particleblog

A Simple Lifeform I

2009-01-14T17:37:00.000Z

Friends, it is time to close up this old blog o' mine. I am moving house.

Some weeks back just before Christmas, I left my job working as a producer and moved to a partnership in a startup company. Simple Lifeforms is its name and social games are its domain. We have a blog in which I will be relaying my new grand adventure. I hope you'll join me there!

Tadhg

The Economic Crises: A Game Design Approach

2008-10-18T15:17:00.002Z

With the recent set of turmoil that has engulfed markets all around the world, I can't help but think of it as a game. At the moment the banks are all in trouble, the levels of trust in markets at an all time low. It is, in essence, a game of poker that has gone bad, and many people are taking their stakes and going home. There's a lot of culture of blame going on, with various groups and politicians calling for curbs on pay packets to executives and the like, which I tend to think is basic scapegoating when the actual problem is that the rules of the market game were poor and lacked balance.

Investment banking, indeed any kind of financial business, is really just a game. There are rules to adhere to, diplomatic phases to engage with, trades to be done and so on. The reward for playing the game well is money of course, but after a certain level most investment bankers would agree that the money that they get is really just points. The rules of the game allow for a vast accumulation of points, reinvesting of points to build even more points, complex deals based on the promise of the transfer of points etc etc. It's just a big MMO.

What happens with any game of any sort is that players instinctively try to exploit it. Grokking, as it's generally called, pretty much demands this sort of behaviour. To be a great player, you have to learn now only how to play but also how to play well, and what the limits of the system are. An example of this is rocket-jumping in Quake, or the road-rail cheat in Transport Tycoon. All game systems have unintended emergent behaviours and the more complex the system becomes, the more opportunities for exploits become available.

Exploits, it should be noted, are different from actual cheats. A cheat is where the player uses some outside influence to artificially alter the system (such as looking at your opponent's cards). An exploit, however, is legal within the system even though many players may not consider it sportsmanlike behaviour.

The current financial crisis is essentially the result of two things:

1. Poor rule design in the game of the markets.
2. A proliferation of exploits gone bad

Rule design
The key rule design that has been flawed is that of the complex derivative and credit swaps market. In short, the intergovernmental system had adopted a highly free market approach to all business as much as was possible over the last 30 years (pretty much since the 80s) which had had good effects in liberating a lot of credit but also had bad effects in limiting monitoring and oversight. While free markets sounded good in principle, in actuality they drove the complexity of transactions. It has been said a lot in recent days that the core of the problems really stem from most of the players having a very poor understanding of the transactions to which they were committed. A whole vast industry had arisen on the basis of this exceeding complexity to the point that pretty much nobody knew what anything was worth any more and everybody believed that everything was secure until they realised that it wasn't.

Exploits
So what about those exploits? Well transactional complexity figures largely here because they essentially allowed the players to inflate their value in the absence of a clear sense of worth. Secondly in many countries the relationship between players and rule-makers was too close. Financial institutions (being as they are players) are motivated to want to collect as many points as possible and so they lobby for changes to the rules of the game in order to get those points. This is not dissimilar to high-level long-time players whining about their characters in WoW to Blizzarrd in the hopes of getting some advantage for themselves.

So since lobbying is legal, it has been an oft-used exploit. Another is the practise of creating new kinds of financial product at a rate much faster than the hobbled government can catch up to and examine them. When you have a mortgage market with hundreds of thousands of separate "products" (meaning deals) in it offering all sorts it seems that our political structures simply cannot react fast enough to them. The same thinking applies all across the credit market, and led to some real limiting-inducing types of product such as a the 110% mortgage with no deposit. Nobody seemed to understand why this is a bad idea any more because of the exploits involved.

Blame?
The failure here is therefore political. Unlike the players in the market, it is ultimately governments that set the rules of the game. You can always assume that a player will play a game with such high stakes in an unfair manner if they can (because that's how it is in the top leagues) so the real fall-down is not with the players who simply played, it's with the politicians who either didn't understand what they were doing or didn't see the consequences, or convinced themselves that they couldn't govern. Non-governing government is a central theme in all of this, and it explains how they were caught so flat-footed.

Simply put, politicians of all stripes over the last 30 years have slowly relented from their responsibilities in government. This too is for reasons of a game: while a government controls so much of a bureaucracy or a series of departments it is vulnerable to attacks or even downfall from those avenues. This means a government running road, rail, postal services, schools, military, police and so on can potentially take a lot of heat - especially in an age of 24-hour news.

So their natural inclination has been to get as many of these concerns off their books as possible. Privatisation benefits the government because it makes headaches over the rail system someone else's problem. Extreme liberalisation of markets benefits the government because it gives them a convenient set of targets when everything is going to hell. And so on.

