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[LordCrash]

Brian Fargo On InXile’s Darkest, Publisher-Driven Days

By Nathan Grayson on August 15th, 2013



The future is looking very bright for Wasteland 2 and Torment: Tides of Numenera developer inXile. Very bright indeed. Two wildly successful Kickstarters and one nearly complete, maddeningly exciting game later, Brian Fargo and co have finally found their niche. Or rather, they’ve settled back into the comforting clockwork of an old wheelhouse, an old home. But the road to this point was hardly an easy one. The developer-publisher relationship has always been rather skewed, and inXile’s taken its fair share of licks. Some times have been good (see: The Bard’s Tale), and others, well, others have been Hunted: The Demon’s Forge. The latter, especially, is a sore spot for Fargo, but he’s been burned by various publishing arrangements far more than once. He and I discussed that subject, whether Kickstarter is inXile’s permanent solution to that problem, and tons more after I saw Wasteland 2. It’s all below.

RPS: Working with publishers has been kind of a bumpy ride for inXile. On one hand, you got to do Bard’s Tale, but then you also ended up doing things like porting Line Rider, having big projects canceled, and, er, developing a party game. That’s basically the opposite of a sprawling, sophisticated PC RPG.

Fargo: It’s like in all businesses, when you start them. The beginning is what you have to do. You work your way up to what you want to do. I always wanted to make role-playing games, but it was impossible until now. With Bard’s Tale, it had to be consoles. I could not get a deal unless it was console-oriented. And then, whether it was Line Rider or Fantastic Contraption, that was just me seeing talent or seeing products I thought would sell. We’ve done very well with them. But I was struggling to find a business model to allow us to make these kinds of games.

It’s easy to look back and say, “Brian, you should have just gone from Interplay and done role-playing games. What an obvious thing for you to do.” It wasn’t there. When I would talk to publishers, because there was no other way to get the money, I never got to the part where they said, “How much?” They had no interest at any price. There were no options. Once I saw Kickstarter, I said, “This is it. Here’s our chance.”



RPS: How long had you had the idea to do a Wasteland 2 before you finally could do it?

Fargo: 2002. Well, when did I get the mark? 2004. I take that back. 2004. But I’d wanted to do something with it. It was one of the first marks that I got. I thought it was going to be an easy pitch, especially because I had it, and then I was trying to get things going, but then Fallout 3 came out from Bethesda and sold like five million copies. Okay. This is fantastic. I executive produced Wasteland and Fallout. I got one of the designers from Fallout, Jason Anderson, working here. And I had Mike Stackpole, one of the original designers of Wasteland. I have the perfect pitch. I thought, based upon Bethesda’s success, that it would be easy. Nope. No way.

RPS: They’re very different sorts of games at this point.

Fargo: Yeah. They are different. But here’s the best part. As painful as it was [to be turned down so much], I’m glad it never happened any other way. The game we’re making now, that’s the game I wanted to make. I don’t know that, if it had been financed a different way, or with a partner along the way, that I’d be able to do it the way that I’m doing now. It was the best thing for the product.

There was a keynote at GDC Shanghai at the end of 2011. It was about the death of the narrative role-playing game. I would go to Singapore and China and they’d say, “What about Bard’s Tale? What about Wasteland?” I’d always get asked about it. It was all about free-to-play and where that market was going. It’s hard to do a narrative when I’m focusing every bit of my effort on how to get money out of your pocket. It’s a different kind of experience. So it was all about how it was kind of sad that I didn’t see how those games could be made anymore. It was not even six months later that we had the Kickstarter.

RPS: How has the unpredictability of publisher-driven development affected your company? How much has it grown and shrank? It sounds like things weren’t looking so great for you guys before Kickstarter.

Fargo: We used to have more than 60 people. I had to mothball it down to about 15. Again, it’s been trying to find a business model that works, something that’s repeatable. Being a developer is very difficult, because you don’t know what comes next, what you’re going to be working on. The all-or-nothing strategies.

RPS: When you had to cut it down to that size, did you think you were in danger of just having to call it quits on the whole thing?

Fargo: I always had revenue coming in from Bard’s Tale and Line Rider and Choplifter. I’m kind of a scrappy guy, for making things happen. I wanted to build a business. Ironically, I was going full circle. Interplay was a very similar thing, in that when I first started Interplay, it was, “How do I build a business?” Most of the guys who were making games back then were making money. Somebody who did a Dr. J and Larry Bird, well, it sold about a quarter million units, and if you’re just one guy who did it, he’s doing great. If I have a team of people and I sell a quarter million units, big deal. It was why Interplay became a publisher, ultimately.

When I was doing Bard’s Tale one, two, and three, Wasteland, I wasn’t making much money. I was making nothing. My guys were getting it all. I was making nothing. That was why we became a publisher and started doing Battle Chess and Castles and all those other things. It was changing the paradigm. Here, I could probably sit at home and, through my contacts and ideas, make a nice little living, but it’s not really building a business and doing all this, which is what I love. So it’s come full circle, me figuring out how to do that again.

RPS: It’s interesting that you went from something like Hunted: Demon’s Forge to this. That, to me, felt like an RPG that was all of the… “This needs to be on console, so we have to include elements from shooters and things like that” obligatory pandering.

Fargo: The original pitch for that was to be a dungeon crawl. That was what that game wanted to be. Then it got slowly changed to become more of a shooter. But that’s not my background, so… To me, that was a typical failing, where you have the arguments about what a product should be and everything that goes with it. People don’t know sometimes how little the developer can have input-wise into a product, even if it’s theirs. The opening cinematics weren’t done by us. The voice casting was not done by us. We didn’t get to direct the voices in the game. There are all these things that go on that are just pulled away from the developer, that we had no control over.
Ultimately, the people that control the purse strings are going to control the direction of the product. But yeah, how it came out was very different than what my pitch was.



RPS: When that happened, was it basically devastating?

Fargo: Extremely so. Frustrating. Very frustrating. Because ultimately… It’s like when Obsidian took a hit on their Metacritic and didn’t get their bonus. Mostly they got dinged because it was a buggy product. Obsidian, their reputation was taking a hit for shipping buggy products. They don’t control QA. The publisher controls it. The publisher always controls QA. They decide when it’s done. There’s no bug we can’t fix. There’s no bug they can’t fix. Somebody made a conscious decision – because there was a list. I guarantee you the QA department had a list of bugs. They said, “We don’t care. We gotta ship it anyway.” Why does the developer lose their bonus and get their reputation killed for that?

So yeah, you can imagine – even if it’s a different scenario – how it can be frustrating to be a developer doing work when you’re the one that’s taking it every which way. You’re usually not making money, either. I would run the numbers on games and say, “Look. You guys are up $20 million in profit. It’s my idea. I came to you. I did 100 percent of the work. And guess what? I don’t mind if you make more money than me. That doesn’t bother me, because you took the financial risk. However, when you’re up $20 million after paying your marketing and everything, don’t you think we deserve $1 million?” Nope. So yes, it’s frustrating.

RPS: So then you inevitably have to lay off a bunch of your friends and co-workers because there’s no longer enough to go around.

Fargo: Yeah. Every dollar they give you, typically… There’s always some deals that change. I’m sure the guys working on Titanfall have a different deal, so put that on the side. But most developers have a certain kind of deal. It’s all in advance. If a publisher says… Let’s say they slow you down and you have to spend another six months on the project and your team is burning half the money in a month. That’s $3 million of your money. You’re in the hole another $3 million, because everything is in advance.

It also hurts on the creativity, because let’s say you think, “God, I have a great idea. Let’s do it.” And it takes two more weeks to do it. Now you’re in the hole another $150,000 for doing it. It’s counter to coming up with clever ideas. It’s almost like you saying, “Oh, I have a great idea, but you know what? I have to add some more money on to my mortgage.” You’re not going to be as inclined to come up with creative ideas, because you’re never getting out of that hole. You’re digging it deeper. That’s why you have… Usually the owner of the company is spending very little of his time on the project, which you’d like him to spend. Instead he’s thinking, “What are we going to do next? We’re probably not going to recoup and I don’t want to let people with families lose their jobs.”

RPS: With that looming specter of joblessness, too, I think you end up risking not letting the team establish a rapport. If someone comes into a company with the knowledge that after the project’s done, they’ll probably be out, then they can’t get comfortable. They never end up feeling like part of something bigger.

Fargo: And they’re looking for jobs as a result. What you’re going to have is, towards the end of the project you’ll have people leave. You’ll have people leave with two months to go. They’re saying, “Brian, do I have a job afterward? What’s the deal?” I’m not gonna lie. I’m gonna say, “I don’t know. My publisher wants to see how well the product does.” That’s not very much reassurance for a guy who has a wife and kids. You have that even further on top of it.

That’s why this is wonderful here. Everybody knows that we’ve been pre-funded. Any units we ship will be profit. Also, I have Torment. I don’t assume that… We may sell 10,000 units or a million units. I don’t know. I don’t count on that. We don’t know where the production is going to roll. So most of these people you see – Matt and Chris and them – they’ve all been here for 10 years.



RPS: How big is inXile now?

Fargo: A little more than 20 now.

RPS: How big had it blown up to during Hunted and things like that?

Fargo: More than 60.

RPS: So that’s when it hit more than 60. Then you just had to let most of those people go.

Fargo: Yeah. We had to reinvent ourselves. If you’re not doing a big triple-A game, you can’t have 60 people. You just can’t do it. It’s so hard to make money doing the triple-A business. So hard.

RPS: Yeah. You see it more and more right now. People who have been triple-A for decades, even, going indie. I know that there’s been… Not an exodus, but a number of people leaving 2K Marin now that The Bureau is wrapping up. They’re all going off and just doing little indie projects, because it’s finally viable.

Fargo: Right. It’s more satisfying. You feel closer to the sales part of it, too. You think, “If I can make this do 50,000 units…”

RPS: Then you’re golden.

Fargo: Yeah, you’re golden. These times, they are a-changin’.

RPS: Do you think that, as a company, for whatever the next thing is once you’re done with Wasteland and you’re on Torment, will Kickstarter crowdfunding be where you go for that too? No more publishers?

Fargo: I don’t see why we wouldn’t stay with it. You can look at it from a persepective of… Obviously it would only be predicated on us delivering a Wasteland that everybody loves. Now we’ve delivered a game, and they did it. To go back again, you could look at it from one perspective of, “Hey, that way we can get the game cheaper than if we bought it at the final price.” But there’s this whole dialogue and this whole vetting of the idea. If I want to go do something, well, maybe it’s a good idea and maybe it’s not. To me, it ferrets out all these different issues. It opens up a dialogue that we love. I think it’s a great way of doing business. I couldn’t see stopping it.



RPS: What about your history, though? Do you think you’ll keep revisiting aspects of it? What about Bard’s Tale, for instance?

Fargo: I hate to comment on what we’re going to do next, because we have a lot of different ideas, but I’d be more likely to do something more for my core audience than I would to do something off-kilter. We have our niche. It’s role-playing games. One guy’s going to have a niche for train simulators. I think we’re all going to have our different niches. I feel like I know what this audience loves. I’m good at delivering it. So I’m more likely to stay in that wheelhouse.

Comedy [ala the most recent Bard's Tale] is tough, though. I just find that with humor, everybody has an opinion on it. We were going to do a Bard’s Tale 2 Disney, actually. Kind of a funny story. They loved Bard’s Tale, right? So we had this letter of intent in place. We delivered a script. And then somebody on their team, who was an accountant, said, “This isn’t funny.” It was only a first draft. We were going to make a thousand iterations over the next year and a half. It was just to get going. “Well, it’s not funny.” So I was talking to one of the executives there and I said, “Okay. We think it’s funny. She didn’t think it’s funny. We have just shipped a game that we wrote, Bard’s Tale, that people said is the funniest game of all time. So being that we’re like this, wouldn’t you give us the nod? Wouldn’t you think that maybe we had it? You know, the accountant, she hasn’t done this before.” Nope. Killed us. For that and for some other reasons. But it wasn’t funny [laughs].

RPS: Hah. But also awwww. Thank you for your time. It was, um, a lot. Extremely kind of you.


Quelle: Brian Fargo On InXile’s Darkest, Publisher-Driven Days | Rock, Paper, Shotgun

 

[LordCrash]

Plague of game dev harassment erodes industry, spurs support groups

By Brian Crecente on Aug 15, 2013 at 1:00p @crecenteb



The greatest threat to the video game industry may be some of its most impassioned fans. Increasingly, game developers are finding themselves under attack by some of the very people they devote their lives to entertaining. And this growing form of gamer-on-game-developer cyber harassment is starting to take its toll.

Developers, both named and those who wish to remain anonymous, tell Polygon that harassment by gamers is becoming an alarmingly regular expected element of game development. Some developers say the problem was among the reasons they left the industry, others tell Polygon that the problem is so ubiquitous that it distracts them from making games or that they're considering leaving the industry.
The problem has become so pronounced that International Game Developers Association executive director Kate Edwards tells Polygon that the organization is looking into starting support groups and that while the harassment isn't yet having a major impact on game development, "we're at the cusp of where it could."


Power and positioning

Fans are, by definition, fanatical.

That passion for the books they read, the movies and television they watch and the games they play can lead to amazing things from cosplay to tribute operas, from charities to art. But that fanaticism can also lead to a level of obsession that can trigger some very bad things like threats of death, kidnapping, torture, stalking and financial ruin.

Online harassment, no matter the reasoning, is always about power and positioning, about putting people in their place, said Nathan Fisk, lecturer at the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

"I think fans harass developers for a range of reasons, but again, it is always about power and position," said Fisk, who co-authored Bullying in the Age of Social Media. "Fans are invested in the stories and worlds that developers create, and certain design decisions can be seen by fans to threaten those stories and worlds. Harassment silences and repositions content creators in ways that protect the interests of certain fan groups, which again is no justification for the kinds of abusive behavior and language seen online today."

The internet and the anonymity it grants has made harassment easier. According to several studies, Fisk said, the lack of social cues and perceived lack of consequences afforded online communication also changes the way people treat one another.

"This is particularly true in the case of harassment in gaming communities, as most of the abusive behavior is not grounded in local, offline relationships and social networks," Fisk said. "There are groups of fans harassing developers and representatives, and it can be assumed that very few (if any) of those fans have actually met those developers in person. Further, game developers are in many ways becoming public figures as they openly interact with gaming communities, and social networking technologies have made making contact a simple process."

Fisk believes that online harassment is more of a problem for industries and professions which rely heavily on the creation and management of public image, than those that don't. And the video game industry's evolution to mainstream popularity may be playing some role in the problem.

"In particular, I think that the game developers — more recently independent developers — are struggling with becoming public figures," he said. "I also suspect that problems with online harassment have long been a problem for the gaming industry, but with the level of visibility provided by platforms such as Twitter and the growing public concern over various forms of harassment among gamers, that industry representatives are no longer willing to quietly ignore harassing or threatening comments."

The rise in harassment in gaming communities can be linked to a number of factors, Fisk believes.

"First, traditionally gaming communities have developed around big, triple-A games, coming from developers and publishers large enough to have employed moderators and PR staff," he said. "With the recent explosion of independent development, there are small teams or individual developers managing the work of managing fans and expectations on their own, resulting in increased tensions and the potential for more publicly visible reactions. Second, gaming communities are experiencing growing pains as they become more diverse and mature, challenging the status quo. The recent debates over the portrayal of women and minorities in games are bound to generate aggressive and hateful comments, which again do the work of silencing and repositioning those groups to maintain dominance. Finally, I think there has been a reaction by gaming communities towards industry trends which are genuinely manipulative and restrictive, and while that in no way justifies abusive behavior, it certainly plays a role in the increase of online harassment by fans and gamers."

Fisk said he and his colleagues were just discussing recent issues within the gaming community, including those surrounding Fez 2 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 2.

Late last month, Treyarch studio design director David Vonderhaar took to Twitter to announce a patch to popular first-person shooter Call of Duty: Black Ops 2. The seemingly innocuous changes included reducing the damage of one weapon and rate of fire on two others. The changes, which were fractions of a second, spurred threats of violence online and an editorial by Activision social media manager Dan Amrich.

In the piece, Amrich cautioned calmer heads and noted that a vocal minority were giving gamers everywhere a bad name.

"If you enjoy your games," he wrote, "have a little respect for the people who make them — and stop threatening them with bodily harm every time they do their job."

Four days later, game developer Phil Fish got into an online argument with writer Marcus Beer, tweeting "I fucking hate this industry" (for the negativity and criticism it's brought.) The back and forth ended with Fish tweeting, "I'm done. Fez 2 is canceled. Goodbye."

He later confirmed the game's cancellation, and hasn't responded to press requests for comment since.

Those two are just the most recent in a series of vitriolic responses to games and the people who make them this year.

Adam Orth, a Microsoft Studios creative director, provocatively tweeted about always-online consoles in April in the thick of growing trepidation about that possible requirement for the Xbox One. The tweets spurred death threats, an apology from Microsoft and international news coverage. Orth left Microsoft about a week later.

The botched launch of SimCity in March led to a flood of angry emails, tweets and the seemingly inevitable death threats focused at some of those involved with the always-online game.

And those are just some of the more public cases of harassment. Stephen Toulouse, who for six years headed up Xbox Live's policy and enforcement, says the problem is omnipresent in gaming.


"I'm going to kill you"

"I have approximately 70 messages on Xbox Live right now and half of them are, 'I'm going to kill you' and 'I'm going to find you and destroy you' and I haven't worked (at Microsoft) in two years. Even to this day people who don't know I left Microsoft still come after me."

But Toulouse seems more amused than annoyed by the messages. It comes with being the head banhammer at Xbox Live for so many years. It's to be expected, he says.

"The root cause of the problem isn't in what we do, making games, it's that there are so little consequences to this wildly violent approach of communication that we are simply one audience of many that are subject to this type of focus," he said. "There's no real penalty right now."

For Toulouse that consequence-free harassment even included swatting, essentially tricking a law enforcement agency to respond to a person's house for what they think is a violent confrontation.

"Even the swatting thing, only now that Justin Bieber gets swatted, do prosecutors go, 'Oh, we should probably do something about this'," he said. "I couldn't get the Seattle police interested to save their lives, in prosecuting the kids who were doing this. I'm like, 'Come on, guys, they're sending your SWAT team out. What if you shot somebody. Don't you have an interest in going after these kids?' And they're like, 'No, because they are kids and at the end of the day it will be a juvenile sentence in juvenile court and that doesn't give prosecutors headlines.'"



While adults certainly take part in online harassment, Toulouse believes that it is the younger harassers who are the worst.

"With the adults you get a lot of the bluster, but no follow through," he said. "Because they do have something to lose. They might realize on some level the difference between typing, 'I'm going to kill you,' and calling you and saying you're going to kill someone is a pretty big leap when you can be recorded."

"The vast majority of adult vitriol is bluster."

Toulouse says working as the head of enforcement for Xbox Live required him to have very thick skin, something not all developers have.
"You have to approach it from a very dispassionate point of view, and that's a really hard thing to do," he said. "Not everyone can do that. That's a tall thing to ask people to do. It's like, 'Yeah, I know they just said they're going to rape your wife, but you've got to let that bounce off you.' That's tough to ask people to do."

In his role at Xbox Live, Toulouse said he was often asked to step in and help developers deal with these sorts of issues.

"A lot of developers just sit and make their games," he said. "Not everyone is Jonathan Blow, who is willing to engage. The vast majority don't, so they're almost constantly surprised when something happens.

"Here you are trying to create and in what manner does creation entail, engender or otherwise justify horrifically violent communication. It's not like we're making political or religious inflammatory content, we're making games. At what level does making a game trigger that bizarre overreaction and hatred?"

Toulouse said that when he started at Xbox he analyzed the problems Xbox Live was having with this issue and determined that one solution was to have a single person as the face of enforcement for Live, a "sheriff."

"Nobody knew who was actually processing those complaints," he said. "Customers needed to know that there is someone who is in charge of making sure this gets better. What came along with that, unfortunately, was SWAT teams and threats and abuse."

One of the reasons Toulouse left, he said, was because Microsoft didn't know how to deal with that from a corporate standpoint.

"Microsoft didn't know what to do," he said. "I would bring it up. I would say, 'Hey, I am putting my family at material risk, by you wanting me to be this public sheriff.'"

Toulouse said he asked for security because people would tell him they were going to kill him at events like PAX.

"They were like, 'We don't do that,'" he said.

Since Toulouse's departure, no one has stepped into those very public shoes. So while Xbox Live certainly still has a sheriff, it's not a person as approachable or harassable.


The Cyberbullying Research Center

Founded in 2005, the Cyberbullying Research Center is a clearinghouse of information on the misuses and abuses of technology.

Co-directors Sameer Hinduja and Justin Patchin have been researching the topic since 2002 and includes data from about 14,000 children about their experiences as both cyberbully and victim.

One thing they've found is that there seems to exist a disconnect between a person and their conscience when they go online.

"When individuals are online they are sort of separated from their conscience and from social conventions and morals and norms and even the law, and they feel a little bit more free to say whatever they want to say," Hinduja said. "You can be spontaneous online and just listen to your emotions and just go off on someone without taking a moment to sort of assess the situation."

While the organization saw its formation in the wake of a number of cyberbullying-spurred teen suicides, and was formed to deal directly with the problem in schools, Hinduja said that adults routinely contact the group seeking advice. The center also occasionally works with companies on cyber harassment issues.

"We hear these stories (like the game industry harassment cases) and we know that they are taking their toll on adults," he said. "We're seeing more and more of these cases surface."

Hinduja sees the problem getting worse before it gets better. That's because he believes society is entering a new internet age, one that doesn't bring with it the decorum and manners formed over thousands of years of civilization.

Stop Harassment

1. Do not retaliate.
2. Keep evidence of all harassment.
3. Alert your work.
4. Contact police
5. Report abuse to service providers such as your cellphone service provide, Twitter and Facebook.
6. Contact an Attorney about a possible civil suit.
7. Speaking with trustworthy friends about what you are going through could be cathartic.
8. Do not befriend the cyberbully.
9. Block the cyberbullying at its source.
10. Change your e-mail, phone number, or online account completely as a last resort.

Source: Cyberbullying Research Center

It's as if the internet hit a reset button for some people in terms of how they treat one another.

"It's almost like we're reverting to our primitive tendencies where we didn't know rules of social decorum and so forth," he said, and in the short term it seems to be getting worse, as if people are socially devolving online.

"I feel like how we've progressed over the years and decades, I feel like it's more and more normative to be cruel and then be JK, LOL, not really a big deal, even though we know that words wound," he said. "I think we're seeing a desensitization when it comes to acceptability and conduct, whether it's online conduct or even offline conduct, whether it's verbal or textual or the things we post to embarrass other people. We can try to cover our tracks or say we were just messing around, but the damage is done. That's why we have kids killing themselves based on what's been posted and sent and shared."

Hinduja's hope is that at some point the social devolution will stop and people will start acting online how they do in real life.

"My hope is that, and hopefully this doesn't sound too idealistic, that over time people ostracize those who are jerks to other people, who are rude and cruel online and we just get to a point where we just don't do that anymore," he said. "Kind of like we don't really litter anymore. Or people don't use the N word anymore because we finally socially have gotten to a point where it is completely unacceptable. My hope is that we get to that point with this sort of stuff."


"Graphic threats to kill my children"

Jennifer Hepler left BioWare this week to begin work on a book about narrative design and do some freelance work. Her most recent job title was senior writer on Dragon Age: Inquisition. But it was Dragon Age 2 that led to the death threats, the threats against her family and children and the harassment.

After Dragon Age 2 came out in 2011, Hepler told Polygon, many of the people involved in the game's development received angry emails, abusive forum posts and petitions calling for them to be fired. About that time, someone dug up an old interview Hepler participated in six years earlier. In the interview Hepler mentioned that her least favorite part of working in the game industry was playing through games and combat. Some of the interview was put in the official forums as evidence that Hepler was to blame for changes in the game's combat. The forum post was removed and Hepler went on maternity leave. But then the following February someone created a forum post resurfacing the interview and called Hepler the "cancer" that was destroying BioWare.

"I had opened a Twitter account a few weeks before that, and this poster or others quickly found me there and began sending threatening messages," she said. "I shut my account down without reading them, so I'm not certain what they said, but other people have told me they were quite vile."

The forum post and Hepler's initial response on Twitter, ignited a firestorm of hatred and harassment that included emailed death threats and threats against her children.



"I did my best to avoid actually reading any of it, so I'm not quite certain how bad it got," Hepler said. "I was shown a sample of the forum posts by EA security and it included graphic threats to kill my children on their way out of school to show them that they should have been aborted at birth rather than have to have me as a mother."

Hepler also received harassing phone calls and threats on the BioWare Social Network.

The impact though, she said, was mostly positive.

"The outpouring of support I received — large amounts from female and gay fans — was incredibly heartening," she said. "I got hundreds of messages from people who had been deeply moved by characters and scenes that I wrote and who had made positive changes in their real lives because of it. Without the negativity, I'm not sure that I would ever have heard from all of these people confirming that there is a need for characters that tackle touchy social issues, for characters who are untraditional or even unlikeable. It has definitely strengthened my desire to continue to make games that strive for inclusivity and that use fiction and fantasy to explore difficult, uncomfortable real-world issues."

The incident also spurred Hepler to think a lot about how to raise her children who "won't have that sense of entitlement where if they don't enjoy a particular entertainment product they think it's fair to attack the creators personally."

"I definitely try to make them understand that there are real people behind the shows they watch and the games they play," she said, "and even if they don't like the finished product, they should understand and respect the work that went into it."

As with other game makers who have been harassed, others who have been attacked reach out to Hepler to talk about their own incidents.

"It's something that comes up in almost every conversation with female developers," she said. "Overall, people seem to try to shrug it off publicly and fume privately, and younger women contemplating the field are reconsidering whether they have the stomach to handle what it currently asks of them. That's the biggest risk, in my opinion: that we will lose out on the talents of people who would make fantastic games that we would all be the better for playing, because they legitimately don't want to make themselves into targets. A lot of the best artists and storytellers (and quite a few great programmers too), tend to be sensitive people — we shouldn't lose out on their talents because we are requiring them to be tough, battle-scarred veterans just to walk in the door."

Hepler, like many of the people who talked to about this, believes that gamer-on-game maker harassment is one of the biggest threats to the video game industry.

"Games cost much too much money to focus on a niche market," she said. "To survive, they need to be such a broadly popular part of entertainment culture that you would be hard-pressed to find anyone who doesn't play games. Women represent over 50 percent of the population, tend to be in charge of household finances, and are the majority purchasers of games (when factoring in games bought by women as gifts for husbands, children, friends, etc.). To indulge a community that is actively trying to alienate this powerful market segment (not to mention gay men, casual gamers of all types and anyone new to the hobby), is suicidal.

"It's important to listen to fans about what's important to them, but it's equally important to listen to people who are not currently gamers about why they aren't playing. Hardcore gamers want a product that is made specifically for them and is actively unfriendly to anyone new. They will beg and bully to get this product and then praise and wax nostalgic over any game that lives up to their standards even if the company that made it went bankrupt. They don't care about keeping companies in business or artists employed. Their only job as fans is to say what pleases them, and it would be foolish to expect them to think beyond that. But to cater to those desires without thinking about how to bring new audiences in and make them comfortable will ultimately result in a stagnant and money-losing industry.

