Chat Show: Dan Pinchbeck and Korsakovia
The Chat Show takes us inside the mind of the modder, to interview some of the top mappers, artists and coders. Our goal is to bring a better understanding of the work that goes into modding.
GamesModding.com grabbed a quick Q&A with Dan Pinchbeck, the creative mind behind experimental mod developers thechineseroom who’re responsible for projects such as:
The award-winning Half-Life 2 mod Dear Esther.
And the recently released Korsakovia.
GM: Could you please introduce yourself and give a short summary of Korsakovia?
Dan: I’m Dan Pinchbeck and I’m a games researcher based at the University of Portsmouth, UK. I specialise in first-person gaming, so that’s looking at gameplay and the relationship between story and gameplay specifically. I’m also involved in game preservation [GM – The KEEP project], and I also lead thechineseroom, which is a research project that makes experimental FPS mods and releases them.
Korsakovia is our latest mod. The basic idea behind it comes from this question of what happens when you start undermining a player’s normal expectations. So you remove things like anthropomorphic visualisation from agents and use really abstract sounds, to try and undermine the normal projection of things like motive and behaviour onto them. And then this extended out to having this story and environment where nothing really makes any sense, where we have distorted, re-used, half-finished environments, rather than going for a fully ‘realistic’, ‘real’ world. It’s basically a horror game about madness, but a very different type of experience to Dear Esther.
Image: Bedlam sounds about right.
GM: A big part of the appeal of Korsakovia for most people seems to be the story, as in Dear Esther. Where did the idea for it come from and how long did it take you to write the script for the mod?
Dan: The script got done in a couple of days. I tend to walk around with an idea festering away in my head for a bit and then just slam the whole thing out in more or less one sitting. It didn’t really take that many re-writes this time – Esther took a lot longer. I first read about Korsakoff’s through William Gibson’s Mona Lisa Overdrive, years and years ago, and when I thought about doing this mod which was all about things being jarred and broken up and having no sense or continuity, it popped right back up and went from there really.
Image: Dear Esther (pictured) leaves the actual definition of a lot of story elements up to the player, whereas the Doctor in Korsakovia provides a greater degree of explaination for what’s happening.
GM: What first inspired you to create experimental gameplay mods?
How much intelligent feedback do you get as a result of them?
Dan: All the feedback is intelligent, even when it’s blunt or negative. I’ve just read a toe-curling thread over at Interlopers [GM – There’s a rather negative review there by Srredfire] which was like having acid thrown over me. But you have to accept that this is as valid as anything if you are going to work in the public domain. It’s really important to me that these research projects we’re doing – these mods – go out and are played by players who don’t give a monkey’s if they are research projects or not, which means you’re going to get flak and a percentage of that is going to be really valid and if you can’t deal with that… don’t do it in the first place.
So, there are things I wanted to try out with Korsakovia that have just fallen flat, people have hated them. And there are other things we just got wrong or did badly. The key thing is to separate those out and work out where we go from there, and you need every single bit of feedback you can to do that. At the same time, if you’re a researcher and interested in what you can do with this genre, where you can break the rules or test things out, then you’ve got to take any feedback as being of equal value. If you put a game out there and twenty-thousand people mail you and say “It’s shit” then that’s data, same as if twenty-thousand people mail you and say “It’s the best game ever made”. Ideally, in both cases, you’d like a little more detail to the responses, but it’s all good data anyway.
That all sounds a bit negative. Overall, there are frustrations and problems with Korsakovia, some of which I will look at putting right, some of which I’ll chalk up to experience. But there’s also a hell of lot we got really right, looking at the feedback. Players are getting the idea behind it, they are scared stupid, the audio is causing wet trousers across the community, the script is getting loads of compliments… and as an experimental game, we’ve pushed at some boundaries for good and bad. It’s a mod that you can learn a few things about how you could do something different like we’ve achieved what we set out to do in those terms.
