RPG Codex Interview: Chris Avellone on Pillars Cut Content, Game Development Hierarchies and More

[ColonelTeacup]

I love the man as much as anyone, but he has the voice of West Hollywood tranny.

That's actually better reactions than I usually get.

The best quote I ever read on my voice (which I agree with), is "a voice that could make babies cry." (Or maybe punch babies, it was an odd quote. Either way, it implied even the most innocent among us can't bear to listen to me speak.) I confess, even I find it hard to listen to my voice, part of the reason I became a writer vs. a public speaker.

Your voice always reminded me of that of a Boston accent.

 

[Farewell into the night]

Chris,

what PC game is the most fun for you? I'm looking for some recommendations, any genre is welcomed.

 

[Cael]

In that case, AHDHtron wouldn't dare anger Twiggy.

I do not know who that is.

The original waif model.

Note the size of the biceps.

 

[ColonelTeacup]

In that case, AHDHtron wouldn't dare anger Twiggy.

I do not know who that is.

The original waif model.

Note the size of the biceps.

An edgy little thing, aren't you?

 

[Delterius]

"a voice that could make babies cry."

I believe the expression is 'victorian dilletante being mauled by wolves'.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Chris,

what PC game is the most fun for you? I'm looking for some recommendations, any genre is welcomed.

Realms of Arkania HD

 

[Cael]

An edgy little thing, aren't you?

Just have a profound dislike for bullies and assholes that abuse their power, although given recent revelations, I can understand why ADHDtron feels the need to abuse his power at every possible turn. The fantasy that he is virtually hurting someone is the only high he will ever get in his ill-used, immature, mentally challenged life.

 

[mastroego]

One thing you can say for ERYFKRAD, he's surely consistent

 

[ERYFKRAD]

One thing you can say for ERYFKRAD, he's surely consistent

Barbaric consistency even.

 

[Rostere]

I would say Chris sounds as if Elmo and Donald Trump had a baby together.

Hush, don't let CNN hear this!

 

[Twiglard]

I'm still waiting for that Arcanum LP.

 

[norolim]

I would say Chris sounds as if Elmo and Donald Trump had a baby together.

Hush, don't let CNN hear this!

Trump-Sesame Street collusion? Hmmm...

 

[Lahey]

Well that brought up a fun search result:

Sesame Street is the deep state

Sesame Street was created by veteran officers of the US Army’s Psychological Warfare Office with the goal of blunting the force of social-justice radicalism in the United States by promoting the liberal ideology that oppression not a structural economic injustice, but a matter of poor individual character or bad social skills. In a 1970’s state-directed project to determine how humans establish cathexis with military hardware, computer engineer Alan Kay leveraged the graphical capabilities of highly-advanced prototype personal computers to display animations of one of Sesame Street’s most popular characters, Cookie Monster, because he felt this would help children see personal computers not as technological artifacts derived from Air Force weapons, but as friendly and even “magical” helpers in their lives.

Kay, who developed the PARC Alto computer and Smalltalk programming language concurrently with Xerox funding the creation of Sesame Street, 
is very clear about this in his “Early History of Smalltalk.” Building the Sesame Street characters in to the design of the Alto’s user 
interface was an evolutionary step in ARPA’s 20 year study on “Human-Computer Symbiosis.”

Aerial combat was the initial use case for this cyborg symbiosis, and in the 1950’s/early 1960s this research was directed towards neuromuscular interfaces with the hardware – humans being literally “wired in”
 to the computers. By the late 1960s / early 1970s, computer displays + pointing devices (derived from Air Force radar scopes) had become
 responsive enough that it was possible to use the computer as an interface to display traditional works of art: books, music, animation. 
This is where it became possible for the user to establish deeper cathexis with the hardware across the full range of human emotions. Control feedback loops became visual / endocrine, not 
mechanical / muscular. This was the conceptual leap that Engelbart + Kay pulled off at SRI and PARC.
 It took Steve Jobs another few years to figure out how to commodify that cathexis, and then the Personal Computer Revolution was underway.