"I could go on and on about this, but I'm just going to consider one example: the word 'noob.' If you decide to take up almost any other hobby in the world, you can find beginning classes teaching you how to do it. If you want to knit, you can go to a yarn store and meet fellow knitters who will help you get the basics. If you want to play basketball, you can join a rec center or community league at a beginner level. And generally, the people already involved in those hobbies are thrilled to have someone with whom they can share their passion. But if you want to get started as a gamer, you get told, 'go home noob,' because people in this hobby hate newcomers so much they turned the word itself into an insult. How are we supposed to thrive as an industry if we are actively hostile to growing our audience?"


A harassment support group

"At the end of the day, it seems the number of hot button issues you can 'step on' increases every day," one triple-A developer told Polygon. "Soon, I think a lot of game developers will spend as much time going about avoiding those issues, time they could have focused on better game design, performance, art direction and balance."

The topic of developer harassment has circled among special interest groups within the International Game Developers Association for awhile, but recently it seems to be coming to a head, said IGDA executive director Kate Edwards.

"It's gotten onto our radar," she said. "We're getting to a point where we're thinking, 'Yeah, it's becoming something we're going to need to talk about. It might be time to consider doing a more explicit support group or mechanism to help people who are dealing with this sort of thing."

What bothers Edwards, beyond the very real impact it has the individuals targeted, is the potential impact it could have on the industry as a whole.

"It adds a layer of discouragement," she said, "especially to people who are just starting out or maybe they had a career at a studio, a larger studio, and they're trying to start an indie effort and now they're getting squashed right out of the gate, before they even really finished something. I don't think it's having a major impact (on the game industry), but I think we're at the cusp of where it could and I think there are a couple of major reasons for it."

Edwards believes that some of the issues are tied to the rise in crowdfunding for game development.

When a developer goes directly to fans to ask for money they're, perhaps accidentally, creating the illusion that those fans will have a greater say in the end product. And sometimes that's not meant to be the case. Social media, and the sense of relationship it creates among fans, can also lead to problems, Edwards said.



"When we put ourselves out there on Twitter and other social media we are inviting more of a conversation and I think the fanbase sees that as more of a conversation about the creative direction and not just a conversation about the fandom of that particular IP," she said.
Finally, fans can be fanatical. And in some cases, that can become wearing.

Edwards points to George Lucas' very public semi-retirement last year as an example. In January, Lucas told the New York Times that he was retiring, blaming in part the negativity of fans.

"Why would I make any more," he said, "when everybody yells at you all of the time and says what a terrible person you are?"

"If someone as successful as George Lucas, someone who has been arguably both creatively and financially successful, is basically hanging it up because he's tired of hearing the negative feedback, that's a pretty serious thing," Edwards said. "He is such a prominent person and to have him so publicly talk about that particular issue, it kind of resonates with a lot of people."

And then there is Phil Fish, who so recently gave up the game development industry for similar reasons. Edwards worries that others will look at his example and decide to follow suit.

"Phil Fish and his declaration could get people thinking about, 'Maybe I should think about it as well. Is this something I really want to put up with?'," Edwards said. "I think it would be disappointing to see Phil and others like him not do what they're so passionate about on the basis of that kind of feedback.

"Harassment isn't new but we didn't use to see the kind of vitriolic harassment that we're seeing today. There needs to be a broader sense of how we're going to cope with this as an industry."


Death threats and game development

"It's definitely gotten worse," said Greg Zeschuk. "The threshold for a flip out or a major scandal has dropped. The smallest thing will set people off."

Zeschuk is happily talking about the game industry as an outsider these days. As much as he loved his career — his second career, building Bioware with fellow doctor Ray Muzyka and creating franchises like Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights and Mass Effect — he's happy he left it. And he's likely never to return.

Now he's onto his third career: writing about, creating videos about and maybe one day even brewing craft beer.

While he's no longer in the industry, he says he can't help but still watch it and he's noticed the flare ups of harassment. Perhaps that's because BioWare's Mass Effect 3 was the flashpoint for one of the most publicized recent gamer backlashes. At the time it seemed an unprecedented reaction by fans who were unhappy with the ending of the Mass Effect trilogy. While most fans displeased with how the game concluded simply expressed disappointment, a small, vocal group began threatening and harassing BioWare and its developers.

Zeschuk said the studio was "without a doubt" shocked by the reaction to the game's ending and in particular to how virulent that reaction was. But he stops short of discussing what impact it had on his and Muzyka's ultimate decision to leave both BioWare and the game industry half a year later. But it was, he told me in January, a factor.



Since the release of Mass Effect 3, and the over-the-top response to it by some gamers, Zeschuk believes that those sort of death-threat-laden reactions have become more common in the game industry.

"What amazes me is that all of the gloves are off on this stuff," he said. "It's just astonishing what people will do online now."

Death threats have become the routine, the sort of knee-jerk minimum among cyber harassers. And Zeschuk has a couple of theories why.

There is the ease at which someone can communicate their thoughts to a broad audience.

"Part of it is availability," he said. "It's this megaphone that's sitting on your desk and if you want to use it you can. And that moment when you're most angry and frustrated there's no reason why you can't send out an email or put a post up or do a video, and if you get more attention as a result all of the better.

There is the increasing access fans have to the caretakers of their passions.

"It's unprecedented the access that exists today," he said. "It's a double-edged sword. It's not always going to be accolades, there are also going to be complaints."

There is, as Zeschuk puts it, a new breed of opinion-makers who seem to deliberately inflame in order to grow their reach and popularity.

"A path to awareness on the internet is controversy and people drumming it up," he said. "I think it's almost like if more people throw fuel on the fire and there's more and more of that and some people think, 'Hey, I can do that. I don't need to work, I can be an internet personality and yell at people all day long. I win."

Zeschuk, like Edwards, like most of the developers we spoke with, has big concerns about the lasting impact this sort of behavior is going to have on the industry. But unlike many, he thinks it's here to stay.

Dealing with online abuse, Zeschuk said, is now an integral part of being a game developer.

"It's part of going out there and putting yourself out there," he said. "I just really wish it would get sorted out. I do think there are good, passionate people who get dragged into it and it makes their lives miserable. Making games is stressful enough, just making them, without having to worry about this.

"The impact of having all your brightest creators losing steam and going, 'Screw this,' it's not good. It's not going to lead to good stuff."

Image Source Wikipedia, Flickr user OregonDOT, Flickr user Bitspitter
Quelle: Plague of game dev harassment erodes industry, spurs support groups | Polygon

 

[LordCrash]

Stalker fallout: Polygon traces the exodus from Kiev's legendary GSC Game World

By Charlie Hall @Charlie_L_Hall on September 08, 2013


The team behind the Stalker series had nearly 200 members in its prime. Polygon sought out enclaves of former employees, both big and small, in post-Soviet Ukraine.


Sergei Grigorovich was the CEO of the largest game developer in Eastern Europe, GSC Game World. He and his company were famous for two game series. The first was Cossacks, a set of real-time strategy games known best for its scale, pitting upwards of 60,000 units against each other at one time. Popular throughout Eastern Europe, the series made Grigorovich a millionaire before he was 25 years old.

The second series was called Stalker. Its first game, subtitled Shadow of Chernobyl, was nearly eight years in development when it was released in 2007. An ambitious blend of first-person gunplay and role-playing, it featured elements of survival horror as well as an open world that reacted to the player based on their reputation. It received outstanding reviews, both for its gameplay and its narrative, and became a hit throughout Europe and North America.

In February of 2011, while Grigorovich and his team were busy working on the fourth game in the series, called Stalker 2, Ernst & Young, a multinational financial services firm, named Grigorovich Ukraine's entrepreneur of the year. He was the first member of Ukraine's booming IT industry to earn the honor.

Ten months later, on Dec. 9, Grigorovich dissolved his company. He gave no explanation to the staff beyond "personal reasons."
While the games media flailed for answers, Ukrainian news site Ukranews posted the simple headline, "Kiev company ... decided to self-destruct."

Polygon went to Kiev to map the fallout from the implosion of Ukraine's most famous game studio. From the largest triple-A developers to the smallest indie team, these are the people of the late GSC Game World and the games they're making after Stalker.


The survivors

Oleg Yavorsky started working at GSC in 2000, just a year before the first Stalker game entered development. More than 11 years later, the soft-spoken public relations manager was there for the end.

"[Grigorovich] just gathered us all up in the presentation hall," Yavorsky remembers. "He said, 'I have decided to stop Stalker 2 development. Goodbye.' ... It was a very short speech."

The staff of GSC was in total shock. People went back to their desks and stared dumbly at their monitors. There was silence for almost two hours.

The cruel irony is that the team had been looking forward to that Friday for weeks. It was supposed to be the first chance for the entire staff to learn about the Stalker 2 storyline. Yavorsky had even helped plan a small party, with pizza and drinks, intended to boost morale. The game had been in development for two years by that time, and layoffs and attrition had shrunk the staff from a high of nearly 200 to a core group of less than 50.

"We were all so passionate about Stalker 2. We were involved with it for two years. It was like a child that we were slowly raising, watching it grow up." Their last paychecks would arrive in February. After the Christmas break they would all be officially unemployed.
After Grigorovich left the building, Yavorsky went ahead with the presentation of Stalker 2 anyway. It was a bittersweet moment for the staff, who sat viewing a partial trailer that they knew would likely never see the light of day.

"We were all so passionate about Stalker 2," Yavorsky says. "We were involved with it for two years, and the Stalker series well before that, since 2001. It was like a child that we were slowly raising, watching it grow up."

After the presentation, not far from the cold pile of untouched pizza, Yavorsky and the rest of the middle management stood before their staff to discuss the two paths that lay before them. They could each go in separate directions, or they could band together and try to find another way, a way without Grigorovich and without GSC.

"In the end," Yavorsky says, "we decided to stick together."

GSC's remaining leaders worked as quickly as they could to contact publishers in Europe and North America, but because of the holidays no one would talk to them. With time working against them, they began to look for venture funding. It was their first experience trying to find capital, something in short supply in the former Soviet country.

"We went to local investors," Yavorsky says. "We went to Moscow to talk to people in Russia about potential funding, but ultimately we found problems because [Grigorovich] ... seemed to want to continue with the [Stalker] license [on his own]." Unable to come to an agreement over the intellectual property rights, the former staff of GSC resigned themselves to starting over from scratch, to building a new game world on their own.


Vostok


In Survarium, nature has risen up to reclaim the world.


Survarium's ruined schoolhouse

Yavorsky says that since most investors did not have enough money to fund the entire development process for a multi-platform game the size of Stalker 2, the team was forced to lower its ambition. It settled on a PC-based multiplayer shooter set in a post-apocalyptic world. Survarium would look much like Stalker, but play more like Call of Duty. To reach as wide an audience as possible the game would also be free-to-play up front.

After these modifications potential investors began to come forward.

"It was important to have a partner who was safe enough," Yavorsky says. "You [had] to be sure that, in the worst case scenario, if the game [didn't] work out, that funding partner wouldn't come to knock your head off or something. In the early '90s, after the collapse of the USSR, we really had those gangs around and it was a risky time."

Yavorsky laughs, deeply at first, and then swallows hard. "They could easily kill you."

The memory of that chaos, a period that Ukrainians call the "Wild '90s," was still fresh on the minds of his team members. They were cautious, thinking it better to disband than to take dirty money.

"We were very lucky," Yavorsky says. "By March of 2012 we met with guys from Vostok Ventures. We found that they were actually looking for a team like ours," he says. "It took us barely two weeks to reach the basic agreement."

Vostok Games was founded that month, and soon moved into its current location, an old industrial park in Kiev just a few minutes' walk from the former headquarters of GSC. The building, dating from the Soviet era, has been remodeled and looks new. Painted a cheerful pink, it stands out from the overgrown industrial lots that surround it. Inside the office Vostok's walls are bare. The conference room is empty, save for a few chairs. Yavorsky says that Polygon is among its first visitors, that until now the team hasn't had a reason to purchase a table for presentations.

But around the floor, more than 40 artists and programmers, the last remaining employees of GSC Game World, are sitting and working on Survarium. They're tapping away on modern computers with dual monitors, creating assets and designing levels. Currently in closed alpha, the game is being played by slightly more than 1,000 Eastern European players.

By the end of 2013 Vostok plans to open the game more broadly to other Russian-speaking countries. Morale is high, and Stalker fans seem excited to see what the team has in store for them. By the end of our visit Yavorsky was beaming, proud of all that he and the other former GSC leaders there have accomplished.

But his team is not the only band of survivors soldiering on after the collapse of GSC. In fact, it is only the most recent.


4A

A half-hour cab ride in Kiev costs about 40 Ukrainian grivna, or about $5. But 30 minutes is all it takes to travel from Vostok Games to the only other triple-A developer headquartered in Ukraine.

The offices of 4A Games are set behind an eight-foot concrete wall glazed with Cyrillic graffiti. An old man sits near a weathered gatehouse behind the entrance to the complex, and inside that wall he is surrounded by industrial debris and rusted chunks of Soviet-era trucks. Stray cats stalk the lot.

Amid the clutter, huddled inside a small gazebo perched atop cinder blocks, a few casually dressed smokers kill time after lunch. Beyond them an unmarked door leads into offices, where the men and women of 4A build a grim but popular series of first-person shooters. This is the home of the Metro series, including Metro: 2033 and Metro: Last Light.

Like at Vostok, nearly everyone at 4A is a refugee from GSC. The company was founded in 2006, after the first Stalker game was finished but before it was published in the West.

The owner of the studio is a short, powerful man named Andrew Prokhorov. The son of Ukrainian artists, he graduated university with a Ph.D. in aeronautical engineering. His boyhood dream was to one day design and sell beautiful aircraft based on his parents' paintings, but when the Soviet Union began to collapse in the 1980s his plans changed.

From 1991 to 1995, during his graduate work, he was employed by one government research center after another, earning a salary of less than $100 a month. He became interested in playing games, and began to teach himself computer graphics as a way to make money on the side. Soon after he discovered GSC Game World was hiring he said goodbye to aeronautics forever.

When Prokhorov came to GSC in 1996 it was only a loosely affiliated group of 15 people in a two-room apartment. The 26-year old Ph.D. was interviewed by their leader, a then-16-year-old Grigorovich.

"It was like a crazy house," Prokhorov says, but the work was intoxicating and the pay was marginally better than what he was receiving from the government.

Throughout the early 2000s, as GSC grew larger on the sales of Cossacks games, Prokhorov and others began to resent how the company's earnings all seemed to go to Grigorovich. Their CEO had stated many times that Cossacks earned the company more than $100 million, but Prokhorov says the wages of average employees remained comically low.

In 2005, six years into the development of the first Stalker, GSC employed 140 people. Prokhorov says that in the parking lot there were only four cars. Three of them belonged to Grigorovich: a BMW X5, a Porshe Cayenne and a Ferarri F430 with plates that read "Stalker."

The fourth car was a second-hand beater owned by one of GSC's programmers. One hundred forty people worked for Grigorovich, with only one car among them. There is anger, disgust even, in Prokhorov's voice as he tells the story.

Eventually, after a falling out with Grigorovich over wages in 2006, Prokhorov and two lead programmers left the company to found 4A. After the first Stalker was published in 2007, Prokhorov says that Grigorovich fired the entire art department at GSC. Nearly all of them came to work for 4A.

"We decided to make [4A] a firm where the first priority will not be money, but people," Prokhorov tells Polygon. "We pride ourselves on having created a good team. Because if you have a good team, sooner or later you'll earn the money. ... Most of our people own a car." On the day Polygon visited there were perhaps a dozen cars in 4A's main lot, a black luxury BMW among them. The average level of games industry experience at 4A is 10 years. Prokhorov puffs out his chest as he talks about his team, proud of its expertise, its perseverance and how far it's come since leaving GSC seven years ago en masse. Last Light survived the bankruptcy of its publisher, THQ, and has gone on to sell more than the original Metro title.

The only challenge left to Prokhorov is finding enough people to help his studio grow. He says his darkest moments come during those rare instances when employees leave, because there is no one in Kiev with enough experience or the right skillset to replace them.




Humans must answer

When companies like 4A and Vostok Games look for talent, they are ultimately drawing from the dozens of independent studios now popping up in and around Kiev. For that reason Prokhorov and nine other industry leaders spoke at Kiev Games Night this past April.
The event, organized by Russian journalist–turned–business developer Sergei Klimov, was billed as an opportunity to network, a way for aspiring developers to learn the secrets of the trade. But in reality it was a stage for the big developers in Kiev to promote themselves as good places to work.

More than 250 people packed the tiny coffee shop in Kiev, while half as many more were turned away. Most were doing work in the mobile space, but one team in attendance was nearly finished with its first PC game.

SumomGames is composed of two men, Denis Matveenko and Evgeny Yatsuk, formerly playtesters at GSC. They left their jobs in July 2011 to become independent game developers, just five months before GSC closed down.

Yatsuk is 30 years old. He graduated from university in 2007 with a degree in technical physics. His area of study was electro-optical devices, like infrared motion scanners and CCDs. Unable to find work in his specialty, he took a job as a playtester and eventually came to GSC.

Today he lives with his mother, father and grandmother in an apartment the family was given by the Soviet government after World War II. A similar apartment, he says, would cost him more than $1,000 a month to rent.

Yatsuk never made more than $900 a month working at GSC.

Matveenko is in his 20s and dropped out of college in the mid-2000s. He wanted to study computer programming, but found the materials and instruction at his public university to be more than 20 years out of date. Before working at GSC he dabbled in eSports. As a member of the Kiev-based Defense of the Ancients team Explosiv, he placed first in Ukraine and fourth in Russia, but gave it all up in order to make games with Yatsuk full time.

Their shoot 'em up (SHMUP), called Humans Must Answer, is the first Ukrainian game funded through Kickstarter. With the help of a partner in England, they launched a campaign in March that closed the same day as Kiev Games Night: April 12, 2013. The men earned 5,519 British pounds.

They would use the majority of that money to pay for their living expenses over the next four months.

Matveenko's one-bedroom apartment is the closest thing Sumom has to an office. His building, which overlooks Kiev's busy Industrial Highway, is a five-story structure dating back to the 1950s or earlier. In the entryway, which is painted a dark military green, the lights are broken. The remains of some hasty rewiring tumble from an open junction box near the ceiling.


Denis Matveenko and Evgeny Yatsuk

Outside, in the rain, Matveenko's neighbor is picking greens from between sections of broken sidewalk. She is washing them in the stream of water falling from her umbrella and handing them to her son, no more than 8 years old, who dutifully places them in a plastic bag. These greens will be part of tonight's dinner.

Inside, at a desk pressed up against a dirty blue wall, Matveenko is using a pirated copy of Photoshop to make a SHMUP that is reminiscent of the 1987 classic R-Type but with chickens. It seems absurd, but in reality this type of entrepreneurship is desperately needed in Ukraine, and the skills Sumom is learning are invaluable in creating the next generation of Ukrainian game developers.
"We want to make a SHMUP," Yatsuk says, "but with some additional elements that haven't been seen in other SHMUPS, including weapon combinations and tower defense elements."

"There are many damage types and armor types," Matveenko quickly adds. "There are many different combinations." Their enthusiasm is contagious.

While Yatsuk paces off his nervous energy, moving the length of the tiny apartment, Matveenko shows off their compiler, which takes the easily manipulated Photoshop files and converts them into game code. By altering the image they can build spectacular levels, filled with secret passages and intelligent enemies. It is a good place to begin, but they admit they have a long way to go to learn how modern games are made. For them, this is just the first step.

Humans Must Answer was released in July. So far Sumom has sold a little more than 1,300 copies. That's including the 372 copies it gave away to donors of its Kickstarter.

For Matveenko and Yatsuk, it's not about sales numbers or profits. It's about the act of creation. SumomGames has begun working on its second title. It will not be a SHMUP.

"If [our first game is] not very popular it's no matter to us," Yatsuk says. "We can do this! We made this! It's very important for us. ... It means that, for the first time, we achieved something.

"It's more important to us than finishing high school, or finishing university," he says. "It's about making something."


Anmerkung: Ich empfehle euch unbedingt den Originalartikel auf Polygon zu lesen, da er noch einige Zusatzabsätze und zusätzliche Medien enthält. Außerdem solltet ihr Polygon für den Artikel einen Klick spendieren.

Quelle: Stalker fallout: Polygon traces the exodus from Kiev's legendary GSC Game World | Polygon

 

[LordCrash]

Game devs ditching mobile in favor of PC, console?

By James Brightman Tue 24 Sep 2013 2:11pm GMT / 10:11am EDT / 7:11am PDT



“I wouldn't touch mobile with a ten foot pole” - we chat with several devs about the challenging mobile market

The mobile and tablet market has grown tremendously in the last several years. The number of apps on Apple's App Store and Google Play is downright mind boggling, and if you're an app developer... well, best of luck to you. As the new survey from App Developer Conference organizers revealed this week, piracy and discoverability are making it incredibly hard to succeed. Nearly half of the app developers surveyed made no profit at all.

So the question has to be asked: after years of flocking to mobile, are developers actually retreating to the PC and console space? Devs GamesIndustry International spoke with were torn on this, but none would deny the massive challenges of developing apps today.

"I speak with lots of mobile devs regularly and most are moving away or at least thinking of it, either to other platforms or out of the trade completely," Paul Johnson, managing director and co-founder of Rubicon, told us. "Having to give your game away for 69 cents a throw (after Apple's and Google's cut) and then competing with 1000 new apps each day is hardly a draw for anybody. We've reached a point now where even those slow on the uptake have realized the goldrush is over. It's actually been over for a few years."

Jeffrey Lim, producer, Wicked Dog Games, agreed: "The mobile space offers certain advantages, like having the largest customer base and relatively low development costs. However, there's no doubt it is getting harder to be profitable with the ongoing piracy and discoverability issues."

"So yes, we do think developers (especially indies) are considering going back to develop for the PC - and even game consoles. The cost of self-publishing on these platforms has dropped significantly, and console makers are also making their platforms more indie-friendly now," he added, alluding to efforts on next-gen systems like Sony's PS4.

Chillingo COO Ed Rumley isn't quite of the same mind as Johnson and Lim, but as a publisher, Chillingo has noticed that too many developers simply are failing to make high quality games, so it's no wonder that their titles are being ignored.

"The number of games being submitted is growing, as is the number of developers contacting us. I'm not sure if some are being scared away, but we know from experience that some developers underestimate the time and quality it takes to make it in mobile now.

Consumers are a savvy bunch and spot second rate games a mile off. You can't just knock something together in your spare time, upload it and wait for the money to roll in anymore," he warned.

Michael Schade, CEO, Fishlabs Entertainment, acknowledged the big challenge in mobile, but he doesn't think developers are going to have to look elsewhere.

"Sure, mobile's not an easy market to breach into, but then again, which market really is? No matter what business you're in or what product you're trying to sell, you'll always have to work hard to gain your ground and make a name for yourself," he noted. "So that alone shouldn't scare you away from mobile, especially when you keep in mind that no other platform in the history of digital entertainment has ever evolved faster and born more potential than mobile! With more than a billion smart connected devices in use and hardware capabilities on par with current-gen gaming consoles, today's smartphones and tablets constitute by far the most widespread, frequently used and innovative gaming platform the world has ever seen."

Schade also remarked that the last few years of veteran developers getting into the mobile scene has made things more difficult. "The fact that more and more established PC and console veterans open new mobile gaming studios and more and more traditional publishers port their titles to iOS and Android, doesn't make it easier for one particular company or product to stick out. But that's not necessarily a bad thing, as it clearly shows that the trend goes towards mobile, rather than away from it," he said.

For every developer we spoke with, the discoverability issue reared its ugly head. There's no doubt that this is a major concern. While building a high quality game can help, it's simply not enough. In the world of apps, you cannot let the game do the talking for you.

"I think many developers have the misconception that it's simply enough to release the game and let it speak for itself. They underestimate the importance of a marketing/PR campaign leading up to the game's launch," Lim stressed. "As a result their games fail commercially; not because of the quality, but due to lack of visibility. Hence the marketing/PR campaign should be seen as an integral part of the game's development. An appropriate portion of the overall budget and effort should be allocated to increasing the game's visibility, and if developers do not have the experience or time in marketing/PR they should consider hiring professionals in this area to lend a hand."

Gree vice president of marketing Sho Masuda concurred that marketing is becoming crucial to mobile success. "They have to spend more time thinking about marketing and post-launch efforts in addition to building the the games. Fortunately, there are a lot of tools and services available for devs of all sizes to ensure that they can get the direction and support they need in these areas. Additionally, the mobile dev community is a very, very tight knit community and there is an amazing level of information sharing and support," he said. "We encourage mobile devs of all sizes to talk to their peers, take advantage of all the meet-ups and events, and get to know all the services available to help get eyeballs on their games."

A number of devs also believe that platform holders have a larger responsibility that they've been shirking so far. "For platform holders (e.g. Apple's App Store), they can start to curate apps released on their store because there are too many clones of existing games that are taking up the traffic. They could attempt something like Steam Greenlight; although it is still an imperfect system, it's better than not having any curation at all," Lim commented.

Paul Johnson agreed, telling us that he'd really like platform holders to have a much more active role, as the discoverability issue has "about reached terminal" for unknown devs.

"If Apple don't pick your game out for a feature, and you can't drum up enough interest before launch yourself, then I'd say you're pretty much screwed. It doesn't matter how good your game is if nobody ever sees it and downloads it. They can't tell their friends about something they themselves don't know about!" he stated.


If Apple spotlights your game, you're golden

"The only thing I think the platform holders could do to help is stop allowing crap to be released. There's only so much space for features and the end users only have so much effort in them to look under all the categories all the time, so I really don't think adding more of them would help much. Maybe more apps for shorter times, but this is all a drop in the ocean really."

"The one thing I've come up with that would make a real difference is for the platform owners to charge five grand for a developer license. All the utter crap would disappear and there'd be less apps fighting for space," he continued. "And the end-users wouldn't have to waste time downloading the crap as nobody who makes stuff they don't believe in would dream of fronting that license fee. It's Draconian but it's really the only thing I can see having any noticeable effect. Anything else is just lip service."

Discoverability issues aside, another major - and possibly growing - problem for devs to contend with is piracy. The App Developer Conference survey showed that 26 percent of devs had their apps pirated and a similar amount even had in-app purchases stolen.

James Vaughan told us, "Plague Inc. has a piracy rate of about 30-35 percent, which equals millions and millions of copies, but I don't consider piracy to be a problem; it is simply a fact of life and I don't get too worked up about it. Piracy is a byproduct of success and I choose to focus on the success which has resulted in piracy rather than the piracy itself. (The best way to stop your game from being pirated is to make a crap game!) I focus on continually improving and updating Plague Inc. which makes the game even more valuable to the people who have brought it (and encourages pirates to buy it as well)."

For those devs who actually do lose sleep over piracy, there are some ways to combat it, Lim said.

"There's no question that piracy is prevalent, and I think it will continue to be so for a long time to come. In fact, with high-speed Internet access and the wide spread use of file-sharing software nowadays I think this problem is going to get worse," he observed.

"The first way to deal with piracy is to implement the appropriate business model, and I think free-to-download with micro-transactions is the right way to go. Making the game free for download can work to our advantage; it allows us to reach out a larger customer base. And if players are hooked by the game, they can be enticed to buy additional high-quality content for a minimal price."

"The second way would be to build a strong rapport with our customers - e.g. through frequent interactions on social media, events or even email. Developers of notable games (e.g. Hotline Miami and Game Dev Tycoon) have addressed piracy in this manner. By having a loyal customer base which is appreciative of our efforts in delivering quality content, they would empathize with us and be more willing to pay for the games in support of our development efforts."

