Our greatest gift as a species is communication.

While that is my strongly held personal opinion, there are countless examples to back it up throughout the known history of our species. It is safe to assume that humans have been communicating since we were first able to externalize information as basic language, and will continue to find new ways share ideas far into the future, whether for good, pleasure, a function of survival or manifestation of pure evil.

With each advance in communication, the methods need to re-established with each new technique for sharing information with others, coding it, and consequently consuming it.

While we have no records to indicate the effect cave drawings first had on communication some 30,000 years ago, I imagine it to be similar (and in some respects more monumental) to the creation of Gutenburg’s printing press or the first transmission on DARPA’s little contingency project, the Internet. Without these and other methods of persistent externalized information, culture as we know it would not exist. If we didn’t have these externalized accounts, we wouldn’t have education, government, or even story telling.

Persistent externalized information can be easily seen as the most obvious piece of the communication puzzle, but without the agents of its creation and consumption it is null. While this stands as a no-brainer in terms of a basic understanding of communication, this rule can become lost (I sometimes catch myself losing sight of this fact). The designer of whatever communication has a huge responsibility to create an ideal apparatus for information for the receiver.

This craft of designing communication no doubt extends as far back as spoken language itself, manifested in scribes and historians the world over. It can be seen more recently as the responsibility of authors, directors, performers and the various other stewards of contemporary transmission methods. A relatively new method of communication has come about in the last two decades, and it too requires a new communication model and a new generation of communicators willing to design for its strengths. That new method is videogames, and designers are in for a challenge as these games challenge the foundations of how we’ve created and consumed information systems thus far.

While I am only beginning my odyssey as a videogame designer, I feel that the path I have taken so far acts as a blueprint for my philosophy of effective design, and perhaps the underpinnings of my design manifesto as a responsible framework for creating experience.

But before I dive head-first into self-gratification about how I’ve figured it all out, I should back it up a little.

I grew up in a household that can be describe as highly conducive to creation. Entertainment in the Flanagan home usually boiled down to making stuff: real, imaginary or somewhere in between. My parents made sure that the necessary tools were always within reach and that one could create just about anything with enough elbow grease and imagination. Needless to say, it was ingrained early on that making things was an acceptable if not ideal pastime, one which I have found myself following as lifestyle and career ever since.

During my final year of CEGEP this need to create became what appeared to be a major liability. My marks were excellent and I was poised to enter the world of Architecture. Despite my science-heavy education I still craved the ability to create and communicate, and architecture seemed to the logical choice that combined both.

Architecture quickly took a back seat though, as I stumbled onto a like-minded group of creative young people focussed on nothing more than sharing their creations with the world. They had constructed an online apparatus for massive one-to-many communication and invited me to become a part of it somewhere along the way. This was my (admittedly naive) opportunity to create and communicate on a huge scale with near instant gratification.

Easy one-to-many communication. Maybe it was too easy

The organization was called ::breed:: and served as a platform for digital artists to share, collaborate and present their work to the world, and did it ever. For a good part of the year 2000, we were attracting nearly 30,000 unique visitors to the site. Even by today’s standards that kind of traffic is monumental. I quickly became entwined in these online digital art communities, fueled by the seemingly elegant method of distributing my messages. This consumed virtually all of my time, and the plan for architecture fell by the wayside.

With an overflowing virtual toolbox and a healthy chip on my shoulder, I started a small design company with a few friends. Surely my experience with ::breed:: had prepared me to be a first class designer. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Within a year of selling our services for vastly too little money, it became clear that I didn’t understand what made for clear and concise visual communication. I got it right some of the time, but the formula for success was hidden from me. These missteps made my workflow inefficient and mismanaged. I regularly found myself burning out on what I’ve now come to understand as the ‘little details’ where I should have been focussing on the big picture when it came to communication. I would later determine that all of my experience with ::breed:: had been in creating digital art and not design, a distinction that would take years to truly understand. I decided to return to school in order to better understand design and the tools used to communicate.

I enrolled in a post-undergraduate certificate program specializing in New Media Design at Sheridan College in Oakville Ontario. This education proved to be highly enlightening, but not in the manner I was hoping. Nearly everything in the curriculum was useless from a methodology perspective, and in the fast moving realm of ‘New Media’ the emphasis the program put on tools was already outdated.