Kay was trying to create a paradigm shift in ARPA’s ideas about human-computer symbiosis. 
This is Kay first realizing the implications of Engelbart’s vision and how portable computing will completely change the world:




The point to all of this is that it’s been a military project w/ military goals all along. Computing never escaped the defense labs and 
became some pure technology of liberation. That’s a libertarian myth about a cultural shift that happened in the industry the late 1960s. 
Computer networks evolved from centralized air defense systems designed to fight a nuclear war to decentralized counterinsurgency systems.
 The state’s application of force evolved from direct application of kinetic force (“monopoly on violence”) to surveillance and coercion.
 This understanding informs Alfred McCoys research on the origins of the surveillance state in the US colonization of the Philippines.



The camouflage that the state uses to hide its coercion creates all kinds of mutant aesthetic offspring. 
Some of them look “kooky” on the surface because they appear in places where you don’t think you should find them, at least at first; the whole point of camouflage is to allow infiltration into spaces where you don’t belong.

Computing devices / software still mostly “work” for people because of how they establish + amplify cathexis – with the devices themselves, 
or with images + texts, that might represent real people or fictional people or video game characters or whatever. 
It’s important not to mystify this or think there’s some essential spirit / zeitgeist in the network. If “the internet” (social software) 
feels oppressive or fashy that’s because of how the software interfaces and moderation systems were designed (this is again based half really banal needs-of-the-marketplace stuff, and half on really deep and particular assumptions about human selfhood and what it means to be a human interacting among other humans), and how the behavioral 
standards of online communities have been cultivated. You can still find pockets of liberated space online, although IMO they were more common 20 yrs ago.

Kay saw computers as the recursive application of processes that hide their internal state and behaviors.




These are the “objects” of Object-Oriented programming. 
Smalltalk is a recursion on the computer itself – a nested hierarchy of objects that each simulate little computers. Kay’s inspiration for 
this came from his study of cellular biology – cells hide the entropy of their metabolic processes from each other and “communicate” by passing proteins
 (hormones) thru a membrane. Equilibrium is maintained in an organism by complex, interdependent systems of feedback between cells even though the cells themselves remain physically distinct from each other. Kay designed operating systems where logically distinct “objects” communicated thru passing “messages” and
 elicited a hormonal response (cathexis / user-friendliness) in users thru the display and manipulation of culturally meaningful symbols.

I got started on studying this history of the tech industry last year after recursively applying Pynchon to Pynchon, supposing that Thomas Pynchon’s own career mirrored the stories of many of his protagonists: ordinary people who slowly become aware of massive imperial conspiracies surrounding them. In a similar vein you can get insights on the technology industry by recursively applying Kay’s idea of a computer the historical context in which he designed computers: Palo Alto in the 1960s and 1970s. 
All of these defense tech projects in the “ARPA Community” were classified or highly bureaucratically segmented systems which hid their behaviors and internal state from the outside and
communicated in various “messages” – money, research, classified data, products. Kay’s invention of the personal computer was an iteration
 of larger political / industrial / economic forces – but Kay’s particular conceptual model of the computer (encapsulated or compartmentalized systems of logic with their own internally-consistent but globally incompatible states of truth) can provide a map to the specific context (ARPA / California / War on Vietnam / MKULTRA) that he was working in.

Think of the cults and psychotherapy practices that were popular in the Bay Area of the 1960s (and incorporated into the work culture ARPA projects like Douglas Engelbart’s research at SRI) as “objects” in the computer-programming sense. Each one is compartmentalized, hides its behaviors and internal state from the outside (secret knowledge for the initiates / doctor-patient privilege), acts internally on propositions that may not hold true outside of the cult, and only interacts indirectly with the outside world through recruiters, evangelizers, fundraisers. Group therapy, death squads, police informants all act as these kinds of objects, nested concentrically within the law enforcement + intelligence agencies that operate them, separated by layers of procedural compartmentalization in the same way logical objects in Smalltalk’s object hierarchy are separated, or how biological cells in an organism are kept distinct but also bound into tissues and organs by cellular membranes.

Even though Kay hasn’t achieved the capitalist success of entrepreneurs like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, in Smalltalk he created (or really “encapsulated”) a microcosm of how the decentralized capitalism of Silicon Valley functions.