I started making mods because there are questions I want to know the answers too about FPS games that you can’t answer by just looking at commercial releases. So, warts and all, Korsakovia does some stuff that you’d be pretty unlikely to find in a commercial game, unless the developers explicitly wanted to make their lives incredibly difficult and risk making no money whatsoever. That doesn’t make the questions or experiments worthless though. So it was partial frustration, although FPS games have exploded sideways in terms of the types of content and gameplay you see in the last few years. Partially, it also let me play as a writer, which is part of the ongoing experiment, about reactions to very different types and styles of writing and storytelling in FPS games. I think it’s there we’ve had most impact, as I’d say if anyone wanted to ask what kinds of stories work in a first-person game experience, or what players will be attracted to or like, typing Dear Esther or Korsakovia into Google is likely to let you know very quickly that there’s a whole world of players out there hungry for different story experiences than you get in commercial titles. That’s not putting down commercial titles for a second – the quality of writing in FPS games has shot up over the last few years – and also recognising that I don’t know how commercial games like DE or Korsakovia would ever be (they’re pretty uncompromisingly niche – and neither was ever intended to be developed to a commercial release standard, we just didn’t have the budget for that) – BUT that doesn’t mean to say that it a) doesn’t work as a ‘game’ experience and b) players don’t want it.
Image: There are some smaller visual story elements in Korsakovia that you might just miss.
GM: What attracted you to the Source engine?
Dan: Used it before [GM – Dear Esther, Antlion Soccer], and it’s relatively simple to use, plus it’s got the biggest audience base in terms of FPS modding. I keep threatening to move to CryEngine as there’s stuff there I really like and prefer, but Source is just really adaptable in a lot of ways. I do think our next step as a dev team is to head out of modding and into a fully bespoke, self-enclosed game which means we could move, just depends on licensing costs and basically how much money I can raise, or what deals I can cut. So if anyone out there has a spare top-notch engine they’d like to lend us, or about £150-200K, that’d be grand. Stick it in an envelope to the usual address…
Image: Danger, Danger!
GM: Were there any parts of developing the mod that you had difficulty with, and how long did the development process take?
Dan: Where do you want to start? Yes, one or two, or hundreds. It was a bit of a pig. First up, we had an incredibly limited budget and timescale. As it’s an academic project and I’m using it to further my career, for me, its important that everyone gets paid. So there’s a big cost there already, and the budget for this came out of an internal fund I managed to secure at the University, plus a little top-up later on as it wasn’t going to get made otherwise. And this had to be spent within a certain period. So basically all the problems with Korsakovia come out of this shortfall – there wasn’t enough time to really go through a detailed design process (yes, yes, I know, but if we didn’t push on, then there would have been no mod AT ALL), and we didn’t have the cash to take on another two, three people which is what the mod required – and I wasn’t going to have a situation where some people involved in the central development work were being paid and others weren’t. So we were short-staffed, short-timed. That was incredibly difficult.
Overall… hmmm. I think Max [GM – Maksim Mitrofanov, coder and student at the University of Portsmouth] worked on the code for just under a month, and Adam [GM – Independent developer Adam Griffiths of Dark Rock Games who also aided Dan with design, further build work done by Ankur Shah and Dan] did most of the build in about three when you count the days. It’s difficult to add-up. I think the closest I can get is if we take out Jess [GM – Music composer Jessica Curry] and the voice actors [GM – Doctor Christine Grayson was voiced by Genevieve Adam and Christopher was voiced by Ben Crystal], we had the equivalent of about 6 person-months total. If that. So again, next project I want a bigger budget, and I want full-time staff for at least a year, with at least one person in every major role: code, art, design, audio, script, etc.
Image: Dear Esther is currently undergoing a remake (pictured) at the hands of Robert Briscoe.
GM: Do you have any plans for updates or patches to Korsakovia?
Or even for a ‘remake’ like the one Robert Briscoe is creating of Dear Esther?
Dan: Yeah, it needs a patch. It needs subtitles; realistically I’m going to have to at least replace the HEV suit clipboards and a few over bits like that or I’m going to end up being killed by an irate mapper somewhere. There are a couple of signposting bits that, even with 7-8 play testers not finding a problem, are just causing spasms in people. The warehouse level is, I’m pretty sure, going to go down in modding history. Whether I’ll have time to re-build that completely, I don’t know. It’s also tempting to re-balance the Collectors, so there are less of them but they are harder to kill… I don’t know. So there’ll be a basic 1.1 before the New Year which will look to take out the superficial issues that are coming back.
More in-depth ones, like tweaking the last level in terms of difficulty or rebuilding whole sections? I don’t know. I still think I’m so lucky to have Rob rebuilding Esther and doing such an amazing, amazing job. Anyone wants to take on Korsakovia, I’d be delighted to let them have it… – also, as far as I’m concerned, this is all open source, public domain stuff, so I’ll take whatever people want to give. New textures, objects, hell, send ‘em in. The vmfs are in the zip file as well, go for it… Source files a bit big for Moddb, but they’re right here if anyone wants them…
Image: The now-infamous warehouse area.