Despite the underwhelming lack of stimulus, I made two important discoveries. Firstly, the school’s emphasis on specific and rapidly aging software showed me that mastery of a specific tool(s) is a path to personal obsolescence. If one could sum up designers as different types of knives (as I regularly do), it is preferable to be a multi-purpose swiss army knife than a single-use bowie blade. The swiss army knife might not be the first choice for gutting a fish, but it can do anything.

Secondly, I discovered typography. Of all the professors pushing now archaic technologies on us, one had the foresight to teach us an actual graphic design fundamental, the science of letters. Upon deepening my understanding of type, its intended functions and complex history, I began to truly understand some basic design systems. With this experience in typography as primer for effective design communication I returned to Montreal.

As it turned out, my epiphany with typography only opened the door to further design research and understanding, showing me how little I really knew. After roughly another 2 years working as an designer and art director on a wide variety of communication projects, I came to develop a clearer vision of what was missing in my design playbook. It was at this point that I decided to return to school again.

The Nova Scotia Craft Art and Design University seemed like a better choice as it was renowned for its approach to design philosophy and it’s complete lack of contemporary tools. I expected to be given classic design formation whether I liked it or not.

I did.

The school had much stricter approach to design, teaching the broad fundamentals first then refining our skills and understanding of systems for achieving ideal communication. It was in an especially brutal third year typography workshop that my eyes truly opened to the role of good design, message, and communication in the following excerpt from Beatrice Warde’s The Crystal Goblet.

Imagine that you have before you a flagon of wine. You may choose your own favorite vintage for this imaginary demonstration, so that it be a deep shimmering crimson in color. You have two goblets before you. One is of solid gold, wrought in the most exquisite patterns. The other is of crystal-clear glass, thin as a bubble, and as transparent. Pour and drink; and according to your choice of goblet, I shall know whether or not you are a connoisseur of wine. For if you have no feelings about wine one way or the other, you will want the sensation of drinking the stuff out of a vessel that may have cost thousands of pounds; but if you are a member of that vanishing tribe, the amateurs of fine vintages, you will choose the crystal, because everything about it is calculated to reveal rather than to hide the beautiful thing which it was meant to contain.

Beatrice Warde, 1955

Even in her own words the metaphor initially comes across as a bit long winded, but there is some true genius present. Where the goblet represents ornament, aesthetic superfluousness and waste, the crystal glass is a vehicle of pure transmission. The transparency of the crystal allows for an uninterrupted experience of the message. This passage was part of a series of essays discussing the many aspects of typography, with the crystal glass standing as an example apparatus for all who choose to embark on design.

Too often do designers get caught up in the ornament of their creations, obfuscating not only the message but the pathway to communication. This was my biggest fault in the beginning of my self launched career. Warde’s simple metaphor showed me that the most powerful examples of design are vehicles to experience, exposing the pathways to understanding.

This passage has become quintessential in my personal theory of communication and a cornerstone in my belief that in order for a user to obtain a meaningful communication an effective design must facilitate the pathways to experience as transparently as possible. Over the past 2 years I’ve had the opportunity to put these methods into practice. I have been fortunate enough to work with a group of creatives here in Montreal at a little studio called Bluesponge who understand that experience is the fundamental aspect to any interactive medium.

We created several enormous interactive web projects and whenever possible designed for experience as opposed to message or mechanic. Developing experience based projects not only made for (mostly) better final projects, but satisfied some of my need to develop for experience as a means communication. But there were better examples out there, outside of the interactive industry.

If we look to some of the most affecting viewer/reader messages in great works of writing, performance and film, there is a common communicative thread. In order for a communication apparatus to have its most profound effect, it must imply the user in the decoding of the message, implicating some degree cognitive processing.

If we take the emotion of fear in narrative as an example, a creator can present this in a number of ways. The cheap trick would be to surprise the user, causing a reflex action and consequently momentary fear. This method can be seen regularly in genre horror films, and is sadly the most common example of player induced fear in videogames (often referred to as monster closets).

A more responsible way to design fear into a narrative would by to implicate the user in a more meaningful way. The master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock has honed this technique into a science by communicating enough information but forcing the viewer to infer what isn’t shown. As viewers, warming up a few neurons as opposed to being handed the answer directly initiates a cognitive experience that creates richer, more meaningful pathways from the information apparatus to us.

