AFTRS is Australia’s national screen arts and broadcast school. Loads of successful filmmakers are graduates: Alex Proyas, Jane Campion, Andrew Lesnie, to name but three.

Next year, AFTRS is offering a Graduate Certificate in Games & Virtual Worlds, open to writers, artists, animators, directors and programmers. The course “concentrates on the development of original concepts for virtual stories, games, social worlds and innovative gameplay resulting in the creation of a working prototype by the end of the course.”

If that sounds like you, applications are open until November 1. Visit the AFTRS website for more info.

We spoke with Brown more specifically about the game design side of the new AFTRS courses, exploring games like Portal, Braid, Flow, and God of War in a discussion of what games need to learn from film, how the game designer should be recognised like a film director, how gameplay and story should mix, and most importantly what a game design student at AFTRS can expect to take away at the end of the course.–

What is your perspective on the new game design course?
We think the course is pretty unique in this country. While there is definitely a niche for the vocational training provided by most other course out there — after all, 80% of the work of producing a game is asset creation and coding — we think there is a gap in the ideas generation side of things. Australia hasn’t been very good at developing world class creatives, with a few notable exceptions of course. But there is no training institution dedicated to sucking the marrow out of that area, saying “alright, we’re not going to worry about the technical side so much, we’re going to concentrate on story and game mechanics and trying to be innovative.” So that’s been our basic philosophy.
We’re talking the Portals, the Braids, and the Flows. They’re maybe not AAA titles, although we are totally focused on integrated story and narrative. They are games that should have something new about the game mechanic, and we are going to emphasise that.

We are a film school, so we do want to make story and narrative a fundamental building block of everything. There are a few schools of thought on what makes games tick. You’ve got the ludologists over one end who say it’s all Chess, all kids chasing each other around playing tag, there’s no story. Then you have the narratologists over the other end, saying everything is a story. Even Chess has an implied story. But the reality is probably somewhere in the middle, and we do want to cover both perspectives. Personally, I think there is a story implied in just about everything. We can’t help but to impose a narrative on just about everything we do. I love the Flows of the world, but I’m wondering about the universe and the story implied there.

We are trying to elevate the role of game designer to the same level as the role of a film director. Games don’t have this hundred year history and glamour associated with it, but a game designer can be in charge of $50m+ creative projects and a lot of it is basically the same. Look at the God of War series, and there is some really strong narrative to it expertly told. Shadow of the Colossus too, and I was just devastated at the end! I had a greater sense of loss with that game than with most films, and I can’t believe that someone with the right level of talent and mastery of this process can’t achieve the same kind of satisfaction that famous film directors achieve. So I’m quite interested in, if not promoting the idea, at least giving them the same opportunities with education and training. So they know about creating great characters, and tension, and all that great narrative stuff that hook you in and propel a story. If you are going to create a game you should know about these things, or at least be given the opportunity to learn about it.

It does seem like there are more small, well polished ideas, like Portal, like Braid, appearing in the market right now.
There’s no real reason for games to be 20 hours long. If the money you pay is proportional to the time you get. But Portal, and Flow, and de Blob, have all been based on student projects. So we think, yeah, wouldn’t it be great to create an environment where these sorts of ideas might happen? We’re definitely hoping we get some people with some really creative ideas and give them as many toys and as much opportunity as possible. I know animation is definitely inbred as an industry, and I think to a certain extent games are too. Very inward focused. So we are deliberately trying to break down the barriers a bit here. Not like going to a graphics college where everyone just talks about the same stuff all the time. There’s little broadening of horizons. But here some people will be talking about film, someone else animation, and then we’ll have our game designers. This is all hypothetical, this is really new so we are hoping, but with any luck we will see some things that test the boundaries.