The good news for iOS devs, at least according to Schade, is that Apple's store is less prone to piracy. "Having lived through the 'dark ages' of Java and made it out of there with two black eyes rather than one, piracy has been a very delicate topic for us at Fishlabs ever since. Based on our own experience, however, it is not as much of an issue on the App Store as it is on other platforms," he noted. "I guess that's mostly because Apple still has a lot of 'premium' customers willing to pay for high-quality content. Of course, we're well aware of the fact that neither the closed iOS environment nor the Free-2-Play model will ever be able to eradicate software piracy entirely, but at least they are doing a comparatively good job at containing it as good as possible."

If developers can effectively navigate the problems of discoverability and piracy, there's no doubt that the potential is massive. One look at the overwhelming success of Angry Birds, Temple Run, Clash of Clans and others proves what's possible. But for the vast, vast majority of devs, that's a pipe dream.

"From the consumer angle, it's a golden age. The amount of good quality games that can be bought for laughable prices is fantastic and there's a ton of money being spent on this platform as a result. The problem for developers is that each individual cut is tiny. This isn't even remotely sustainable and I don't know what the future is going to look like. If I was starting again now from a blank slate, without an existing fan base, I wouldn't touch mobile with a ten foot pole," said Johnson.

Quelle: Game devs ditching mobile in favor of PC, console? | GamesIndustry International

 

[LordCrash]

VIDEO AND CABIN FEVER

Filed in Developers' diary by Dan @ 9:26 am UTC Sep 27, 2013


An image from our storyboard, this one was not drawn by me

A strict deadline for all things to come together invariably leads to “funny” situations. You may for example have fully functional pathfinding and a completely operational crafting minigame and when combined into a single whole, both will stop working for some unfathomable reason. The likeness of that happening increases with the number of systems that are being joined together, as a result, when everything is merged, nothing works.

It goes without saying that the bar goes up as well. You stop overlooking “tiny” glitches like clipping (graphics that vanish when they get too close to camera) in combat. It didn’t bother anybody so far, everyone was happy that it’s possible to fight at all and we saw superficial stuff, like two weapons intersecting each other, as something to be fixed later. But when you show the game to somebody, the clipping and the weapons intersecting each other are the first things they’re going to notice in combat. It doesn’t matter that no other game ever had combat like this: it flickers and looks unfinished, so it must be rubbish.

And when you try to fix those things, you learn that you need a new version of the engine that’s going to be released in a month, i.e. about a week too late for your demo. And what now? You have to start hacking. Doing that, the enemy AI starts to behave strangely and you come a long way on your downward spiral. People get nervous and start quarrelling. So besides being nervous yourself, being a boss, you have to be a company shrink for the rest of the team to put their minds at ease.

PIECE OF CAKE

In our case the catalyst of the tension was the video. We decided to go beyond a mere collection of in-game shots and top it off with an action-packed intro outlining the plot of our game. At the same time, we didn’t want the video to be too difficult to make. I wrote the screenplay several months ago, the animations were mostly recorded in the motion capture session, and we didn’t forget about voiceovers – so it was going to be a piece of cake. Not completely…

We discussed our options for putting it all together with respect to our time and resources, I drew a simple storyboard and artists as well as animators set out to work. We have good artists and animators and so I was pretty sure everything was going to turn out well and went on with my PowerPoint wizardry. When I saw the first draft shots in a few days, I was aghast. “This doesn’t look next-gen, guys!” “Why? It’s exactly as you wanted it!” “But the lighting is all weird and the shots are too long and boring.” “The shots are exactly as they are in the storyboard!” “That may be so, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t cut a long shot with a different one. It just didn’t occur to me when I was drawing it!” “But I did it exactly the way you wanted it!” “All right, but can’t we re-cut it somehow? And we should do something with the lighting, it looks like a faded video…” “I like it the way it is…” “But if we re-cut it, it’s definitely going to be better. Can you please do it?” “I don’t know how, so either tell me exactly how to do it or you can do it yourself…” And the atmosphere around the office grows thicker. Opinions differ occasionally and somebody has to make a decision (by virtue of my position it should be me), somebody is bound to disagree completely and, unwittingly, a conflict is born. I have lot of experience with that, I used to be a ruthless angry boss riding roughshod over other people’s feelings to get what I wanted. This can be a good short-term strategy or it may work under some very special circumstances, but it’s counterproductive from the long-term perspective. So I try to do the exact opposite now: getting reasonable, consensual people that are good at what they’re doing. It makes for fewer opportunities to get angry, but from time to time it just doesn’t work anyway.

IT’S TOTALLY CLEAR! IS IT?

Sometimes the root of a disagreement is a simple misunderstanding. I have a very specific idea how a thing should look, I explain it as best I can, I make pictures, supply photos of how it should look but the other party understands it in their own way and as a result, when they deliver what is, from their viewpoint perfect work, they feel understandably irritated when I have a feeling that they created something completely different from what we agreed upon. This is ‘wrong’.


An image from our storyboard, this one is the work of the master.

In this situation it always boils down to how specific the original idea was and how to approach a different (not necessarily worse) result. Once I showed the artists a shot from an older movie and noticed that I like its lighting and colors. However, I didn’t make myself clear enough and the result was almost the exact opposite of what I wanted. The artist thought I was pulling his leg and I felt exactly the same way about him. It would have been enough, though, to specify the OBJECT in that shot the color of which I liked, instead of saying I LIKE THE COLOR OF THIS SHOT.

Things like that cannot be avoided with creative work like making videogames. You can limit it somewhat by making very detailed specifications, but this will make the creative people feel they have no freedom, they won’t like what they’re doing, will deliver poorer results and finally leave the company for a place that would allow them to express themselves better. Or you can give your colleagues just a rough sketch and leave the rest to their creativity. The result can be something so awesome you wouldn’t be able to dream about it much less to describe it, because your artist is understandably much better at what he’s doing than you are and his work will be better than your idea. Or the exact opposite happens and the result is something quite unutterable, because the artist, genius as he may be, did not understand your idea at all and went off on some weird tangent. When this happens, you have to have him redo it and this will probably anger him more than a too strict specification would have.

ALL IS WELL THAT ENDS WELL

Every person feels about these things differently. Somebody pedantically sticks to strict specification, somebody else hates it and want to have his hands freed (but this only works if his tastes are similar to yours). And then there are people who are very good craftsmen that would be appalled if something inventive is asked of them.

A good creative boss has to know the best way to approach somebody. You hear stories about film directors that purposefully make actors angry so that they look authentic on camera, send them to military boot camp, avoid talking to them or use other manipulative techniques. However, developers are not actors, game development takes much longer than actual movie shooting, and you want to avoid violent confrontation, so it’s better to eschew some methods.

Finally my colleagues made the video as they saw fit, I re-cut it a bit, everybody had to swallow some pride and everything ended well. Save for me cutting the video at 11pm with our plane leaving in the morning.

That’s how it goes when you work in a company that does video game development instead of video editing and one day you need to edit a video. You download all kinds of freeware to convert video from one format into another, desperately try to find a codec where it would look best and would work for everybody. Finally, everything was ok and the video (or rather several videos) was here. We had a trailer, five-minute overview of all the game’s features and a thirty minute complete play-through of the whole prototype.

In the meantime Viktor & Co. were desperately fixing the build that started to break down on its own as usual. We changed the ugly beard of one character for a nicer one and an apple that the character was looking at suddenly disappeared. A journeymen in a forge stopped working the bellows (he probably went on strike) and the riders that were supposed to gallop past the player in the opening scene sometimes rode, sometimes walked and sometimes didn’t move at all. We were also fixing our automated camera system. For several months I ‘didn’t have time’ to show the programmers how to set cameras and so I ‘did it’ just before leaving and at the very last moment we were dealing with stuff like viewing angles, depth of field and camera placing. Fortunately, we were successful.

Late at night we copied all of it onto a flash drive and our demonstration unit and went home, where I stayed up till four packing my stuff for our dainty three week roadshow. But that’s another story.

Dan Vavra, Creative Director

Quelle: Warhorse studios: BLOG

 

[LordCrash]

An important lesson

Posted on September 18, 2013 by Swen Vincke, Larian Studios

I have these little notebooks in which I write down my thoughts. Every day I fill a couple of pages with new observations, questions and decisions. Whenever a notebook is full, I put it in a drawer, there to stay until the drawer is full at which point I empty the drawer, and put the notebooks in a box. I really don’t know why I bother with it, because I rarely read what I wrote, but I guess it helps me organise my thoughts. It also makes it look like I’m paying attention in meetings I’m not particularly interested in.

If you’d take the notebook that says January 2013, you’d see that I listed as major tasks for 2013, the organising Divinity: Original Sin’s kickstarter, releasing Dragon Commander and releasing Divinity: Original Sin. At that time, I only had hopes and aspirations and I really didn’t have a clue whether or not my plans were going to work.

Taking risks is of course part of the metier of running a game development studio, and there’s only that much that you can do to cover your bets. You know certain things will go wrong, you hope more things will go right. So last night, I started thinking about how we were doing compared to what I hoped for at the start of 2013…

Well, pretty good actually.

If I look at where Larian stands today, I can’t say that I’m unhappy about how 2013 unfolded so far and I think it’s safe to say that more things went right than wrong. Our Kickstarter campaign beat expectations, Dragon Commander outsold Dragon Knight Saga 3 to 1 in its first month and will be profitable, and a surprising amount of people reported that they had fun playing the game. Sure, things could even be better, but considering some of the environmental parameters we encountered, I’m definitely not going to complain.

But that is already in the past and I really have no time to linger as there’s plenty of work ahead of me. My next job is to finish and release Divinity Original Sin, something that given the scope of the game will be quite an undertaking. In a way it’s the one task I’m the most nervous about, probably because I have the feeling that that’s the game where our players expect the most from us. I also know that considering the many opportunties I’ll get, chances are high that I’ll make some judgement error in the coming months that’ll hurt the game. I can only hope the damage won’t be to big.

My activities last night were part of an introspective exercise with the aim of avoiding making mistakes made in the past, and so I started taking stock of what went wrong on Dragon Commander and specifically, what problems were caused specifically by decisions I made. Of course, looking at failures in past performance carries with it the risk of sounding too negative, so I do want to make a point of saying that I don’t think we botched up the release of Dragon Commander too much, and I’m quite proud of what we created. I think there was a lot that went right and if I talk a lot about errors and mistakes in the next paragraphs, then it’s because I believe good ends when it stops improving.

Looking at how I personally handled the self-publishing part of our business, if anything, I think my biggest mistake was that I let weaker sales channels or markets affect our development flexibility at the expense of the better sales channels and bigger markets. I’m mostly talking about the retail portion of our release here, though the lesson is applicable to other channels/markets too, such as territories with a low amount of paying players but complicated localization needs. It really doesn’t pay to spend most of your resources on markets where you’ll gain the least, especially if your resources are limited. That may sound obvious to you, but it wasn’t that obvious to me in the run up to the release of our latest game, and it cost us.

For Dragon Commander, at present digital sales make up 85% of our revenu and retail only represents 15%. If you take into account that the digital lifecycle of a game is a lot longer than its retail counterpart, and also a bit more profitable, then numbers like this tell the entire picture – if you have to choose where to put your effort, put it in the digital side. The mistake I made was that I had our studio do pretty much the opposite of that, for all the wrong reasons. As a consequence, a large portion of our publishing investments were done in the retail side of things and that automatically meant that certain digital opportunities were lost, because obviously, we couldn’t do everything. That wasn’t such a clever move.

I guess the thing I regret the most about my misplaced belief in retail was that I let it affect our flexibility so much. Small teams like us gain part of their competitive advantage from our ability to quickly make changes when needed, and I feel I was a fool for manouvering ourselves into a position that handicapped this flexibility.

For a variety of good and bad reasons, we ended up crunching for two months to get everything ready, and during that period we really could’ve done without the constraints of a retail release. I’m sure that had we not been locked into a fixed street date, we could’ve gained a few extra points in our review scores, because we wouldn’t have had to make some last minute compromises. PC Gamer gave it 85%, Gamespot 8/10 and IGN 78%. Obviously it’s the 78% that hurt.

I was of course aware of the risks we were taking when the release date was set a few months before, the biggest risk being that we were still developing. Still, I thought we could manage, and to ensure there was some extra buffer time, decided to make the retail box Steam activated. That way we could have a day 1 patch which everybody would get, meaning that we could continue developing until the very end, instead of until the day the gold master was delivered to the factory. But while that worked to a certain extent, we still had to make more compromises than I wanted to.

There’s a lot of preparation involved in a retail release, especially if you’re launching in multiple countries, and in a small team like ours where the same people wear many hats, a retail release problem popping up automatically means key developers will be affected.

A good example of this is what happened to our translation system. The timelines involved in localizing a game with 200K words and full voice acting with facial capturing on top necessarily require several months of localization. Spread that over multiple languages, and you have a compicated process. It’s already hard when you have a all the source assets in place, but it’s even harder if you’re still developing and the text that is being translated is prone to change.Because we were running late, this was the case for Dragon Commander, so we knew there were going to be some casualties. Still I reasoned, better that than stop making improvements to the game. We had come prepared for this eventuality, having invested significant resources into developing a new and fancy well-functioning localisation system that could deal with incremental versions of a localisation kit, presumably without a hitch.

Yeah,right.

The problem was that our new system had only been demonstrated to work with test data, and well argumented theory, and that the programmer responsible had since left for the competition. In real life, the localisation system failed miserably, and of course it only started doing that when we only had a few weeks left. Life suddenly became very complicated, the nights became even longer and a lot of much-needed time was lost fixing this particular problem. It was seriously bad and if it hadn’t been for the fixed retail release dates, I would’ve postponed the game with a few weeks right there. Or at the very least, I’d have released the English version first and let the other languages follow later. But I couldn’t make those kind of decisions anymore because of the retail agreements we had, and so several lead developers had to scramble to get things sorted out. That of course made them lose time in other domains which were desperate for attention too, and inevitably it meant that certain things weren’t done or only half-done. A real pity.

I realize the core problem here was that the system didn’t work and that the localisation had to start when we weren’t ready with development yet, but these are the kinds of things that happen in any complicated production, and at times like that, you really want to have as much flexibility as possible.Being locked in prevented me from taking the decision that was the best for the game, and it was quite frustrating.

A similar thing happened because we chose to release on different digital channels. Here the problem was that our multiplayer layer used Steamworks for matchmaking and lobby creation, and that we didn’t have any really good alternatives for players on other platforms. (We actually thought we’d have them but that didn’t work out). I completely mismanaged this part, even if we did spend a lot of effort on it, and in hindsight I think we’d have been better off just releasing on Steam, and then deal with the other platforms later. That could’ve avoided a lot of unnecessary frustration and allowed us to focus on the core release, which a Steam release is in the modern day PC market.

As I continued to review things that went wrong on the publishing side and that affected development, I found that the common pattern was that most of them were inspired by the different requirements of the different sales channels. Things like separate builds, different feature requirements, special DLC packages etc… I seriously underestimated the impact of this on our development, and I should’ve been more alert when initially agreeing to certain things. Funnily enough this is of course the very thing that I always cursed publishers for, so I guess a few apologies are in order here and there.

Like them I found myself sending out review code to magazines, even if the game wasn’t ready for review, pumping money in ads just to convince retail buyers that there’s a market for the game and limiting the size of a day 1 patch because I didn’t want retail buyers to have to downoad gigabytes and gigabytes. Oh oh oh , what I have become!

Of course, every time there were logical reasons for all of this, but in hindsight, they were not good enough reasons. I should’ve guarded development more than I did because after a while, the only thing players remember is the quality of the game, not who released it or how it was released. At least, that’s what I remember when I think of a game.

So yes, I discovered a few interesting lessons.

The most important one for me was that in the future I’ll try to only commit to a release date when the game is actually done. Not if it’s 85% done or even 95% done, but only when really, it’s done. As in, ready to be released. It doesn’t matter if that release date is inconvenient – the lifecycle of games is now much longer than it used to be, and there are ways around inconvenient release dates.
In case we find ourselves in a case again where we have to release, which I guess will be more than often the case, then at the very least I’ll play hardball when it comes to guarding our flexibility and refuse anything that’s not focussed on our core release or our core release channels.Fragmentation over different channels cost us too much time and we didn’t gain that much from it. On the contrary, if we had focussed on our primary channels and disregarded the secondary ones, we could probably have improved things here and there.

So to conclude, as I said, this may all sound obvious to you, but in the heat of battle, it really wasn’t to me. The thing I wrote in my notebook therefore was exactly what you’d expect after reading this entry: When in doubt, finish the game first, then think about releasing it. If that’s impossible, focus on where it matters, and refuse all the rest, no matter how tempting.

If that’s wise or not, I don’t know, the future will tell. I know several developers or publishers who make quite a lot of money by being on every platform they can think of, so I might be wrong, or it may really depend on the game, team and release path. It in any case seems to be the most sensible thing I could distill from my experiences of the past months and so it’s shaping my thoughts. I’ll let you know how it works out for us.

Quelle: An important lesson | Swen Vincke @ Larian Studios

 

[LordCrash]

Going it alone: Adventures in self-publishing

October 4, 2013 | By Mike Rose



Double Fine has seen both sides of the video game publishing coin. The studio originally had titles like Psychonauts, Brutal Legend and Costume Quest distributed by a variety of publishers, and while this worked out reasonably for the company, there was always the thought that going down a DIY route could work wonders.

With the release of its Broken Age Kickstarter, Double Fine stuck a longsword deep into the belly of the traditional publishing beast, and went it alone -- well, "alone" meaning "with tens of thousands of Kickstarter backers," of course... and for the most part, the company isn't looking back.

"For the most part, I think the traditional publishing model for third party development is dead," says Justin Bailey, vice president of business development at Double Fine.

"The days where you take a paper pitch for a console game to a traditional publisher and walk away with $10+ million are effectively over, and have been for a couple of years now," he continues. "Very, very few publishers are spending that kind of cash on outside development, and the value added service they used to provide, such as retail shelf space, dev units, console access, and marketing budgets, have become either irrelevant or inconsequential."

Bailey is quick to point out that there are still a number of publishers adapting well to the shift, and are developing new ways to add value for developers.

"For those publishers, I'd say we are still very much interested in partnering with them, but at least a part of our studio will always be working on self-published games - I don't see that changing," he notes.When should you self-publish?

Since Double Fine has experience on both sides of the fence, I ask Bailey when smaller studios should be considering self-publishing, rather than using a publisher for their games.

"It's definitely a complicated decision with many far reaching implications," he muses. "The answer to that question relies upon the answer to many other questions, such as will the game need external financing? What is the business model? What's the best distribution model? Etc."

He adds, "If you have an alpha-funded or crowd-funded game, the success of those models usually revolve around effectively engaging and leveraging your supporters. In these cases, the developer needs to stay as close to the community as possible and therefore self-publishing is preferable if not required."



But if a developer is working on a free-to-play mobile or online game, Bailey believes that using an outside publisher is probably a good idea.

"There's a whole slew of things that those types of publishers do that have nothing to do with game development, and quite frankly are not things a game dev is likely to enjoy or be successful at by figuring it out as they go," he reasons.

Another point to consider: Do you have any experience or interest in all of the traditional publishing elements, such as QA, localization, distribution and so forth? If not, you've got another reason to consider a publisher.

"Unfortunately, one of the current challenges is that there's not a 'one-size-fits-all' publisher, so many of these functions usually come as a packaged deal," Bailey says. "And part of the package, especially if there's financing involved, will require a dev to give up some creative control."

For Double Fine, the self-publishing model has fit in with its development style perfectly. "Frankly, we relish being closer to our community and being as transparent with our supporters as possible," Bailey tells me. "And that transparency has paid off in a very surprising way, such as our community serving as de facto good will ambassadors for the studio."

Conversely, Double Fine has found that it needs to be a lot more disciplined as an outfit. Without review milestones put forward by a publisher, the studio is having to create its own targets and goals.

"Since we're the publisher now, we have to ask the hard questions of ourselves, and ultimately it's more stressful because we feel a deep seeded accountability to the fans that helped make these games possible," he notes."You're entering a very mature arms race, and if you don't have a significant war chest, you're going to get your ass handed to you."

Of course, the best thing about self-publishing versus the traditional publisher model is that you have complete creative freedom over whatever you are creating, and you can easily bring in community feedback whenever you like.

"When we solicit feedback from our community during development, we have the ability to directly incorporate it into our game designs," Bailey explains. "This type of interaction has already occurred with Broken Age and Massive Chalice, and it's almost like the rush that a band gets from putting on live shows, where the fans excitement ends up driving the team to greater and greater heights."

When it comes to self-publishing, there are certain situations in which Bailey would rather not find his company dealing.

"I'd say don't spend money on traditional marketing and customer acquisition," he says. "When you play that game, you're entering a very mature arms race, and if you don't have a significant war chest, you're going to get your ass handed to you."

"Instead, do the things that come naturally - build a grass roots community and spend a lot of time cultivating it. Concentrate on your games' quality so that there's potential for great word-of-mouth buzz when it gets released."

He also recommends partnering up with other developers, and helping each studio out as much as possible. "Disintermediation has created a lot of opportunities for developer to self-publish," he adds, "but it's also created many issues around discoverability - so take every advantage you can. Maybe even partner with a veteran developer who's done it before and who can show you the ropes."Renegades of self-publishing

Renegade Kid is another studio that has worked with publishers and self-published. Before Jools Watsham started up his own studio, he worked at Iguana/Acclaim for around 13 years, where all the titles he contributed to had a publisher.

"It was a good experience, but it took me and my friends and colleagues through many highs and many lows," he explains. "It was quite a ride. Quite chaotic, really."

"The day we started Renegade Kid... I felt a huge sense of relief and excitement to have the opportunity to make games for the right reasons, and not to be steered by people who - in my opinion - did not base their decisions on what's best for the game and player."

The first five years of Renegade Kid saw Watsham and co. working with publishers, to release original IP like Dementium: The Ward and Moon, both on Nintendo DS.

"This was certainly a step up from what I experienced at Acclaim, and we thoroughly enjoyed and appreciated the experiences," he notes. "But when compared to having ultimate freedom - as we did with Mutant Mudds - it was still very much tainted in many ways."

Renegade Kid finally moved into self-publishing in 2012, when the studio made the switch from Nintendo DS to 3DS. The aforementioned Mutant Mudds was the first big self-publishing hit for the company, and Watsham says, "it changed everything for us."



"The development of the game was a joy," he adds, "despite it being a project we crammed in on the side while we developed games for money during the day. And, to have the game be received as well as it has been is more than a dream come true."

Now Renegade Kid plans to stick with self-publishing, and has done so with further titles like Planet Crashers and the upcoming Mutant Mudds sequel. Yet Watsham says he is not against working with publishers again at some point.

"It just has to be for the right reasons and under respectful conditions on both sides," he notes. "It should be a partnership, not a parent-child relationship.""I think what's most important is trying to determine what's going to make you and your team happy."

With Watsham's path to self-publishing in mind, I ask him when a new studio looking to release its first game should consider self-publishing over the traditional publisher model.

"I think what's most important is trying to determine what's going to make you and your team happy," he answers. "What is the most important thing you wish to accomplish by making your game? Is it success, sales, and so on? Perhaps it is artistic expression? Or, maybe it is just the desire to create fun?"

Once you're 100 percent clear on what that important element is, you'll be in a much better frame of mind for deciding how to guide your game through the publishing process.

"Something I firmly believe in is that one of the biggest risks of all can be taking no risks at all," Watsham says. "Be bold. Have fun. Tomorrow won't make it any easier. Just do it today. These are all very cliche, I know, but they are also very true. The trick is to believe in them, and truly understand why you believe in them."

And what about those studios that have decided self-publishing is the correct route for them? Are there are obvious dos and don'ts to be aware of?

"No, I don't think so," Watsham tells me. "Everyone and every game is so different that in today's crazy market anything goes really."

That being said, he's keen to stress that your studio's image can be extremely important in today's connected world, thanks to social media like Twitter and Facebook.

"I don't necessarily think anyone should censor themselves, but you should be mindful of the fact that a press website can take anything you say and turn it into a headline," he notes. "That can be both in your favor and harshly against your favor. Boosting sales and crippling them accordingly."

"How you connect with your audience, and how you respond to individual's questions is something you will encounter if your game is successful," he says. "It is important to at least take a moment and think about how you - and your company - want to be perceived by the public, and live with that decision."When a publisher doesn't make sense anymore

Adam Saltsman is another developer who has seen it all. Along with his studio Semi-Secret Software, Saltsman has worked on self-published games (Hundreds, Canabalt), licensed games (Hunger Games: Girl on Fire) and many more.

His thoughts on the publishing vs. self-publishing divide are blunt and to the point. "From where I sit, I have a hard time imagining a scenario where a publisher would fit in with my plans," he tells me.



"That's not to say it's totally out of the question; publishers can totally help you. Publishers can have money so you can buy food, and connections that can help your game reach a wider audience, and they can help negotiate with platforms and distributors, and they can help you push your game to that kind of super clean presentable level of polish even. But they can also be really toxic, and risk-averse, and controlling, and can be looking for really evil levels of returns on the back end."

The developer suggests that any studios considering whether to go with a publisher should think less about the ideology, and more about whether your interests align with those of a potential partner.

"Right now a lot of the things a publisher can offer are not super valuable to me," he says, "and it feels like the returns they expect are really out of proportion. But I also know a lot of really smart, talented people that are having really positive experiences with publishers, especially on consoles."

And if you do opt to self-publish, Saltsman has some simple pointers to keep you heading in the right direction. "At this point I think my main advice is to just start building hype early, and don't worry about over-explaining things," he says.

"Err on the side of open. Building awareness of what makes your game different and special and clever and fun is hard, and it takes a long time, and if you wait until after your game comes out you are taking a pretty huge gamble," the dev notes.

He admits that either way it's all a gamble at the end of the day -- "but you are taking an unnecessary risk if you put [building awareness] off to the last minute," he adds. "And you can do this in a good, honest, authentic way - marketing doesn't have to be nasty and slimy. But it does take a long time!"And on mobile?

Notably, Saltsman has dabbling in mobile game publishing too. Semi Secret Software published Aquaria on iPad -- yet Saltsman states that mobile game publishers on the whole are even less reliable than those for traditional platforms.

"It's less reliable in the sense that publishers with some big hits are definitely not converting every game they publish into something that gets a wide audience," he states. "It's more extreme in the sense that they often give less money up front, and take more money on the backend. I am suspicious that they can do this because the signal-to-noise ratio is so low on mobile right now, that anybody and everybody are desperate to get noticed, even if it means giving their game to someone else."

Are there are specific situations in which the Canabalt dev thinks a studio would benefit from having a publisher for a mobile game?

"Not at the moment," he answers. "They don't seem to be able to convert their audiences or have good brand recognition, and there is so much competition for App Store space and player brain time, that I just don't see the point right now."

Tate Multimedia is another studio that has experience with mobile game publishing. The company is about to release Urban Trial Freestyle on mobile, having already brought the game to consoles and handhelds -- and having a publisher for the iOS release just made sense for the company's Paul Leskowicz.

"Having a publisher for our mobile games makes real sense when it comes to targeting a specific market, where the content of the our mobile game shall be adapted to the local cultural and gaming habits," he notes.

"Releasing a mobile game in Japan with a publisher makes great sense," he continues, "since what the players expect there is quite different to what might be proposed to the European or American players, and the input of a local publisher might be a great added value to match the player’s expectations."

Leskowicz notes that self-publishing could allow the studio more freedom in the development process, and that working with a publisher means they don't have full control over every aspect of the game -- but self-publishing means his studio would have to do its own QA, marketing, press relations, sales et al, and he's perfectly happy to get a publisher to handle all this.

