I see the doors are closed that's my cue I heard. Welcome everyone welcome to and I have to verify but you'll might know this is the sixth edition of the Missing Link can we call it a symposium? I think we can call it a symposium. So the sixth Missing Link symposium in previous ones there was focus on topics such as the growing role of women in video games I think trolling behavior in League of Legends was discussed, legal issues facing the e-sports industry and most recently I think we talked about the transition from offline to online during COVID times and the influence that that all had on us but very welcome a warm welcome to you all to this edition in which we will talk about the process of character creation and to that end we have invited well we actually invited three speakers but I'm already gonna decided to rip that bandage off quickly we've only got two speakers because unfortunately Nathan Wildman has fallen ill I see yes yes but I'm sure that these other two speakers that are on your ticket they're also gonna blow your mind don't worry about it but we are as well disappointed I wouldn't say but we it's very unfortunate that Nathan couldn't make it today he has unfortunately fallen ill but I'm sure that you will see him sometime around campus here again because he is a philosopher here at the Department of Philosophy at Tobrik University but we have two wonderful speakers first up in a bit we have Aris Emanoludis who is the head of the game and art design department at the SAE Institute in Amsterdam which is an institute that offers well you can talk about that yourself a bit but what I read on their website is that they offer fully fledged undergraduate courses in game and art design so if you're very interested in that please talk to Aris afterwards and he is gonna take us through the entire process of character creation actually from its conception of a game character to its implementation in the actual game after his speech we'll have time for a few questions then we'll have a short break of I think ten minutes maybe something like that ten minutes and after which we'll reconvene here and we'll continue with Rudolph's talk and he is the narrative producer at Wolfpack game studios you can talk more about that yourself what that exactly entails but you have a lot of experience when it comes to VR games and strategy games and I also heard you talking about escape rooms and you will tell us more about the while you will show us some good examples bad examples of game characters and he promised us a very interactive talk so please prepare like already think ahead what are your favorite characters what makes them good in your eyes so after that we'll have a panel discussion after Rudolph's contribution both speakers will join me here on stage and there will be more than enough time for you to ask all the questions that you have very shortly about me my name is Ruben Bosse answer I'm an alumnus of Tillwick University now I am a part-time teacher at the Funtas University of Applied Sciences I teach journalism studies and ethics of journalism but far more importantly for the purposes of tonight is that I'm also a little bit of a part-time gamer myself I'm not that good I actually suck but tonight and I also discusses with Rudolph I'll be transforming into my imaginary counter ego in a game of D&D he's called many a duck stumble toe he's a very drunk monk and he's a halfling and he has some obvious character flaws just goes to say I just want to make the point across that I'm also very interested in what I can learn from these talks of these of these two speakers all jokes aside I think we best get this party on the on the road so Aris I would like to invite you to come to the stage please give him a big hand is this on yeah perfect thank you Ruben thank you link for inviting me here it's really nice to be here with you today and also really nice to see so many people interested in video game characters as Ruben said I am the program coordinator and head of the game art and animation department at SA Institute in Amsterdam and I have I have also completed my PhD on cultural analysis at the University of Amsterdam and the focus of my research is online video game communities so today we will examine the two ways that shape and define video game characters will go first in the first part because this is a little bit of a hybrid focus on this presentation will go a little bit on the technical stuff for which because I come from cultural analysis and more theoretical background I asked the help of my colleague Dennis Burzma to whom I'm grateful and then we will also look how characters are being shaped by culture the culture around them so first and I took this screenshot from the logos YouTube channel because it's always important to reference your sources the word character has Greek roots it was a little bit easy for me to understand because I am Greek but to explain it to you as well character comes from the word character which means mark engraved and the verb harasho or harato which means to engrave this engraving in terms of video game characters can occur in two ways one by the designers themselves as I said earlier and two by culture maybe there are more sub paths but today we're going to look at these two main ones so first what we need when we set to design a character we need a game Bible game Bible doesn't really have to be paper documented could also be a digital document but there we write everything about the game so we first have to conceive the character we have to conceive the setting the plot of the game pretty much everything background powers motives everything that defines the character of course you will hear more about it later but it's something very important when it comes to designing a character then comes the stage of concept art we draw and there is usually a large team of designers and artists who draw various ways of how they envision that character always staying true to what the designers and the producers have asked them to include what is also important to note here is that a lot of concept art remains unused so sometimes when you go to the games video games extra menu you can see concept art or sometimes companies ask you to pay a little extra to get access to that content concept art but what I'm trying to distinguish here is that concert art is different and promo art because promo art comes after the character is finished and is used for promotional reasons and it's also possible that the promo art usually is not included in the game but it's not concept art it's a different thing at this point after the character is designed it's finished in the concept art level we have to transfer we can scan the document or start anew through some software and we transfer it to our software and then comes the part of meshing which is actually our character becomes a blockout at this point we also have to think of animation and what will this mean for the character so how will our character move because we will have to animate the character later this is of course required for a 3D character for a 2D character a 2D character comes to life by also different types of software but the concept art phase is equally important and then the transfer and implementation on software then it's the sculpturing phase so we can start with a low polygon sculpture or a high polygon sculpture and we load the base the mess that we created on the software zebras is a standard software the one that is used mainly in the industry it's one that many artists know how to operate and use and also lots of companies ask for zebra knowledge zebras knowledge sorry and here we can also add more polygons add more details and start giving a bit more realistic we will talk about realism a bit later to our character then comes texturing we color our character we can use photoshop or substance and there are some other software as well free or not free but usually it's the more expensive one that companies asked for we animate the character and then the character is ready to be imported to an engine such as unreal or unity and be part of a larger game there are two other techniques that give life to a character here and one of them is still in use the other one is becoming more and more obsolete but it's already obsolete so first there is mock-up which is this abbreviation of motion capture people wear this shoot they perform moves and then these moves are being implemented in the game and then there used to be this other process which I'm very fond of but I don't really see anymore in games I wonder why digitization this is from Gabriel Knight so what they used to do back then the studios they would hire actors these actors would perform the moves of the character and then they would be captured through a video camera and transferred on a computer and then this would be implemented in the game we see Gabriel Knight here and one of my favorite examples we see Mortal Kombat so in that particular case they also needed costume designers in order to capture the aesthetics of an ancient fighting tournament so if you are doing it through digitization you also need to think of the costume designers yeah who can find that helmet so one thing we should also note is that and always keep in mind that character design is a part of a larger group I said earlier but I cannot stress this enough working at the same time and also having long meetings and usually I mean depends on the project and the budget sometimes it's a small group of artists or even one artist if it's an indie production but usually it's not supervisor who's in charge I got these pictures from the guerrilla games website by the way and guerrilla is based in Netherlands so we are supporting the local product of course if you want to improve your skills and learn more there's a number of online communities and forums sometimes they are official like the unity has its own community there are also servers on discord in which artists can get together and exchange ideas and find more projects to work on and create a community is that simple is it that simple what about the process behind all that because yeah we have a character we design the character but is it just this phase there is way more than that so this is an example from Street Fighter 2 which features a very colorful cast of international characters actually the subtitle of the game was the world warrior Street Fighter 2 the world warrior so this is the basic cast of the eight world warriors that were included in the first version of the game and some of you might be familiar with it but I want you to take a moment and think and let me know if you can distinguish which character is the American the American fighter can anyone guess yeah guy I mean you can see the flag on his American flag on his elbow and of course Ken is also American but Ken is a little different story then we have well Honda which is obviously Japanese and is dressed as a sumo wrestler featuring Kabuki see at her face paint Zangief the Russian but I want to take a moment and talk a little bit about the character on the bottom right as you can you see the reason I picked this is because fighting games are excellent cases and they feature diverse casts with multiple stereotypes sometimes or even exaggerated but let's talk about Dalsim now so this is Dalsim you can guess in a way that he's from India because well his attire is as the designers at least perceived an Indian fighter he has exotic face paint earrings brusselettes good point good point and his fighting style is listed as yoga so while everybody goes to participate in a fighting tournament being trained in some dangerous deli martial art Dalsim goes there as a yoga fighter also he as an elephant he also throws flame which is not really part of yoga it's more closely associated with the street performers and so-called fakirs but for some reason the designers thought that an Indian character should know yoga and throw flames and he's also a little bit of a magician because he can teleport and this is something that has also been depicted in other Indian characters such as the great tiger in pants out who uses magic to