Sesame Street, meanwhile, continues on its mission of pathologizing political radicalism and treating it as a developmental issue in children, with a new program being launched in Syrian refugee camps to use newly-rebooted Arabic-language version of Sesame Street to turn children away from being recruited by ISIS.

 

[Andhaira]

Chris Avellone A couple of questions:

-Considering how much you enjoy writing, have you ever considered going into tabletop RPG writing? Though much smaller than the gaming industry, some RPG companies seem quite profitable like FFG (who have the Star Wars license); and there is always Paizo and WOTC. Furthermore with PoD publishing and places like Drivethrurpg you can self publish whatever you want really; your name will ensure buys. It could be a nice change of pace too, and going back to the roots of RPGs (which in turn led to PC RPGs) in the first place could reinvigorate you mentally.

-Why don't you use your own brand/name to start a company of your own and kickstart a game? I get you don't like being the owner, but you could appoint a GM and/or a CEO to take care of the administrative side, while you oversee the development and creative sides. Maybe join with Gaider to do something like this?

-Have you ever played the original Realms of Arkania trilogy and did you like them? The tabletop rpg system powering them, The Dark Eye, has had numerous other games including Blackguards, Drakensang, etc. Its is now in its fifth incarnation, but I haven't heard of any PC rpgs being in development using it yet (hint, hint)

 

[Prime Junta]

In other news, Mr. Rogers is a Russian psy-op.

 

[Morality Games]

Chris Avellone

Big fan. Your work in game development has been impactful on my life and my enjoyment of this hobby.

I get that overall you disapprove of the owners of Obsdian, but stated you would consider working with some of them under different circumstances (as long as not in charge of financials, etc). Did Feargus or any of others ever make what you would consider to be "winning moves" that contributed positively to the company in a decisive, major way?

Or rather, do any of them have any redeeming qualities in their roles, instances of unsuspected competence and/or ability, etc.

I know that's not the theme of this party, but it's the dark side of the moon that makes me curious.

 

[Rostere]

I'm still waiting for that Arcanum LP.

I agree, but the existing parts of the Arcanum LP has already brought me more joy than I expected. So Chris, please continue the Arcanum LP at some point, whether or not it is 100% continuous or if the next installment comes in a year or so doesn't matter to me. I would just like to see more.

Well that brought up a fun search result:

Sesame Street is the deep state

Sesame Street was created by veteran officers of the US Army’s Psychological Warfare Office with the goal of blunting the force of social-justice radicalism in the United States by promoting the liberal ideology that oppression not a structural economic injustice, but a matter of poor individual character or bad social skills. In a 1970’s state-directed project to determine how humans establish cathexis with military hardware, computer engineer Alan Kay leveraged the graphical capabilities of highly-advanced prototype personal computers to display animations of one of Sesame Street’s most popular characters, Cookie Monster, because he felt this would help children see personal computers not as technological artifacts derived from Air Force weapons, but as friendly and even “magical” helpers in their lives.

Kay, who developed the PARC Alto computer and Smalltalk programming language concurrently with Xerox funding the creation of Sesame Street, 
is very clear about this in his “Early History of Smalltalk.” Building the Sesame Street characters in to the design of the Alto’s user 
interface was an evolutionary step in ARPA’s 20 year study on “Human-Computer Symbiosis.”

Aerial combat was the initial use case for this cyborg symbiosis, and in the 1950’s/early 1960s this research was directed towards neuromuscular interfaces with the hardware – humans being literally “wired in”
 to the computers. By the late 1960s / early 1970s, computer displays + pointing devices (derived from Air Force radar scopes) had become
 responsive enough that it was possible to use the computer as an interface to display traditional works of art: books, music, animation. 
This is where it became possible for the user to establish deeper cathexis with the hardware across the full range of human emotions. Control feedback loops became visual / endocrine, not 
mechanical / muscular. This was the conceptual leap that Engelbart + Kay pulled off at SRI and PARC.
 It took Steve Jobs another few years to figure out how to commodify that cathexis, and then the Personal Computer Revolution was underway.