What will the rest of the school bring to the world of game design?
I think one of the great things film can bring to games is a strong sense of editing and pacing. I mean, anyone who has sat through a Hideo Kojima game… god, it just goes on forever! I admire the Metal Gear games, but it feels like the dialogue is on auto-pilot. It’s nice to have a beautiful, strong story, but at the same time less is kind of more. Most films work because of what has been cut out. Like the Ironman film. I realised that it must have worked because of what they had left out. It could have been so silly at so many points, but I have a strong suspicion that they probably did cross over into ludicrous territory in places but then were smart and cut that out so what you are left with is a really strong implied journey. But games aren’t restricted to only letting you sit there for two hours, which is a long time. You play a while, you save, you come back the next day. A bit more episodic in a sense, so maybe there is more in common with TV. But even TV has a real discipline — a story must be half an hour from exciting incident to resolution of the plot. I just get the feeling games don’t have that discipline at the moment. The structure of the pacing has a bit to learn from film.

Act and Episode structures do seem to be appearing in the game space more, so maybe we are making some headway.
Looking at something like God of War and how expertly the first game was told. It was almost Tarantino like. You are given something tantalising and you are slowly given little nuggets. When you play through for the first time it really feels like you are playing a TV series, as you reveal a little more background. It is a rare thing in games right now.

People got very excited about Bioshock.
But in essence it is still a shooter.

And the developers have also discussed how they had to move away from shaded endings and deliver the black and white outcomes instead.
Yes, they often promise shades of grey. Bioware promised this a number of times. But in the end you have two distinct linear tracks — the good and the bad. But how do you structure multiple pathways? I’d suggest just picking one and finely honing that to get a real emotional response. So when you start doing this choose your own adventure style of thing. I just remember how in those books you’d get a few decisions in and suddenly you’ve fallen through a trap door and died so you go back to the beginning. Oh, that wasn’t very satisfying. I guess the same is true of games. How do you create multiple versions of the same story that are all equally satisfying? It’s probably close to impossible.

But maybe an exciting challenge for the field?
Here’s to hope. Film has got a really strong vocabulary now. Everyone knows it like a second language. But it’s hard to get to know the mechanics of it and that’s why places like this exist. Part of the hope is if we can teach them about how people have done things in the past we can get closer to this idea of creating more variations and more satisfying for the player. Hopefully there will be more courses like this at other institutions in the future, concerned with the art of story.

What kind of student intake are you expecting?
It’s hard to know. In the past it has been four students across two years, so eight in total. This year we are hoping for up to ten or twelve.

We have had a lot of dreams come true, actually. Birthday Boy [Academy Award nominated animated short film] was by a student here, and he got to go to Japan, meet Miyazaki and show him his film.

We had another graduate from last year personally hired by George Miller to work on his new games project. He really wanted to meet him, and he went and interviewed George and they really hit it off.

Everybody has gotten a job that they wanted. There are very few disappointments coming out of here. Peter Giles, our Director of Digital Media, is a fantastic guy and a real visionary, and he provides a lot of opportunities for people. Though we don’t really say that as part of our recruitment message.

What technical areas will you explore in the course?
While we are de-emphasising the coding, it is a technical thing, so you have got to know what you are doing. We do everything we can to support students trying their hand in the labs as well. We often see cinematographers getting into visual effects, for example. We do everything we can to support that, by making sure we have plenty of machines and plenty of software, and mentor them and support them with their questions.

But we are going to work on paper-based things for a start. Basic gameplay. What it means to engage in a game. Board games, that sort of things. These things are still drawing stories out of you, and creating spaces you can move around in. Very representational things you can learn a lot from. Maybe even some choose your own adventure style work with story options on cards to lay out on a table and get comfortable with the creative process.

At the other end of the spectrum we will work on rapid prototyping and possibly finished games in Unity and maybe Virtools. For relative newcomers we are favouring Unity as it leverages the skills we already have here — you can seamlessly bring in Maya assets and it uses Javascript. It’s an amazing tool and so stable. That has the possibility of exporting to iPhone as a platform, which is consistent and won’t demand bizarre licensing.
If you really want to get to a commercial level game we have the tools here and hopefully the support needed as well. But we are emphasising the rapid prototyping and the ideas, but if you want to create a sample or prototype to show somebody you can.