participate in boxing fights and he teleports around the ring or creates duplicates of himself so to some designers an Indian fighter should fulfill those criteria should wear this kind of exotic attire practice yoga ride elephants throw flames and have magical powers what does that teach us though is this a realistic representation well in a way yeah and I will explain what I mean so here is a screenshot from Forza the racing game and we see that it's well quite really detailed it looks very real and yes it could be perceived as realistic the car picture can be realistic but then if I add an explosion there or if I add an UFO invading the city it will still look realistic because of the design being made in a way to look it like it's real but realism also means that what is real is not restricted on appearance but also perception so realism does not reproduce reality as John Fisk said but also makes sense of it so this is John Marston from Red Dead Redemption and one could argue that he's a realistic character because he has he's he lived during the Wild West period he has a beard holds a gun wears a hat the American flag so he's exactly as designers and gamers and the culture around it would understand an American cowboy notice the American flag which was also prevalent in Gile that I saw earlier that had the American flag tattoo on it so on him so he might look less realistic than the car to the right to the left but at least in the minds of people he's realistic because he carries all those stereotypes that have been assigned to characters of that period and so realism is not only what looks like it exists in this world but it also reproduces what is understood as dominant now talking about realism and characters I quote Lawrence Maldonado who in his turn featured this interview by John Diaz a game character designer so there is this default tier which is a very highly repetitive character design a character trait the straight male white gunslinger so this is Chris Redfield from Resident Evil and Diaz pretty much argues that if you remove this character and replace him with any other male white straight gunslinger you could pretty much have the same game if you remove him and put I don't know Duke Nukem in his place maybe not much will change in the game but it's a good thing that we now have a bit more of a change in video games and the culture so we see more representation from characters such as Aloy and Miles Morales in Spider-Man so yeah so we have the default tier but we should keep in mind that there's a wave of different characters coming in and this is a really welcome change now it's also important to know that when it comes to designing characters the fans themselves can have an input and this can be evident in games that feature character creation and there you can pretty much create your own character as you want or realistic as you want and video games implement this more and more and they all pretty much allow for some smaller or bigger changes and edits on video game characters now I want to moving on I want to move to another path of video game character design and this is more focusing on fandom which is my favorite field and I want to take you back to 1992 again we go to we stick with fighting games because as I said it's a very interesting genre when it comes to character representation and character design and we have we will look at Mortal Kombat the original Mortal Kombat which was released in 1992 as I said it featured two Ninjas subzero and Scorpion but it also featured this menu when the operator of the arcade game because it first was released as an arcade when the arcade operator would turn it on they could access this menu which featured these little setting there called airmax which is shortened version of error macro and it was just put there for the machine to capture various errors in the game but when fans show that they thought that airmax because airmax was placed underneath reptile appearances and reptile battles and reptile was a secret character in the game they thought that hey there might be another secret character airmax so they started writing letters to magazines yeah video game magazines used to be a thing and now not anymore unfortunately but they were sending messages asking about airmax and then there was some Tony Cassie who claimed he managed to meet her mac and also sent a picture which was probably edited because the airmax did not exist there was not a character named airmax in the game but someone claimed they found her mac and it was he looked like a red ninja so it's also most likely that maybe it was it was a glitch because as I said earlier there were like two ninjas in the game at blue ninja and yellow ninja so maybe it was a glitch maybe his TV screen had some settings different but airmax did not exist there was no airmax in the game however midway the company that released the game took notice of all these discourse around airmax and then in Mortal Kombat 2 they included some hints about airmax like here is a character another ninja by the way who shows up and says airmax who and then disappears so that added even more fuel to the fire and then we reached 1994 5 in ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 and airmax became a reality and airmax was a red ninja exactly as fans rumored circulate all those rumors about his appearance but what I find really really interesting is that airmax continued existing in the Mortal Kombat universe and when Mortal Kombat 9 was released in 2011 he was given this tagline we are many you're but one because according to the game's lore airmax is an character is a being created by the fusion of thousands of souls put together to create one very powerful being so he has the power of the thousands of the fans that asked for him and he was manifested as one powerful being so we are many you're but one means that he has the power of the thousands of fans supporting and backing him and that was also played a couple of years later when Mortal Kombat 11 was released and a very popular character Milena was added to the roster while being initially absent and in one of her pre-battle intros someone asked her hey I thought you were dead Milena responds a million of souls were asking for my return so yeah companies sometimes like these little hints and like doing this kind of marketing research by taking taking notice of fans requests to shape characters but we should always be a cautious of exploitation because sometimes companies might overdo it a little bit also because we live in a capitalist world so companies really like not not all of them but it's also becoming a prevalent thing asking fans to pretty much create characters or settings or items or artifacts of the game for free and then borrow them and put them in the game and I remember when Fallout 3 was announced Bethesda also announced that they're opening a forum in which fans can submit ideas for the game and submit ideas for items and environments and other things for the game and the best ones will be implemented and they will all help them create the game together and some fans were a bit hesitant because they understood this as free labor but most of the fans surprisingly were quick to disregard those comments and just say no no it's our opportunity to finally get the game we wanted I don't know if they did but this is the tactic that Bethesda employed to sum things up a character yeah comes from a designer or a group of designers and artists that work together and in a way can shape opinions because they throw a character out in a social context character is not just an artifact that exists on a void but a character can also be part of a culture and in the end can also be appropriated by fans themselves and the fans can give additional properties to the character and in a way push a company toward change or not and I know some of you here are parts of and other e-sports competitors and they participate in competition so you're very familiar I suppose with Waluigi and Smash in case you're not I will explain that Waluigi is a character from a Mario franchise who in the games themselves a Mario games he's a secondary or even tertiary character he doesn't really have an important role but for some reason he's extremely popular with the Super Smash Brothers community and there are all those petitions online for him to be included in the Smash Super Smash games he hasn't been included but yeah fans still create memes about him and still ask for Waluigi to be implemented in the game so far he hasn't been and I don't know if you will but I decided to finish my presentation with Waluigi exactly to give you this example that companies use software and use teams to design characters but it's also the social context around the characters that shapes them I thank you for your attention and I'm looking forward to your questions thank you any questions for ice do we can't can everybody hear him or would it be I'll just what is your main source for inspiration for characters my personal story inspiration so I personally do not make characters I'm not a game designer myself I am part of the school who does though but since my contact with students and when I discuss their assignments with them I always try to let them go their way and implement when it comes to designing characters or creatures or environments to always use their own let's say experiences and always because sometimes it's difficult to come up with an original idea so and I believe that even if an idea is original still there's a little trait of you in it so yeah my advice and if I ever want to design my own character would be to always go back to my own experiences to my own worries my concerns my proudest moments and look for inspiration first in me and then around me any more questions I was wondering maybe like does the process of character creation which you often often see in games does that always add to these characters that eventually roll out of them being more realistic or versus I would say pre-made characters you understand what I can you elaborate yeah well you have games where you for example just get jumped get pushed into a story and you have like a set protagonist and you are playing this protagonist and he has all these character traits and you can't really have any influence on them but you also have games which allow you to create your own baby basically outsourcing it to the public which of the two do you think is more realistic in terms because yeah both of them in a way can be realistic because well yeah games sometimes give you with a set character and you cannot really influence a lot of it so yeah that could be the easy answer but I also believe a lot in the power of fan fiction and user generated content so it's very common for fans who might not specifically like or want to give their own take of a character they want to give their own version of a story or an event to create their own content either by well animate designing a character themselves or by creating art or creating fan fiction or creating their own videos mashups and in a way alternate the story and give their own take so yes I think it comes from both ways another question you were talking about stereotypes in video games but I assume there is there has to be some level of kind of stereotyping in the character so that you can show the characters culture especially in like firing games so you know kind of the story of that character with just their fists how do you decide on the right level of stereotype in the character so I'm not sure if there is a right level of stereotype and yeah the truth is that the word stereotype is more of a negative connotation which is not bad it's actually a good thing to take into consideration that sometimes you might offend a group of people I think against that it gives actually more it adds to the thought process so yeah I would say that it's not bad to have a character who represents a culture and people can find it very empowering but when it comes when becomes problematic is when this character might turn in might be slowly turning into a caricature so the character I showed earlier does him to be honest