Quelle: Gamasutra - Going it alone: Adventures in self-publishing

 

[LordCrash]

Rimworld: A Video Game Review

Every so often something comes along that is completely outside our scope of normal coverage, but is so much fun it cannot be ignored. And that’s Rimworld a game by Tynan Sylvester that’s currently up on Kickstarter. Where it has cleared its funding goal in a matter of days, and has now more then doubled it.

Tynan was kind enough to give us a copy of the Pre-Alpha version of Rimworld to let us tell you all about it.

(Remember that everything we’re going to talk about here is from an early build of the game, and will be subject to change. Everyone who backs the Kickstarter at the $30 CAD level or higher will get a copy of this same Alpha build after the Kickstarter concludes. )


​

First let’s talk about what Rimworld is.

Rimworld is a single-player strategy game where you are trying to survive on a deserted planet with only what you can find and build. The look of Rimworld currently resembles Prison Architect (but that will be changed once Tynan hires an artist), as does some of the game-play. With the main mechanical similarity being the click and drag to build, and plopables system. But that’s where the similarities end.

Mechanically speaking Rimworld’s primary difference from similar games is its AI Storyteller. The Storyteller (inspired by Left 4 Dead’s “Director”) controls how the “random events” will flow during the game. They will affect the weather, determine if and when you’ll be attacked by pirates, or if new folks will stumble on to your colony and join you.



Currently there’s only one real storyteller “Cassandra Classic” and she steadily increases the challenges the game throws at you. For example: while early on pirates may come in groups of two or three, by the two hour mark or so, you might face eight or more. There is also “Randy Random” who just throws truly random events at you. And eventually there will be at least one more “Phoebe Friendly” who will keep the violence to a minimum and let you enjoy the building aspects of the game. Right now Tynan is asking his Kickstarter backers if there are any other types of Storytellers they might like to see. So, if you have an idea and you’re a backer feel free to make a suggestion. You can also head over to Ludeon Studios to find out more and join the forums there.
Now lets talk about my gameplay experience.

I played for about two hours straight without even noticing the time pass, the experience was engrossing and very fun. I started like all players by picking my colonists.

From the new game screen you get to name three colonist, and randomize their traits. Every time you click randomize you basically get a new person; their sex, age, job skills, and background will all be changed. Just keep clicking till you get one you like. Do this three times and you have your first set of settlers.

One thing you might notice in the image above is Klein spent her childhood as a medieval slave, which at first may seem odd for a distant future setting, but one of Tynan’s main influences was Firefly, and this trait represents that she was raised on a primitive outer world. She also has a bad back, and pretty mediocre stats so, time to hit the randomize button again.

Landing on the planet… The world is procedurally generated, so it will be different each time you start a new game. Currently there is only one sort of arid mountain-y biome. But Tynan has suggested the possibility of multiple biome types like jungles or frozen wastes. Whether we get these will be based on fan demand and how much work it will take. So if that interests you, be sure to let Tynan know.

After your colony ship crashes the three of you have only some metal, a few tools (which you won’t see, but trust me they have them), a little food and a place to sleep in the dirt. (There’s also a trash heap and a storage area.) In the upper right you’ll notice it says “build a room” and “need meal source.” These are nice helpers to let you know what you should be focusing on. If you ever feel lost just check up there, if there’s nothing there your probably doing pretty well.

You’ll have full control of game time so after your colonists land you should pause (While time is pause you can still issue order and the like, but nothing will happen till you un-pause.), and start laying out what you want to do. One of the first things you might wan to do is specialize your colonist work priorities. In the screen below you can see al the colonists and the types of work they can do. If there’s a green check that colonist will do that job when they’re fee to do it. The lighter a checkbox is the better the colonist is at that job.



You can see here that Klein is a miner, and her mining box is nearly white, so it’s best of she focuses on that for now, especially in the early stages of the game. You can also see what everyone else is good at just by glancing, but if you want more detailed info, hovering your pointer over a checkbox will bring that up.

Life is hard when there are pirates… And after about ten days the first “dark season” will start and Cassandra the Storyteller will start bringing in the pirates. Which will be minor nuisances the first season or so.

But after a couple “cycles” your colony may start to look like this…



Hard combat has left the ground blood stained, and the graves are starting to fill up.(You know its going to be a great game when one of the first things you need are graves.) You can see in the lower left UI that there is a big “Draft” button. This allows you to make any colonist a soldier. While drafted they will only do as ordered. They will not eat or sleep, so be sure to stand them down once the danger has passed.

Well after about two hours Cassandra had beaten me down pretty well, all my original colonists were dead, and the new folks hadn’t had much time to recover since the last fight (they hadn’t even picked up all the bodies yet). Then 10 new pirates arrived, when it was all over and the dust had settled my colony was lost. I had made some mistakes earlier, and they cost me in the end.



In all Rimworld is a great strategy game to fill in those hours when you don’t have anyone to play a good board-game with. Of course it’s a great game to play for any reason. If you like games like Prison Architect, or Dwarf Fortress, and you’re a fan of a Firefly style sci-fi universe then this game is defiantly for you. Personally I’ve played Prison Architect and I prefer Rimworld’s theme and more advanced combat system.

If you want to see this game in action check out Quill18’s excellent introductory video.

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Well that’s all for now, if this looks interesting to you be sure to head over to Kickstater and back this. And if you’re a Steam user be sure to vote to Greenlight this game as well.

One last thing… This is the first videogame Kickstarter I’ve ever backed, and I’ll tell you why. The fact that he has a real working game running and has sent it out to some really awesome youtubers to make previews really sold me. I’m confident, he will actually make this game and it won’t languish in an eternal development cycle never to be released. Also I’m happy to he’s taking the Kerbal Space Program approach by having a public Alpha we can all enjoy, and share in the development experience. That way all these newly minted Rimworld fans will have a game to play as soon as possible and it will only get better.

Happy gaming.

Quelle: Front Toward Enemy: Rimworld: A Video Game Review

 

[LordCrash]

The Simulation Dream

by Tynan Sylvester on 06/02/13 04:09:00 pm

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

There’s an old dream in game design. It drives the design of games like SimCity, Dwarf Fortress, Tropico, The Sims, and Prison Architect. I like to call it the Simulation Dream.

In 1996, Starr Long, the associate producer of Ultima Online, talked about the game before release:

“Nearly everything in the world, from grass to goblins, has a purpose, and not just as cannon fodder either. The 'virtual ecology' affects nearly every aspect of the game world, from the very small to the very large. If the rabbit population suddenly drops (because some gung-ho adventurer was trying out his new mace) then wolves may have to find different food sources (e.g., deer). When the deer population drops as a result, the local dragon, unable to find the food he’s accustomed to, may head into a local village and attack. Since all of this happens automatically, it generates numerous adventure possibilities.”

That’s the Simulation Dream – the idea of making a complex simulation of a story world, which creates fascinating emergent stories as powerful as those you might write yourself. The idea bursts with potential. And it appears everywhere. Early in the development of BioShock, that game had an ecology too. There were three parts to it. Splicers would hunt Gatherers, who were in turn guarded by Protectors. The player was supposed to interact with and manipulate this ecology to survive.

But these dreams shattered. After its release, Richard Garriott said of Ultima Online:

“We thought it was fantastic. We'd spent an enormous amount of time and effort on it. But what happened was all the players went in and just killed everything; so fast that the game couldn't spawn them fast enough to make the simulation even begin. And so, this thing that we'd spent all this time on, literally no-one ever noticed – ever – and we eventually just ripped it out of the game.”

The same happened on BioShock. While BioShock retained some valuable vestiges of its simulation-heavy beginnings, the game as released was really a heavily-scripted authored story. There was no systemic ecology at all. It worked fantastically as a game – but it wasn’t a deep simulation.

The problem is that simulations with a lot of moving parts quickly become complex in the intimidating academic sense. There are so many pieces interacting that the game can easily become too much to understand, predict, or play with. All the interesting stuff in the game ends up lost in the silicon, inaccessible to the human players’ understanding.

And that’s really the key – making complex simulated events accessible to human understanding. Which brings us to a nerdy idea I like to call the Player Model Principle.

The Player Model Principle

The Player Model Principle is this:

The whole value of a game is in the mental model of itself it projects into the player’s mind.

We make a simulation in computer code. That is a computer model of some situation – a dwarven fortress, a prison, and so on. But that is not the only model of that situation designers need to worry about. There is another model of that fortress or prison - the mental model in the player’s mind, which the player constructs while playing the game. Designers create the Game Model out of computer code, while the player creates their own Player Model by observing, experimenting, and inferring during the play.



In play, the Game Model is irrelevant. Players can’t perceive it directly. They can only perceive the Player Model in their minds. That’s where the stories are told. That’s where dilemmas are resolved. So the Game Model we create is just a pathway through which we create the Player Model in the player’s mind.

The Player Model Principle indicates a source of risk. Namely, anything in the Game Model that doesn’t copy into the Player Model is worthless. That’s what happened with the ecologies in Ultima Online and BioShock. They didn’t enter the Player Model and so degraded into noise. This is a fairly obvious risk and is common in game design – all designers have seen players not understand a piece of their game.

But the Player Model Principle also implies an amazing opportunity. What if we could put something in the Player Model without implementing it in the Game Model? What if we could make the player perceive some event or relationship or meaning that wasn’t even there?

The advantages are obvious. We wouldn’t have to build it or test it. And it wouldn’t add any complexity burden to the game. While this sounds exotic, it actually happens all the time. It’s called apophenia.

Apopheniais seeing meaningful patterns in random or meaningless data. For example, look at this wall socket. What do you see? A face! And not just a face. But a face with a confused, perhaps pained expression. Why do you see that? There is no such personality here. But we perceive it all the same. It’s how we’re wired as human beings.

That ability to perceive personality and intent is a deep-seated human ability. It happens below conscious awareness, the same way you can look at a room and understand it as a 3D space without thinking about it. The only knowledge of the room you have is a 2D projection of it on your retinas. But some silent processor in your brain generates the perception of a 3D environment. In the same way, we effortlessly perceive minds and intentions. It’s why ancient peoples perceived spirits in rocks, water, sun and moon.
Apophenia is powerful and varied. Consider these Michotte demonstrations, named after the researcher who explored them in the mid-20th century.

http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Discourse/Narrative/michotte-demo.swf

Michotte did many variations on these demonstrations. It’s amazing how much people see that isn’t there. We perceive human-like relationships between the balls, with concepts of dominance, gender, and intent. Some of the explanations are astoundingly complex. For example, "The little ball is trying to play with the big ball, but the big ball doesn't want to play so he chases the little ball away. But the little ball is stubborn and keeps bothering the big ball. Finally, the big ball gets mad and leaves." None of those feelings existed, except in the Player Model.

This apophenia – this perception of personality and intent where there is none – is the key to making a simulation game work. We can’t simulate the emotional core of a good story on silicon. Computers just aren’t good at handling generalized intelligence, intent, and feeling. But we don’t have to simulate those things. We only need to show the simulation equivalent of moving balls and let the player layer in their own emotional perceptions.

In this way, the simulation is a co-author of stories with the player. The simulation does the logistics and generates some random outcomes, while the player adds the meaning and pathos.

Apophneia example in The Sims 3

Here’s a story someone created with The Sims 3. He created a Sim version of himself and his roommate. Soon, a cute redhead enters their lives. And the redhead goes straight for the roommate, leaving the protagonist frustrated, angry, jealous, and alone.



But none of those emotions are in the game. The Sims 3 has a very simple computer model of social interactions which does not really depict deep human emotions like jealousy and anger. We perceive these things through apophenia – the same way we perceive a small ball fleeing from a large one.

Now the player takes control of the story. He hatches an evil plan involving a cheap stove, poor cooking skills (which cause fires), and wooden chairs.

http://tynansylvester.com/wp-content/uploads/sims2-300x187.jpg

And the plan works.

http://tynansylvester.com/wp-content/uploads/sims3-300x194.jpg

This story was co-authored between the player and the game. The game simulated some simple event (attraction between redhead and roommate), and the player ascribed meaning to it (jealousy and frustration) the same way he might have for the Michotte balls, even though that emotion was not actually in the simulatiion. The next part of the story was cued by him when he orchestrated the murder. The game simulated the logistics of firey deaths, but the sense of sorrow and revenge was, again, ascribed completely by the player. Most of this story is apophenia – present of the Player Model, absent from the Game Model.

Creating apophenia

It’s hard to see obvious ways to make players imbue meaning into a game that the game doesn’t actually have. But survey the products that do it well and you see patterns.

Borrow archetypes from real life and fiction

Use the archetypical jealousy plot, the evil stepmother, the good king, the classical hero. This saves exposition since the player already knows the stock character or situation you’re hinting at. This makes it easy for players to fill in absent details.

Allow players to project themselves into the game.

When a virtual character has your name pasted on, it is easy to imbue that character with motivations that are relevant to you. The same goes when the player projects in their friends, house, and so on, into the game. The Sims gains massively from this.

Create uncertain situations with human-relevant values in the balance

This is storytelling 101, but it bears mentioning. The simulation has to create situations that are worthy of being called stories. That means something important has to be in the balance, and the outcome has to be uncertain. Human values must be at stake.
Human values are things like life/death, alone/together, wealth/poverty. The game should revolve around things that affect these human-relevant values, and not descend into a dry simulation of traffic networks or production lines. Such simulations may be intellectually interesting, but will not generate effective stories because they are emotionally hollow.

Express or imply simple, pure, primal emotions

Annoyance is less interesting than fury because of the difference in intensity. Melancholic existential hipster sadness is less accessible than grief over a dead child because that grief is simpler, more relatable, and more primal. If the game has no opportunities for characters to feel such emotions, it is unlikely to generate good apophenic stories. Stories are built from primal feelings, so the subject matter of the simulation must create situations where characters would feel primal emotions.

Drowning in Complexity

So we’ve covered the benefits of apophenia. But we still haven’t solved the problem that killed the ecologies in Ultima Online and BioShock. How do we handle complexity? For apophenia to work, players have to see and understand interesting things happening. And this can easily prevented if they’re drowning in complexity.

Think of a simple system, like orbiting planets. For the most part, each planet only has a relationship with the sun around which it orbits



If you want to tell a story about each planet, it’s easy. You just look at its one relationship and talk about that. So the Earth orbited… and it orbited… and it orbited. The problem is that while this story is easy to see and easy to tell (satisfying the Player Model Principle), it is also quite dull. We need more interactions, more variation, more unpredictability. We need more complexity.

Now imagine we’ve made a simulation of a village. Each of the hundred villagers has a relationship with each of the others – father, friend, enemy, lover, or acquaintance. Each can work at the fishing pond, the market, the field, the mill. Each can satisfy their own needs at the tavern, in bed sleeping, at the outhouse. The water can flood the field. The outhouse can spill into the market and contaminate it, causing sickness, overloading the hospital, making the doctor work too hard, leading to divorce. It sounds like the Simulation Dream. But there’s another problem now. The connections multiply until the whole system appears as a gigantic hairball of complexity.



Such a system could support some very interesting stories. I just told you one of them. The catch is that it will constantly break the Player Model Principle. With so many relationships, it becomes very hard for players to understand cause and effect in the system, so those stories end up buried and unobserved.

What we want to do is create systems that are smaller and simpler than these giant hairballs, yet have more interesting, comprehensible interactions than simple systems like orbiting planets. What we really want is not a system that is complex, but a system that is story-rich. Story-richness is a term I invented for this article, and a concept that I keep in mind while doing simulation design. It has a simple nerdy mathematical definition.

Story-Richness:The percentage of interactions in a game that are interesting to the player.

Consider every interaction in the game – every crop harvested, every path walked, every work spoken by a character. Of all the interactions happening in the game, what percent are part of an emotionally meaningful story? In a successful game, this percentage is high. Much of what you observe will be part of a story. In a poor game, it is quite low.

Interestingly, real life and most fictional worlds are not story-rich! Most days for most people on Earth or in Middle Earth are quite mundane. It’s only very rarely that someone has to drop the Ring into Mount Doom. Follow a random hobbit in Hobbiton, and you’ll be bored soon. It reminds me of an old war simulation MMO, where players sometimes had to drive a truck for hours just to reach the front line. Yes, we know war is 99% boredom interspersed with moments of terror, but a game about it should not be.

This means that a simulation game can’t be a faithful simulation of its subject matter! It has to be a narratively condensed, intensified version of that village, fortress, or prison. And it has to seem true to the source material without being true to that source material. The Simulation Dream just got harder.

Creating Story-Richness

Like apophneia, the sources of story-richness are difficult to see. But there are some patterns. The basic principle is to avoid uninteresting events and create more interesting ones.

Choose the minimum representation that supports the kinds of stories you want to generate

This is a complex piece of advice that I’ll try to unpack by example.

Imagine we’re making a simulation game and trying to decide how to model food in that game. How many classes of food do we put in?
We have lots of options

• All of them! Cheese, venison, beef, chicken, broccoli, barley, corn, beer, water, juice, and so on. Hundreds of options, each acting slightly differently.
• Categories by type: Meat, vegetables, liquid.
• Categories by quality: High-quality, medium-quality, low-quality.
• One: Food is food.
• Zero: Food is not modelled and nobody eats.

Which do you choose?

Choose the minimum representation that supports the kinds of stories you want to generate.

The above sentence is fairly dense, so I’ll try to unpack it.

Consider the kinds of stories you want to generate in your game. To what degree are they about food? If you’re making a simulation of a New World colony in 1550, food will be important because starvation is a key driver of many stories in such a setting. The threat of hunger is, one way or another, part of most of the stories in such a setting. So you’d probably want a pretty nuanced food model. In such a game, the difference between seal blubber and vegetables could be important, because a diet of only seal blubber leads to scurvy during the winter, which leads to death. Human values are at stake!

However, if your game is a prison sim, you could make a strong case for not simulating food, or for simulating it in the simplest possible way. Because prison stories are not typically about food. Watch Oz or The Shawshank Redemption and few of the plotlines revolve around who is eating tasty bacon and who is eating cheap rice. A complex food simulation in such a game is likely to just add a lot of systems and noise that don’t contribute anything to the stories players care about. This complexity would be better added to the systems for gang membership, shiv combat, or friendship.

In general, lean on the simple side. You don’t have to simulate that much. The game is a co-author, not an author. It just need to hint at what is going on - the player’s apophenia will fill in details.

Use hair complexity for cheap fictional flavor

Hair complexity is my term for pieces of the simulation that don’t affect anything outside themselves.

I call it hair complexity because it sticks off the main ball of relationships without feeding back into it, like the hair on your head. Such hair complexity can be ignored by players who don’t wish to deal with it, while more interested or skilled players can pay attention and get its full flavor. It’s like the flavortext in a card game.

Examples:

• In Dwarf Fortress, each dwarf has an appearance. These appearances do nothing, but help players form mental images.
• In Prison Architect, prisoners have criminal histories. They do nothing (so far), but they add flavour if you want to watch a certain prisoner.
• In The Sims, sims have conversation topics represented by images in speech bubbles. For the most part, these topics don’t matter. They could talk about sailing or sports; it makes no difference. What matters is that they are talking and their relationship score is improving. But players can, if they wish, watch the stream of images and imaging a thread of conversation leading from money to cars to a mutual friend.
• It was mentioned to me at a conference that hair simulations (e.g. Tomb Raider) are, ironically, hair complexity, since they don’t affect anything else in the game. Har har.

Hair complexity is cheaper to design. And since it doesn’t feed back into the larger game system, it doesn’t add complexity – just a bit of interface burden.

Eclipse Colony design case study: Crop Growth

Let’s put this into practice and look at a small example of a simple system design problem from my game Eclipse Colony. I faced this problem in early May 2013. Get ready for design nerdiness – we’re about to do some heavy analysis on what seems like a simple problem.

Task: Currently, plants just grow on a timer and can be harvested when the timer expires. But it’s odd that plants yield the same regardless of whether they’re exposed to vacuum or not. I’d also like some notion of farmers tending plants to help them grow and yield more. Fix these issues.

In this situation I wrote several candidate designs to choose between before I decided on a path. Here they were:

Option 0 – Skip it

• Do nothing. Let plants grow the same on the same timer anywhere.

Analysis: Option 0 should always be there. There are always a lot of things we could work on in a simulation game. We could make a better friendship system. We could add animals or new weapons or wild plants. We could improve world generation. We could differentiate cultures, make a religious belief system, or add more nuances to the combat model. You have to be sure that what you’re doing is actually somewhere near the top of that gigantic priority list, because it’s easy to get tunnel vision. In this case, I decided that crop growth was worth working on because starvation is a big part of life in this fictional space colony. Furthermore, the missing behaviors had been bothering me in a direct and present way during playtests. It was a problem crying for a solution.

Option 1 - The yield variable

• Each plant has a variable called yield.
• When the plant is harvested, the amount of food that appears is based on yield.
• Each time a farmer tends the plant, yield increases. Once tended, plants can’t be tended again until a certain time has passed.
• Damage to the plants reduces yield.
• Being left in vacuum reduces yield.

Analysis: I liked this system at first because it seems to reflect the fiction well. But there’s a big caveat: a new variable (yield) is undesirable complexity. Also, how will yield work for wild, unfarmed plants in the future? Will they even have it? How does it interact with more normal damage from fire or explosions? Do plants also have a health variable? The added complexity and edge case ambiguities made this seem a poorer choice.

Option 2 - Use the growth timer

Remember that plants already have a timer that counts down until they’re finished growing.

• Each tending operation speeds the plants towards finishing growth.
• Damage to the plants reverses their growth.
• Being left in vacuum reduces plant growth.

Analysis: The simplicity of this is good because it doesn’t require any new variables. But this doesn’t capture reality – real plants don’t just grow slower when deprived of care or when damaged. They grow poor harvests, but they still flower around the same time. This system could lead to absurd situation like crops being slightly damaged repeatedly and just never becoming harvestable. Or plants being very well-cared for and being harvestable on a weird accelerated schedule.

Option 3 – Re-use the health variable

• Plants have the standardized health variable.
• Final harvest output is proportional to the plants’ health.
• Plant health steadily decreases at all times (due to insects etc.)
• Plants are damaged by vacuum and normal damage sources like fire.
• Tending plants is essentially repairing their health.

Analysis: There are no new variables or interfaces, which is good. It captures the essence of the idea well enough. It even expresses the rotting of grown plants, since they lose health over time after they finish growing. This seems like the minimal representation that captures the subject matter and supports the stories I want the game to co-author with the player.
I ultimately decided to re-use the health variable. But even this could still change as the game gets tested more.

The Simulation Dream Reborn

It seems like maybe we killed the Simulation Dream. You can’t just simulate a super-complex world because players won’t understand it. And even if you did, it would be boring, because even Middle Earth isn’t very story rich.

But the Simulation Dream lives on. We just know we have to approach it very carefully. We can’t blindly simulate everything, because most things are boring and people can’t understand over-complex systems anyway. We have to carefully craft a condensed system of simple, understandable hints that cue players’ apophenia to do the heavy lifting of ascribing emotion and meaning. We have to make sure that system projects well into the Player Model. And we have to make sure that much of what happens in it concerns powerful, primal human emotions, not logistical details.

But if we do all that, I think the Simulation Dream is still in our reach.

Check out my game design book Designing Games (published with O'Reilly Media) at Amazon or O’Reilly.

Twitter: @TynanSylvester
Blog: tynansylvester.com.

Quelle: Gamasutra: Tynan Sylvester's Blog - The Simulation Dream

 

[LordCrash]

Valve is the champion PC gaming deserves

By Rob Fahey Fri 11 Oct 2013 6:30am GMT / 2:30am EDT / 11:30pm PDT



Taking the fight to the living room - Valve's Steam is the most dynamic force in PC gaming in decades

It's quite extraordinary to look at Valve's Steam platform today and think back to its first appearance - as the much-derided and rather unstable digital distribution millstone around the neck first of Counter-Strike and later, somewhat decisively, of Half-Life 2. From such humble beginnings, Steam has become the dominant distribution network for PC games and changed its creators at Valve from a single developer of wonderful if incessantly delayed games into the most powerful company in the PC gaming market - more powerful than any publisher (EA's Origin system is a minor challenger to Steam's dominance) and even more powerful than Microsoft, whose Windows operating system is no longer the only saloon in town for PC gamers.

The story of Steam is fascinating precisely because anyone predicting this outcome back in 2003 would have been laughed out of the room - and Valve is clearly in no mood to sit back and crush its carefully-tended laurels. The industry is still digesting the potential impact of the company's three recent announcements. Valve's independence from Microsoft's operating system, which began with moving Steam to OSX (essential, giving the increasing dominance of Apple devices in the high-end consumer space) and then to Linux (which looked rather less essential at the time), now looks much more aggressive thanks to the firm's move to create its own Linux-based gaming OS. Meanwhile, it's finally confirmed plans to define and certify a hardware spec for living room PCs, known as Steam Machines, and unveiled an unusual and potentially very interesting controller for those devices.

Valve's intention with these moves is not modest, nor is it in any way disguised. Valve wants to own PC gaming - to the same extent that Sony owns PlayStation gaming or Microsoft owns Xbox gaming, if not in the same manner. Valve wants Steam to be a third pole of the core gaming market (fourth, if you count Nintendo, although they're really playing a different sport entirely) - one which appeals to a somewhat different market and operates on very different principles to the traditional consoles, but which is focused around the Steam platform for distribution and functionality just as much as consoles are focused on PlayStation Network or Xbox Live.

For this approach to work, the move to the living room is crucial. Ignore the would-be iconoclasts who claim that gaming on a TV with a controller in your hands is old hat, and we're all soon going to be doing everything with an iPad; this is little more than second rate soothsaying from tech-fetishists who consistently make the same fundamental error of assuming that just because something can be accomplished technically, it means consumers will actually want to do it, and just because something is technologically impressive, it makes it into a good and worthwhile experience. The reality is that the market for the kinds of experiences afforded by a big screen and a dedicated controller (be it a joypad, a keyboard and mouse combo, or something in between, as Valve's proposed solution appears to be) is larger than ever and will continue to grow even in the age of tablets and phones - in the end, it will be dwarfed by the games market on those devices, but will still end up being larger and healthier than it is today. Valve's move on the living room is not backwards facing, it acknowledges a realistic market view that's all too easily obscured by our newfound excitement at having cute little computers in all our pockets.

In Valve's worldview, the great advantage of PC gaming (and how long before we all start calling it Steam gaming, a term that's already got a certain degree of traction?) is that it can take pride of place in the living room without sacrificing the study or the bedroom. Valve starts from the opposite side of the pitch from Sony and Microsoft - it operates a supremely successful software platform with no hardware attached, while the others are hardware manufacturers (perhaps ironically in Microsoft's case) whose software platform evolved later and is still tied to specific hardware devices. That comes with big advantages - you can create an iconic hardware design that leverages enormous cost savings thanks to manufacturing tens of millions of units, and sell them to consumers at far less than the cost that a third-party box builder would have to charge. It also brings disadvantages, though. PS4 and Xbox One will never be general computing platforms, and they'll never be available in the sheer range of form factors that Steam can reach - from a Steam Machine under the television to a powerful tower in the den through to a gaming-specced laptop in the student dorm room. In Steam's hegemony, Steam Machines will still only be one possible option - every PC and Mac sold will still be a potential device for the Steam platform.

For some people, Steam is guaranteed absolute victory in the end simply on philosophical grounds - open always beats shut, they declare, which is a statement that needs a fair few more qualifications than you might like in order to actually make it true, but is still a provocative sentiment. Of course, Steam is only sort-of open. You can run it on any PC or Mac hardware, it's true, but you can't release any software you want on it - Valve still acts as a gatekeeper of sorts, albeit a bit more open than the console firms are (though they are both, at somewhat different rates, moving towards more openness on their publishing platforms). In that sense, Steam is a less open platform than, for example, iOS - although anyone who actually wants to step outside the Steam ecosystem need only drop back to a desktop and install anything they want, which makes Steam Machines and their ilk into the obvious gaming devices of choice for hobbyists and the technically inclined, just as PCs have always been.