These courses are really focused on creating something you can pitch. So if you have one great idea when you come out of here we are going to work that up, even in a business sense. We have the Centre for Screen Business here as a resource, so you can create something and package it as a presentable business idea. That is common to everything we do — we are not just creating art pieces here. At the end of the day it is great if someone has their great creative idea and they can realise it too.

We caught up with two of the key staff behind the courses and will be sharing those interviews today and tomorrow. First up is Gary Hayes, the Founding Head of LAMP and the leading light on the Virtual Worlds course. You can read his terribly impressive bio here. Tomorrow we speak with Ian Brown, with another ridiculously impressive bio (hello… Sequence Lead VFX Artist on Lord of the Rings), who shares more insights on the Game Design course.

Jump for the interview with Hayes, where we explore the general nature of the courses, the strengths of studying games in the AFTRS environment, and why it has taken so long for games to take story seriously.–

So tell us about the new courses.
There are two new courses being brought into the film and TV production mix that AFTRS is traditionally known for. Games design and virtual worlds, obviously with a more cinematic slant to them. Probably more than many other places around the world we looked at. I think they’re exciting because we have tried to integrate them with the two sides of the school — the directing, writing, producing side and the production. We have industry professional level training to offer on both sides of that fence.

Games production courses to date have often been quite vocational based. You know, using the tools and less to do with character, story, and cinematic aesthetic. It’s been a long time planning this. I run LAMP, the Laboratory for Advanced Media Production, here at AFTRS for about three years now. That has worked with many major digital players to expose them to ‘cross media’ but in effect to participatory, interactive media, showing them how to author for that space so they are extending their narrative around that. It often resulted in things like Alternate Reality Games and virtual world designs. So we have already been creating these blended film / TV / game spaces at LAMP, separately from these new courses. So these have partly come out of that as well.

What talents should people have to be ready for these courses.
Well, it is graduate level. We’re looking for creative thought leaders from across the board. The ability to create stories, be innovative, and be a bit different from the typical production person. Students should show they are willing to take risks, think about who the user is in a major way, be innovative, bring a strong vision of new types of games as well. We feel that is something that will move the Australian industry forward. Coming up with new IP in this space.

Other key attributes we are looking for? We are quite keen on medium level programmer types, from a computer background, who want to learn about the filmic world. Perhaps people who have already been modding, or have made some casual games, and are looking for some real narrative story experience.

On the other side of the fence we are keen for traditional producers who really want to shift into game design and virtual spaces. We are not really asking for specialist skills in Unity or Torque or anything like that but we just need to see they have a passion and a vision. If you can show us something you have done that has sticky gameplay we are keen to see it. And any traditional filmmakers who have done machinima and understand game engines we are interested in that too.

Has the school been playing with machinima elsewhere?
Probably half the LAMP projects we have done have been in game or virtual world space. We actually appeared on Good Game for a machinima feature. Some students were working on a machinima project at the time, and since then a couple of students have gone on to work with George Miller on his game projects now. Others have gone on to work with Hoodlum, a Brisbane-based company who are probably world leaders in ARGs. They’ve done ARGs for Spooks and Lost. The Lost one has been pretty big.

Will there be a focus on group work?
We are not going to force students to work in a group, nor force them to work solo. We will encourage them to develop projects that have merit in themselves and then they can decide whether it needs a team or not. We do want them to develop team skills, as that is one of the most important things going. That’s not to say one person in a studio can’t create a fantastic game. We’ve seen things like Braid, so that’s fine! But we want to encourage cross fertilisation with traditional film people so the depth of knowledge here can permeate into the games curriculum. We encourage multi disciplinary teams from across the school, which I think is one of the attractions of coming here. You just wouldn’t get that at a computer-focused games course. Here you can rub shoulders with future Oscar-winning cinematographers and designers. The design department has excellent synergy for this course, in creating virtual sets. There is such a crossover between pre-visualisation in film and in designing virtual worlds.