I don't know how he has been received in the Indian community of gamers but I know that some mainly Western gamers see him as a caricature because one of his super moves is that he can stretch his limbs really really really far because of his yoga expertise so I think that for some people this could be perceived as a caricature so I think that when you it's as I said it's not bad to include some representation representation is empowering but when yeah you get the feeling that you're crossing a limit then maybe it's time to you know take a step back and think do you consider it because I think that a game for example with the stereotypes we just saw in a game such as like Street Fighter I think or a Mortal Kombat I think that would have more backlash in this day and age I don't know if you agree but there are some obvious stereotypes in there is there is there do you think is the process of creating characters has has that become more difficult now that stereotyping is more frowned upon in your opinion short question short answer yes but as I said earlier it's something that and now it's a good thing that they work with larger groups and more people participate in the thought process so it's it's a good thing that they can also take these into consideration also I wouldn't say it's always that difficult to notice those things because they're like bigger studios backing those AAA projects and there are sponsors behind so there is an entire process of marketing as well there are there's not just one team I explained how one team of artists can sit down and design a character but when it comes to creating the plot and when it comes to marketing the game and when it comes to designing other elements of the game this is part of a much much larger process and there are so many teams behind it so I think the fact that there are more and more people working on it and also people from different backgrounds then yeah this could prevent miss hops all right yeah so a diverse team is it is an opportunity it is the thing is that I don't know how diverse the gaming industry is at the moment because yes we hear a lot about it but let's not forget that a few months ago actually in summer there was all all those allegations of sexual misconduct or racist commentary in activism blizzard for example and in other companies so I think it's something that is promised and something we hear about but still we are a long way from that all right there's a question in the let's take two more questions and then we'll go on to the next speaker since your expertise in also in online community in the game community and don't you think there's also a negative aspect of the fandom gets too involved in what they want and what they want to see for example I think that I thought of us with the release the last of us to remember that the character Abby that her voice actors Laura Bailey actually got death threats from people online because they didn't like what I think we will hear about the last of us in the next presentation right yeah but it's something that is there yes toxicity is a thing and I can think of a bigger example than Gamergate which was this scandal that this movement as its participants named it that started from fans in order to cleanse the video game journalism field and in a way they just went around threatening women who work in the industry and women journalists because they thought that they should not be part of their culture and that they are biased or yeah and they even came to the part of forcing video game designer joy queen to relocate due to death threats so yes toxic toxicity exists gaming cultures are toxic they're not balanced and as I said earlier we still have a lot of work to do all right I'm actually very happy that Luke asked that previous question because that is a perfect segue for my question I don't know if it's been a very widespread thing but I know that with the release of Horizon forbidden West they actually aged Aloy a bit more and made her gain some weight you know because it's supposed to be a couple years in the future and whatnot but there was lots of fan backlash for apparently quote-unquote ruining the character misrepresenting what she stands for etc etc to what extent do you think that you know a gaming community and said toxic gaming community can actually keep the lid on general open-mindedness surrounding character designing in the future if you know what I mean yeah yeah yeah yeah I get it well I think to yeah a community sometimes is as powerful as its wallet so yeah if a company sees that this might also affect their marketing they might yeah implement some changes or as I said earlier there were constant requests of Milena immortal combat and then they decided to create Milena and of course she was not added for free to the game people had to pay and download her so also to give a short answer companies do listen but let's not forget that the companies are enterprises they are profit-driven so yeah they first and foremost want to make money and also all those changes that we were talking about and all those additions they cost money to be made there's there has to be a team that will sit down and work for hours days months on those changes and implementations so yes in the end is profit always been taken into consideration all right I think we will leave it at that but there will be more than enough time afterwards to ask Iris some more questions please give him another big hand I would like to give the floor to to rid off who is going to talk to us about good examples bad examples your examples of video game characters so please give him a big hand everybody can you hear me can you hear me thank you very much all right I'm gonna have an interactive talk today so I hope that all of you are awake enough I know it's dark and afternoon no we want to be in sunshine take half an hour of your time I hope this will be interesting it's probably gonna be interesting so I'm Rudolph I am a game writer and narrative designer I've been doing this since 2011 I've worked on a variety of projects I have some experience I hope that will come across today and in my profession but I guess generally everybody gets this occasionally where people will walk up to you or you're at a meeting in a creative meeting usually and they go like oh have you played this game have you played this particular game and my answer 80% of the time is no to be honest I don't have that much time playing games I'm usually working but the answer usually no and then people will go on a complete like inspired rant and literally I have this every other day I'm not joking just now I came off the train somebody saw me was like oh you're wearing a kilt and they're like have you seen the series Angel share and who are you but for them that was a great opportunity to go like oh angel shares is blah Scottish blah blah something they get exclusive whiskey and I literally get this every time so I just want to like share the pain with you guys for a moment and I'm gonna single somebody out over here really having eye contact hello there my name Rudolph excuse me which what's your name hey Helen have you played God of War like the the new one of PS4 PS5 so you have played it all right what do you think of it so far okay so what that's the characters the story is that this the gameplay part what do you like about it okay and I'm assuming that's just like the action part is that because of the character representation is some okay alright anyway that's what games right for some some some hit some don't I'm gonna pick somebody else who was unfortunate I said when he's sitting on this side looking away thank you so much yes you're still looking away hi my name is real what's your name excuse me what was your name so have you played League of Legends okay this what did you mean which character did you did you play there okay yeah yeah it was cool yeah oh I'm so sorry yes I didn't get the character name but you played a character with a sword in League of Legends oh are we getting a microphone out there yeah all right this is gonna be double up here could you just repeat yourself yeah so I played a character that used a sword all right excellent very much and I'm gonna single somebody out how this guy over here at the front dude have you played the last of us part one no no no you should definitely play I've seen my friend play but at the time I was kind of like rebelling against the whole like zombie thing appearing everywhere too many zombie games too many zombie series I feel you in that regard we definitely have to play that game so I'm just gonna I'm gonna do a following thing here hands or noise whatever you prefer everybody who here has played the last of us part one I said play whatever man join in join another fun join in on the fun all right who's who's played it yeah all right what did you think general good bad just bra bra bra bra bra right so it's okay so my confession here is as follow I played it during like up building up 2018 a lot of people walked up to me and said hey have you played the last of us part one as a writer I hate that sentence as a writer you should really play this game because of the story and the characters a super immersive great game to play so end of 2018 I was like done with it I bought a PlayStation 4 I got God of War I got the last of us I got some uncharted games because I was supposed to play all of these games as a writer I was supposed to like them so approach to already getting this when I played the last of us I didn't like it probably a great game probably great story Naughty Dog please don't fire me or don't not hire me but the main thing that I had a lot is that these characters that we were to play with which is Ellie over here and Joel over there in the corner and this character you're not going to play with him there's also characters somewhere in the corner over there but we don't see him because of the darkness Ellie is a great character she is perfectly written somebody went out to go to a lot of effort and it was like great motion capture I really believe Ellie whenever she was on stage I really get her voice acting you know and when the writers went into this they went through a lot of effort by going okay we want characters on stage we want people to believe them want to realize and to really get across so sorry we're gonna go back here thank you so much wrong button there's a very tiny pointer button over here but she has wants and needs which usually something that you do when you write your characters you go like what does the character want but what's the character really need that those two kind of conflict with each other that conflict is something that you as the audience really get into when you watch the show or when you play something but the interesting thing to me was while playing this that her wants you know as a character she is a young woman she tries to have a childhood like a very cruel world because it's a zombie game so it's supposed to pop and she wants safety she wants shelter she wants to belong somewhere she really needs family and a purpose and those like a very important elements that try to collide because she's a little bit played as an orphan in the story well what you do as a player is you you kill people you pull a bunch of leverage that you climb over stuff and to me none of this stuff like as actions as me as a player being this character really embodying that character I don't I don't get the wants and needs they don't I don't I don't get to like really immersed in that so what what happens is you got a great game looks beautiful probably plays well if you like that type of gameplay but you just occasionally put your controller down and you see the characters do their stuff and you as a player then do the shooting bits from a narrative design perspective from a story writing perspective for games this is like a real shooter right you guys remember real shooters anybody here is old enough to know what real shooters are one person old enough to know real so real shooters used to be a thing in the early stage of giving games where you got a first-person perspective shooter and since there were