Kay was trying to create a paradigm shift in ARPA’s ideas about human-computer symbiosis. 
This is Kay first realizing the implications of Engelbart’s vision and how portable computing will completely change the world:




The point to all of this is that it’s been a military project w/ military goals all along. Computing never escaped the defense labs and 
became some pure technology of liberation. That’s a libertarian myth about a cultural shift that happened in the industry the late 1960s. 
Computer networks evolved from centralized air defense systems designed to fight a nuclear war to decentralized counterinsurgency systems.
 The state’s application of force evolved from direct application of kinetic force (“monopoly on violence”) to surveillance and coercion.
 This understanding informs Alfred McCoys research on the origins of the surveillance state in the US colonization of the Philippines.



The camouflage that the state uses to hide its coercion creates all kinds of mutant aesthetic offspring. 
Some of them look “kooky” on the surface because they appear in places where you don’t think you should find them, at least at first; the whole point of camouflage is to allow infiltration into spaces where you don’t belong.

Computing devices / software still mostly “work” for people because of how they establish + amplify cathexis – with the devices themselves, 
or with images + texts, that might represent real people or fictional people or video game characters or whatever. 
It’s important not to mystify this or think there’s some essential spirit / zeitgeist in the network. If “the internet” (social software) 
feels oppressive or fashy that’s because of how the software interfaces and moderation systems were designed (this is again based half really banal needs-of-the-marketplace stuff, and half on really deep and particular assumptions about human selfhood and what it means to be a human interacting among other humans), and how the behavioral 
standards of online communities have been cultivated. You can still find pockets of liberated space online, although IMO they were more common 20 yrs ago.

Kay saw computers as the recursive application of processes that hide their internal state and behaviors.




These are the “objects” of Object-Oriented programming. 
Smalltalk is a recursion on the computer itself – a nested hierarchy of objects that each simulate little computers. Kay’s inspiration for 
this came from his study of cellular biology – cells hide the entropy of their metabolic processes from each other and “communicate” by passing proteins
 (hormones) thru a membrane. Equilibrium is maintained in an organism by complex, interdependent systems of feedback between cells even though the cells themselves remain physically distinct from each other. Kay designed operating systems where logically distinct “objects” communicated thru passing “messages” and
 elicited a hormonal response (cathexis / user-friendliness) in users thru the display and manipulation of culturally meaningful symbols.

I got started on studying this history of the tech industry last year after recursively applying Pynchon to Pynchon, supposing that Thomas Pynchon’s own career mirrored the stories of many of his protagonists: ordinary people who slowly become aware of massive imperial conspiracies surrounding them. In a similar vein you can get insights on the technology industry by recursively applying Kay’s idea of a computer the historical context in which he designed computers: Palo Alto in the 1960s and 1970s. 
All of these defense tech projects in the “ARPA Community” were classified or highly bureaucratically segmented systems which hid their behaviors and internal state from the outside and
communicated in various “messages” – money, research, classified data, products. Kay’s invention of the personal computer was an iteration
 of larger political / industrial / economic forces – but Kay’s particular conceptual model of the computer (encapsulated or compartmentalized systems of logic with their own internally-consistent but globally incompatible states of truth) can provide a map to the specific context (ARPA / California / War on Vietnam / MKULTRA) that he was working in.

Think of the cults and psychotherapy practices that were popular in the Bay Area of the 1960s (and incorporated into the work culture ARPA projects like Douglas Engelbart’s research at SRI) as “objects” in the computer-programming sense. Each one is compartmentalized, hides its behaviors and internal state from the outside (secret knowledge for the initiates / doctor-patient privilege), acts internally on propositions that may not hold true outside of the cult, and only interacts indirectly with the outside world through recruiters, evangelizers, fundraisers. Group therapy, death squads, police informants all act as these kinds of objects, nested concentrically within the law enforcement + intelligence agencies that operate them, separated by layers of procedural compartmentalization in the same way logical objects in Smalltalk’s object hierarchy are separated, or how biological cells in an organism are kept distinct but also bound into tissues and organs by cellular membranes.