We want the virtual worlds students, in particular, to become skilled in pre-viz, and then also in MMO design and thinking about multi-user environments. Also understanding social virtual worlds, creating spaces for people to just hang about and be creative themselves. And then animation itself.

We want to pioneer new ways of making films in real time, almost as if you are on a set. Working with writing and directing students we are moving toward ideas in improvisational work in game spaces and virtual spaces. Kind of like where Red vs Blue came from, you know, some guys farting around in a games engine, pretending to voice it, and then real merit emerges. After an improv session done in this way you can export logs and you can be surprised how story can fall out of these spaces.

There is no reason why, with a really rich set, well-designed characters and good actors, you couldn’t have a live performance like you were watching a film.

Back on the cross pollination at AFTRS, game developers seem very keen to bring story to the foreground more and more today. David Cage is an obvious example, but there are many studios bringing in screen production and writing talent to refine story.
Yes, we often pull out David Cage as an example of where things are headed. And it is great having Matt Costello on board here, who is a TV / book writer and has been very helpful in why story is important and character is important. Probably more important is the quality of the dialogue itself. Even in Indigo Prophecy [Fahrenheit] there were some very suspect moments. So that’s such an obvious synergy — the dialogue that informs the character than informs the design. We want students to explore the tension between cut scenes and gameplay, the emotion of AI, particularly in MMO design. This helps to generate better gameplay in game conversations, not just in the action. So we are going to focus quite heavily on the writing, the quality of the dialogue, and the AI engines that drive that.

Why do you think it has taken so long for games to focus on doing story well?
I think we are moving out of the low-resolution, Bruce Willis / Arnold Schwarzenegger, game world — those kinds of movies generally have had crappy dialogue too. In those earlier games dialogue didn’t have to be important. Now we are moving into more richly rendered games and along with that people have decided they are not going to put up with sub-standard dialogue.

One thing here is we will be working with motion capture, and we do get to work with top actors here at the school. So we can explore that human side of character performances.
We really want to explore virtual spaces that are in the middle ground between games like WoW and social worlds. There is one title, Tales of the Desert, that is highly social but has some strong collaborative game components as well. Literally building cities in the desert together, while being a place to hang.

How do you teach people to prepare for the unexpected in virtual world design? How to develop worlds that encourage user creativity?
This is absolutely core to the virtual worlds course. It’s all about iterative design. You get 30-40% there, you invite people in, then you develop it based on how it is being used. It is harder to do with AAA type games, obviously, but it is suitable for casual game spaces.
LAMP has been very involved here in spreading the idea that this is a two-way process. You build something, people try it, we change it on the fly, and things are constantly evolving.

How do you think the course will evolve?
Maybe everything in the school will have a gaming element? We are looking at documentary and drama courses here, and it is starting to feel odd when talking about designing a curriculum that a drama thing has no element of participation, that the audience can’t chip in with their own stories, or that the characters aren’t blogging or on YouTube. It feels odd when you say I’m just creating this one pushed element. And documentary definitely could be viewed through different eyes.

So I might imagine that in five years time these courses are a central part of the school.

Today some brief notes on what I’ve learned about the courses, and in coming days I’ll share some more information gleaned from interviews with two of the key staff involved with the development of the new programs.

The essentials. We’re talking Graduate Diploma level studies, with applications due November 7. Courses in Game Design and Virtual Worlds are both full-time over two semesters in 2009. These aren’t like courses you can do at a graphics college. You won’t be focusing on learning 3D graphics and programming tools. The focus is creative leadership, understanding game mechanics, and prototyping your concepts. More on the basic ideas behind the two new courses in a video after the jump.If you don’t really know AFTRS, it is the Australian Film, Television, and Radio School. The peak school for anyone wanting to become a professional in the traditional media arts. Multimedia elements have been appearing in their courses, and the foundation of LAMP (Laboratory for Advanced Media Production) in 2005 set the scene for the increasing focus on interactive and networked media, and now into games. Previously based near Macquarie University, AFTRS now has its own campus at Moore Park next to Fox Studios (just past the Hoyts for those who know the Entertainment Quarter / Bent St).