no controls because usually these were on arcades there we should be like an invisible rail that the character would be on and they would like move across and there would be a moment where like characters would jump out on the screen and you could shoot at them for story wise perspective this is the same thing for me when I play Last of Us because I all the interesting story elements already pre-written is prescripted I have no influence over it I just watch it I'm not engaged and when we write for film when we write for television there's a very important sentence which says show don't tell right so we don't want text on screen that tells us what's going to happen what's happening when an emotional thing happens when something happens that really changes the character we want it to be shown because as an audience we're sitting over there we're watching this and by seeing it we believe it but games on the other hand what you get is that this is a relatively young medium and most people making games have a background of inspiration that comes from film some of them have a web books some of them have a with D&D like you know there's tables up RPGs but most of them want to make these great impressive triple A type films and so their reference point is going to be some zombie film some zombie series of great characters and they want that in the game part but then you just do the shooting events where I very much believe that this is a play don't show thing like when stuff happens on screen that is story technically super important I don't want to put the controller down and watch people do it because in that that's the most important element for me that draws me into the game and yet it's the one thing that I have no choice over right that's such an enormous loss I feel quick question from the audience over here and I'm gonna single somebody out I've got you over here man could you tell me the difference between a game writer and a narrative designer without looking at your phone and checking the Wikipedia to be honest I have no clue all right I'm gonna go over to you with the gray sweater so sorry what's your name hi Joyce do you know could you perhaps give an indication what's the difference between a game writer and a narrative designer well a game writer narrative designer designs the story of the game and the game designer designs how you implement the story into a game sounds correct to me sounds correct right I'm gonna one more I really had you I'm not gonna talk to you too much we're gonna present over here of TSA link I think the game designer focuses more on playstyle like how you play the story well the narrative designer like writes the story so figuring out what the story is and actually playing the story and how to play it would be all right I would I would put the titles in the opposite but that was exactly where we were supposed to be so a game writer writes parts of the game they do the writing bits usually when games are made the game director or like the lead game designer is super inspired and they got a story in mind and like you know two ferds into the development they go like this is a lot of work we just hire somebody to do the writing bits they then hire a writer who's usually a game writer who has experience with writing for games and then they do the writing bits from that came narrative designers narrative designers are more on-team developers who have game development experience who know how to game design you know how to design interaction for players and use their knowledge of storytelling on how to get players really engaged into the story so we are looking at a game from what is going to be the player experience what do you want to do next and how are going to make that into an expect a compelling story experience and the word experience there we're going we're slowly developing a better language on this but story experience is super super duper valuable here because story experience is the thing that you tell afterwards and most players have had this before that when you play an impressive game experience what you're going to bring back is all the things that you did out of the game but when we ask you what happened in it you'll get me something explosion something characters are super great you got to play the story but what I really loved about it the first stuff that I did and from a narrative design perspective we want those two things to merge so when you write characters usually you do the following thing so you this is a character matrix over here that's why I use the title character matrix you're going to ask yourself okay we got a world populated with a certain story the story has a goal to it and that goal of the story you know that's usually something that's very important save the world or get you know romantically interested with each other usually that's how you write books are you right plays are you right film anybody here goes see theater play still haha that's enough hands I wasn't expecting that at all all right thank you so much please support theater but what we look at is you know what for a character we're going to like give them some personality they're gonna have once and these they're gonna have a background story you probably heard this term before like a three-dimensional character fully fleshed out three-dimensional character the three-dimensional part was all the rage when 3d became a rage thing you know back in the 80s 3d is a thing now and that's the reference point because people actually don't use the 3d matrix to create personalities but they was supposed to say that it has a certain depth to them they have a background story they have wants and needs and what you usually see is that most story characters kind of end up in this like middle half section which is like you know completely one-dimensional means that they they're just there on the background they don't have a lot of things that they want to say they're just present and like very poorly written serial characters also like appear and they only have one thing which basically a support character of a main person those are one-dimensional characters where characters have wants and needs in a back story like those are three-dimensional fleshed out then we also have a level of agency how much does the character actually want to do in the story like you have characters that just you know usually the story is about a character doesn't want to do a lot until they're thrown into the story and suddenly they have to like decide and take action and this is where you will see that some characters are really dynamic which we'll call in their agency they have dynamic agency they they keep changing themselves over time like they have a certain want that they pursue during the story they've learned what they actually need in life and then suddenly shift sort of their agency and how to move in on that I think Kratos is an interesting character in that regard because obviously like you know initially he wants to be God of War then you know God of War we set this up and they call it God of War which is super confusing and at that point Kratos like really needs to like deal with how to deal with his new family life no spoilers there I'm not going to spoil too much the game but basically Kratos and boy or God of Boy or boy of that and what Ellie like she has a certain need it does shift a little bit there in the game but mostly she like that that's definitely out there with other characters we have in most video games what you will see is that like when you just have a generic character that you make they have no backstory they could have a name you could have a semi backstory but the main thing is that they're a player avatar which is a different concept than a protagonist these are protagonists and these are player avatars in MMOs or most other games where you really get to create a character that's really really a player avatar but it doesn't do much than be a vehicle for you as a person to play the story fighting games and eSport games are out there as well however they usually have something iconic about them because when you select them their iconicness tells you already their story so they have a sense of agency and they have a sense of personality but it's not too much out there because they have to be generic enough for everybody to still be able to like identify with them this is about usually where we get to do things but as a player I ask so what what do we do with this characters created they have a backstory they have once they have needs they're super dynamic but what does the player really get to do in any of that right so as we move along I'm gonna quickly check and see if we can put some of your favorite characters here on this matrix because somebody just told you you have to think about your favorite characters so now I'm gonna quickly test you on that and dude I'm gonna single you out what is your favorite game character I know it's a difficult question but like if you have to choose the genre-wise character favorite games and I like that Lara Croft probably where the background change in every single game so it's kind of hard to pinpoint but Lara Croft from Tomb Raider alright and when you say Lara Croft like what is it per se that you feel makes her a great character again it depends on which timeline of Tomb Raider you're following but what I like about the newer Tomb Raider games is she comes from almost well she of course she has her background of course she's a background in survival skills but she comes from nothing she gets thrown in this situation and she has to deal with a new environment deal what's going on and she's going and she's basically surviving she's at that it's a very very strong person she does not give up and he takes what she can get and just move on with that yeah so would you would you say that Lara Croft is like somebody who's very dynamic in their agency like they want to achieve a lot of things they make a lot of choices actively in the story it again depends on which timeline but the current Tomb Raider games I would say yes she has a certain goal because she's solving with her mom at this period and this Trinity and etc she has certain goals she has certainly goals she wants to achieve and all of that's personality right yes yeah so it's definitely up here in the right right corner of things that's where you put the modern iteration the modern version of Lara Croft like the newer game yes all right and I'm gonna go a little bit in the back over there there's always the thing with people sitting in the back you tend to be ignored all right yeah I'm seeing you being pointed you were not aware hello what's your name hello Leica nice to meet you I'm gonna ask you the same generic question over there do you have a favorite game character if I had to say it would be Vaz Montenegro from Far Cry 3 excellent all right the newest Far Cry but I'm guilty I haven't played that one yet yeah I would definitely say it'd be more to the right top as well because he's well he's not like playable character in three obviously I don't know exactly what happens in the newest one but for three it would be I generally really like him because he's like the evil guy but you kind of do still relate with him in a way like you're not like oh he's bad right he's yeah not that evil as he would seem at first instance so it's kind of difficult to look at it in this chart I'd say but I would definitely say he's more at the right and if you take into account the newer game I think he'd be very top right as well really like you feel he also like has a lot of agency like he chooses his own actions bad guys usually they're starting story usually in control things right yeah I do believe that in the newest one I don't know if people have played it or not but you can also play as him or at least he's more of a protagonist than a non-player character so then yes all right very good and I see a person some there up there in the dark you thought you were going to be ignored hey ma'am what's your name current hi current nice to meet you um so could you guess what question I'm going to ask you a character I can't remember his name but