GM: Do you think that the greater level of acceptance that gaming seems to gain with each console generation is finally reaching a point where there’s a market for intelligent games, similar to the progression of cinema from a kind of looked-down-upon mindless entertainment to an art form?
Dan: Richard Bartle said in a Guardian column last year “Games are mainstream. Drown, or learn to swim”. I think there’s a real truth in that, but I also think that there’s always been a market for intelligent games. Go right back to the first wave of FPS games and you’ve got Doom and Rise of the Triads and what have you, but you’ve also got Marathon. Couple of years later you’re into System Shock, Deus Ex… they’re not exactly mindless. Plus, I think we need to be careful not to see too much of a progression – it’s more about the medium widening. So you don’t progress from mindless to art – there’s an assumption that art is *better* than games there I really resist, or at the least an assumption that they are comparable…
And, just like sometimes I want Tarkovsky and sometimes I want Chuck Norris, I don’t see any necessity for ‘improvement’ beyond Wolfenstein, it’s just nice to see alternate experiences also being available. The most exciting thing for me is the fusion of what is seen as classic traditional gameplay with really smart, deep, affective experiences, like Bioshock or S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Maybe we’re all just getting old (I’m ZXSpectrum-kid to N64/PSOne-adult generation), or the younger generation of players are more sophisticated than we were, or the tech can actually finally start delivering, or the medium maturing (although I really, really *hate* that phrase)… Certainly, the one good thing is it’s getting increasingly difficult for popular media and the tabloids to bash games the way they used to. Sure, you’ve still got Manhunt, and I drove past a billboard for Wet yesterday and just cringed with embarrassment, but you look at Portal and it’s damn funny and sophisticated. Mass Effect has a script as good as any sci-fi you’d see on TV or cinema.
The final thing is that the discussions and comments both Dear Esther and Korsakovia have provoked shows consistently and explicitly that gamers are very, very smart people for the most part, with a huge amount of knowledge about their medium and very interesting things to say about it. Even if we’re still happy to gun down brainless zombies in their thousands and really enjoy that (I’m halfway through Resistance 2 at the moment, and it’s just really fun) we can talk about it at a sophisticated level. I used to work in the arts, and from personal experience, if I want a really intelligent, thought-provoking, well-read and engaging discussion about a work of media, I’d go to gamers over arts audiences any day of the week.
A big thanks to Dan for his time and his long answers.
Some releveant links:
The thechineseroom website, including mod information and research papers by Dan.
Mods by thechineseroom at ModDB.
The Dear Esther remake is being created by Robert Briscoe.
Korsakovia and Dear Esther concept art by Ben Andrews.
The Dark Rock Games website.
Music by Jessica Curry.
The Keeping Emulation Environments Portable (KEEP) project.
5 Responses to “Chat Show: Dan Pinchbeck and Korsakovia”
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What makes the warehouse so infamous?
“There are a couple of signposting bits that, even with 7-8 play testers not finding a problem, are just causing spasms in people. The warehouse level is, I’m pretty sure, going to go down in modding history.”
There’s a very difficult to spot ladder that you need to climb, plus because of a door with a padlock on it most people wander around looking for the crowbar (and failing as it’s not in that room). It’s of the issues that crop up in a lot of ModDB comments.
[...] GM: Dan Pinchbeck and Korsakovia [...]
This is copied from Podcast17.com. Thanks Dayvi for commenting on our transmission:
I just had the chance to read through the interview – sorry I couldn’t in time for the podcast. One thing that really interests me about Dan is that he combines mod development with academics and the study of human perception. Video games have a strong bond with emotion, not only mental emotion but metaphysical as well – and I don’t think this is explored enough. With an engine so versatile as the source engine I think it would be stupid not to incorporate some form of in depth interactivity into a mod or piece of work.
I loved this quote:
“At the same time, if you’re a researcher and interested in what you can do with this genre, where you can break the rules or test things out, then you’ve got to take any feedback as being of equal value.”
This is what I try to do with Podcast 17… even though a lot of our negativity is bullshit, some of it, or at least the bits that I try to communicate are addressing those who I believe can break the rules if they just push a little further. By no means do I want to see the mod community stagnate into a pile of zombie mods and cs clones.