Sometimes it's good to liberalise, sometimes it isn't. In so doing to an extreme degree, the governments of the west have essentially been allowing the exploits to multiply for a long time. They have also been retreating ever further away from their essential role of the rule-maker, but it is still a role that they have.

Moving Forward: Digital Nation
This is where we, the game developers, can make a difference. The real issues of complex systems and exploit management are our bread and butter. We make games for a living, some of them very complex. We model systems and simulations on a more or less constant basis and we do so from the position of experts both in systems and in player behaviour. If you accept that markets are essentially driven by game thinking, then who is better placed to come up with innovative solutions that we?

More importantly if we are also going to prevent this sort of catastrophe from happening again, who is better placed to help modelling a new form of digital governance than we? Politicians don't seem to have the tools at their disposal to make informed decisions any more or really see the results of what they are deciding, but we can. We can make systems that model the entire development of a civilisation if we put our minds to it. We are the professional systems makers, simulationists and gamers.

So, when looking at the latest series of rises and falls on Wall Street and the latest ever more listless cash injections being used to try and preven further meltdown, think of it like this: What you're seeing is a badly designed game in operation being managed by people who don't have a firm grasp of it because of its complexity and who are really just hoping not to get the blame. We can do better than this, and we should.

Embedding and sharing in the Play Room

2008-09-05T07:00:00.016Z

The Play Room is proving to be quite entertaining, and it's always fun to share within it. Some tips:

It's really very easy to join. Simply register a username on Frienfeed.com (this takes all of ten seconds) and then click this link: http://friendfeed.com/rooms/theplayroom and the Join This Room button.

You can share items to the Play Room very easily using a bookmarklet. This is simply a button that you drag on to your browser's bookmarks toolbar. Thereafter, any time you see a page that you'd like to share, you simply click the bookmarklet and a little box appears asking you to fill in some details. Don't forget: While the bookmarklet is opne you can also click one of the pictures on the page to add it into your share. Shares with pictures are always more attractive. The bookmarklet is here: http://friendfeed.com/share/bookmarklet

You can embed a little frame of The Play Room on your own blog or site if you like. Simply add the following piece of javascript to your site, and you will see a widget just like the one on the right hand side of this page:

<script src="http://friendfeed.com/embed/widget/theplayroom" type="text/javascript"></script>

Come join in the fun!

Nine members

2008-08-11T12:19:00.000Z

Well it's a start.

So far the activity in The Play Room has admittedly mostly been mine (come on members, get with the sharing) but some of those items have been quite interesting even if I do say so myself.

Two articles, for example.

One is about piracy and Cliff Harris's call for pirates to speak to him directly about why they pirate (A mildly confrontational, but I suspect fruitless, challenge).
The other is from Gamasutra and is about the hurdles that Johnathan Blow encountered with the Microsoft certification process for XBLA.

Both links are sitting in the room now. Come, join, comment, share.

The Play Room: Friendfear?

2008-08-07T19:19:00.000Z

Something I hadn't expected.

I've asked a few friends, not many - people in games - to sign up to the room. A few have. But some of the reactions that I've had from those who haven't has been something that I hadn't expected: Fear of publicity.

Specifically, that they didn't want discussions, even light-hearted discussions, on the subjects of games in case somebody somewhere (from their jobs mostly) might Google them and find them.

It says a lot about what it is to work in games when even a link-sharing group strikes terror into the heart.

The Play Room: 24 Hours later

2008-08-05T23:04:00.000Z

Well things have gotten off to a good start: There are 7 of us in the room now.

I've had an interesting day talking to a few friends about it in fact, giving them a link etc. All but one of them didn't know what Friendfeed was at all, and there was a lot of suspicion. One friend kept badgering me and asking what was in it for THEM. It was hard to explain that it was one of those "what you put in, you get out" deals.

For those that don't know: This is a wiki page about what Friendfeed is.
It's not a spammy service, it's just a simple gathering tool, not a million miles away from a webforum or Facebook group, but it's really easy to pass interesting links that you've found on the web and start discussions etc.

Come, join in.

The Play Room

2008-08-04T20:16:00.000Z

I don't know about you, but recently I have become very very bored with the whole blogging scene. Games blogging such as it is had this really high wave of activity about 3-4 years ago when people like Greg Costikyan and Scott Miller and Daniel Cook were at the height of their powers. It was all big, serious-minded people writing big serious essays on every subject from how to manage a brand to very in-depth talks about game design.

But lately the scene has just gone to seed. We're not along in this either: Lots of the world's biggest blogheads are engaged in furious debate at the moment over why blogging has gone so damn boring. A lot of them are now talking about micro-blogging, life-casting and sundry other concepts which could be described as fascinating and horrendous all at the one moment.