the protagonist from Watch Dogs 2 excellent very cool I think he'd fit more around the middle though yeah would you point him out like he's not super dynamic doesn't have that many wants and needs precisely yeah yeah could you explain to us what how you get introduced to the character what in the game like did you just pick the select them from a menu screen oh no I think it starts off you just him okay so you get like a cinematic in the beginning I haven't played Watch Dogs 80% of your games so you get a cinematic in the beginning that introduces the character like it jumps into I don't it's been a while since I played it I think it jumps into a scenario and then it like introduces the concept of the game and then you escape from there and then you move on all right and and do you feel that the actions on the on the board the board the actions on the in the game themselves also kind of reflect the way that the character fits in there like you know does he want to shoot does he wanna does he want to do all the action bits of the story is he fighting against it yeah like there's a whole team behind like behind the main character I guess so it does fit in with his wants and needs for example okay excellent so there's no what you would call a ludonarrative dissonance where ludo means to play it's old narrative obviously means the story experienced overall and dissonance means that there's a disconnect between what's happening ludonarrative distance something we really take care of which is that the stuff that happening on screen the stuff that you are playing it still matters to you as you're playing it you don't feel while playing I'm playing a racing game but the main character wants to do something completely different that part that's something I'm really focused on but what I noticed with this particular type of graph when you're creating characters what you're missing is this part and that's why what you are going to see in the future a lot more and I'd like you to like really take care of that or really really look into that for the future is that there's going to be another axis on this type of matrix where originally we got agency and personality what we're going to be asking a lot more is what is the player influence on the character this part over here one-dimensional but a lot lots of dynamicness this is where you put your MMO characters usually they have no personality really you make the personality I best you get to RP it a little bit you know but usually that's about as far as it gets in my experience there is about Bioware games there's about cyberpunk that gets like a little bit into this area that's a little bit up here what I like do a lot of character writing and they try to as much create like a what do you call a nonlinear story or a story that kind of deviates a little bit as you make choices over time but to my experience this part is completely underutilized I know for a fact that there are lots of people working at this point trying to make this part because this is what you would call a red ocean this is from a strat sorry from marketing strategy perspective this is where you would say there's lots of stuff missing here unless you're one of the nerds and you're playing tabletop role-playing games or live-action role-playing games or real life games because there you get to be yourself and you get to role-play or choose to role-play but you physically stand within the game world and work in imagination are part of the game world your actions your choices make all the difference in video games this is extremely difficult to achieve because of the technology because you know computer has to or like the programming background has to take into consideration that it could go in any direction and we don't know alike with Second Life and similar games you do have a sense of usually generated characters where you're allowed to choose a little bit of a background but that's difficult right because in movies or in books the background is something that is superimposed is told in post afterwards this is what the character came from and that's why they want this from a game you start the game usually create character that's as much as you get perhaps you get to choose from a drop-down menu what the back story is but that's about as far as it gets so there's a lot of work to be done still for the near future when it comes to game storytelling particularly character creation that we don't know you this is also next to this being a red ocean this also a black box for us because we don't know yet how to do this with the exception of the nerds who played us who played us or who played this and I happen to have some luxury that I've been writing games for this as well and what we do them particularly real life games you have an actor and the actor is themselves are a little bit dynamic in their ability to interact with players actors give players a small goal like his quest so to say and you write for the actor like a small note of framework that they get to be they the player then gets to do what they want to do they get to role play a situation or it just get to like solve puzzles as they get along and we're seeing that there's lots of people who love these real life games because they get to like let go of real life a little bit get into a game scenario and some of them really enjoy role-playing a character while doing this but most people just enjoy the setting in the atmosphere and this is something where we're going to see a lot of stuff in the future happening let's see what's the time at the moment down by three what do we got all right so I'd be very curious if anybody can think of a character gameplay experience that they've had in video games that they can fit onto this matrix where the user-generated element is also a part of it anybody enlighten me on games that I haven't played yet because I've not played a lot of games yes I was actually thinking about two games because you have those story games which are like called butterfly games so I was thinking of until dawn where you essentially follow a story with a bunch of different characters I don't know how many let's just say there are five and essentially the goal or not the goal is to make sure they are all alive at the end and to do so you have to make different choices so are you gonna help this person yes or no or you have to stand still and if you don't they fall off a cliff or whatever so I was thinking would you say that's user generated because of course you make the decision or is it still pre scripted because they of course wrote those decisions beforehand and you can do anything outside of that and I also had a second game called this honored there you play a character and you have the main quest line but there are also optional side quests and if you do the side quest that of course also already says something about your character because you do them or you don't do them and then when you do the side quest there are also choices you can make for example kill this person or help them because there's like a witch to not spoil it too much so are you gonna help the witch are you gonna kill the witch that kind of things so if I understood correctly your first comment there was also a question at the same time would I would I consider that prescripted so the interesting thing about that is that all games are prescripted because obviously there's a certain set of scripting and all writing games are prescripted at the moment because we have to script all the writing elements because writing and or programming and artificial intelligent to write all that we're not there yet we'll get there meaning that will allow for more user generated conflict but for me that is definitely like in the like in this this area here where you have prescripted multiple options that you can choose from and you allow the player experience themselves to guide which element they want to go for you play a protagonist there do you play or do you play as the group as the player you play as all the players okay so do you so you would say that as characters you're pretty 3d they character a lot of background stories and you get to do a little bit more choosing as well right yes you do so essentially it swaps point of views the whole time so you place each character and at the same time we can also go up because there's lots of agency characters want to achieve things as well yeah yeah so this is also welcome to my job by the way like we'll do multiplying your thinking over there all right thank you so much anybody else really feel like they have a game experience that they feel they can plot out on this in the 3d sense I got somebody over the front here yeah it's similar to until dawn I would say the Life is Strange series which is entirely about the story of following one particular character in game one that's Maxine Caulfield who was like living her life at this high school and she discovered she has power to turn back timer for this entire game you're following her story relationship with her friends around her and some mystery that you're uncovering at the school but I think it makes it a little more interesting it's like that you're only following it through her eyes so instead of that you see it like there's no bird bird eye overview there's no change between characters so everything she knows is also what you get to know so would say that is indeed prescriptive but there's also a little bit more relation between the player and the character since you're basically her in the entire game and everything she knows is your knowledge and everything that she doesn't know you also don't know in that very moment you really see it from what she is experiencing yeah and I I happen to have played this game so I definitely and I love the thing I love about that game is also that the actions that you do as a character also fit kind of like you know what the character would do she's at a high school she's a she's a photography you get to make photos at the same time she is a person who's pretty shy but she will connect with other people you get as a player to play connect with somebody as well so I really love that element because the personality their personal development as well that is part of the gameplay and that part I really love and that's where I love making games myself now there will be lots of questions in the end for that for now that's me thank you so much for your time a big hand I would say but I suggest let's continue with the questions and maybe also for artists if there are more questions for artists but here's a question if you have a question for artists and also say that you have a question for artists and he knows that he has to answer them what is your favorite character in the video game that is a very good question so if I really had to choose right now I know this is not a good example but it is link I grew up awkward of time kind of shaped me I see fans thank you so much link doesn't have that much personality which for me is great because when I play games I tend to do a little bit of role-playing in my head while playing it so I get to do a little bit obviously doesn't have that much dynamics going on it's good enough but whenever I see link I'm like yeah I'm curious to hear what artists favorite characters yeah I think this is an answer that changes you know depending on the face of my life but I think right now I would have said you see me to from taken another fighting game because I see a pattern here there's something fighting going on and I can explain so this character has always been introduced with a mystery around his personality he has always been seen under a mask and armor you never get to see his real face in the 25 years of taking existence and he has been labeled from his debut as a space ninja so there's also been the debate is he a man is he a machine because he also has a machine part so is he a man is he a robot is he an alien is he like everything so I like this little mystery that is around his character and what I find very interesting is that all this information about his backstory and his motives his robotic parts or his supposed alien parts or everything