I find it utterly surprising that Dan got as much negative feedback and he describes. I know a lot of people didn’t feel a strong connection to Korsakovia as I did, but I’m surprised that people can’t appreciate it for what it was/is.
I sincerely hope developers, both mainstream and community based (like the Half-Life community) can learn something about Korsakovia. Dan was trying to something experimental and he did just that. He wasn’t trying to woo anyone with aesthetics; he wanted to question the way mod development is done.
All you readers out there… (at least the ones that got this far into my comment), how many mods can you count that has done something unique – I guarantee you can count them on one hand. It really does anger me when developers decide to just “go with the flow” – why don’t they take all their talent and determination and direct it towards something unique and creative.
Dan talks about his mod getting negative criticism, but then he also talks about how that alone is a complete success because for him he can build upon that and for him it’s a research technique. For me personally Korsakovia was a mod I have been waiting around for for years, but for others… well they like that same shit different pile crap.
I do find it disheartening though, that Dan says “funding” was a great issue with the development of the mod. Budget shouldn’t mean anything for Dan and for the developers of Korsakovia; I guarentee Dan could find plenty of people in the Half-Life community that would LOVE to work with him for free. Hell I would! I would do anything I could. If he wants voice acting – I’ll try to make it happen. There are many talented people who I’m sure would work with him too (campaignjunkee from radiator comes to mind).
Another quote comes to mind:
“Anyone wants to take on Korsakovia, I’d be delighted to let them have it… – also, as far as I’m concerned, this is all open source, public domain stuff, so I’ll take whatever people want to give.”
Epic… this is what the community is all about… pure gold.
Either way excellent interview – sorry if this turned into some what of a rant, but I truly believe Dan is a genius and an asset to the community.
I think the majority of the negative feedback was related to ‘technical’ aspects of the mod such as texturing and level design. I believe it was intentionally unconventional as a means of expressing the state of Christopher’s mind but I really fell in love with Dear Esther so I did a lot of reading up on it and Korsakovia prior to doing this interview. Other people who hadn’t done so would quite likely have misinterpreted it as having been badly made rather than intentionally messed up.
I paid a fair bit of attention to Korsakovia’s ModDB page after the release and there were very, very few people who simply didn’t get the whole idea (ie found it boring and not enough like your average action FPS) but there were a good number of frustrated people who wanted to play the mod but had real difficulty with things like that one ladder in the warehouse or the apartments level with doors everywhere you look. I think their criticism has been valid in that respect as the mod does still need to be playable and some concessions have to be made, having an great story and top notch audio doesn’t mean you can leave identifiable Half-Life 2 meshes referring to bits of HL canon and people won’t care.
I would suspect a lot of people had played Dear Esther and were having a good look around to find extra bits of story only to find the exact opposite. It breaks the immersion in quite a significant way.
The funding thing makes sense as it’s directly furthering his career by providing research data. Most mods are for fun or for helping to gain a career in game development, they’re more like practice whereas Dan’s projects are work. I can certainly understand him wanting to pay people and I suspect the people he works with only want a minimal fee.
I did find it quite surprising that the enemies were supposed to be a significant part of what Korsakovia was examining, enemies that don’t behave in a human way aren’t really anything new to gamers are they? I don’t think many people really look all that much into what the enemies in games are doing (they’re only playing preset animations after all), it’s just an enemy and you need to damage it in some way until it can no longer damage you. It can be a bipedal animal, a cloud of smoke, a textureless cuboid, a vehicle, a walking mushroom or a giant spider but at the end of the day if you have a weapon or several and they do damage to all of those things in a similar manner it doesn’t matter what the enemy actually is.
I’m rather wishing I’d stuck with Source now, I had a brief stint with it then moved onto Unreal as it’s so much easier to use (but unfortunately has a small playerbase). I’d have loved to be involved with a Korsakovia do-over too.
He’s definitely helping to push things in the right direction, hopefully we’ll see less generic sci-fi setting FPS deathmatch MP mods and more people trying to emulate the kind of single player experience that Dan has created with Dear Esther and Korsakovia.
I wouldn’t worry about ranting, it’s positive that the projects are inspiring a level of discussion about mods that goes beyond “weapon x is too powerful” and “those textures needs more work”.