What is far more important than the question of whether "open always wins" or not (spoiler: it doesn't, unless you seriously mess with your definitions of "open" to the point where they're practically meaningless to most people) is the fact that Valve's moves are absolutely designed to align PC/Steam gaming with console gaming in the living room, and create a genuine, workable third way for console gamers considering new pastures, PC gamers tempted by the simplicity of console, and newcomers dipping their toes in the gaming waters (yes, plenty of those still exist - they're not all simply getting as far as Hay Day and Candy Crush Saga and declaring themselves satisfied).

There are huge challenges to this approach, of course, and I fear that nothing Valve can do is going to smooth out some of the wrinkles involved with PC gaming. PC devices are more expensive than consoles because they're manufactured by third parties who want to make a profit from the hardware, and don't have the advantages of scale that console makers enjoy - so the Steam Machines will probably be great devices but will represent a much bigger investment than a console. Moreover, their higher specs will look great to some parts of the market (although they'll be gobbledegook to lots of other demographics) but will also become outdated faster than consoles - a major reason for PC gamers to 'lapse' to console remains the upgrade treadmill, and I have to confess, there's a certain pleasure for this lapsed PC gamer in sticking The Last Of Us into a 6-year-old PS3 in the absolute knowledge that it's going to play it perfectly. Steam Machines won't enjoy that advantage; for many, of course, they'll outweigh that problem with many advantages of their own.

It's easy to be a little bit spooked by the degree of dominance Valve is building over the traditionally open, free and somewhat Wild West world of PC gaming - but I think this is a development worth embracing. PC gaming may be a wild frontier, but it has always needed a sheriff - or rather, a shepherd, a company with a strong interest in guiding and developing the market while retaining its essential freedoms. Once, we all hoped that Microsoft would step up to that role, and for a while it actually did - hence the very existence of DirectX, for example. Of late, though, Microsoft's interest in PC gaming has been minimal, and even when it's stuck its oar in, it's rarely been welcome - Games for Windows Live being one memorable debacle. Valve taking the reins and delivering a great digital distribution and social play platform, following it up with credible pitches to marry the OSX and Linux markets to the Windows market and now proposing hardware outlines for living room gaming systems and a radical new controller - well, that's the kind of input the PC gaming market needs to remain not only fresh, free and dynamic, but also commercially credible over the next five to ten years, especially as tablets continue to usurp sales of consumer PC hardware.

Whatever your belief in the power of 'open', or your personal preference in gaming power, Valve's rise to being the dominant force in PC gaming and its representative in the wider industry is a positive and interesting move. It seems certain that core gamers' choices in the coming years will have to be carefully weighed between three different logos on the box - Sony's, Microsoft's, and Steam's.

Quelle: Valve is the champion PC gaming deserves | GamesIndustry International

 

[LordCrash]

Talking through The Long Dark with Hinterland founder Raphael van Lierop

27 September 2013 • 17 days 5 hours ago • Story by robzacny



“When I was in college I had a job seismic crew in northern BC,” Raphael van Lierop tells me. “Basically, doing seismic surveying for oil companies. You’re flown in to the middle of nowhere by a helicopter and there’s no roads, nothing except for a few logging camps. It’s extremely isolating. I think that a lot of classic wilderness literature has played on those themes; what happens to the veneer of civilization that we all carry around with us when we’re put into a real survival scenario.”

That’s the scenario where van Lierop and his team at Hinterland want to put players in their recently-announced survival game, The Long Dark. It’s a survival game set in the Canadian backcountry in the midst of civilization’s collapse.

That might seem like coals to Newcastle. After all, PC gamers watch civilization falling apart just about every day, and that’s just from reading comment threads. Then they play games involving zombie invasion, plague, aliens, and sometimes even environmental catastrophe. What makes The Long Dark different is that it’s more Jack London than George Romero, inspired less by American urban survivalist fantasies and more by a Canadian frontier that remains untamed, where man is not the real monster, but another of nature’s potential victims. It is a place near to van Lierop’s heart. In fact, it’s practically out his back door.

When it comes to peeling back the veneer of civilization, van Lierop may already have created the definitive work with 2011’s Space Marine. That veneer is hard to maintain when you are controlling a burly man in bright blue armor who is curb-stomping Orks, sending curtains of blood slashing everywhere.

“You know, with Space Marine I didn’t set out to make the most violent action game ever made,” van Lierop says. “It just turned out to be that way because that’s the IP of Warhammer 40,000.”

While I will defend Space Marine to my dying breath (though I am bias), van Lierop seems ambivalent about the project. Or perhaps more accurately, he found himself becoming ambivalent about his entire career in its wake.

“After every game I’ve shipped, I’ve gone through that process of reflection and asking myself, ‘Is this the right thing?’ And after Space Marine it was particularly strong... I got to that point where I reflected back on why I first got into games. What my ambitions were when I started out in the industry. And... it felt kind of like a now or never scenario. It was like, I could sign up for another big triple A project that’s going to be another two or three years of my life, or I can take a shot now, at this moment, and try and see if I can make it happen.”



Time is something van Lierop has become acutely aware of. His time in mainstream game development showed him how slowly years transform into new games, how truly short a career in development can be.

He explains: “If you look back at projects that got canceled, or that you can’t finish for whatever reason, and the games that you do ship but don’t really resonate, you’re kind of like ‘Shit, if this keeps up maybe I’ll get ten games out by the time I’m done, and a couple of them will be pretty good, and the rest will be ok.’ Does that feel like it’s going to be enough?”

Into the wild

For van Lierop, it wasn’t. He departed Relic and started laying the groundwork for Hinterland Games and The Long Dark while working as a consultant on a variety of projects, including Far Cry 3. But it was all to pay the bills while the small team at Hinterland started working on the game they really wanted to make, a game with its origins in the Canadian backcountry and van Lierop’s own connection with it.

“My wife and I moved here out to Vancouver Iisland from Vancouver shortly after I finished Space Marine, largely because we wanted to get out of the city. My office is like 30 meters from 50 km of really rugged mountain biking trails that go through all these log cut areas and forests with cougars and bears and all this kind of stuff. So this is my backyard,” van Lierop explains. “I really wanted to explore that space.”



Van Lierop has left the city behind, and so has The Long Dark. Van Lierop wanted to make a uniquely Canadian game, one more informed by the isolated, rugged communities that dot Alberta and British Columbia.

“I wanted to explore not the end of the world, not the urban apocalypse, which we’ve all seen a million times, but what does the end of the world look like from the fringes?” Van Lierop asks. “What does it look like for people who live in the crossroad towns and small rural communities on the edge of nowhere. How did they become even more isolated than they were before? ...We’d like to eventually end up in some of those more familiar settings, but we want to start from this different context.”

On the edges of civilization, the breakdown of order and society wouldn’t necessarily turn into the Hobbesian free-for-all depicted in most games and movies. For people who live on the northern edge of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains, for whom the Arctic Circle is almost as near a neighbor as the United States, the most likely enemy is always nature. Where a gallon fuel oil can mean the difference between life and death, where the nearest major hospital might be a long helicopter flight away, survival is more about counting calories than ammunition.

“A survival sim is about resource management,” Van Lierop says. “I was really inspired reading about some of the Antarctic expeditions. These guys would very carefully plan out how many calories of food they are going to take in, versus how much they are going to expend. I read about how badly some of these things turned out because they made bad choices, or didn’t calculate things properly. When you hear about the Scott expedition, you hear about how they calculated they were burning 4000 calories per person per day. It was only after [they set out] that they realized they were burning closer to 7000, because they were pulling their sledge of supplies. So gradually they were all starving to death. They just didn’t know it.”



Knowledge will play a key role in The Long Dark. This is not going to be a game where you just wander around and peer inside a trash can and find an entire meal waiting for you along with fuel for your car. Nor will an abandoned cache wait for you to come find it. Other people are trying to survive, and the world’s already vanishing resources will diminish further as time goes by.

Van Lierop explains, “As players encounter other survivors, or encampments or find cabins etc., when they find knowledge of some sort -- could be a map, a conversation with someone that tells you about something in the world -- that knowledge decays. For example I might find a survivor on the road, and I have an interaction with him. They mention ‘Oh hey, two hills over there at the abandoned gas station there’s a car over there with some abandoned stuff’. Now that you have that on your map and that it exists in the world and a pretty strong sense that if you can get there quickly enough, you’ll be able to find it. But if you dilly-dally and get distracted by other stuff, it might already be gone. So there’s that constant push and pull between wanting to explore the world, having to think about how much it’s costing you to do that... It’s really a tug of war between exploring and staying alive.”



Exploring will require a measure of woodcraft. Van Lierop talks about how he wants players in The Long Dark to become hyper-aware of their surroundings. To be able to trace a stream stream to its source. To know how to escape predators, and the times of day when they’ll be most active.

Occasionally, those predators may be human, but Van Lierop stresses that combat and battles with other survivors are not what The Long Dark is about. In fact, originally they didn’t want to have combat at all, but eventually the team felt it was too artificial a limitation. Instead, The Long Dark treats combat as a last resort and, in most important ways, a failure. Every encounter with another character is a negotiation, an attempt to figure out if it will end in cooperation, indifference, or violence.

“It’s not about pulling your gun out before them, but trying to suss out what they’re looking for and if there’s a way they can help you, or them, are they going to try and kill you and take your stuff, are they in trouble and do they have anything you need that can be exchanged? We’ve been thinking about other survivors more as people and a resource for knowledge as opposed to just people who you kill and take all their shit,” Van Lierop adds.

Project Management

Right now The Long Dark is not quite halfway funded on Kickstarter. Hinterland are asking for $200,000 Canadian dollars, though it sounds like the Kickstarter money is more aimed at giving Hinterland an extra layer of spit-and-polish rather than funding the entire development.

“We’re kind of scoping when it comes to the content side, but even with our Kickstarter we’ve been really upfront with our backers, saying our goals are not built around adding more content to the game,” van Lierop says. “What we don’t want to do is end up in one of those situations where we we’re forced to have a bigger game, where we’d need a bigger team which brings more risk, etc. Our stretch goals are more built around things like making 30 minutes of custom music into 60 minutes. So it’s not stuff that risks the production of the game, but just adds more quality to the game. So that’s where we’re kinda at; we have a good sense of what we can build.”

While The Long Dark will be a realistic and sophisticated survival sim, its presentation will be far more abstracted and stylized.“

Van Lierop explains, “We’re not going to chase photo realism, it’s not a goal we care that much about. ...Hokyo [Lim] was the art director of League of Legends and the Unfinished Swan, and so Hokyo has a strong sense of his own style, and that’s why I wanted him to work on this, because I knew It needed a very unique art style and iconic identity for the game. So the style that you saw in the concept we made is what we want the game to look like.”

With a strong team of veterans developers, including former Volition technical director Alan Lawrence, Hinterland are well-equipped to deliver on their ambition to create a stylish Canadian STALKER. It’s especially encouraging to hear van Lierop talk about how much he wants to avoid experience and perk systems that create an illusion of mastery, and create a game with enough depth to give players the real thing. As much as The Long Dark might be a story of man versus nature, survival depends on becoming attuned to that dangerous, hostile environment.

“We will be successful,” van Lierop says, “if we can deliver that kind of an experience to the player. Where they not only feel immersed in how beautiful the world is, but where their time in the world makes them better at being in the world.”


Quelle: Talking through The Long Dark with Hinterland founder Raphael van Lierop | PCGamesN

 

[LordCrash]

Why are big-budget game developers so afraid of exploring sexual themes?

Edge Staff at 12:00pm October 18 2013

Our society already gamifies sex,” game developer Anna Anthropy points out on her blog, linking to a Google image search on the word ‘Cosmopolitan’. Hundreds and hundreds of Cosmo covers pop up, with coverlines such as ‘75 sex moves men crave’, ‘100 best sex tips’, and ‘Guys rate 50 sex moves’, as if women can win or keep a boyfriend by thoroughly completing a checklist. Sex is everywhere. ‘Sex comedy’ is a Hollywood film genre firmly marketed at young men and women: Easy A, Superbad, American Pie. We are consistently told that sex sells, and are bombarded with tits-out HBO dramas and ‘edgy’ TV series such as Game Of Thrones. The porn industry has more vigour than ever. And yet the best-known western videogame we have about sex is Leisure Suit Larry. Is the industry afraid of sex?

BioWare has tentatively included thematically serious sex scenes in its games, to much public comment, ever since the first Mass Effect. David Gaider, lead writer on BioWare’s Dragon Age series, gave a talk at this year’s Game Developers Conference called ‘Sex in Videogames’, in which he pointed out that sex is an exceedingly popular topic on the BioWare forum. Yet videogames, he says, have a very particular image problem. “We’ve had negative reactions [from the media] to go along with the positive – not all of it is particularly credible, but it’s important to understand where that negative reaction comes from… you have to understand how people view our players, who they think our players are. The public views our audience as mostly children… For us, who play games, we are like, whoah, that’s so far behind – 20 years behind the reality.” Any attempt to make a game with sexual content, even with strict age ratings, may be construed as a subversive move for a medium until now best known for its supposed influence in school shootings.

Gaider went on to explain how the game industry itself is no better: we tend to think of players as being young adult males, which is still a good ten years behind the reality. The ESRB reports that the average game player is now 34 years old, and that 47 per cent of the gaming audience is female. Regardless, sexual content remains scarce, and female characters are still primarily the ones being sexualised. During sex scenes, the woman tends to be the focus – her body, her vocals, her nakedness.


The Witcher’s sex scenes are representative of many across videogames – shot from a male perspective.

Take the Witcher 2. It contains a sex scene between Triss and Geralt that involves a 360° shot of Triss removing her clothes entirely by magic, while Geralt dives into the bath with his trousers on. It’s incongruous from a narrative standpoint for Geralt to do this: he’s no prude. Triss’s hips, buttocks, super-perky breasts and orgasmic expressions are the focus here, and her loud moans are actually the subject of the cutscene’s narrative device. In contrast, there are no camera shots of Geralt’s naked chest or buttocks, shots of his face or any kind of audible vocal expression from him during this fairly explicit scene. It’s a neat shorthand for the way games treat sexual encounters: sex scenes are for heterosexual men to look at, and are usually shot from that male perspective. It brings to mind Spinal Tap’s Nigel Tufnel who, when accused of sexism, retorts, “What’s wrong with being sexy?” Perhaps by portraying sex in the same tired manner, the game industry is missing an opportunity not only to try new (camera) positions, but also to broaden its (sex) appeal.

But what about playable sex scenes? These are few and far between in videogames, and the ones we do have – such as the one between Lucas and Tiffany in Farenheit – seem clumsy and awkward, made more ridiculous by the idea that you can ‘win’ at sex by pressing a button at the right time. (Farenheit was rebranded Indigo Prophecy for the US market, with most of its sexual content scrubbed to avoid an ‘Adults Only’ rating.)

Richard Lemarchand, ex-Uncharted lead designer and visiting associate professor in interactive media at the University of Southern California, objects to sex being portrayed as an interaction that can be won, lost, or completed. “That kind of modelling in a game of sex comes at the subject with a certain mindset,” he says. “There’s a ‘game of skill’ to be played here – if you win the game then there’s a positive outcome, and if you lose the game there’s a negative outcome. I think a lot of people have that idea about sex itself on many different levels – you know, if you wear the right aftershave and you say the right things you might get to have sex with someone… I think a lot of people grow up thinking there is a right and a wrong way to ‘do sex’.”


Fahrenheit’s sex scenes are made ridiculous by the idea that you can ‘win’ at sex.

Famed for saying to a crowd at NYU Game Center that game creators put up too much front and didn’t make themselves vulnerable enough, Lemarchand goes on to say that he is heartened that games are becoming more about the idea of play as being intrinsically rewarding. “The historical place that we’ve come from in game culture is to do with zero-sum games, or to do with win/lose states in games. I’m excited to see a shift in games away from win/lose conditions and towards systems and artefacts that embody many different kinds of playfulness. The greater this shift, the more optimistic I get about being able to map that onto unisexuality. As I have struggled to come to an understanding of sex and what it means to human beings, over the years I’ve come to understand that sex is not just about navigating obstacle courses and goals. Play is an end unto itself.”

However, Lemarchand is still keen to emphasise how difficult human interaction is to model. “As games have advanced in the last few years, there’s obviously been a move towards figurative descriptions of either quasi-realistic or stylised realistic scenes… It’s very hard in computer graphics to get characters even emoting well at one another. Depicting the human body, and the human emotion… something as complex and as nuanced as that – which you need to depict sex well – this presents one of the biggest hurdles to depicting sex in games.” For example, he says, “we always agonised as to whether we could get the characters to kiss well in Uncharted” – a game where he says the team preferred to cut away rather than depict sex graphically.

Former design director for Epic Games Cliff Bleszinski shares Lemarchand’s sentiment. “Take Mass Effect, for example,” he tells us, “a fantastic series that I’ve praised numerous times, but when the characters interact in their sex scenes it kind of looks like two cosplay mannequins rubbing together. I think the key is to suggest sex, and to imply first, before we try to make Hot Coffee: The Standalone Game.”


Mass Effect’s sex scenes looks “like two cosplay mannequins rubbing together,” says Cliff Bleszinski.

Not everyone feels this way, though. Martin Hollis, the veteran designer whose work spans GoldenEye 007 to Bonsai Barber, is making a game about love for GameCity Festival 2013, and he is not sure that it’s just game mechanics that are steering big-budget titles away from more sexually aware themes.

“In terms of game mechanics, there’s no theoretical problem,” Hollis says. “Videogames have a lot of repetition. Sex itself is… repetitive seems like the wrong word, but you know what I mean. Given the repeating layered loops in the structure of most ludic or game-like games, it is silly to say that the medium is intrinsically antagonistic to sex. In fact music, dance, sex and games naturally and structurally have an intimate relation that we can loosely call ‘rhythm’… What we see, however, is 6,000 years of games about competition, conflict or war. The cultural history of games we have been bequeathed makes it difficult to mine [other] tropes, mechanics or systems, so it is an uphill struggle to design the abstract part of a game concerning sex. Even the concept of a romantic game is a difficult one for a westerner familiar only with middle-of-the-road western games.”

The structural history of games can be a crushing load to bear for game designers: the fact that there is no real track record of sexually explicit interactive experiences being profitable or successful is a theoretical roadblock. Game designer Matthew S Burns once lamented games’ structural problems on his blog, pointing out that their reluctance to leave familiar game mechanics behind causes the accompanying narrative to suffer as a result. “The very second you try to wrap actions like [shooting aliens or punching people] in a ‘good story’ that does not somehow address what happens during the mechanical part of the experience,” Burns argues, “is the second you fail to write a good story.”

http://media.edge-online.com/wp-content/uploads/edgeonline/2013/10/Fear-of-sex-3.jpghttp://media.edge-online.com/wp-content/uploads/edgeonline/2013/10/Fear-of-sex-3.jpg
“It is silly to say that the medium is intrinsically antagonistic to sex,” says game designer Martin Hollis.

Is that why Mass Effect, God Of War, even Grand Theft Auto’s sex scenes seem incidental and barely developed? Is it because we are failing to address sex directly, with a new language of game mechanics? Is sex doomed to be a punchline like in Leisure Suit Larry, or a racy subtext like in Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines?

Imagine, though, that developers had not spent years and years iterating on technology to make violence more realistic, and instead focused on making emotional experiences, sex and the interaction between characters’ bodies more believable.

Independent developer Pietro Righi Riva is making a Unity game called Awkward Sex, which simulates two human bodies that hover where your mouse leaves them: the aim is to click and drag where you would like them to go. Of course, the game is called Awkward Sex, and you are inclined to make the two bodies touch each other, but it’s melancholy and difficult. Positioning the two humanoids to meaningfully touch each other is a slow, almost impossible process. Imagine that we had mastered this years ago: would we be playing games that had more to say about sexual interaction?

There’s still hope. Japanese games have always embraced sex as a subject and theme, although they can be very misogynistic and often avoid 3D modelling or any real approach to sex as a meaningful interaction between two characters. And there certainly isn’t a dearth of actual thematic discussion of sex in the indie game scene. As previously mentioned, critic and developer Anna Anthropy often makes games about sexual experiences, shunning hyperrealistic graphics for discussion about the issues surrounding sex. Anthropy’s game Mind Fuck, about staring down your partner erotically in a competition for points, is multiplayer and entirely based on one button – the rest of the game leverages your real-life relationship with a partner.

http://media.edge-online.com/wp-content/uploads/edgeonline/2013/10/Mind-Fuck.jpghttp://media.edge-online.com/wp-content/uploads/edgeonline/2013/10/Mind-Fuck.jpg
Anna Anthropy’s Mind Fuck.

A text-based adventure about saucy police antics, Anthropy’s Sex Cops is a game where the oppressive constraints of the narrative options act as a domineering dominatrix on your erotic adventure. Twine game developer Porpentine used the same constraints to make Cyberqueen, where your character is erotically abused by a sci-fi computer resembling SHODAN from System Shock. From what Lemarchand and Bleszinski have said, perhaps large-budget videogames are actually crippled by their own compulsive reliance on incredibly sophisticated 3D graphics – so much so that the complexities of sex are impossible to portray in a nuanced and non-ridiculous manner.

But exactly what is it that allows independent games to explore these issues more freely? Although David Gaider’s games and the Mass Effect franchise have clearly done well, what stops big-budget games being more explicit, more incisive, more exploratory with sex like indie games? There’s something else at work. Conservative attitudes present in western culture, particularly in the US and Australia, are limiting the ways in which such content is portrayed in games.

“The taboo of sex in console games is politically and commercially censored more strictly than that of male nudity or the taboo of killing people,” Hollis says. In particular, Hollis cites the furore surrounding the Hot Coffee mod made by Patrick Wildenborg for Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which allowed players to access a previously unrated sex minigame that existed in the game’s undeleted assets. The Hot Coffee content, although inaccessible without the mod, caused GTA: San Andreas to be re-rated in the US, turning it from an ESRB rating of ‘Mature’ to ‘Adults Only 18+’, which made many shops pull the game from their shelves.


The Hot Coffee scandal saw Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas pulled from shelves and re-rated in the US.

This is a serious issue for publishers in terms of profits, and a warning shot for big videogame developers. But it’s an issue that the makers and distributors of free games about sex – such as Anna Anthropy and Porpentine – don’t have to worry about. “The bottom line is that the only way my games got made is because I made them myself, for free, on my own time without compromise,” Porpentine says. “[Most commercial games] focus on realistic graphics and refuse to experiment with stylisation that would better evoke emotions and arousal. They rely on highly structural, antiquated mechanics instead of designing organic controls suited to intimate experiences. You see stylisation in every other artform, but [triple-A games are] focused on realism in a way that reminds me of when rich people only cared about extremely realistic paintings with detailed lighting.”

Hollis cites commercial and political censorship as one of the main reasons why big studios won’t touch the topic of sex. “After Rockstar Games’ clumsy and accidental ejection and Take-Two’s spanking, we should expect little from console games because of self-censorship,” he says. “With Hot Coffee, a conflux of conservative America, Australia and opportunistic politicians did wrathfully smite a game publisher who [had] thought naughty thoughts. People say there is no such thing as bad publicity, but there certainly is such a thing as being badly removed from the shelves. The view seems to be that 17-year-olds should be allowed to engage in virtual murder but they don’t have sex, and therefore do not need to know or learn about sex in the interactive medium. Sex is very wrong and illegal, whereas mass murder is acceptable and legal – in games. One is abnormal and the other is normal; what a strange world we have made.”

“When I was 12 years old it was perfectly OK to watch Robocop or Predator,” Bleszinski says, “but the second that a breast was flashed on screen, my mother would attempt to toss a blanket or a coat over my head. That probably explains a lot of my adult issues. Americans in general have really weird ideas about sex and violence, and that micro-example kind of summarises it nicely.” Bleszinski feels certain that commercial games can still address the diverse ways in which humans interact with each other; he’s just unsure about how well they can do so.

“I still have hope that we may someday feature titles that deal with the nuances of relationships and how very complicated yet beautiful sex can be,” he says. “I have a feeling that Oculus Rift might just help with the immersion aspects of depicting a sexual experience. [But] when it comes to nuance and pacing and depiction, that’s another battle altogether.”


Wicked Paradise, “the world’s first erotic virtual reality videogame”.

Someone who is already attempting to fight that battle is Jeroen Van den Bosch, the founder of Wicked Paradise. His team – a group of triple-A veterans who’ve worked on Rage, the Call Of Duty series, Lost Planet, Madden and PlanetSide 2 – is in the very early stages of developing “the world’s first erotic virtual reality videogame” as episodic content powered by Oculus Rift. Although Van den Bosch says that he will initially be making experiences targeted at straight males, he adds that he would like to branch out into making games for other sexual orientations too. The 3D virtual reality headset will offer more immersive experiences, and so is ripe for exploring other experiences than the usual death machines; already it is being lauded as a way for those who may have mobility problems to experience things they may not be able to do in real life.

Asked if he thinks there is a special risk attached to making erotic games, he says: “I think a big part of the industry evolved into choosing the safe route and rehashing their successful formula year after year. I remember in the early days of my career in the game industry there was much more room for creativity. Games with unique premises such as Messiah, Magic Carpet and Little Big Adventure had a place. But slowly over time, it seems that most of the triple-A studios moved towards the same style of games, and every year we have a slightly better version of the same game being released. Most of the really creative games have moved to the indie scene. These smaller studios simply don’t have the same budget as large studios. There are special risks in doing a project like this, but I don’t want to play it safe. You just need to have the conviction to go for it.”

For Van den Bosch, the sophistication of 3D technology is more of an asset for him than a limitation. Having 3D bodies interact is the crucial part of his work. “It is difficult, but it’s not impossible. I think Mirror’s Edge did a great job of avatar embodiment, giving the player a virtual body. Ultimately it boils down to having very talented 3D character artists and animators on the team who fully understand every aspect of human anatomy and know how to translate that into realistic behaviour in a virtual environment. But at the core of it, we are using the same motion-capture techniques that are used in triple-A firstperson shooters, so just from a pure technological standpoint there is no difference.”

http://media.edge-online.com/wp-content/uploads/edgeonline/2013/10/Wicked-paradise-2.jpg
Wicked Paradise uses “the same motion-capture techniques that are used in triple-A firstperson shooters.”

But is he overestimating how much work it will take to have two or more 3D bodies touch each other meaningfully? Van den Bosch agrees that his job would be significantly easier if the industry had iterated on the mechanics of love rather than the mechanics of violence for years. “I always found it amazing that it’s perceived ‘normal’ to blow people’s heads off in games. However, when you create a game that focuses on happy feelings, like sex or relationships, it immediately becomes controversial. That just doesn’t make any sense to me. Luckily that is rapidly changing, and I think we see it in other media as well. For example, Game Of Thrones is a fantastic series with a rich, complex storyline and copious amounts of sex. That paid off for them.”

Are we talking videogame porn here, then? Is that where we are going? “No, not at all; we are not making porn,” Van den Bosch emphasises. “Unlike porn, in Wicked Paradise [the developer’s first game will be self-titled] the player isn’t watching something passive on a screen, but rather the player is immersed in an interactive virtual reality experience. That’s a huge difference. We are actually working with a critically acclaimed erotic novelist to help us create a rich, mature storyline.”