Implying the user more deeply in the experience is a slippery slope and requires a skilled designer in order to achieve the correct balance of information provided versus information inferred. Literature, theatre, music and film have had the luxury of time to develop these mechanisms in order to enrich their communication experience. As mediums they also have the advantage of being static compositions, providing a much more controlled framework for their respective content designers. This allows for deliberately paced scenarios for implying the user in the communication experience and other scenarios where the designed apparatus is in direct control. If user experience is such a valuable communication tool, how would designers develop an apparatus whose primary method of communication is the experience itself? The answer is videogames, which by their very nature break the way we’ve been designing communication thus far.

Designing communication in videogames is a double-edged sword. On one hand the medium has an opportunity to create highly meaningful cognitive scenarios for its users through a much higher concentration of experience based communication. Where other mediums strive to implicate the user experience in separate controlled scenarios, videogames are experience-based from start to finish.

One the other hand, creating an apparatus that is flexible enough to be experienced in a pseudo or non-linear fashion but that has enough constraints as to be consumed as it was intended is a new and challenging feat for game designers. A user watching a film or reading a book has no input method to change the apparatus, where in games the experience is flexible and subject to change.

New methods for designing games as more valuable communication systems are being developed right now, with researchers, authors and designers contributing to the medium.

While the craft of designing videogames is a relatively new practice, we are beginning to see examples of games that are taking the medium’s strength into account as aspects of design. These implementations can manifest in delivering narrative, experience as narrative or constructing new models of experience as technology becomes more powerful an flexible. One such designer is Brenda Brathwaite.

Train by Brenda Brathwaite

Brenda Brathwaite is a veteran game designer who has contributed to the Wizardry and Jagged Alliance Series (Sir-Tech, 1984-1991) and is a activist for better, more responsible game design. In February of 2008, Brenda began working on a series on non-digital games known collectively as “The Mechanic is the Message.” and according to the series abstract,

The Mechanic is the Message captures and expresses difficult experiences through the medium of a game. Much like photographs, paintings, literature and music are capable of transmitting the full range of the human experience from one human to another, so too can games. Due to their interactivity, … games are capable of a higher form of communication, one which actively engages the participant and makes them a part of the experience rather than a passive observer.

Brenda Brathwaite, 2009

Brathwaite’s position echoes my own, and suggests that designers have a responsibility to consider these experiences as more than just a function of the medium, but its raison d’être. Her 2009 game, Train is a powerful example of the ability of games to affect users in a meaningful way that other mediums cannot.

Train is a Holocaust simulator.

The player becomes complicit in transporting train cars full of Jews to their extermination. It must be noted, however, that the fact the player is doing this isn’t explicitly presented until fairly far into the game. Train has produced massive emotional response in players, largely due to the way in which the game has integrated them into the experience and its horrific discovery. Its a communication experience like no other, and could not have been reproduced in other mediums.

Another example of game design that I consider excellent from a perspective of both experience and mechanics is Jonathan Blow’s Braid (Number None, 2008). Braid is presented in a very familiar light akin to platformers of the past, and as such has a very low barrier to entry. Throughout the course of play there are multiple references to the game itself and other notable titles in the short history of videogames. This again reinforces the familiarity while constructing an experience and a narrative based on the player’s performance.

Jonathan Blow’s not-so-humble masterpiece, Braid

The design of Braid also employs methods of altering the scale of its apparatus. By involving varying degrees of meta-game into the more base levels of experience, aspects of the interface start to become implicated in the communication as opposed to the bland tools we’ve become accustomed to. Before long, the boundaries of the game start to become unclear as does the player’s role in the experience. This experiential shift comes to an incredible conclusion, challenging the user’s perspective of their experience, and presenting a new type of communication that could not be achieved in any other medium.

I feel that it is a little early to start discussing Jonathan Blow’s Braid and Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose in the same breath, but it is a first step in developing a hermeneutic voice for videogames.

Jonathan Blow’s Braid and Brenda Brathwaite’s Train are just the tip of the iceberg when examining games as powerful methods to delivering meaningful experience. While there are plenty of mavericks out there willing to challenge how we design games with smaller experimental titles, I believe there is evidence that intelligent design choices are making their way into triple A, mega-budget titles as well.

