound

The Splinter Cell series has at least one major iconic sound (beyond that of Michael Ironside's gravely voice): the high-pitched sound of Sam Fisher activating his night-goggles. Fabien Noel explains where it came from.

"The story of that sound is funny. A long time ago, I was watching Silence Of The Lambs. At the end of the movie, [Jodie Foster] is chasing the serial killer, who's using night vision goggles. The sound that was coming from those goggles: when I heard it, I thought, wow, that's really scary - but it would make no sense for goggles to have a sound like that! But it's totally what my ears wanted to hear; you felt that there was a beast and someone he was chasing.

And if you look at that sound, the way it's built, it's kind of simple; when a sound is great, it can be very simple, without tons of effects or layers or anything like that. But the sound for Sam's goggles came from a camera flash - where you've got the flash recharging. And then, we applied some filters and effects on it, but that's the basic origin of the sound: not sexy, but very efficient."

Sam Fisher's headset symbolises that truth about sound design: classic sound often aren't complex at all. The sound when Sonic The Hedgehog grabs a ring, for example, comes from a single tone generated by a Yamaha synthesiser.

 

Breaking in

Becoming a videogame sound designer can be a long process, as - like any other career in the industry - there is a huge amount of technical knowledge to digest, both in terms of pure sound design theory and in terms of game design. And one thing's for sure: the only time the work of most sound designers ever really gets noticed is when things go wrong, so be prepared to feel slightly obscure.

It is, however, a lot easier to break in today than it was in the past. Universities now offer courses tailored to sound design for videogames, and taking this route means that not only do you get the grounding in sound technology but also in how to work within a design team. And although jobs are still sometimes tricky to come by, as they are in all sectors of the industry, there are far more sound designers required today than there were fifteen years ago, when there were a mere four channels of audio to work with on a sixteen bit console, and one man was frequently responsible for the audio of an entire game.

There are other ways to move into the role as well. Nick Brewer of Rebellion came from a games testing and quality assurance background. "I weaselled my way in when a space showed up in sound design," he says. "My background was as a gigging and recording musician, and I really wanted to work on sound in another format."

 

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