Do we even need a “rich, mature storyline” to justify our interest in sex? Can’t sex itself be an expression of who we are? Thanks to the fearless personal games that indie developers are making, the examples of how to treat sex as a nuanced expression of the human condition are out there, waiting for the larger culture to cast off its superficial titillation.

If it has proved a difficult task before, focusing on hyperreal graphics may not be the answer. Focusing instead on character, and the different ways characters are affected or motivated by sex, is something that could help benefit the wider videogame-playing public. Games would be the ideal environment, for example, in which to explore the idea of consent – what it is and what it means to people. If sex is addressed more directly in this way, it could lead to greater respect for others’ bodies, not to mention greater respect for sex itself.

Quelle: Why are big-budget game developers so afraid of exploring sexual themes? | Features | Edge Online

 

[LordCrash]

On Videogame Reviews


1. Game of the Year

BioShock Infinite is the worst game of the year.

It’s an unjustified shooter without a single new idea. It’s a self-gratifying spectacle that confuses cunning with depth. It’s a craven, heartless game of false moral equivalencies that uses the suffering of oppressed people as window dressing, as theme, while it explores its own cold metaphysical conceits.

For its lack of humanity, for its fake guilt, for its flat boring gameplay, for its 100 million dollar cost, for its cleverness, for its cowardice, BioShock Infinite is not just the worst game of the year. It’s the worst game I’ve played this generation.


2. Complicating the Narrative

BioShock Infinite is the third most highly reviewed game on Metacritic so far this year. Across 3 platforms (PC, Xbox 360, and PS3), it has received 126 positive reviews and 2 mixed. Its overall Metacritic score is 94 out of 100.

“This is as close to perfect as videogames get.”

“Irrational’s achievements in BioShock Infinite dignify the medium.”

“[BioShock Infinite] is about circles, and how you can go around them and end up in a completely new place. It’s a beautiful game.”

The question is not: why do none of these reviews agree with me? It is: why do they all agree with each other? Where is the diversity of opinion? Where is the spirited debate? In the aggregate, it becomes clear that the problem is not any one review. It’s all the reviews.

I don’t expect every reviewer to give BioShock Infinite a 2 out of 10, as I would. But I expect to see more dissent than that offered by excellent outliers like Game Critics or Quarter to Three or Action Button. I expect to see more actual criticism in the videogame review community. I expect to not have perspectives like mine looked upon as trolling.

Reviews are not about finding agreement. They are not based on commonly held values. As if anyone is sure just what makes a videogame great. It’s all contested ground. It’s our values as gamers that are exactly at stake in reviews. We shouldn’t be asking whether BioShock Infinite deserves a 9 or a 10. We should be asking whether it deserves a 2 or a 10. That’s a real debate.


3. Fake Empire

BioShock Infinite is lauded for its art design and worldbuilding. This is an obvious plus for most reviewers.

“I don’t say this lightly…but Columbia is simply the most intriguing, fascinating setting I’ve ever set foot in as a player.”

For me, this is one reason the game is so disappointing. A beautiful, corrupt place that I can only see, not touch. That I can interact with in no meaningful way except to shoot or loot. That actively presents itself as fake, a theme park, but offers no mechanics to go behind the curtain.

A game’s visuals cannot be separated into some separate category for evaluation. That’s the old logic of graphics/sound/fun factor. They are instead an integrated part of the entire game experience. Striking images and loving details can actually make a game worse if they draw you in and suggest a world that the rest of the game cannot support. A basic dissonance is created between hand and eye, and you feel more like a viewer than a player. The world calls to you, but you cannot respond. This may be all too common in videogames – compelling visuals overlaid on stiff, conventional, unimaginative mechanics (see also: Sonic the Hedgehog, Limbo, Skyrim) – but Infinite doesn’t get a pass just because it’s all high-minded and old-timey about it.

For all its artfulness, BioShock Infinite’s Columbia doesn’t even try that hard to suggest a world. It’s a ‘living’ city filled with animatronic dummies and conveniently closed shops. It hangs in the sky with no sense of altitude, since you can’t fall off. You ‘explore’ by rereading the same few propaganda posters, rummaging through desks for pineapples and bullets and hot dogs, and wandering around until you discover which way to go and then going the other way (for fabulous prizes). All those fine period details become merely glowing objects to click through, and the game reveals FPS to mean first-person scavenger as much as first-person shooter. It’s the thinnest sort of exploration imaginable. You’re not in a floating city; you’re not in a place at all. It’s just another videogame level.

Of course, the game claims to be aware of all this fakery. It Disneyfies with glee and says: hey, this Columbia is pretty dystopian, huh? And if this dystopia seems like your typical videogame world, well there’s some sly critique for you. The BioShock series’ great talent thus far seems to be thematizing videogame conventions rather than challenging them. It has mastered the safe subversion, never mind its conservative heart. Clever self-awareness trumps actual innovation. And gamers eat it up. Because we love to feel smart, removed, safely above it all.


4. Picnic, Lightning

BioShock Infinite is an intensely boring first-person shooter. Its gunplay is loose, loud, full of bluster. Weapons and vigors are poorly differentiated and seem designed around lurid effects rather than compelling interplay. When I was offered the chance to buy upgrades my first time through, none of them interested me. So I waited. I saved all my scavenged silver eagles and waited for a reason to buy anything. And then the game was over. I’d never bought a thing.

It’s not that I have any particular talent for shooters; it’s that Infinite’s entire upgrade system and economy is unnecessary on normal difficulty. In fact, there is no real difficulty at all on normal (outside one inane ghost and the final firefight). Like the original BioShock and its game-breaking vita chambers, without a meaningful penalty for death, it all comes down to a war of attrition. Even among modern games and all their coddling, Infinite is particularly indulgent about failure. Your choices are either a frenetic, garish, mayhem-filled picnic on normal or the tedious meat grinder of the harder difficulties.

A natural question arises: why is BioShock Infinite a shooter anyway? If it barely matters how well you shoot, why shoot at all? And if the most potentially engaging part of the game – its world – is inaccessible, why not make it some other kind of game? One that would allow actual exploration and some meaningful form of, you know, interactivity?

The most straightforward answer is that the original BioShock and System Shock 2 were shooters. The genre pressure on a 100 million dollar game is probably another reason. But in-game, BioShock Infinite doesn’t justify its own gameplay. I get that Booker is tough, a deeply violent man. But a one-man army? With flashy magic powers shoehorned in just to make the killing cooler? Given his mission (bring us the girl, wipe away the debt) and Infinite’s ambition (a videogame of big ideas), does the basic interactive premise of the game really make sense? In the way that the gunplay of Halo, Far Cry 2, or Call of Duty does?

This line of thinking seems illegitimate to most reviewers. You can’t question a game’s genre. You are supposed to take the game on its own genre terms, see what it’s trying to do within them, and then evaluate it fairly. But what if what it’s trying to do is dumb? Telling the story of a violent man trying to come to terms with his crimes while using lightning to make heads explode is dumb. Creating a world of delusion, suffering, and historical evil and them making you feel awesome as you plow through it is beyond dumb. This is not meaningful violence. This is having your cake and chain-lightning it too.

Reviewers speak about videogames genres as if they’re well-established categories. They are not. They are in constant flux, and any supposed convention is up for debate. In practice, genres are either marketing labels or convenient shorthand for writers who do not know how to describe their videogame experiences. They keep our expectations in check and our criticisms either in a comparative/historical mode or at the level of the nitpick. We do not ask why we’re here, what it’s all about. We narrow and focus on surfaces, features, the presumed genre facts, not our experiences of them. It’s not even that thinking in genre terms can’t ever be useful. It’s that in videogameland, we don’t know the difference between a genre and a rut.


5. Not My Thing

So BioShock Infinite is not a compelling first-person shooter. Then again, few first-person shooters are. Once I admit this ‘bias’ – that I think the FPS is one of the most limited, least interesting genres – I’ve marked myself as someone unqualified to give a fair review.

Online, we often say a game is ‘not my thing’ if we dislike it or just aren’t interested but want to be nice to all those people for whom it is, presumably, their thing. (See also the demographic cop-out: I’m not the target audience.) It works as a courtesy, as a basic acknowledgement that other people with different tastes exist. But it’s also shallow, a way of not engaging. It forecloses conversations about the ‘thing’ itself before they can even begin.

We’ve internalized the logic of ‘not my thing’ in our reviews as well. We assume that genre preferences are all about taste. Thus, you should at least halfway enjoy platformers, or JRPGs, or racing games to give them a fair shake in a review. To make sure you ‘get’ them, their particular pleasures. To keep your criticisms in check, not prone to personal ‘bias’.

We assume that disliking particular genre elements disqualifies a reviewer, but not the opposite: that being predisposed to liking a genre, being a fan, might be the problem. That it might also predispose a reviewer to a fan’s conservatism, a fan’s indulgence, a fan’s myopia and pedantry. Fans excel at celebration, but criticism? No, fandom seeks to insulate itself from criticism. And yet videogame reviewers are, by and large, avowed videogame fans.

‘Not my thing’ is really gatekeeping dressed up as broadmindedness. It’s the preemptive agree-to-disagree that keeps conversations pleasantly limp and premises unexamined. It erects a neighborly fence so that thoughtful outsiders don’t accidentally wander in. It says: I’m treading lightly; you do the same. And if this all sounds like a weird club run by the faithful, by thin-skinned boys, well that’s because it is.


6. Press X to Elizabeth

“Elizabeth though is really the hook that knocks BioShock Infinite into maximum score territory…She is a truly phenomenal combination of coding, voice acting, mo-cap, design, and writing…She’s a fully formed character, a real person near enough.”

You have to wonder if some reviewers know any women. Do they have sisters, mothers? Or, less likely, are they women themselves? Who else is on their list of fully-formed female characters? The rebooted Lara Croft? Our standards for women in games are so low that a down and dirty Lara can now make claims to being a feminist hero. Never mind that her QTE deaths are mini snuff films. That every time she finds a tomb to raid, the camera cozies up for a sideboob shot. That none of this is accidental. (Did the sideboob camera direct itself?)

Elizabeth may clear the very low bar set for women in games, but she’s not a complex character. She’s a companion cube in a corset. For most reviewers, this counts as a real person. Or near enough.

She comes from the haircut school of character development (which can sometimes actually work – see The Walking Dead’s Clementine). She gradually loses her clothes over the game until she is finally re-damselled and etherized upon a table, mo-capped, fully formed. She’s been caged and ogled her whole life. Why stop now?

While leading the player to end-game enlightenment, Elizabeth serves a practical function as well. She’s really a power-up more than a person. A kind of embodied super-vigor mapped onto the controller, sharing the same button as use/reload. She also flicks coins and supplies at you, just to remind you she’s still there. She is otherwise invisible to the rest of Columbia, despite being its most wanted citizen. She exists only for you, a marvelous tool, an extension of your strapping self.

This is all by design. Irrational head Ken Levine wanted the player to forge an emotional connection with Elizabeth but not have her be a burden. Because lord knows, relationships are never burdens. In an interview, he contrasted Elizabeth with a crying, needy Microsoft Word. Who wants that? And reviewers agreed, praising Elizabeth for ‘being useful’ and ‘not getting in the way’.

“She is among the best AI companions I’ve ever had.”


7. Fair and Balanced

If the reception of Elizabeth isn’t evidence enough of reviewers’ inability to evaluate the human elements of a videogame, the response to BioShock Infinite’s story makes it perfectly clear.

Let’s recap: a racist, nationalist, religious cult secedes from the Union, and the planet, and proceeds to oppress all people of color, enslave its workers, and stone interracial couples, all while its privileged white citizens bask in an orgy of Americana. So far, so good. This is a videogame, we have a gun, let’s shoot the shit out of this place.

But Infinite has higher things in mind. Halfway through, the people of color who constitute the rebel Vox Populi actually manage to overthrow their oppressors. And lo and behold: the white man’s fear comes to life. The Vox slaughter, they scalp, they paint their faces and play the part of the bloody savage. See what happens when you let these people out of their cages? No better than beasts, Infinite says.

Many reviewers were impressed by this insight:

“Infinite slyly submits that both sides of the coin have their demons, and neither can claim the moral high ground in Columbia.”

“This doesn’t boil down to the typical good guys/bad guys scenario. Due to the nature of the world and the way it changes over time, you’ll also see that Vox Popul’s rebel forces are capable of just as much cruelty as the forces they seek to overthrow.”

Why are the Vox capable of just as much cruelty? Because the legacy of violence is passed on from oppressor to oppressed? Perhaps, but that’s not actually in the game. Is it because history is full of examples of bloody rebellions and reigns of terror? But then that ignores the actual historical context in America that Infinite claims to care about, where the struggle for civil rights was remarkably non-violent (at least on the side of the disenfranchised).

No, the Vox are just as cruel as the Founders because Irrational decided they would be. They wanted to show a city fall, not just the aftermath as in the original BioShock. They wanted a new set of enemies, a literal skin palette-swap, halfway through the game. They wanted to make a point about how any extreme position is dangerous. Even if that position is racial equality, fair wages, or medicine for your daughter dying in Shantytown. Infinite is a game that lets you peck a man to death with crows, but hey, let’s not get too worked up, too extreme, about suffering and social injustice.

Infinite creates a clear moral equivalence between Columbia’s oppressors and oppressed. Both Booker and Elizabeth voice versions of this ‘one no better than the other’ logic, in case you miss the point. Such false equivalencies are beloved by the lazy, the aloof, the cowardly. It’s as if the game almost realizes the absurdity of the scenario it has set up, since it doesn’t even happen in the universe you occupy the first half of the game. You have to cross over to a parallel reality to experience it. It’s like admitting: at least both sides are equivalent in some universe!

Infinite may be about multiple universes, but the game itself has only one reality – the one you play through. This false equivalence is not optional, given to some quantum fluctuation. Open the box and this cat will be alive 100% of the time. This turn by the Vox is not even background noise, something you can just ignore. This is a videogame after all – you have to participate. Those people you were just sympathizing with in Shantytown? They’re coming to kill you now. Pull the trigger or walk away and miss the end of this mind-blowing story. And don’t feel guilty when you shoot them in the face. Though Infinite claims to be a game about a genocidal white man’s guilt, all the racial stereotypes turn out to be true. The racially impure are just as bad as the Founders feared. You are justified.

If you still have doubts about this equivalence, consider the question Irrational tweeted in late June (since deleted):

“If you had to pick a side in Columbia, would you choose the Founders, or Vox Populi? #BioShockInfinite”


8. God Only Knows

“Perhaps most importantly, BioShock Infinite doesn’t compromise its narrative to placate a particular group or suit a specific agenda.”

Why is the moral failure of BioShock Infinite not only accepted but celebrated by reviewers? Because Infinite’s politics are exactly the same as that of many gamers. It doesn’t ‘compromise’. It doesn’t ‘placate’. It suits no ‘agenda’. This is familiar conservative language for those who imagine themselves above politics. Who do not see that claiming no political position is itself a political position, and a self-serving one at that. The straight, white male gamer could in fact find no better home for his high-minded non-politics than BioShock Infinite.

Of course these gamers don’t get what the big deal is. They can’t relate, didn’t feel the same way, aren’t offended. Of course they don’t see that Infinite’s ultimate depiction of the Vox is not that far removed from the racist caricatures in the Hall of Heroes. Of course they applaud Elizabeth’s character growth, her ‘education’, first sympathizing with the powerless in Shantytown and then realizing her naivety once their brutality emerges. Of course Shantytown itself is just a fiction to these gamers, a videogame level, and ultimately, like all the hucksters and snake-oil salesmen of the time, a sham.

But see, they say, that’s not what the story is really about. Did you see that ending, man? Oh right, there’s ‘always a lighthouse, always a man, always a city’. I’m not sure what’s worse: the false moral equivalency, or dropping all concern with the Vox so that we can get to this profound truth at the end. Like so many videogames, BioShock Infinite can only make comments about itself, about its franchise, about theories of the world, not about the world itself, not about the human beings in it.

“Once things unravel, easy villains vanish and people are left in their place.”

If only this were true. Infinite doesn’t know how to humanize the white citizens of Columbia and make their vile perspectives comprehensible. Instead, it dehumanizes minorities and laborers so that everyone is a monster. Why does Daisy Fitzroy, a black servant falsely accused of murder, turn into a rebel leader who would actually murder children? Because Irrational needed her to. For moral equivalence to Comstock, for Elizabeth’s character growth, for their plot. Why are the Luteces the most successful characters in the game? Because clever, amusing, so-above-it-all-they-are-actually-outside-space-and-time characters are the only ones that play into Infinite’s ethos. The game doesn’t grant characters much humanity because, while it believes in quantum mechanics, I’m not sure it actually believes in humans. Or has any use for them.

The thing is, reviewers don’t care about any of this. Infinite’s use of racism and oppression as window dressing, its indifference to the suffering and injustice it portrays, its dropping of it entirely once its sci-fi engines get going, none of it seems to trouble the average reviewer. He’d rather not have any ‘politics’ in his games anyway. Certainly nothing that would ‘compromise’ the narrative to ‘suit a specific agenda.’ He who strives for ‘objectivity’, who claims to have no ‘agenda’ of his own. There may be consequences to callously using race and class to fill out a world and then casually dismissing it. But not to videogames reviewers. They just don’t care.


9. Embarrassment of Riches

I’m not the first to bring up some of these criticisms. After the initial wave of laudatory reviews, posts began to appear questioning the combat, the violence, the depictions of Elizabeth and the Vox. Cameron Kunzelman collected some of the best of these early critical impressions, and more appeared soon after. Such writing is vital to the ongoing conversation about videogames, and it has led to the present sense that while reviewers loved Infinite, ‘critics’ were not nearly so impressed.

There are a couple problems with this, though. First, it plays up a division between reviewers and critics, one supposedly commercial and mainstream, the other more academic and higbrow. This leaves reviewers to comfortably churn out the same feeble game apologetics and the critics isolated in their own little community of like-minded folks. Second, the critics’ impressions are themselves insufficient. They are often too loose and bloggy (just some thoughts…) or too detached and meditative or prone to simply talking past reviewers. They observe, they analyze, they muse, sometimes passionately, but they rarely lower themselves to appraise. To evaluate comprehensively, and with force. To judge.

It’s not like critics and reviewers would have nothing to say to one another. You don’t have to look for low mainstream reviews to find criticisms of BioShock Infinite. You just have to look at the 8’s. Reviewers who score Infinite in this range see many of the same problems as the critics. Reading their reviews, you might think they’re describing an average-to-bad game. That is, until you get to the part where they say how despite the game’s obvious problems, they still admire its ambition, applaud the obvious effort and expense, and feel, in the end, that the good outweighs the bad. Nice job. 8 out of 10.

The review scale is one of the most embarrassing aspects of the videogame community. Where else is an 8 the acceptable level at which to criticize a failure as colossal as BioShock Infinite? The score that won’t cause too many waves, since anything in the 7’s is average at best, and below that: no man’s land. Where else do you see these numbers? School, that’s where. There is perhaps no clearer admission that videogames have not escaped their adolescence than grading them on a high school curve.

This is an old problem, but one that even relatively new sites show no inclination to address. When Polygon launched last year and began putting out higher caliber feature stories, I had some hope that they might approach reviews differently as well. I read their review policy and saw a lot of fuss about updating reviews over time but nothing new when it came to the scale. Worse, the scale they put forward actually validated and reinforced our current low standards, only gussied up with professional language. 9’s “may not innovate or be overly ambitious but are masterfully executed.” 7’s are good but “have some big ‘buts’”. A 5 “indicates a bland, underwhelming game that’s functional but little else.” Not 5 as average, as commonplace, the middle instead of the bottom of the scale. (Their 2’s, 3’s, & 4’s list some silly trinity of ‘complete’ failures to justify their existence.)

These numbers are unworthy of a serious site. Which is to say, there are virtually no serious sites for game reviews. And why are they not serious? Because their reviewers don’t actually believe in videogames. When you believe in something, you have high expectations. You believe it’s capable of amazing things, things you can barely imagine. Our pitiful standards for games betray not only our lack of belief but our acceptance of this lack. We expect nothing more than entertainment, gratification, distraction. And we grade accordingly.

One might be tempted to think: hey, this scale isn’t better or worse, it’s just different. Once you know how it works, you can translate the numbers to the full scale, if that’s your thing. Except that in doing so, in parsing all the fine distinctions between 7’s and 8’s and 9’s, it assumes a baseline of worthiness, an implicit approval. Look at all our highly-rated games, look at this embarrassment of riches. It gives the unmistakable impression that videogames today are basically great. Even though they’re not. They’re really not.


10. Let Us Now Praise Famous Games

About two years ago, I decided to start taking notes and assigning scores to nearly every game I played. I’d been abroad a few years and fallen way behind on all the next-gen games that reviewers raved about. I suspected my own evaluations might be different, but I wasn’t sure just how big the disparity would be.

The first game to shock me was the original LittleBig Planet. Of 85 reviews, only 5 dipped below 90. The lowest was a 75, and the metascore was a staggering 95. But the game I played was a 3 out of 10. I loved how it looked, loved its charming DIY spirit, loved how it encouraged player creativity, even found many of the player-creator intro videos quite moving. But Sackboy’s running and jumping were so appalling that it killed all my motivation to play and negated the game’s many virtues. There was no explaining it away with talk of physics engines or how it was really a different kind of platformer. Its controls were simply game-ruining for me.

I continued to play highly reviewed games that not only underwhelmed but often stunned me with their failures. There were more 3’s (Skyward Sword, Halo 4, New Super Mario Bros 2) and 4’s (Skyrim, Dear Esther, Tomb Raider) but not so many 5’s (Arkham City, Bastion), since my feelings didn’t often fall in the middle. Even 6’s that I mostly enjoyed (Red Dead Redemption, Fire Emblem: Awakening, Journey) were nothing to get that excited about. Only 7’s (Gone Home, The Last of Us, Wii Sports Resort) and 8’s (The Walking Dead, Kirby’s Epic Yarn, Far Cry 2) really started to get interesting, and there were a handful of amazing 9’s (The Binding of Isaac, Kentucky Route Zero, Spelunky). While I did play two 2’s (the other was Limbo), I also played two 10’s (Minecraft and Demon’s Souls).

Of this sampling, you might agree with some of the scores, but how could anyone agree with all of them? That’s precisely the point – no one could, or should. And without an explanation, why should anyone care about numbers alone anyway? If I were to write a review, it would be my task to articulate why I thought the game deserved that number. And of course readers could decide how convincing they found it.

But some of these scores no doubt look ridiculous to anyone familiar with most reviews. The very outlandishness of my numbers points to how ingrained our pitiful review scale remains. It speaks to how easily we submit to the tyranny of the perceived majority. It’s the same kind of thinking that leads to the many ridiculous sacrosanct positions held by the gaming community. To say you consider Ocarina of Time not a great Zelda or find Half-Life 2 overrated or prefer Metroid to Super Metroid, as I do, demands an explanation. It invites skepticism of not only your opinions but of your very motives. What’s your deal? You’re just trolling for clicks. And why should I listen to you anyway? You didn’t design the game. You don’t represent the average gamer. You’re just some vocal minority.


11. The Other Way

It’s exactly a reviewer’s job to speak for the minority. A minority of one. How could a reviewer speak for anyone else? They aren’t elected to stand in for some demographic, and the review community is not a representative democracy. Every time I see a reviewer try to speak for the average player, the fabled everygamer, I see a dodge. An unwillingness to put himself out there and state his values, an attempt to hide in the crowd and submit to the majority. I see not a reviewer sensitive to his audience but a reviewer cowed.

Even for those who have the sense to speak for themselves, there is a more pervasive problem. This is the call, posed a thousand different ways, for objectivity. Isn’t BioShock Infinite objectively a good game? Doesn’t it have good graphics and sound, play well enough, provide interesting characters and themes? I mean, let’s be reasonable here. Let’s be fair. Irrational put a lot of time and money into this after all. Most of your criticisms are just based in your personal biases. They’re just your interpretations. At least you have to admit it’s a lot better than most games out there.

Here’s what I’ll admit: many boys have a really hard time with subjectivity. To grapple with your own subjectivity is to grapple with the subjectivities of others. It’s to see the world not as legible, stable, conquerable but as resistant, shifting, and fundamentally unknowable. It diminishes your certainty and authority. It leaves you vulnerable. This is a human problem, being a person among persons, but one that many boys have trouble admitting even the basic tenets of. And so they call for an objectivity that has no foundation except received opinion, that seeks to diminish individual experience, and that turns out to not even exist.

Objectivity is very convenient for the straight white middle class male gamer. Videogame culture encourages him to see his own subjectivity as the standard, as objective. He’ll invoke science, economics, statistics, and all manner of folk wisdom to defend his little kingdom. He’ll decry any challenge as ‘politics’ or ‘bad business’ or ‘whining’ or ‘here we go again’. He never considers how often objectivity is a cover for a dominant subjectivity, for a subjectivity that stays in power by not being recognized as such. He fears what will happen if the established order breaks down and the Vox take control.

This cult of objectivity has it exactly backwards. They want it to be one way. But it’s the other way. A good review is openly, flagrantly, unabashedly subjective. It goes all in with the reviewer’s biases. It claims them for what they really are – not tastes, not mere opinions, but values. It is a full-throated expression of one person’s experience of a game. This is the authority it claims – the player’s. And how could it be any other way? How can a reviewer get outside him or herself?

Some might admit that objectivity doesn’t exist but that it’s still an ideal to shoot for. It is, after all, a worthy goal to try and get outside yourself and see things from other perspectives. But chasing objectivity to achieve this is, again, entirely upside-down. You do not connect to the world outside, to the world of others, by suppressing or negating yourself. You do so by fully being yourself and recognizing just who that person is. A good reviewer knows that none of our values are settled, that the game community is actually in thrilling flux, despite the placid surface of its reviews. The only way to change how we talk about games is to encourage a plurality of voices, revel in their diversity, and be honest about our own subjectivity among them.


12. Old Boys

This means the old guard, and the old boys’ club specifically, has to go. Out with the fanboys and apologists and sycophants. Out with those who know a whole lot about videogames and not a lot about anything else. Out with those who applaud basic competence and hand out A’s for effort when ambitions fail. Out with reviewers who invent new ways to fawn, to heel, to kowtow, and whose relationship to game companies could best be described as a kind of Stockholm Syndrome.

We obviously need fewer reviewers who casually begin paragraphs this way:

“I was particularly fond of the Skyhook’s melee attacks because of the gruesome executions they deliver.”

But also fewer adult men whose idea of sensitivity and fair-mindedness leads to asinine transitions like this:

“While Infinite goes out of its way to point out that these views are negative, some are going to be disturbed by the amount of racial caricatures and casual racism throughout the game…On the other hand, few games in this generation have used music as well.”

Here’s the trouble with subjectivity – you have to own it. If your subjectivity encompasses a love of bloodletting, of feeling relentlessly rad, if it conveniently espouses equanimity in the face of injustice and over-sympathizes with the aggressors, then I can understand why you might want to cower behind objectivity. The straight white male gamers so untroubled by BioShock Infinite, whose ideology and privilege are in fact perfectly reflected in it, are just not up to the task of reviewing on their own. Their subjectivities betray complicity. It’s a dead end, the good old boys speaking to their bros, and only by diversifying in every way possible can the review community thrive.

This means more women, more people of color, more queer and transgender folks, more reviewers from diverse social, economic, and cultural backgrounds that don’t neatly fit the lifelong gamer mold. Not simply because we need reviewers to match the shifting demographics of those playing games, but because diversity is of clear and obvious value to any community and any discourse. We don’t speak often enough about values in gaming, but every game and every reviewer possesses them. And unless we make this discussion public and get different people involved, then the values that inform the power fantasies and self-gratification of the highest-rated games will continue to go unquestioned.

