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June 20, 2003

June 2003 Meeting Report

It was most definitely an enjoyable meeting for all in the month of June. We once again returned to the city of Ann Arbor. This time, instead of meeting at the University of Michigan, we decided to try someplace new. Soar Technologies was kind enough to allow us to make use of their facilities, so we all met in the KIVA room. It was actually a very nice conference room, laid out in a U shape with tiered seating. It made me feel important, like we were a part of the UN. Unfortunately, we forgot the digital camera, so no pictures this month. Sorry.

About 20 of us showed up this time. We started off with a bit of chatting while watching another Animatrix episode. We sent out for some pizza, pop, and chips, so once that arrived we grabbed some food and got things underway.

To open the meeting, Casey Meekhof from Spartasoft (MSU) gave us a brief summary of his experiences at E3. The big event there was the HalfLife 2 booth. There was something ridiculous like a 4 hour wait to get in there, so needless to say he moved on to other things. One of the highlights of his presentation was his mention of people who work at the booths and get dressed up to the theme of their game. He showed us a hilarious picture of him getting pistol-whipped by some German soldier.

After Casey wrapped up, we moved on to our main topic for the day. Jack Zaientz of Soar Technologies took the stage to give us a report of the research that he and Patrick Kenny had done on "Game Visualization Techniques for Game Designers and Implementors". The goal of their research was to take a look at how video games take large quantities of data and present it in a usable fashion, and to see how some of those techniques might be applicable to non-game applications.

Jack mentioned that one reason a lot of games fail is because of a poor user interface. Without a good way to get the user the information they need, the game can be overly difficult and unintuitive. After an overview of many different game genres, the focus turned to God/Strategy games in particular. He talked a bit about the 3 scales of detail (everything, subsets, and individual objects) and how RTS games in particular do a very good job of presenting all 3 scales in the user interface via HUDs, spatial displays, and symbolic overlays.

Next he talked about some of the stylization techniques used in games. He mentioned using presentation stylization to provide visual clues to the player as to which items/characters were likely to be important in the game. He talked a bit about game model stylization, and how most RTS game boil down to the Rock-Paper-Scissors model, where different units have different strengths and weaknesses, and (if done correctly) no unit is superior.

After that he briefly went into strategy driven displays, where the information is displayed in the perspective of the actor. The example shown was Alien vs Predator, demonstrating how the user interface is completely different between sides to reflect the varying info and technology available to each group.

Finally, we took a brief look at the GNAVE project, which was a sample implementation of some of the results of their research put to use in a non-game environment. He wrapped up the presentation with the statement that the key to successful visualization is to have the right information available at the right time and in a useful way.

Once we wrapped up the presentation, we spent about 20 minutes for some Q&A with Jack and Patrick. We talked a bit about how this is all applicable to military technology, how their research affected their outlook on games, some of the things that games can do better, and how differing visual and auditory clues subconsciously affect our perceptions.

A few important observations came up in the Q&A. One was that games are very good at presenting current information but are less adept at showing recent and long-term trends. As a result, while you can always see where you stand at a glance, it is difficult to see where things are headed and exactly how you are making progress. The other observation was what Jack referred to as the "2 blink rule". This means that once a notification cue (such as a blinking light) has been triggered twice, the user tunes it out and it tends to become part of the background. The way to combat this is to have increasing levels of alertness (a light that gets brighter, a sound that gets louder, etc). However, this has the side effect of overwhelming the user if too many alerts reach a high enough level simultaneously.

Our last presentation of the night had Casey Meekhof returning to the stage with Chris Bray to demonstrate their game Breakin' Battle. This game was their entry into the 2003 IGF student showcase, and it was chosen as 1 of the 10 finalists. In Breakin' Battle, 2 players compete against each other in a battle of breakdancing and rhythmic skills in an attempt to win over the audience. Using specific keyboard sequences timed carefully to the beat of the music, the player can pull off different combinations of moves. However, the audience bores easily, so you need to keep things fresh by combining a variety of moves. After the demo, we did a quick Q&A, talking about things such as the origins of the game idea (did you even remember breakdancing?), how the game could be adapted to differing dance styles, and where they plan to take Breakin' Battle as they expand it from a tech demo to a full fledged game. If you want to take a closer look at Breakin' Battle, go to http://www.spartasoft.msu.edu/breakinbattle/

We wrapped up the meeting with a brief discussion of our previous 5 meetings, how things have been coming along, and where everyone would like to focus future meetings. We also decided that we would like to try having a purely social meeting in the off months between regular meetings. It looks like we might give this a try sometime in July. After officially ending the meeting, some of us socialized while others watched a 15 minute preview clip of HalfLife 2.

As was mentioned above, we dropped the ball on getting pictures this meeting, but below are a few screenshots from Breakin' Battle

All in all, it was an excellent meeting. The topics were interesting, and we had a lot of active discussion from everyone in attendance. Hopefully future meetings continue to go this well. We hope to see you all either at our next regular meeting in August or at our social-only gathering if it takes place in July (check the chapter website or mailing list...we'll keep you updated).

The chapter coordinators:

Rich Elswick
Ron Frazier
Brian Winn

Posted by BrianWinn at 05:13 PM | Comments (0)