comes from paratex from the game so manuals and fun and art books and what the fans themselves appropriate so his character that has been given to the fans with some specific traits in the game it doesn't explore that deeply but the fans get to make their own theories and their own meanings and ideas of this particular mysterious character all right any others I wanted to ask like with the whole movement of games becoming more simulators with the metaverses roblox I don't know PR chats and I assume in the future it's going to get even more deeper since people are living online basically right now how much do you think can the pre-written characters survive that or do you think the future is just user avatars basically not characters in that sense that is a very good question and it's difficult to say because it is a black box but I have a the following opinion about that my expectation is that writing written characters will always exist because they have a very strong element a pre-written character has a certain personality to them that allows people to reflect themselves on to that character or from that character character with a very strong determination when you encounter them you ask yourself do I agree with that character or not doesn't say that I'm going to expect that user generated characters are going to fill that in a lot but the issue with that is once you have like a room full of people that don't really have a particular direction where they're going story-wise it is unlikely that you'll get like a very gripping story experience out of it you'll probably get something like a memorable experience out of it you'll occasionally get story experiences out of it but you'll always need to put something of a drop in there that gives it a direction and that's where you'll get pre-written characters and or a I scripted characters that are given something like a hint okay we want this group of characters to go into that direction we're going to take a character you're going to be a little bit combative and they're going to try to challenge the group into you know having an opinion about something and develop it over time my criticism that's definitely where we're going to head to other than that LPs and audio tapes are back so I kind of expect that people eventually go back into a retro wave and go like oh man remember those pre-written characters wasn't that great those were way more stable and understandable he definitely expected that's going to be like a say a retro game type remake wave that we'll get in the future as well any more questions or remarks no I yeah well I had I had one question what you say you you you'd say it's a it's a red ocean it's a sea of opportunities but I was also but maybe you already answered it was gonna ask isn't it also just a matter of preference because I know for example my cousin he doesn't like to play these mass open-world sandbox a gazillion side quests creating your own character kind of games he just wants to play the more well link type games where you get dropped into a story and the characters don't necessarily have too much death and you follow the story that these artists have thought up it's also a matter of preference I would say right it is absolutely a matter of preference there is one thing outside of matter of preference that drives game development which is money most games are made with an idea in mind that they will get a certain money a certain amount of money back from sales and from that perspective hype is going to be a big thing right now big open-world games with lots of like hyper realistic art graphics and like really detailed screenwriter type characters are a thing because we have this once like the technology the people from the technology side want to do that they are hand there's people with money usually not game developers themselves usually the pre-investors they don't have that much they don't play games that much and the thing that they know are movies so they know nice visuals and nice characters because that's what they know as a reference point and so you will still see that there's like an element that says okay we'll do what the people with the money want and NFTs are a thing now so people are jumping on the NFT by wings because that's what usually the board members want and we will eventually see that you know at some point AI is already becoming a massive hype the metaverse is becoming a massive hype and you will eventually get more people with money to go like hey do we have one of those a prescripted AI character things I've heard they make a lot of money so you will eventually see that push I do expect that to happen definitely so I'm relatively old as well in this room in this room yes and some of my favorite RPGs are Final Fantasy 7 with cloud which is my favorite character but also Fallout 2 and Baldur's Gate 2 which are both very much open-world type games but one of the things I always wondered is how much more difficult is it to make the open-world game as compared to making a game like Final Fantasy 7 because I always imagine that you can build the entire game around that one narrative that one character and you can put all your resources behind it and Fallout 2 has great replayability but it does mean you have to build for every possible pathway that you can take so in terms of resources does that we also play into into this absolutely yes so your question is going to be like it's what's the difficult difference between creating a linear type game so the game is not like a straightforward experience and a nonlinear type game that has an open-world aspect to them it grows about four to ten times more difficult to make them because in a linear style game we know what's going to happen since we only have one story moment going forward there will be some side quests here and there but we have very clear points very clear endings of so-called scenes we said okay this is now the main character solve the certain point in the story and it can progress onwards you do that as well with open-world games because you want to have the feeling of a story progressing but I'm for example somebody who while playing The Witcher 3 have hardly played the main story I've done most of the side quests I'm way too high of a level right now for the main story so to say and I don't care I honestly don't care but I know that there's people out there trying to push me to really play the main story element and they've also done that from the design perspective because a certain point the amount of things you get to do runs out and they go like oh yeah that was a main story I need to go to I'm currently working on a MMO and I'll tell you man that's difficult because you're going to have to assume that there's people going to play a main story of it but you're also going to assume that people just gonna log in and just want to do their daily grind stuff and like they'll get bits and pieces of it but you're going to have to facilitate everybody so it really looks like that the difference between this and this basically when it comes to creating open worlds because you have an enormous dimension that you have to take care of while writing which usually means you have to write ten times as much as you would otherwise would. Well can I say that you actually need to write in like well in a story like writing one game but in what you say like writing multiple games to a certain degree yeah yeah yeah at least multiple stories I'm always wondering what you think about those like TV show spin-offs like you saw Jinx on screen and obviously Arcane has been very popular and there was also like World of Warcraft movies and stuff do you think that's a tool that's going to be used more to give characters more of a background story if it's not possible in-game or what do you think what role does that play? That's it is not set as far as I've seen so for example of Warcraft the movie and Arcane the television series both have different functions obviously with Arcane the game developers had the opportunity with the wealth that they've had to do something that they wanted to do but the community has asking first of all on what's the backstory of these characters so they went like we'll do that I started making a comic book series we're gonna make a series as well so for them that was their purpose with the World of Warcraft movie that was a part that the team also wanted to achieve but it's definitely also the money part which is hopefully we'll break into a new area of storytelling which from my perspective didn't succeed as much it's going to be very dynamic so what you used to have is that in the past when you created a movie a big blockbuster movie say Pirate of the Caribbean you'd have like a video game spin-off and like you know something like a comic book spin-off on the side as well I'm expecting that that's definitely a lot more the future as well with video games you get spin-offs that do a little bit of extra but they take into consideration that it's a different audience that they're writing for and so they will also be telling a different type of story as well considering who the audience is so I'm really expecting that's really the function so to say all these spin-off style media creations I have one more question like maybe to also like combine the two talks of it because you say the Red Ocean right that's what we're talking about how much can for example like your conception of fandom how much can that add to I don't know exploring this ocean so to speak like can fandom open this or help to close this gap in your opinion yes absolutely yeah certainly yes and yeah fandom can also explore things that are even beyond the Red Ocean and give their own appropriations meanings understandings as I said earlier but the thing is how much of it is official and some fans actually care about making that part official part of the canon some others don't really care they just want to create their own version of story and put it up there so it also depends on you as a fan what are you trying to accomplish because if you're trying to convince a company to make something canon then that takes a lot of work and most of the times it doesn't work but perhaps time for one or two more questions and then yes considering we're talking about spin-offs now often TV shows book comment book series game already exists the top games get converted into video games what would you consider harder like writing narrative wise basing something on already existing source material which means you have to be very very close and like very narrow with all the details that everything is right with already existing store or creating a whole new story out of basically nothing what would be harder in that sense so from my personal experience using existing media is good because you don't have to do all the what we call world-building which is you don't have to think out all the logic of the world where the story is going to take place and you know you have a sense of audience that you can write for so that is easier to write for because of that has a very difficult element which is if you're not familiar with that like for example the director says we want to make a game about this particular book and then I have to go like oh but then I have to read the book and get into the fandom and understand the logic of it as a writer you may not be properly adjusted to what the expectation of the audience at the fan base is going to be I'm going to be very honest with you I was hoping and I'm still hoping that this will happen with cyberpunk would break this as well what we've seen with movies is that when a movie is being made 90% of the times maybe 95% of the times it's based on a pre-existing media because writing the film based on pre-existing media has the following things you know there's going to be fan base you're gonna be people showing up you know the story works because you can read it from beginning to end and you also know kind of what the story experience is supposed to be as a picking that up and turned into a movie is great you have to project from a director perspective what the action of the movie experience is going