That said, not everyone’s a critic. Everyone has an opinion, everyone has their own experience of a game, and we need to encourage all forms of videogame writing (many as yet uncreated). But not everyone is inclined to think critically about their game experiences and articulate a judgment accordingly. The call for diversity is not a blind one, nor does it pretend to be a panacea for all the ills of videogame reviewing. It is absolutely necessary but insufficient on its own. Good individual reviewers – independent, dynamic, discerning reviewers – are still needed.


13. Portrait of a Videogame Reviewer

What makes a good reviewer? They are not experts, for one. Professors don’t usually make great reviewers in their own field, and neither does someone who’s played every platformer in existence. Such knowledge narrows the perspective of the reviewer and makes it difficult to engage non-experts. Hardcore gamers worship expertise, but an abundance of esoteric trivia often leads to nitpicking, if not missing the point entirely. Videogame reviewers don’t need to know more about genre history or how games are made; they need to know more about something outside of games. Many of the best reviewers I read have clearly been educated in the human world, and they bring to their evaluations an eye unsullied by the ingrained assumptions of videogameland.

Good reviewers do not go the other way either, towards a broadmindedness that makes tough criticism impossible. Gaming apologists love to bring up the inner child as the arbiter of what is good and true. As if your inner 11-year-old, who knew little and was open to everything, is the person you should really be listening to while playing a game. In my 11th year, I read Lord of the Rings, a dozen Babysitter’s Club books, and Stephen King’s It, and I enjoyed them all. I was addicted to both WWF wrestling and the soap opera Another World. I was open alright, but I was no critic. We should approach games generously, but a good reviewer can’t experience them without judgment all the way through. He can’t forget all his experiences and tastes and accumulated values while playing without being fundamentally dishonest. The inner child is just the nostalgic version of having no biases, of striving to be an objective un-person, not a crusty adult with a point of view.

A good reviewer has her own standard, though it can shift between games. She calculates case by case, knowing that one aspect can ruin an otherwise excellent game, and another quality make a clunky mess worthwhile. She doesn’t give her Game of the Year a 7 or 8 because she knows it’s weird and doesn’t match others’ idea of a great game. She gives it a 10 and articulates why. She isn’t intimidated by immaculate, expensive, hollow games, and she doesn’t hesitate to score them down for their lack of soul. She knows her own values and does not apologize. And yet sometimes she surprises herself.

A good reviewer does not fear emotion. He knows that emotion is not the enemy of game reviews but the key. Emotion clarifies. It cuts through all the noise endemic to gaming, and a good reviewer is dogged, even stubborn, about following his feelings to their ends. In this, he is not afraid to contradict himself, and he is often unreasonable (as reasonableness hasn’t done the game community much good so far). He values the polemical and the contrarian, and he knows that criticism doesn’t require a solution or any proof that he could do it better. He is, in all of this, self-aware. He knows how his own point of view positions him in larger debates, but he is not hamstrung by this awareness, unable to argue his perspective because of it.

A good videogame reviewer is a player first. She speaks both as a particular player and for the player’s experience more generally. She knows good reviewers across media do this as readers and viewers and listeners, and that this is especially crucial in gaming, where there is no game, nothing at play, without a live person. As a player, she asks the most basic questions. Not: am I entertained? Or: do I feel good? But: what is this game experience, and how, and why? And then, she judges that experience. This judgment may put some people off, but it’s where the answers to those basic questions become forcefully personal. It’s where the person herself comes to bear directly upon the game, that singular, willful, unpredictable ghost invading the machine. The cult of objectivity would like to erase the human altogether, but a good game reviewer reasserts the primacy of the player, and testifies to why she matters.


14. We Hope We Shall Arrive Soon

Citizen Kane comes up a lot in game discussions, to the point of absurdity. There is something desperate about it, and you get the sense that many people invoking it have neither seen the film nor understand its significance. But I think it also speaks to something more honest, and more hopeful, that unites gamers: that sense that games will someday arrive, though they haven’t yet. The Citizen Kane of videogames is meant to signal no less than the full arrival of the medium. And so, any fancy game with the barest pretense to meaning brings out the faithful, the still-hopeful, ready to declare our wait over. Even if, as in BioShock Infinite’s case, what we actually end up getting is more like the Birth of a Nation of videogames.

Videogames have always carried with them an unfulfilled promise. They seem to point ever forward, towards some new union of art, technology, and human agency. It’s why a screenshot can still compel, can suggest an entire world that 30 seconds of tired gameplay will immediately ruin. It’s why reviews remain fundamentally responses to previews, an evaluation of our expectations, of PR promises, rather than of the experience at hand. Any longtime gamer will remember those watershed moments when the future of gaming seemed suddenly unlimited. Playing the first Super Mario or Mario 64 or Grand Theft Auto III or Minecraft. Good critics know that these game experiences are bound to time, but a yearning for timelessness persists, for something transcendent, that speaks through the ages, Kane-like.

This longing for arrival infects our evaluations of both AAA and indie games alike. Where else but a AAA game studio can you find so many smart, talented, creative people working together to produce such puerile rubbish year after year? And yet where are the reviewers who will regularly and forcefully call them out on all their shiny iterative bullshit, who will do more than give an occasional slap on the wrist in the form of a 7 or 8, who will crucify the worst offenders, like BioShock Infinite? Reviews of indie games are not much better, even if the desire to advocate for small, spirited, innovative titles is more admirable. We can say ‘let’s have more games like Gone Home or Journey’ and still vigorously criticize their shortcomings, instead of fighting AAA score inflation with more empty 9’s and 10’s. One needs no better example of how reviewers can be just as blinded by indie charms than the hysterical reviews given to the vapid dead-end that is Limbo.

Some see a solution to our reviewing woes in abandoning scores altogether. Perhaps someday our criticism will arrive there too, and I will welcome it. But it won’t be anytime soon. To those would-be reviewers not inclined to assigning a number to an experience, let me say: If you can criticize sharply and forcefully, offering a comprehensive judgment that reaches well beyond the low standards of our 7+ scale, all without assigning a score, please do so. But don’t assume it’s the numbers that are the main problem, or use it as an excuse not to engage the review community where it lives. This allows the false divide to persist between qualitative and quantitative reviews, between biased subjective experiences and fair objective assessments. As if gamers can just choose which they prefer. As if objectivity isn’t a self-serving illusion and subjectivity our only real option.

Numbers are subjective too, and no official review policy can change that. When I first started scoring games, I wondered how I would decide the exact numbers. It took a few games to get the hang of it, and it remains subject to revision (how could it not – I live in time), but it wasn’t that hard. I have no problem saying that games as different as The Last of Us and Wii Sports Resort and Gone Home are all 7’s, and that this is a pretty high score coming from me. It’s my scale, informed by my values, and it won’t match anyone else’s. Only by reading me a while would you get a sense for what my numbers mean. The burden is thus on me to be a critic worth reading.

But wouldn’t having 100 different personal scales wreak havoc on Metacritic? Without common standards, wouldn’t a Metascore be incoherent? Indeed, but that was always the case. Only on top of it, we’ve made our aggregate scores dishonest and gutless too. They betray our conformity, our thoughtlessness, our lack of belief. And they remain the clearest signs that the videogame review community has not arrived.


15. Will the Circle Be Unbroken?

More than 6 months have passed since the release of BioShock Infinite, and another game of the year has appeared: Grand Theft Auto V. The adulation greeting it has surpassed that of Infinite and The Last of Us, and its 97 Metascore is extraordinarily high, even for our zealous reviewers. The game itself is the very definition of expensive, exhaustively fun, high-quality mediocrity. Its world is breathtaking and brittle, a monument to wasted opportunities. Its structure is tired, its satire flat, its narrative trisected to no end, and the entire experience profoundly thin. Grand Theft Auto V is exactly a modern AAA videogame. And a 4 out of 10.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the three highest-rated games of 2013 are about aging white men, their guilt, their anger, their disappointment, their lies. For the most part, the delirious reviews they’ve received were also written by aging white men. The struggles of Booker, Joel, Michael, and even Trevor must have resonated. At least they often did for me. As an aging white man, I can understand the anger and disappointment. I can understand the solace, the control, sought in games. I can understand diminished expectations and the appeal of objectivity. I can understand, but not accept, the lies this all entails. For through these lies, reviewers collude with game developers to present the illusion of maturity, vitality, achievement. All with a straight, if slightly haggard, face.

And yet BioShock Infinite, The Last of Us, and Grand Theft Auto V also feature protégées who represent the next generation. Elizabeth, Ellie, and Franklin, as well as the observant player, cannot help but see in these father figures a warning: Do not do as I do. If only the next generation of game reviewers would also take this to heart. It’s not their job to sustain the dominant narratives of their predecessors but instead to relentlessly, and mercilessly, complicate them. They must be insolent, unafraid of confrontation, unbowed by calls for reasonableness and objective purity by the illustrious Founders.

Gaming itself is on the cusp of another generational shift, of another sense of arrival, and yet our reviews remain enfeebled, unable to grapple honestly with games as nauseating as BioShock Infinite or as hollow as Grand Theft Auto V. As videogames continue to change, our criticism must too. But who will our future reviews ultimately serve? Game companies, the conservative industry, those gamers who want to preserve their illusions and keep games a site for sad self-gratification? Or will they serve videogames themselves and the players who actually believe in them?

At present, we have this: Carolyn Petit’s review of Grand Theft Auto V received more than 20,000 comments, many of them particularly vile even by gaming’s low standards, because she called out the game’s misogyny. It’s easy to blame these commenters, disgusting as they are, and demand more civility in our conversations about games. But I blame the review community as well for establishing the very grounds for these attacks, for making the 9 she gave GTA V a mathematical deduction on Metacritic instead of the insanely high score that it is, for maintaining the entire farce that is the videogame review and enabling the boys who skulk in the comments below.

Those boys, all those pitiful boys – they don’t get to decide anything. It’s the reviewers, all of them, who must give their readers no other option but to face a game’s failures. We don’t have to choose between mechanics and politics. Reviewers must pay attention to both, and everything else besides, and score according to their criticisms. The review cycle must no longer be a source of embarrassment but a dynamic conversation that constantly puts our values on the table and invites a reckoning. To encourage this, sites must vocally, and unapologetically, support their reviewers so they don’t have to face those pitiful boys alone. Carolyn’s criticism can no longer be dismissed as ‘politics’. It must be seen for what it is: being a person while playing a videogame.

Tough criticism is an act of belief. It is sincere in its hopes for the future but clear-eyed about the present. Most videogames are disappointing, and disappointing in dependable ways. But it is possible to love individual games, to be ignited by them, and see a future worth pursuing. We’re not at all sure what this medium is capable of, but it certainly deserves more than our regular pronouncements of excellence and the glib advice that we simply accept every familiar trope and gameism. As if criticism is just the sour grumbling of the ungrateful.

How long will it take before all our current scores are obsolete and the outcry over giving GTA V a 9 out of 10 is the nonsensical embarrassment of a generation past? What will we value in our games if the pretty and the awesome and the comforting no longer dominate our discussions? I want to hear every divergent view, every unpopular opinion. I want gaming to revel in dissent. We should marvel at a medium that allows us such room to play, to explore, to bring ourselves to bear on the experience and make it our own. A good review will honor this. It will say: This is what it was like for me. And in doing so ask: Now what was it like for you?

~ Tevis Thompson​

October 16th, 2013

Quelle: http://tevisthompson.com/on-videogame-reviews/
​

 

[LordCrash]

Escaping The Shooter Mold: How Oxide Plans to Revive The RTS

By Mike Williams , Mon 04 Nov 2013



We talk with new dev Oxide about its Nitrous engine and the rise of multi-core

Last week saw the announcement of Oxide Games, a brand-new startup aimed at creating an all-new engine. That engine, Nitrous, is the work of former Civilization V developers Brian Wade, Tim Kipp, Marc Meyer and Dan Baker, with help from Stardock president Brad Wardell. The original announcement called Nitrous a 64-bit, multi-core engine designed for strategy games, but Nitrous is meant for more than just strategy.

GamesIndustry International sat down with Oxide Games co-founder Dan Baker and Stardock Entertainment president and CEO Brad Wardell to talk about the company's plans for Nitrous. Wardell made it clear that despite his involvement, Oxide Games is an independent company not directly affiliated with Stardock.

"I've known some of the Oxide guys for a long time and we've been making strategy games for a long time," said Wardell. "Every time we go and do a strategy game, we have to roll our own engine. It's gotten tougher and tougher for strategy games to be competitive with say, a first-person shooter, in terms of fidelity, because FPSs can just license Unreal. It was getting more and more difficult for us to compete visually as strategy games, and as a result they were becoming more and more niche. Or in the case of role-playing games, they just became first-person shooters."

Wardell said that he had been talking to the Oxide team about a next-generation engine while they were still thinking about starting their own company. Nitrous has been designed to make "something that looks like Lord of the Rings" with thousands of high fidelity assets on screen at once.

Wardell explained that Nitrous is "not just for strategy games." Instead, Nitrous is intended for a wide variety of games with Wardell mentioning RPGs like Baldur's Gate as an example.

"I wouldn't say that strategy games are niche, but it's gotten to the point that unless you're a really big company, no one can afford to build the engines or technology that's involved in making an RTS," explained Baker. "We went back and forth before when we were talking to Brad and one of the questions was, 'why did the RTS genre get thinner?' I've seen a lot of market data and the games that come out sell great. The problem is it became so hard to just make them. It got more and more expensive, so a lot of the publishers just backed out of that market."

Baker said that when Firaxis began work on Civilization V, they looked for engines they could license and found none. Nitrous is an engine for "all the types of games that don't fit inside the traditional engine licensees." Wardell said that part of the problem is most games are trying to fit themselves into the first- or third-person shooter mold because that's what the licensable engines do best.
"We're looking to get the entire rest of the market. Everyone's been trying to redesign their games to fit that type of engine, because that's the only game in town," he said.

One big thing that stuck out in the original announcement is that Nitrous is 64-bit only. Oxide isn't worried about any issues due to that requirement because 64-bit hardware and operating systems are commonplace now. And while the 64-bit part is important, Oxide Games believes the multi-core aspect of the engine is a far bigger deal.

"There's a significant ramp-up cost to doing 64-bit. Part of that is because you have to start over from scratch. We're just biting the bullet and getting it done now. We think it'll give us a pretty big advantage going forward because game developers want to go to 64-bit, it's just that everything you license has been 32-bit for so long," said Wardell. "It's a non-trivial effort to write one of these engines from scratch. These other engines were written during a time where there was just one core. Dual-core is not that old. In another few years, you'll have 16 or 32 cores. It's hard to start from scratch again if you started from a time where there was just one core."

"We have pretty precise market data on customers. Everyone's system is 64-bit, so we don't find that controversial, except that people aren't doing it just yet," said Baker.

Wardell agreed that most games these days are CPU-bound, something he thinks hardware manufacturers have noticed as well. He pointed to the fact that AMD, Nvidia, and Intel have all expressed interest in Oxide's new engine.

"That's because they've seen what we've been doing. We've had video cards on the market that can do some amazing stuff, but the game technology hasn't been able to tap them because they're so CPU-bound. Your box might have 4 or 8 cores - even just 2 cores - most of these games out there are still basically single-core. With Nitrous, the more cores you throw at it, the faster it gets," he said.

Baker explained that legacy engines have actually held back hardware vendors in the long term: why make CPUs with more cores if the software won't support it? Old engines are hard to retro-fit for multi-core thinking, so the hardware industry has been coasting along raising the speed of smaller-core CPUs instead of adding more cores.

"People are beginning to build multi-core engines, but the initial investment of redoing all of your code isn't an issue for us as a new company," said Baker. "The second issue you have is that writing multi-threaded code is generally much more difficult on top of that. Between those two issues, there's a lot of market inertia and it's taken a long time. A few years ago, Intel was adding more and more cores to their CPUs and then all of a sudden that stopped."

Oxide Games is coming out today as a supporter of AMD's low-level Mantle API, which will allow developers to maximize performance on graphics chipsets that support it. Baker said that supporting Mantle was a "straightforward" adaptation that only took a couple of months on an alpha API.

"You'll see people misrepresenting that AMD's pushing this technology, but the reality is that a lot of people - including myself and other graphics architects - have been asking for this type of thing for a long time," said Baker. "I call it a contract of trust. The problem is driver models and APIs are built to protect against any random scenario which might happen. That costs you a lot of performance. Our game engine is already carefully engineered not to do certain bad things. From our perspective, when AMD came around and said, 'we're actually going to do this,' we were very interested to try it."

Baker believes Mantle-enabled games will probably have a seperate executables from their Direct X versions, for efficiency. He said that players could probably expect an option to load the Mantle-enabled version, but otherwise they should not be affected by Mantle's implementation.

"I don't think it's anything like Glide. Back then, the hardware had a lot of very specific variations," said Baker. "While there were advantages to doing that, it was because the hardware wasn't very programmable. A modern GPU is really just a processor; they're so programmable that the analogy doesn't hold up anymore."

Nitrous isn't an internal engine limited to Oxide and Stardock. Oxide fully intends to bring Nitrous to developers everywhere, but Baker wanted to caution developers on their expectations. It won't be a simple, plug-and-play engine.

"If you imagine you have a car," said Baker. "These other engines are like buying the whole car and then painting it. We're more like a high-performance engine. You build the car around it. We're not expecting someone without any experience writing code would be able to take on Nitrous. It's designed for professionals in the industry who want to get a lot of performance out of it, who understand their limiting factor is the ability to get everything running on a lot of cores efficiently."

Wardell said the team is still talking to early adopters and exploring options for licensing Nitrous.

"It's one of those conversations you have. What is the best route? A Unity-type model or do you do an Unreal model?" he asked. "I think that's one of those things that's just going to evolve because we have a different customer base than what you have with Unity or Unreal. With Unreal, it's people making AAA first-person shooters. They want to just plug it in. Unity is .NET/C#-based and they want to make an indie-style game. Nitrous is a very flexible engine. You can make anything you want out of it, but it's a not strategy game engine where you [easily] take the engine and make Warcraft IV."

Nitrous is currently aimed at PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4. The team believes PC-like architecture of the next-generation consoles provides new opportunities for PC developers, and Oxide is going to be on the ground floor.

"This is the first console generation that feels like it has PC-level capabilities," said Wardell. "I remember back in the day, when the idea of making a console game was crippling your game."

"It used to be that when you made a console, you had these customized chips designed specifically for graphics," added Baker. "This is the first generation where, even though there has been significant customization on the hardware level for both, effectively we're using a part that's very similar to a PC. It's not a different breed. Looking at the PlayStation 2, it was an extraordinary exotic thing to deal with."
But what about other platforms? Mac OS X's gaming portfolio has improved, Valve just announced its Linux-based Steam Machines, and mobile has jumped into the 64-bit arena with Apple's A7 chip in the iPhone 5S and iPad Air. Both gentlemen called the Steam Machines in particular "very interesting," but declined to comment further on platforms right now.

"We don't want to get into pre-announcing platforms," said Wardell. "Certainly the next-generation consoles, Mac, and Steam Machines are interesting to us in the near-term. Beyond that, we haven't had a long opportunity to check out iOS 7 and the latest happenings on Android."

Quelle: Escaping The Shooter Mold: How Oxide Plans to Revive The RTS | GamesIndustry International

 

[LordCrash]

Major Players: Edward Kenway

Feature by Anne Lewis | Communications Associate | on November 5, 2013



What kind of research went into preparing for the role of Edward Kenway? What did Joy Division have to do with the casting process? How tall is he? These are just a few of the things we discussed when we spoke with Assassin’s Creed IV Black Flag’s Lead Writer Darby McDevitt as well as the voice of Edward Kenway himself, Matt Ryan.

Edward is not the kind of Assassin you’re used to, as you’re likely learning if you’ve already started the game. He’s brash and selfish. He’s a dirty fighter. And he has no real desire to give up his ways to follow the Creed (much to the chagrin of other Assassins). It’s all these things that make him one of the most compelling characters in the series. Darby and Matt share their unique insights into what makes Edward so special, revealing a few exclusive tidbits along the way.

Finding Edward

Edward Kenway began as a somewhat different character, but went through a bit of a transformation when Matt Ryan was cast. Tell us about that change, and how it happened…

Matt Ryan When I auditioned for the part I used a Northern English accent. When we got to Montreal and just started talking, Darby and the guys were like, Hang on, what’s your accent? I’m from Wales and Swansea is the port I come from. So we started talking about that, and about making that the part of the world Edward comes from. What’s similar between my journey and Edward’s is, I left home when I was 19 and lived in Bristol for three years and then I lived in London and then I moved to America. So in terms of just the accent, my accent has traveled. It would be truer to the accent Edward would have.

Darby McDevitt That backstory was brilliant. I didn’t even know Matt lived in Bristol but I said, Okay, Edward was born in Wales but moved to Bristol. I made that up for the character before I knew that about Matt. Bristol was a very common town for pirates. That’s where Blackbeard’s accent would have been from. It’s a huge port town. That was just a happy accident. I have to admit when we sent out the casting call I asked for a Manchester/Mancunian accent because I’d been listening to a lot of Joy Division interviews and I love the Mancunian accent on Peter Hook and all the guys from Joy Division. So some of the first auditions we saw were true Mancunians and it was cool, but it didn’t quite work. It took us a long time to find Edward. We saw maybe 60 people and we finally got Matt.



It’s not just Matt’s voice that’s perfect, though. He also looks quite a bit like Edward.

Darby I liked his voice, but because we were now going full performance capture we had to worry about how he looked and held himself. Luckily, our animation director said, Matt has the physicality that’s right for Edward. I remember one guy who was a bit too showy – a little too Errol Flynn.

Matt Edward is kind of nonchalant, isn’t he? He’s loose but then he can focus and snap to attention at a moment’s notice.

Darby He’s like an animal. We needed that combination of a guy who has a warm voice and could be friendly but also commanding. Of course, he also had to be physically impressive. Because of technical constraints he had to be between 5’10” and 6’2”. How tall are you?

Matt I’m 5’10 ½”.

Darby Great! If you were 5’9” we might have asked you to wear lifts.

Being Edward

What sort of research did you do to prepare for being a pirate and an Assassin during the Golden Age of Piracy?

Matt Basically Darby sent me a list of books to read – including Colin Woodard’s book The Republic of Pirates – and I researched the period. I think one thing that always fascinates me about doing period stuff is the lack of technology. We take our forms of communication for granted and it’s the first thing I do when I’m doing something set in a different period. I just try to get my head around that. If you’re at sea for months and months, you can’t put out an S.O.S. and have a helicopter come and save you. You’re on your own. Just that sort of mentality is different. Even the shadows were a different kind of dark in those days.



So I researched a bunch on the period, but before I got to Montreal I didn’t have that much information on the character or the project. The first week was Darby and the team bringing me and the other guys up to speed and getting us on the same page as them in terms of the character. One thing about the process that was amazing was that we had a chance to rehearse. We would rehearse for a day and then we would shoot for a day. That’s so rare these days. With TV there’s hardly any rehearsal and with movies sometimes you get a little rehearsal. The only time you really get rehearsals is in theater. We actually had time to really go through a rehearsal process and flesh out the scenes.

I think throughout the whole process there were more and more things I was gleaning from the character because it was shot from about last October or November until June. It was a week here and two weeks there and each time it would get deeper and deeper and the character would get more and more fleshed out. It’s a really interesting process in terms of that.

Darby On average I think we had two rehearsal days for every three days of shooting. That was a first for me, too. We didn’t shoot Revelations this way and maybe every character except Ezio was coming into the studio the day we shot saying, Okay, I got the script two days ago. I read it. Here we go. So even for me it was a nice step forward. There’s always the question of, Why don’t games have better stories? Possibly because we don’t actually empower the people who are good at storytelling to actually tell that story. That’s one reason, anyway. But I think in the last decade we’ve seen some great games from teams like Naughty Dog and Irrational. We’re doing these fantastic stories now and it’s because the companies are investing more and more and saying, Actors are good at acting. Let’s let them act. Let’s not just put them in a studio and hand them a script.



What was it like doing the performance capture for the role?

Matt I was just in a big studio and the guys would show me some images and then I’d have to imagine everything. But that’s kind of what’s great about the medium. It leaves everything up to the imagination so you have to really go to a different place in your head than you would if you were doing film or television, where sometimes you have the things in front you. In this case it’s nothing. A stick can be a gun or a sword or anything you want it to be. It really leaves it up to your imagination, which is such a fun thing to do. You find yourself becoming a kid again when you used to pick up sticks in the shape of a gun and pretend to shoot. Suddenly you’re using that part of your imagination again and it’s a really interesting experience.

I think one thing you’ve got to take into consideration when you’re doing motion capture is the environment. You need to imagine the heat and the pace of things. Often when we’re on the ship I’d be holding two sticks and I’d have to pretend I was sailing. So you’re pitching over the wind and the water and you’ve got to imagine all these things. Sometimes the guys are like, You’ve got to pitch it up a bit. There’s more wind or rain here. So I’d have to project a little bit more. It’s all left to the imagination, which is completely and utterly fascinating and brilliant. I think it’s a fantastic medium. I think it will become more and more popular for more and more actors as it goes along.

How did you balance Edward’s external and internal conflicts to create a rich, robust character?

Matt I think the most interesting thing about the process is you shoot it all out of sequence. Normally you would have an arc and you would map it all out in terms of where you want to take the character at certain points in the movie or game or whatever. That couldn’t really happen within this process, so what you have to do is hit each moment. We’d all talk about it and what beats we were trying to hit and trust that it fits in with the story. But that’s the great thing about this character: his conflict.



He’s so three-dimensional. A lot of videogame characters aren’t. They’re very archetypal and that was the main draw for me really – how conflicted Edward is – and to play those conflicts is a really interesting thing. His drive to get what he wants is so strong, but at the same time he has all these things going on underneath. He’s a real guy, but he’s driven by what he wants to achieve. He thinks he’ll find happiness by achieving fame and glory and riches, but ultimately we all know that’s not how you find happiness. Somewhere along the line he changes routes and becomes someone different.

Quelle: Major Players: Edward Kenway - UbiBlog | Ubisoft®

 

[LordCrash]

Decision Modeling and Optimization in Game Design, Part 1: Introduction
by Paul Tozour on 07/07/13 10:38:00

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

This article is the first in an ongoing series on the application of decision modeling and optimization techniques to game design problems. The full list of articles includes:

• Part 1: Introduction (Blogspot) (Gamasutra)
• Part 2: Optimization Basics and Unrolling a Simulation (Blogspot) (Gamasutra)
• Part 3: Allocation and Facility Location Problems (Blogspot) (Gamasutra)
• Part 4: Competitive Balancing Problems (Blogspot) (Gamasutra)
• Part 5: Class Assignment Problems (Blogspot) (Gamasutra)
• Part 6: Parametric Design Techniques (Blogspot) (Gamasutra)
• Part 7: Production Queues (Blogspot) (Gamasutra)
• Part 8: Graph Search (Blogspot) (Gamasutra)

We’re Searching, Not Iterating

Most of game design is a process of search. When we design, we are evaluating many different possible design configurations to solve a given design problem, whether it be the way the rooms in a dungeon are connected, the set of features and capabilities that different types of game agents will possess, the specific “magic numbers” that govern unit effectiveness in a combat system, or even the combination of features our game will include in the first place.
Just as an AI-driven character will use a pathfinding system in a game to navigate through the game world, design involves navigating through a very-high-level space of possible configurations by taking some initial configuration and iteratively modifying it. We look carefully at the state of some aspect of our design – whether it be our combat system, one of the parts of our game world, a technology tree in a strategy game, or what have you – and attempt to find a way to improve it by changing that configuration.