Despite the mass market appeal, careful design has been implemented
into the experience of these blockbuster titles

Games like Uncharted 2, Bioshock 1&2 and Batman Arkham Asylum may not challenge the foundations of how we perceive experience to the same degree, but they are built on delivering a focussed contextual experience to the player. While it is taking a while for the industry to step away from games built on fragmented mechanisms held together by old cliches, hope is on the horizon.

And while I am only beginning my journey into the world of game design, I hold firm to the belief that designing for communication through experience is the role of a good game designer or anyone creating for an interactive system. Videogames are inherently poised to become an incredibly valuable method of communication in our culture, and while the vast majority are stupid, violent, null and meaningless experiences, the outlook is beginning to change.

As an interactive designer, and hopefully a game designer in the not to distant future, I will always look back to typography as the blueprint to designing for experience. The role of the graphic designer is remarkably similar to that of game designer, even if the tools and outcome are radically different. We are swiss army knives, tasked with solving many different problems on the path to meaningful experience.

With my extensive experience as an interactive designer and art director and nearly a year of intense game studies in Game Design at Université de Montréal I feel am more ready than ever to embark on designing games for player experience. I have no doubt that I’ll encounter new challenges and unforeseen obstacles along the way, but those solutions will add features to my swiss army knife of design. After all, it’s not about the apparatus, it’s about the path to experience.

In the words of a creative director and mentor I worked with extensively,
“You keep what you kill”, I guess it’s time to go kill it.

Some Useful Links:

Typophile
Beatrice Warde, The Crystal Goblet Excerpt on The Typographic Archives
Brenda BrathWaite on Train
Braid
Uncharted 2: Among Thieves
BioShock
Batman Arkham Asylum

After some hard work, elbow grease and a lot of help from Patrick Paul-Hus at Bluesponge, the newest version of my portfolio is up and running great. It’s a big long scrolling page this time around, way simpler and much more direct access to my content!

Each project has it’s own little details panel on the left with major info, date completed, any relevant links to awards or recognition and an easy share button. Each project also has a designation of personal (metal horns), commercial (fistful of cash), and has awards/recognition (OK hand gesture)

Also, be sure to click on stuff: Images zoom, and videos play in the badass little lightbox.

Finally, there’s the lab. A collection of the more experimental and out-there projects I’ve cobbled together over the years.

An awesome little project designed to flex our game design muscles outside of the digital realm, while educating kids on the merits, challenges and aspects of designing videogames. The game echoes some of the mechanics found in the incredible machine, peggle, and even lemmings.

Our design objective was to provide a framework of flexible goals along with a vast set of modular tools, creating an emergent play environment.

The game was a big success, with all groups of kids besting our highest scores by a factor of at least five. Responses were very positive, and our game received the highest marks from the young students at the event.

What started as an experiment in stylized dithering to get a bit more out of a lowish rez image (still huge) for very large scale printing, turned into a plaything for blending techniques. Behold, prettiness.

Watch in HD

In this update:
1. CCA 3D site visualization for the 20th anniversary party
2. CCA actions promo video, used online and in the metro. Type treatment & concept by me
3. Centre Philou fundraiser Slideshow
4. Lancome, art of visionary beauty promo site

While the launch event for the new CCA site went splendidly, the real surprise came in the form of damaged photos from the occasion. I can’t claim the entropy as my own, as our own Linh Truong seems to to have the magic touch when it comes to making the camera act up so beautifully.

A calm Thursday gave me the opportunity to play, in this case emulating some retro printed artifacts in poster form.

CCA 3D site visualization for 20th anniversary IN HIDEF from Richard Flanagan

After developing the new CCA presence online, we were approached to develop a visualization to be used in conjunction with the museum’s 20th anniversary celebration. My final animation was displayed, looping, for 20 hours on 9 plasmas in one of the museum’s central rooms.

The sequence was designed to show the semantic and functional relationships created throughout the CCA’s vast amount of content, while giving event-goers a sneak peak at the site to come.

In conjunction to the 3D animation and other activities going one, I also created a series of smaller looping animations which would introduce major elements of the new site to users as they wandered throughout the rest of the museum. At each of these stations were re-purposed post cards from the CCA’s past exhibitions as customized takeaways for visitors to take home.

The relationship between the site, event, space and animation was furthered by connecting all aspects of the new online presence via glowing OLED filaments (a genius contribution by Emlie Grenier).

I’ve cobbled together some new ideas for visualizing our hot, hot data. Some of these make very little sense, but damn they’re pretty.