to be I was hoping that with cyberpunk and I'm still hoping that that we have a similar thing which are tabletop RPGs they usually have backstory lore and gameplay enhance they put into it that means that for game writers what I really hope that we'll get into a lot more is that a lot more because there's so many tabletop RPGs being made and being published at the moment that we have a large arsenal tabletop RPGs that have lore and characters and everything but also the dynamicness of player agency within it so I really hoping that that's going to be the future of writing for games right last question I think yeah how do you prevent the player from getting such feelings like hey this is only happening right now because the writer wanted this to happen or because the game designer wanted me to like now enter this kind of gameplay therefore the story is like making it happen so yeah that is I hope that you're after talk available because that's a very long conversation to have it is a tricky scenario because as a writer you always have an end goal in mind of the story that's what you're writing towards you and there are occasions where you'll eventually go that okay this is going too much off a tangent we want to bring people back to the main story honestly at that point that's bad writing if you've gone off on attention too much you have to really real people in to create a scenario people go like okay I want having fun but now I have to do the main story part again because the writer wants me to so that's kind of what you mean right you have an example that I could use if I use a very ridiculous example like you know you're just like in the game in the story and suddenly like enemies like assault you like do stuff because they wanted you to fight now or like it can be the other way around yeah I think it's yeah so there is that sort of like structural logic the ludonarrative experience element wherein from a talented or like an experienced narrative designer will be able to avoid these type of scenarios from happening because they'll be creating space or experience boundaries by saying okay this is about what we want the players to experience and these are the type of activities that fit within that or ergo these are also the type of story experiences action romance in your name if for example you feel that you want to be explorative but the main game says hey we wrote all this action stuff all the fighting we want you to do the fighting bit then that's what we call ludonarrative dissonance where suddenly your player experience is being completely like interrupted writing that requires that sort of like narrative design perspective and in order to avoid that from happening you have to like pre-plan that by saying okay this space has the following actions that we want to focus on the action parts of the shooting parts in this space we're going to move on next word as a different focus as well and a lot more modern games I feel are getting into the area there still mistakes being made or accidents happening because budget time constraints games are big so people may forget occasionally to probably play through the area and this is also the place where Q&A shines that's where these people are extremely valuable to play through the game a couple of times to see hey pacing wise it doesn't work as well so the feedback from that is also extremely valuable and important as well the very very last question and then afterwards there's of course room for more questions but then it's more like one-on-one yeah I'm really sorry it's just because I think your perspective on the last of us is really interesting because I was always someone was really hyped just because I love the story but what would you think about the second game then would you say there are certain developments or would you say it's more or less like the first game where would you put it onto your scale all right you're gonna be pretty happy with my answer because my interest I haven't played I'm so sorry so I have no idea what that's gonna be maybe you can tell him what you think of that afterwards I don't know or somebody else who's played the last of us to I haven't played it ours of you play no well then we can help you out but maybe it may be somebody else I would like to to leave it at that for now thank you so much Rudolph thank you so much yes please a big hand for ours as well thanks to both of our speakers I would say thanks to Studium Generale for organizing this of course thanks to the e-sports association link thank you all for coming and hopefully till the till next time that's gonna be next year I think right see you in a year


Hello. So, we continue from where we left off. So, last time we saw that mere continuity is insufficient for us to prove that the partial sums of the Fourier series converges point wise to f of x. The problem is when you try to write the difference between the partial sums S n f x minus f of x and estimate its absolute value. You take the absolute value inside the integral, you immediately run into difficulty because the Dirichlet kernel is highly oscillatory kernel, it is not a positive kernel and the integral of mod d n t d t from minus pi to pi behaves like C log n as you see in the slide in the display in the display. Now, let us try to understand how to get around this difficulty, why is it that instead of continuity if we have holder continuity slightly better than just continuity then the problem is much tractable. So, before we take it up let us expand the Dirichlet kernel, what is the Dirichlet kernel again? Let us see it is basically 1 upon 2 pi, 1 upon 2 pi is an innocent constant factor sin n theta plus theta by 2 and divided by sin theta by 2. The numerator we use the addition formulas of sin, sin of a plus b is sin a cos b plus cos a sin b. When you use this formula, you will get one term sin n theta cos theta by 2, the other term that you will get will be cos n theta sin theta by 2, the sin theta by 2 will cancel out in the second term. So, that is exactly what we are trying to do right, what we do now is we expand the numerator in the Dirichlet kernel and we get at sum of two terms d n theta equal to 1 upon 2 pi cos n theta plus sin n theta into cot theta by 2. Likewise the integral 1.14 splits into a sum of two integrals, one of the integrals is cos n t times the difference f of x minus t minus f of x, f of x minus t minus f of x has been abbreviated to delta x t. It is very cumbersome to be writing f of x minus t minus f of x everywhere. So, I just abbreviated to capital delta x comma t. So, the integral splits into two integrals, integral minus pi to pi cos n t capital delta tx dt, the second integral integral minus pi to pi sin n t cot t by 2 delta tx dx, the second integral that you see in 1.5 that gives you the trouble. All right, let us move a little ahead. The first thing that we should do is to prove what is called as a Riemann-Lebesgue Lemma. So, to handle the first piece integral minus pi to pi cos n t times delta tx dt. Again let us assume f is continuous. So, that delta tx is a continuous function of two variables. So, now first piece, this first integral is an innocent piece. Why is it innocent? Why would it straight away go to 0 as n tends to infinity? Because of the next lemma called the Riemann-Lebesgue Lemma. What does Riemann-Lebesgue Lemma say? If you have a function g in l 1 of a b, if you have a function g in l 1 of a b, theorem 3, then integral from a to b cosine n t into g t, that goes to 0 as n goes to infinity. Likewise integral a to b sin n t g t dt that also goes to 0 as n goes to infinity. So, this is 1.16 in the display. So, we shall prove the Riemann-Lebesgue Lemma later and let us see how the Riemann-Lebesgue Lemma helps us. It helps us to cope with the first term in 1.15 namely integral minus pi to pi cos n t capital delta t x dt that goes to 0 as n goes to infinity. Now, to complete the proof that Sn f x converges to f of x as n tends to infinity, we need to secure that the second of the two integrals in 1.15, the second one minus pi to pi sin n t cot t by 2 delta t x must go to 0, this integral must go to 0. How do you do that? First of all, let us do a simple exercise. Let us define a function capital F of t equal to cot t by 2 minus 2 by t if t is not equal to 0 and f of 0 is 0. How does cot t by 2 behave near the origin? Well, what is cotangent? 1 upon tangent. How does tan theta behave? Tan theta is approximately theta. So, what is cot theta? Cot theta is approximately 1 upon theta. So, cot t by 2 behaves like 2 upon t. So, when I subtract 2 upon t, it is going to become nice because the ugly part in cot is the 2 by t part. So, when I subtract 2 by t from cot t by 2, the function becomes nice. So, this new function capital F of t which is defined to be cot t by 2 minus 2 upon t when t is not equal to 0 and at the origin it is defined to be 0. That is a nice continuous function. And so, the Riemann-Lebesgue Lemma says that integral from minus pi to pi f of t sin n t dt will be 0. So, what we do is look at 1.17, you modify the integrand, add and subtract a minus 2 by t. So, make it cot t by 2 minus 2 by t plus 2 by t. And now when you have cot t by 2 minus 2 by t, that is when you have capital F, use the next line here. So, what we need to show is the 2 is an innocent factor. What we need to show is limit as n tends to infinity minus pi to pi integral 1 upon t sin n t times this difference capital delta x t that should go to 0 as n tends to infinity. This is so, we are reduced the task to proving 1.18. So, now comes the, now we bring in the hypothesis of Holder continuity.  Here l is a constant, alpha is a positive constant, l is also positive.  So, the only interesting case is when alpha is between 0 and 1, 1 included, 0 excluded. Alpha should be strictly positive and alpha should be less than or equal to 1. When alpha equal to 1, then the functions which satisfy this inequality are called Lipchitz functions. So, Lipchitz functions are a special case of Holder continuous functions. So, now we are ready to prove the basic convergence theorem. So, theorem 5, suppose f from r to r is a 2 pi periodic Holder continuous function with Holder exponent alpha positive in the Fourier series of f of x converges point wise everywhere to f. This is theorem 5 in the, in the displayed slide. So, as I explained before, what is needed is to prove limit as n tends to infinity integral minus pi to pi 1 upon t f of x minus t minus f of x, that is your capital delta x t times sin n t dt should be 0. Well, now it is very clear how to proceed. We should split the integral from minus pi to pi into 2 parts and integral from minus delta to delta and the integral of the complementary part. So, mod t less than delta mod t greater than or equal to delta. So, that is how I split the integral into a sum of 2 integrals. So, in the first piece mod t less than delta, in the first piece mod t less than delta we use Holder continuity. What happens is that mod of x minus t minus fx mod less than or equal to l times mod t to the power alpha. Remember the definition of Holder continuity. So, we must use Holder continuity on this difference, but this difference is denoted by capital delta. So, over here capital delta of tx in absolute value is going to be less than l times t to the power alpha.  So, this integral is less than or equal to l times integral mod t less than delta dt by mod t to the power 1 minus alpha because mod sin is less than 1 anyway not a problem. Then the other integral integral mod t between delta and pi 1 upon t capital delta tx sin n t dt you compute this integral it will be 2 l upon alpha delta to the power alpha where the 2 come from is an even function. Then the second piece I have not done anything to the second piece yet.  