Even though Kay hasn’t achieved the capitalist success of entrepreneurs like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, in Smalltalk he created (or really “encapsulated”) a microcosm of how the decentralized capitalism of Silicon Valley functions.

Sesame Street, meanwhile, continues on its mission of pathologizing political radicalism and treating it as a developmental issue in children, with a new program being launched in Syrian refugee camps to use newly-rebooted Arabic-language version of Sesame Street to turn children away from being recruited by ISIS.

Shit, they are on to the truth!

 

[Mustawd]

Madman Kalarion is going through this entire thing.

Happy reading.

 

[LESS T_T]

Chris Avellone How do you think about Larian's writing process? They now have at least 9 full-time writers (2 or 3 more than during the production of D:OS 2 I think) plus narrative designer(s). Also I noticed that many of the writers didn't have game writing experience before they joined Larian.

How does one manage 9 full-time writers while trying to maintain consistency and strive for quality?

 

[GarfunkeL]

Three evenings later, I have finally caught up. Hot damn, what a ride it has been.

 

[Chris Avellone]

Chris Avellone

Big fan. Your work in game development has been impactful on my life and my enjoyment of this hobby.

I get that overall you disapprove of the owners of Obsdian, but stated you would consider working with some of them under different circumstances (as long as not in charge of financials, etc). Did Feargus or any of others ever make what you would consider to be "winning moves" that contributed positively to the company in a decisive, major way?

Or rather, do any of them have any redeeming qualities in their roles, instances of unsuspected competence and/or ability, etc.

I know that's not the theme of this party, but it's the dark side of the moon that makes me curious.

Sure. The biggest positives were Feargus keeping his relationship with BioWare (which not only arguably made Black Isle what it was, it also helped Obsidian get on its feet by offloading the properties they didn't want to do), and Feargus also has skills as a "finisher" - it’s an actual producer position I hear they have at Ubisoft, it’s a producer with no close ties to the project coming in at the end and making the decisions needed to ship the game. This allows them to objectively see issues and gameplay without the attachment, and then cut or focusing on fixing certain elements so the game can ship. The only problem is if Feargus gets involved earlier in the process, and there certainly have been times where cuts were delayed for questionable reasons, even when the teams were working hard on material the owners knew would be cut or changed.

The owners also made sure there were no mandatory crunch hours although a publisher could request them. I don't know if this "no-crunch" is the case at the company based on Glassdoor (which isn't reliable), since that critique in the list of reviews was one of the ones I found hard to believe.

Anthony is likely correct that the owners will help those with medical conditions or who are in trouble. I don't know all the incidents he described, including his own, but they definitely did that before I left - if they favor the employee in question. If not, then they behave differently (and I don't mean me, but others including the immigration procedure for the one employee I described, where normally they would be happy to help her, and proved it by spending weeks upon weeks working on the forms... that is, up until the moment Parker, almost as an afterthought, stopped and questioned if he really wanted to keep her, which in some ways, is crueler b/c of the time lost and that question should have been asked far earlier). And so, one day she was just gone.

Darren was probably more game-savvy than everyone else.

Jones at least called Feargus on shit, and was sometimes able to get him to back down - but he can't do that everyday, he has a family to support and as evidenced, losing ownership isn't an idle threat.

And while I don't care for Chris Parker, it was telling he was called on time and again to pull a project out of a bad situation - the end result often wasn't a quality production, but it was better off than before. As stated, it would have been better had that not happened in the first place.

Also, while the owners don't relay a lot of information, there is other information they do relay, which isn't always the case at other companies.

 

[Wunderbar]

Chris Avellone, what is better - Alien or Aliens?

 

[Life of the Party]

Chris, is there a non-RPG you played that you thought would make a great Torment spiritual successor if only its gameplay was different?

I ask because that's the impression I got from playing Abyss Odyssey.

 

[Chris Avellone]

Chris Avellone, what is better - Alien or Aliens?

Alien for fear, Aliens for adrenaline.

 

[GarfunkeL]

I agree 100%

The endless debate over which one is better is so silly - they are representatives of different genres, and a good example how to make a sequel different, yet great.