Designers like to use the term “iteration” to describe this process, but “search” would be a more appropriate description. The truth is that when we “iterate” on a design, we’re experimenting with a game in development. We are making educated guesses about small sets of modifications that will change the current design configuration into a new design configuration that we believe will better meet our design criteria.

These “iterations” don’t resemble the generally linear changes that typically occur in “iterations” of computer code; they much more closely resemble a search through a maze, with lots of sharp turns and occasional backtracking. They often move us forward closer to the goal, but many times it’s unclear whether they’ve improved the game or not, and we sometimes discover that design changes we assumed would improve the game have unforeseen flaws and we need to back them out or try again.

Game design is an incredibly difficult discipline. Design is like a dark room full of sharp objects, extraordinarily difficult to navigate safely once we stray from the beaten path. There are nearly always some painful injuries along the way, especially if we move too quickly. And we have relatively few tools to light up that dark room, and few well-defined and disciplined techniques for carrying out this process of design search.



This dark room is is the reason we “iterate” -- we don’t always know what the ramifications of our design decisions will be until we try them. In other words, we are searching (Will Wright even directly referred to it as “searching the solution space” in his 2004 GDC Talk).

As a result, design is very often a productivity bottleneck, a major source of defects, and the biggest source of risk in game development. Countless teams have found themselves hamstrung by ill-conceived design decisions, creative thrashing, feature creep, misperception of the target market, or other design problems that resulted in product quality problems.

Given all of the dangers involved in experimenting with design, it’s no wonder that so many publishers and large developers are so risk-averse, preferring to hew closely to established and well-explored genres, licenses, and genre conventions rather than embracing the well-known risks of design innovation in return for relatively unknown payoffs. Exploring the dark room is just too risky.

We would like to find ways to change that attitude. Rather than simply avoiding innovation, it would be better to find ways to improve our design skills and extend our capabilities, and build power tools to make design innovation safer and more efficient.

This Series

This article is the first in a series that will introduce decision modeling, a set of tools for decomposing decisions into formal models that can then be searched to find the most desirable output.

Decision modeling and optimization are frequently used in management, finance, advanced project planning, and many other fields to improve the decision-making process and solve difficult decision problems and optimization problems by searching through the possible alternatives much more quickly than humans can do by hand.

Despite all of the potential benefits, decision modeling and optimization seem to be relatively unknown among designers in the game industry. A recent survey of professional designers on a popular developer forum indicated that only 25% respondents had even heard of decision modeling, and only 8% had used it in practice. A similar web-based survey passed directly to designers via Facebook had nearly identical results with a similar number of respondents.



If used properly, decision modeling can significantly enhance many aspects of the design process: It can help you optimize the configuration of specific design systems or the optimal values of your game’s parameters. It can help shed light on decisions as to what combination of features to include in your game. It can help you model the decisions a player might make, particularly in terms of helping you to identify dominant strategies or ways that players might “game the system.” In this series, we’ll provide examples of all three of these usage categories.

A Definition

So what is decision modeling?

Simply put:

Decision modeling is the process of simulating a decision and then automating the search for its solution.

We start by defining some sort of decision, attempt to pick out all the relevant factors that go into that decision, build those into a model that accurately represents the decision, and specify a set of input variables and a single output variable. Then we search for the optimal values of a set of decision variables (or input variables) that produces the best possible output.

If all goes well, we should be able to search through a much larger number of possible solutions than we could do by hand or with our imaginations. Although we can't apply it to everything, for the problems where it's appropriate, we can often get better results, get results faster, and in some cases, we can even solve problems that simply can’t be solved any other way.

Along the way, we also specify a set of one or more constraints that act as boundaries to ensure that our model is valid. These constraints can limit the range or the type of our input variables or any aspects of our model.

Why Build Models?

Have you ever found yourself playing Sid Meier’s Civilization and found yourself wondering, “Hey, wait a minute – what’s the right way to start off my city? Should I build a Monument first, then a Granary? Or should the Granary come first? Or maybe the Temple first, then a Granary? What’s the best decision? Is there even a way to answer that question?”

Also consider combat mechanics in a real-time strategy game. Balancing the parameters of multiple units in RTS games is a notoriously challenging problem. What if we had a system that could allow us to speed up the balancing problem by answering questions about our game’s combat balancing without having to playtest every single time? What if we could ask the system questions like “How many Swordsmen does it take to defeat two Pikemen and three Archers?” Or, “What’s the cheapest combination of Archers and Catapults that can defeat an enemy Guard Tower?”

In fact, maybe we can!

If we can model these design problems in the right way, we might be able to use automated optimization tools to search through the possible answers to find the one that best meets our criteria, without having to play through the game thousands of times.

Here’s an example of a similar kind of problem – an example that we’ll solve in a future episode of this series.

Let’s say we have a game called SuperTank. In SuperTank, we drive a gigantic sci-fi tank into battle against other SuperTanks. Before each battle, we get to pick the exact combination of weapons on our tank.



You have 100 credits to spend on your weapon loadout. Your SuperTank can carry 50 tons worth of weapons, and it also has 3 “critical slots” for use by special high-powered weapons.

You have the following five weapon types, and you can use as many of each weapon type as you like, or skip any weapons entirely:



Assume that you want your SuperTank to have the highest possible total Damage value (assume that this represents damage per second, so it properly represents damage applied over time regardless of how quickly the weapon fires). Also assume that all weapons have the same range, firing arc, accuracy, and rate of fire, so they’re identical in all ways except for the ones shown on the chart above.

Quick! How many machine guns, rockets, lasers, etc should you equip on your SuperTank? What combination of 0ne or more of each weapon gives us the most damage without exceeding our budgets for Weight, Cost, and Critical Slots?

See if you can solve it by hand, or with a calculator.

Can you do it?

If you try it, you'll quickly see that it’s a surprisingly difficult problem.

There’s probably a way to solve this with complicated math equations. But we’re designers, and math just isn’t our thing.

Also think about how the answer would change if the parameters were different. Would the answer change if our SuperTank could hold 60 tons instead of 50? What if instead of having 100 credits to spend, we had 110, or 90 – how would the optimal weapon loadout change? What if it had only 2 Critical Slots, or 4?

Now imagine that we had a system that could instantly calculate the highest-damage weapon loadout for any given set of (Weight, Cost, Critical Slots) parameters. Type in the weapon parameters from the table above, then type in the SuperTank's parameters (50 tons, 100 credits, 3 critical slots), and BOOM!, we can see the best possible loadout.

Wouldn't that be awesome?

We could use this to instantly give us answers to all sorts of useful questions:

• How does the optimal loadout change as we modify the parameters for a SuperTank?
• How does the optimal loadout change as we modify any of the weapon parameters?
• How much maximum damage will a SuperTank do at any given (Weight, Cost, Critical Slots) setting?
• Are the four weapon parameters (Damage, Weight, Cost, Critical Slots) appropriate and properly balanced for each weapon?
• Are there any weapons that are overly powerful, and are used too frequently? If any weapon is so useful that the correct decision is always to use it, then using it is always the optimal decision, and there really is no meaningful decision there. In that case, we should probably either remove the weapon from the game or rebalance it so that there are some circumstances where the weapon is not useful.
• Are there any weapons that are underutilized, and are rarely or never used? Similar to the above, if any weapon is so useless that the correct decision is to never use it, then there’s no meaningful decision there. In that case, we should either remove the weapon from the game or rebalance it so that there are some circumstances where it makes sense to use the weapon.

All of these are very important design questions that any designer should want to know the answers to. Knowing them will be enormously helpful to us in balancing SuperTank.

In just a few paragraphs, we’ve described a problem that’s remarkably difficult for us to solve manually, but which is trivially solvable with tools already built into Microsoft Excel.

In a future episode, we'll actually build a decision model for this that can answer all of these questions.You’ll be able to see clearly that you can set up a model like this in minutes can allow you to solve this otherwise ferociously difficult problem. With just a bit of work, we’ll create a power tool to let us quickly and safely explore the design space.

Roadmap

Throughout this series, we’ll illustrate quite a few more sophisticated examples, and we’ll provide reference spreadsheets so that you can do all of these examples yourself with nothing more than a copy of Excel. Our examples will include, among others:

• A simple combat example for a strategy game
• A model for optimizing the coordinates of several wormhole teleporters in a space-based massively-multiplayer game relative to each other and a number of population hubs
• A model for determining what tax rate to use for a simplified model of a city in order to balance citizen happiness against tax income in a 4X strategy game such as Sid Meier’s Civilization
• A model for choosing how to assign spells and traits to character classes in a massively-multiplayer game
• An optimization model for determining the optimal build order for a planetary colony in a ‘4X’ strategy game similar to the classic Master of Orion
• A much more sophisticated example of a weapon loadout in a MechWarrior-style game, including heat management mechanics
• An example of a team trying to pick the right combination of features to include in a game, and using a decision model to help them make the appropriate trade-offs

In general, this series will build up from simple examples of finding optimal player strategies in specific game subsystems and then progress toward using decision models to help optimize parameters for game systems and optimizing feature set combinations.
In each of these cases, we’ll describe the problem and show how to model it in Excel and solve it using Excel's built-in Solver tool. In each case, you’ll see that we can do it more easily, quickly, and robustly than you could likely do without using Solver or an equivalent tool. We’ll also provide the spreadsheets for each example so that you can download it and try it for yourself, reproduce the results, and experiment with each of the models.

Also, remember that the underlying representation, whether it be a spreadsheet or a program in a high-level language, or something else – is irrelevant. The important thing isn’t whether we do this in Excel & Solver or Java/C++/C#, but the way we model the problem and try to solve it.

Why Use Decision Models?

Some readers may be incredulous at this point. Building decision models probably seems like a lot of work (or at least, you might be guessing that it would be). Why go through all the effort when instead, we can just use our existing design skills and a lot of user testing in the form of focus group testing and beta testing?

Let us state up front, on the record, that decision modeling isn’t applicable to every problem. Some problems are too complicated or too difficult to model with these techniques, and there are many aspects of the design (such as aesthetic considerations, entertainment value, and the "feel" of the game) that are difficult or impossible to model with numbers. And decision modeling certainly does not eliminate the need for group testing, beta testing, or doing your job by playing your own game continuously throughout development on a daily basis.

But having said all that, it should become clear by the end of this series that decision modeling and optimization methods also give us a unique and remarkably powerful set of tools. They can fully or partially solve many kinds of problems that can’t reasonably be solved any other way, and they can help provide answers and insights to all sorts of design questions that would be difficult to answer otherwise.

As with any tool, it’s up to the practitioner to decide when their use is appropriate.

We can count any number of cases where decision models may be inappropriate or too unwieldy to be useful. But as you’ll see in this series, it’s also surprisingly useful, and the more we can design properly at the earliest stages and get the bugs out of our design decisions before we even get into the user testing stage, the more likely that we’ll be able to design systems that are solid, entertaining, and bug-free.

Think about the tools available to a typical programmer. Programmers have a very difficult job, but they’re also blessed with many tools to help them find bugs before they ever go into testing. They have compilers that constantly scream at them the moment they make a typo; they use defensive programming practices to expose software defects; they have code reviews to help them identify one another’s defects or call out poor programming practices; and they have many profiling and static analysis tools to help them find all kinds of performance bugs and other defects.

But designers don’t have any tools like that. Our job is arguably just as difficult, but we have no compiler to tell us when we’ve made a syntax error. We have no profiler, no debugging tools, and no static analysis tools. We have no way to do code reviews since we don’t have any ‘code.’ We write specifications and design docs and that’s about it; we can share design documents and feature specifications among the team and hope they give us good feedback, but for the most part we have to actually get it in the game before we can see if it works or not.

That makes design incredibly risky, time-consuming, and expensive.

And just as with programming, human error is a natural and inevitable part of the process, and we need as many high-quality tools as possible to protect ourselves and our projects.
We are a very long way from having design tools that will support designers’ exploration of the design space at anywhere near the level the way that our compilers, debuggers, profilers, and static analysis tools support programmers’ exploration of the engineering space. But we’re beginning to see the rise of a few custom game solvers and design tools, including a recently-developed playability checker for a Cut the Rope variant called “Cut the Rope: Play Forever” (link); the abstract game design system Ludi, which generated the board game Yavalath (link); and my own Evolver automated game balancing assistant for the mobile game City Conquest (link). Decision modeling can help us move a few more steps toward that level of support and begin to augment and extend designers’ own intelligence with some automated tools.

It’s Not About Spreadsheets – It’s About Models

This series is written for designers -- and we mean all designers, whether they come from an artistic, programming, storytelling, or board gaming background. So we're going to keep it simple, and stick to these promises:

• No code. We'll keep the articles 100% free of any code and will illustrate all of our examples in Microsoft Excel using the built-in “Solver” utility. However, it’s important to note that this series is not about spreadsheets or Excel – it’s about decision modeling and optimization. Every single thing we do in this series can be done just as easily (and sometimes more so) in any high-level programming language.
• No math (or at least, not anything complicated). We’re going to keep this series mostly math-free, and we won’t use anything other than basic arithmetic here: addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and occasionally a square root. Greek letters will be strictly forbidden.
• No four-dimensional spreadsheets; we'll stick to the two-dimensional kind.

If you’re a designer, this series should give you all the tools you need create decision models yourself, with no need to try to write code or rely on programmers to write any code for you. If you’re a programmer, this should give you a fairly straightforward guide toward programming your own decision models in any high-level programming language, so that you can then build decision models of your own, either from scratch or by building off of a template that already uses Solver and Excel.

These articles are intended to be nothing more than starting point, so that you can take the concepts presented here and choose whether to build them out in Excel, pick another optimization tool, or try to build a solver of your own in a high-level language. Spreadsheets are a good start, but these decision models are most likely to be useful as a springboard for richer and more sophisticated models that can be integrated with your game architecture.

Disclaimers

Before we get too far into the thick of decision modeling, a few disclaimers are in order. Decision modeling and optimization don't provide any kind of complete system for game design, and we won't be making any claims to that effect. It’s helpful to view it as a tool to help with some aspects of the design process, and like any tool, it has plenty of limitations.

Here are some of the limitations you should be aware of:

• It can be easily misused. Like any tool, decision models can be used inappropriately or incorrectly, and an incomplete or buggy decision model can lead you to incorrect conclusions. Just as with software, the larger your decision model becomes, the more likely it is to contain bugs. It’s also very easy to misinterpret what a model is telling you or to build an incomplete model that doesn’t accurately model the decision you're trying to make.
• It’s complicated (sometimes). Some design problems are just too complex to be usefully modeled with these approaches. Many problems have too many moving parts or are too closely integrated with other aspects of the game to be usefully represented in a standalone Excel spreadsheet. In these cases, you’re left to decide whether to model only part of the system (which may leave you with an invalid / inaccurate model), build a complete model integrated into the game itself (which could be a lot of work), or forgo decision modeling entirely.
• Not everything can be modeled. Decision models can’t tell you whether something is fun, whether it’s aesthetically pleasing, whether it "feels" right, or whether it presents the player with a usable and accessible interface. There’s generally no way to represent these kinds of subjective and aesthetic concerns in a discrete model. This means that there are clear limits on where decision modeling can and should be used, and it will be much more useful for systems design and optimizing mechanics and dynamics rather than aesthetics.
• It has limits. All optimizers have their limits, including the Excel Solver that we will use, and it’s entirely possible to create decision models that have valid solutions but are so complex that no optimization tool can find them. For large enough numbers of unconstrained inputs, the problem can grow beyond Solver’s ability to search every possible combination of inputs, and instead it must rely on various optimization methods. As we'll see throughout this series, we can simplify the expression of our models to make them easier for Solver to handle, and the developer of Solver (Frontline) offers a more powerful solver for larger problems, but it's definitely possible to create models that Solver cannot solve.
• It doesn't guarantee optimality. On account of that, when we’re dealing with complex models, we can’t always be 100% sure that we’ve found the optimal decision. We sometimes have to settle for second best: we spend more time optimizing, or start from scratch and re-optimize, so that we can say that the solution we’ve found is either optimal or very close to optimal with a reasonable level of confidence.

Finally, and most importantly:

• We have to make sure we model the right things. Not all problems are important enough that they need this kind of effort, and we have to make sure we know our priorities and avoid getting overly-focused on optimizing irrelevant problems while ignoring other, bigger problems that might be much more important.

Broadly speaking, there are certain things that need to hold true for decision modeling to be useful. The decision in question has to be something we can encapsulate within some sort of discrete model, and map the result of the decision into a single value. In other words, we must be able to map a finite set of inputs through a decision model and onto a single output in such a way that either minimizing or maximizing the output value gives us a better decision.

In cases where there are subjective concerns that can’t be encapsulated in the model – for example, aesthetic considerations or usability / playability concerns – we will need to either cleanly separate those out from the decision model, use decision modeling only as an initial pass, or just abandon the decision modeling approach entirely.

In order for us to model decisions in a spreadsheet, there’s also a limit on how complex the model can be. If our game does something very complex, we may not be able to replicate that complexity in Excel. It’s important to keep in mind, though, that this is only a constraint on the power of the models we can build in Excel, and not on decision models themselves. You can build vastly more powerful solvers in your own game engine than you can build in a separate spreadsheet, and I hope that this series inspires you to do exactly that.

On the other side of the coin, all of these limitations hardly make decision modeling useless. Even in a case where a problem is too complex for decision modeling to tune completely, it can still help you get many components of your design much closer to a correct configuration, and it can help you find and debug a number of basic problems early in development.

And even when a decision model can’t find the optimal solution to a given problem, either because the problem is too complex or because it requires aesthetic concerns or other subjective human considerations, it can still help you narrow down the solution, helping you rule out dead ends and otherwise reducing the complexity of the problem.

Finally, even if you choose not use decision modeling and never attempt to optimize any spreadsheets or build your own solvers, an understanding of decision modeling can still help you by changing the way you frame and think about design decisions.

This series is an exploration. We will look at many examples of game design problems and explore ways to model and optimize them in ways that offer us powerful design tools. You may be skeptical, or you may feel more comfortable not using any optimization at all. But I hope you will bear with me as we explore and see where we end up by the end of the series.

Conclusion

In the end, we should want to design correctly.

Many design questions are subjective, with no “right” or “wrong” answers. But in some cases – many more than you might think – there undeniably are. And in those cases, we should want to know how to get the right answer, or at least understand how we would go about defining the “right” answer and searching for that solution if it exists.

Decision modeling and optimization are powerful tools that can help us accomplish exactly that in many cases. I believe these tools should be part of every designer’s toolbox. With a little discipline, it should become clear that these tools have untapped potential to help us explore the dark room of game design more quickly and more safely, and we will show you how with many applications throughout the rest of this series.

-Paul Tozour


Quelle: Gamasutra: Paul Tozour's Blog - Decision Modeling and Optimization in Game Design, Part 1: Introduction

 

[LordCrash]

Why The Violent Game Debate Actually Isn't Over

By Dmitri Williams, THU 09 JAN 2014 3:51PM GMT / 10:51AM EST / 7:51AM PST

Ninja Metrics CEO Dmitri Williams offers a counterpoint on the violent games topic - the issue runs much deeper in our society, he says

The video game debate isn't over yet, and there's a good chance it never will be. It's definitely down from the hysteria of times past, but the forces that keep it in play aren't going away. Let's walk through this from a couple of angles: legal/political and cultural. Proviso: This is purely from the American experience.

The Legal Front

On the legal side, the Supreme Court decision really did change things, but it was also more or less inevitable. Every court battle had started with a state law being challenged on free speech grounds and struck down. I played a role in some of these events and I think I can actually pinpoint the exact moment when things changed. It certainly wasn't in Congress. As a wet-behind-the-ears young professor, I testified before the US Senate. I was there to explain the science to the committee (TLDR version: we have three good data points, people, and we don't know squat), and my experience there taught me that the science was largely irrelevant. Senators blasted into the committee room, grandstanded, then left, ignoring the testimony. A few listened, but most had their axe to grind and our testimony was pro forma.

No, things changed in the courts, and specifically in Chicago. I was an expert witness in the case of Blagojevich v. ESA. Rod Blagojevich, for any who've forgotten, was the later-disgraced Gov. of Illinois. His anti-game law was challenged, as they all were, and the case was in federal court. I was hired by the ESA, ostensibly to "defend" the industry, although in my view my job was to explain the science to date, including my own. I'd just published the first long-term study on gaming and violence and found no link. This was an intellectual hand grenade that severely annoyed many of my colleagues, but the data tells the story, not me.

In any case, I was testifying across from Craig Anderson, possibly one of the nicest people in academia, and also an ardent opponent of games. Prof. Anderson believed, and still does, that exposure to games makes players more likely to commit violent acts. And whether you like his science or logic or not, he has a lot of people in mainstream academia who agree with him. Pooh pooh this camp at your peril.

That day I offered my testimony (which didn't matter much), and then Prof. Anderson took the stand. He explained the theories of mere exposure and schema activation. Non-nerd translation: if you see something, you'll think about it. If you think about it, you're more likely to do it. Now that's not an insane theory at all. It's quite reasonable, actually. It's just a question of degree. And on the stand Prof. Anderson explained that seeing a picture of a gun would in fact make anyone more likely to commit gun violence.

I was watching the judge in the case during this and he gave the slightest of double takes at this. Why? Because he knew in a flash that what Prof. Anderson was saying could lead to government control of any objectionable imagery. If seeing a gun is bad, then you have to ban all gun images, right? Thought police. And right there, poof, went the case against violent games. The rest--the California law, the Supreme Court case, etc.--was just the long, slow death rattle.

So it's over, right? No, not really.

Culture Wars

Culture Wars are perpetual because the forces that cause them are almost entirely unavoidable in society. Although the technology has changed, the socioeconomics aren't radically different today than in ancient Rome, where they had their own cultural battles. Then, like now, they were driven by race and class tensions more than by the particulars of the debate. This is an important moment to recognize the difference between the symptom and the disease. We may argue over the impact of video games or TV or Google Glass, but what we're really arguing over are our roles, inequality, poverty, and a host of other things. The tech is just a proxy for a larger issue, and the trick is to understand why.

Here's an example: What should we worry about and make policy around to make our lives safer? Chances are, the things that occur to you will not be scientifically driven. Instead, we tend to pick the things that make us feel good, or reinforce our opinions. For example, I read a slew of comments after Brendan's original article about gun control. Well, although I happen to agree with many of them, guns kill far fewer children than swimming pools. Where's the outrage over pool safety? Where's the legislation? If you want to line up what the risks are in society, there should be outrage over driver's education and salt in foods. But since those don't push any cultural buttons, they get no press or attention--unlike say guns or games.

OK, so why games? First, it's not about games at all. It's about women, and their roles in society. Take a look at the households and household incomes in the U.S. over the past 40 years. We Americans have less and less free time, more work, and really no economic gains to show for it. What's happened is that women have been "able" to enter the workforce, but that's slowly become "have to enter the workforce" to maintain the same standard of living within a family. As a result, women spend more and more time outside of the home, and correspondingly less and less time in it. This means less time with their own children, and it often unfairly puts them in the crosshairs of cultural conservatives.

As a society, we feel pretty crappy about how we treat our kids, and women often take the flak. Children are farmed out to teachers and daycare, and over the past 30 years, increasingly to electronic media. TVs, cable, VCRs, video games, phones, iPads, etc., etc. are seen--often rightly so--as electronic babysitters. This gives parents and pundits three choices: 1) Decry the economic disparity and support working families (especially working and single mothers) through policy. So far, that hasn't happened, and it doesn't seem likely in the US any time soon. 2) Make a choice to have a lower standard of living and have a parent spend more time with the children. This is pretty tough, too, especially for those at lower incomes. Or 3) Use any means at our disposal to entertain and occupy our kids, but resent the situation. In this case, the electronic media become our objects of hate rather than the system, or ourselves. For cultural conservatives who think that women should be in the home, electronic media are a particularly easy target.

If you think this is a bit crazy, consider that video games didn't start out as a cultural hot potato. Originally, pre-1981, they were cool, hip and even in nightclubs and bars. I did research on this once, looking at all of the press coverage on gaming, and it makes a hard 180-degree turn in 1981. Suddenly games articles are about kids, shame, guilt and even imputed crime. Articles in 1980 talked about lawyers playing on their lunch breaks, and in 1982 the interviewees said "please don't use my name." Adult game play essentially went into the closet.

What happened? Reagan happened, and brought with him a huge cultural shift to conservatism, family values and a tragically unfair vilification of single female parents. Welfare queens were the villains of the day, and women who didn't fit their traditional roles were bad news. Those who stuck their kids in front of the boob tube or a 2600 were more irresponsible still. So games, along with the VCR, were merely chess pieces in this larger cultural battle. They became tightly associated with irresponsibility. Then, when Nintendo made games a phoenix from the ashes of Atari in the late 80s, they made their marketing 100% child-oriented. There's the cultural nail in the coffin. From that point on, games were infantilized, and it's taken us an entire generation to grow up past that baggage

30 years later and those Nintendo kids (oh, this Atari kid feels old. Where's my C-64? Get off my lawn!) are now parents. More importantly, the gatekeepers of culture have all had a generational passing of the torch. News editors are some of the most powerful people in the world at setting the cultural agenda. And the games industry has gone from being edited by people suspicious of it or hostile to it to those who grew up with it.

But that doesn't mean games are going to get a free pass. What it means (as Brendan Sinclair rightly points out) is that games aren't going to be the first target any longer. Reporters don't take Jack Thompson seriously. Well, most of them don't. Still, let's take a look at the cultural climate. The US may have become a more multiethnic and interesting place since the '80s, but gay tolerance aside, it's not as if cultural conservatives have disappeared. If anything, the conservative movement today is as robust and loud as it was in the 1980s.

Fox News is consistently the highest-rated broadcast news network. Tea Party candidates now have national policy-making positions. The Republican Party has been taken over by its loud and angry minority, and a culturally conservative wave is underway. If you're a left-leaning, educated developer and you think this cultural war is over, think again. Conservatives are celebrating Duck Dynasty as a return to morality. Bill O'Reilly sells books like hotcakes. Sarah Palin is a serious candidate for office.

Newtown was an important moment in the national consciousness. It was too horrible to pin down on gaming, and the reporters have all now played enough Call of Duty (and not killed anyone) to know better. But America's deeply ambivalent reactions to technology aren't going anywhere. The larger forces that drive it--massive economic disparity, deep class tensions, thick guilt over parenting--are as present as ever, and getting worse.

All that remains to be seen is how it'll manifest itself next. Maybe games will get lucky and pass the whipping-boy job on to a new technology.

I offer this prediction: When Oculus launches, it'll be greeted with a mix of nerd enthusiasm and distrust. And that distrust will come in the form of three predictable fears: how is it going to medically harm us, what good thing is it going to replace, and what bad cultural impact is it going to have? It was this way for Nickelodeon, movies, jazz, radio, rock, rap, games and the Internet. Same as it ever was, people.

If you want to defuse these things, think ahead and be proactive. Otherwise, brace yourself. The fundamentals haven't changed.

Dmitri Williams (PhD, University of Michigan) is the CEO, Sensei, and Co-Founder of Ninja Metrics, Inc. Dmitri is a 15-year veteran of games and community research, has authored more than 40 peer-reviewed articles on gamer psychology and large-scale data analysis, has been featured on CNN, Fox, the Economist, the New York Times, and most major news outlets, and he has testified as an expert on video games and gamers before the U.S. Senate.

Quelle: Why The Violent Game Debate Actually Isn't Over | GamesIndustry International