So, the first piece here is already less than epsilon by 2 here. Now, we need to worry about the second piece. Remember that when mod t is between delta and pi when mod t is between delta and pi this business capital delta tx is a continuous function and now I can apply the Riemann-Lebesgue lemma because 1 upon t is also continuous because 0 is far away 0 is far away we are between delta and pi. So, I can apply the Riemann-Lebesgue lemma so this whole second piece goes to 0 as n goes to infinity. So, I can select an n naught so large that this particular piece is less than epsilon by 2 and epsilon by 2 plus epsilon by 2 is epsilon. So, for n greater than or equal to n naught it is this whole thing is less than epsilon and the proof is thereby complete. So, that completes the proof that when you have a holder continuous 2 pi periodic function the Fourier series converges point wise to the given function f of x that was a little bit of work but we will very soon see that we are going to derive some number of corollaries. In particular it is also true for Lipschitz functions because after all Lipschitz functions are a special case of holder continuous functions and our first example that we shall see presently is the case of a Lipschitz function well we have to prove still the Riemann-Lebesgue lemma we have not done that yet. So, to prove Riemann-Lebesgue lemma we shall make use of 2 results one is the Weierstrass's approximation theorem and the other is a theorem due to n in losing by the way there are several proofs of the Riemann-Lebesgue lemma and I have chosen this particular one. I will indicate some other proofs also okay the first is a classic theorem called the Weierstrass's approximation theorem I am pretty certain that most of you have seen the proof of the Weierstrass's approximation theorem in your courses. So, let us recall the Weierstrass's approximation theorem a continuous functions on a closed bounded interval a b can be uniformly approximated by polynomials. There is an informal way of saying it a little more formal way of saying it is in the second line in other words given a continuous function f on the closed interval a b and an epsilon greater than 0 there exists a polynomial p such that the sup norm of f minus p is less than epsilon. In other words the supremum of mod fx minus px over a less than or equal to x less than or equal to b is less than epsilon. The second theorem that we need is a theorem of losing and the theorem of losing says that if a function f is in l1 and epsilon greater than 0 then there is a continuous function g such that the l1 norm of f minus g is less than epsilon. These are the two theorems that we shall use to complete the proof of the Riemann-Lebesgue lemma. So, let us look at the Riemann-Lebesgue lemma the Riemann-Lebesgue lemma says that if you have a l1 function g integral gt sin nt dt goes to 0 as n tends to infinity. So, let us do the following let us take a simple example take g of t to be 1 take the constant function 1 integrate the constant function 1 times sin nt from a to b you can integrate sin nt from a to b you get minus cos nt upon n put the limits a to b and the denominator you are picked up a n and that goes to 0 as n tends to infinity. So, we have already checked it when g is a constant function you can check it for when g of t is t you can prove it for g of t equal to t square because you can actually compute these integrals right when g of t equal to t you are going to be integrating t times cosine nt dt and you have to integrate by parts. But when you integrate by parts you are going to pick up an n in the denominator again it will go to 0 in particular for all k equal to 1 2 3 etcetera you can check the Riemann-Lebesgue lemma is valid when g of t equal to t to the power k k runs from 0 to infinity over the integers. So, Riemann-Lebesgue lemma has been verified. Now the Riemann-Lebesgue lemma is true for g 1 and it is true for g 2 it is certainly going to be true for c 1 g 1 plus c 2 g 2. So, it is going to be true for polynomials. So, the Riemann-Lebesgue lemma is true for polynomials g. Now we want to prove it for a general g take a general l 1 function take any l 1 function by Luzin's theorem we can choose a continuous function h such that integral from a to b the l 1 norm remember integral from a to b mod g t minus h t dt less than epsilon by 3 for example. Now your h is a continuous function since h is a continuous function appeal to Varstas approximation theorem appeal to Varstas approximation theorem and you got a polynomial p of t such that the supremum of h t minus p of t is less than epsilon by 3 times b minus a. If the supremum is less than epsilon by 3 times b minus a integral of g t minus p of t what is integral of g t minus p of t absolute is going to be g t minus h t absolute plus integral of h t minus p t absolute. The first one is less than epsilon by 3 the second one will also be less than epsilon by 3 these two things will become less than 2 epsilon by 3. So, using these two very simple approximations we immediately get that integral from a to b mod g t minus p of t dt is less than 2 epsilon by 3 ok. So, now we are ready integral a to b g t sin n t dt the cosine is similar the cosine integral is similar is integral a to b add and subtract a p t g t minus p t into sin n t dt absolute plus integral from a to b p of t into sin n t dt the whole thing absolute take the absolute value inside the first integral not the second one. Second one keep the absolute value outside in the first integral take the absolute value inside integral a to b mod g t minus p t dt mod sin n t is less than 1 no problem. The first piece integral a to b mod g t minus p t dt is less than 2 epsilon by 3 we just proved that the second piece integral a to b p of t sin n t dt but we are checked that the Riemann Lebesgue Lemma is true for polynomials. So, the second piece integral a to b p of t sin n t dt goes to 0. So, there exists an n naught such that for n greater than or equal to n naught the second piece is also less than epsilon by 3. So, all in all they get integral a to b g of t sin n t dt the whole thing in absolute is less than epsilon for n greater than or equal to n naught and the proof of the Riemann Lebesgue Lemma is thereby completed ok. So, that is a very nice proof. Let me suggest a second proof let me suggest a second proof take for example, an L 1 function take an L 1 function on the interval a to b g g belongs to L 1 of a to b. Now, suppose if g would be a step function what is a step function? Step function means take the interval a to b chop it up into finitely many pieces call a a equal to t naught t naught t 1 t 2 t 3 t k t k equal to b. So, just take finitely many points in the interval a to b or each piece t naught to t 1 it is constant t 1 to t 2 it is another constant t 2 to t 3 some other constant. So, it is discontinuous, but it is a step function. Now, for a step function it is very easy to prove Riemann Lebesgue Lemma because what is a step function? A step function is a linear combination of characteristic functions of the intervals right. Suppose that is a characteristic function of an interval t j t j plus 1 then what happens to the Riemann Lebesgue Lemma integral t j t j plus 1 sin n t d t you have to show that goes to 0 that is clear you can integrate and check. So, it is true for characteristic functions of intervals therefore, it is true for step functions and step functions are dense in L 1 that is another way of proving the Riemann Lebesgue Lemma whichever one is to your taste take up that take up that particular proof. So, the Riemann Lebesgue Lemma is proved. So, now, let us take stock of the situation. So, what is the issue? The issue with continuous functions f of x is merely assumed to be continuous then we know that the point wise convergence fails, but it was believed by many that the point wise convergence holds including initially until Paul Dubois Riemann after several abortive attempts at proving it produced a counter example in 1875. Using ideas from point set topology specifically the Bayer category theorem you can show that the majority of the continuous functions display such an errant behavior. A simplified proof was given by Stephen Banach. In fact, you use the Banach Steinhaus's theorem to produce a counter example. The Banach Steinhaus's theorem not only produces a counter example it tells you that this kind of errant behavior is true for a majority of the continuous functions. We shall give this proof using the Banach Steinhaus's theorem later in the course, but now let us continue a little further. Having proved a nice theorem we should look at a few examples. Let us look at a simple case namely f of x equal to mod x when mod x is less than or equal to pi. Do a 2 pi periodic extension extended 2 pi as a 2 pi periodic function.  Now from the graph it is very clear that the function is continuous. In fact, it is Lipschitz continuous. So, it is even better than holder continuity. Good. Now we know that the function f of x equal to mod x is an even function. It is a nice even function and the extension is also an even function. So, when you take an even function what happens? What is the formula for BN? You see it right here displayed in the slide. Here it is BN equal to 1 upon pi integral minus pi to pi f of x sin n x t. Sin is an odd function. Our f of x is an even function. So, product of an even function and an odd function is an odd function. When you integrate an odd function from minus pi to pi you are going to get 0. So, all the BNs are 0. So, the Fourier series will not involve the BNs it will only involve the ANs. What is A naught? A naught is 1 upon 2 pi integral minus pi to pi mod x dx. But being an even function it will be twice integral the integral from 0 to pi and it is a 1 upon 2 pi. So, it will be 1 upon pi. So, what will it be? It will be 1 upon pi integral 0 to pi x dx and that is easy to integrate and you see the A naught is simply pi by 2 A naught is simply pi by 2. Now, you need to calculate AN. AN will be 1 upon pi integral minus pi to pi mod x cos n x mod x is even cos is even the product is an even function will be twice integral from 0 to pi. So, 2 upon pi integral 0 to pi x cos n x you will have to perform an integration by parts and you have to be careful when you do the calculation. Because you make a mistake you are going to get it all wrong you do the calculation carefully and diligently you will get the ANs put it in the equation for the Fourier expansion f of x equal to A naught plus summation n from 1 to infinity AN cos n x because the bn is 0 and this is exactly what you get. Our basic convergence theorem this must hold for all values of x. Since it is a Lipschitz function the Fourier series will converge point wise to the given function f of x everywhere. So, we get this beautiful representation of mod x as a Fourier series. Now, what do you get when x is 0 put x equal to 0 the cosine term becomes 1. So, you get when x is 0 you get pi by 2 equal to summation 4 upon pi denominator 2 k minus 1 the whole square. Do a little bit of rearrangement you are going to get pi squared by 8 you will get pi square by 8 equals 1 plus 1 upon 3 square plus 1 upon 5 square plus 1 upon 7 square plus dot dot dot. You get that the sum of the reciprocal of squares of the odd numbers is pi square by 8. As an exercise determine 1 plus 1 upon 2 square plus 1 upon 3 square plus 1 upon 4 square plus you are supposed to get pi square by 6 do this as an exercise now. I think this should be a very nice place to stop this capsule and we will continue this in the next capsule. Thank you very much.


Interpolation is generally the root of, like, all the color problems. The colors you specify aren't as important as the space that you're moving within, right? You're moving from a space when you're mixing, when you're animating, when you're doing a gradient. So, like, this is, like, a fun, heady way to think about it is a mix is a single interpretation or a single interpolation in a color space. So, it's like a one moment in the whole interpolation. Like, you have blue and white and it's just, like, one sliver from that. That's what color mix gives you. Well, a gradient is a combined sequence of mixing visualized over time as one moment. That's just nice. Sounds epic, I don't know. And then even cooler to think about is, like, how color animation is, like, a color mix over time or a gradient one shade at a time over time. And all three of these different color coding tasks involve interpolation and can be subject to some issues.