I'm not proposing to start life-casting my day or anything of the sort, but what I am proposing is to get a conversation going and leave the blogspace to become more noteworthy and probably turn into Google Knol in the fullness of time. As with games themselves, this blogging lark should be fun, no?

Well here it is: The Play Room.

The Play Room is a room on the social meta-service called Friendfeed. It is a service in which you can share links and comment on them, share photos, embed feeds, all that good stuff. A room in Friendfeed is simply a sub-division of that space in which an administrator (in this case me) sets a very few ground rules (like staying reasonably on topic would be nice) and really just lets everybody else get on with it. Friendfeed is ridiculously easy to use. Just sign up, set up the things you want to embed in your own feed, and then click on the link above (or here) and join in.

The subject of the Play Room?

GAMES of course. And social media. And funny videos. And webcomics. And photographs of queues outside shops at midnight to buy Halo 4. And blog posts. And links to neat magazine articles. And deriding E3. It's basically a place to share, think, comment and enjoy. Share and enjoy.

That's it, that's the pitch. Come on in, tell your friends, get them to come on in too.

Zero Tolerance: The new music in Zero Punctuation

2008-08-03T09:42:00.002Z

I love Zero Punctuation, the mostly-weekly review video that The Escapist have been running for a while now by British emigré journalist Ben "Yahtzee" Crowshaw. For those three of you out there who may not know what it is, ZP presents 4-minute long animated reviews, mostly of one specific title at a time, and it does so with a calavcade of animated characters and a very distinctive speaking style on the party of Yahtzee. He literally fires through each of the points of his reviews in a mad rant that offers little or no chance for breath or full stops. Hence the name. It's the game reviewer equivalent of The Show with Ze Frank.

Aside from the machine-gun speed delivery, however, what makes ZP work extremely well are three things: Its visual invention, its analysis (which is sharp, witty and often brutally to the point) and its very British off-kilter tone. It has been the making of The Escapist also, which prior to ZP's introduction was a very dusty magazine full of intellectual pieces that seemed more at home in an academic journal trying to make some impact in the world of Gamespot and IGN.

But there's a problem and it is this. Someone in the editorial circle of the Escapist, whether it be Yahtzee himself (doubtful) or somebody at the magazine, has decided to jazz up Zero Punctuation with the introduction of boilerplate animations and music at the front and back of each of the new videos.

So where previously we had relevant and witty music choices.

Now we have cheesy metal and explosions.

This has to be stopped!
Letters need to be written!
Avengers assemble!

The conference ritual

2008-07-14T18:47:00.001Z

There's this ritual that I have: Every year I log onto whichever of the gaming news sites are showing webcasts of the E3 conferences, and in another window I click open British gaming forum rllmukforum.com, wherein live commentary is provided. It's a real treat for two reasons:1. The conferences are usually dreadful, full of flash graphics and music around some of the worst presentation giving you have ever seen. They are legendarily awful unless there's some totally awesome hardware launch.2. The commentary on the forum, on the other hand, is fantastic. They literally tear it apart in a super-lively babble of reality up until the point that the forum keels over for having too many users.Things we've shared over the years:

Fist-pumps to no applause
Timid voices trying to sound exciting
Everybody using the words "opportunity, "experience", "innovation", "compelling", "exciting" blah
Fake thanks on stage
People clearing throats
Bored bored bored journalists
The "one more thing" thing which is so tired even Steve Jobs doesn't do it any more

It's great fun, but not really what the interested parties are trying to do, surely? It strikes me that if you're going to do the conference thing then surely the thing to learn is some stagecraft? Don't put the timid exec on stage if he's not good in front of a crowd, for instance. Find someone to do it for you with confidence, even a celebrity if you have to. Don't talk about how exciting things are: show how exciting they are. Don't trot out lists of features as a replacement for content.In the end of the day, there are better ways to present this stuff but ultimately what it comes down to is charisma, and most of these people doing the conferences are no doubt very talented at their jobs but they comes across as nerds talking about their science project at the head of a bored class on a hot summer's day."Exciting!"

A question of value

2008-07-13T18:30:00.000Z

If I were to ask you what you think the value your game's content was, what would your answer be? I think most developers would answer somewhere between 10 and 25 pounds (or 20 and 50 dollars US). It's what they would likely consider a fair price for their services rendered, and that's perfectly understandable.

The problem is that they don't set the value of their output, the public do. And the public have always placed the value of content at one number:

Zero.

When paying for entertainment, the public are always paying for one of three things: Tickets, memorabilia or convenience. Tickets as in entry to an event. Memorabilia as in merchandise. Convenience as in the ability to use their content as and when they choose. So, for example:

A ticket to go see Led Zeppelin
T-shirts for the event
An album of greatest hits that they can pop on and listen to whenever they choose

It's not the actual thing that they'll pay for so much as the toll to get to the thing, in otherwords. This is largely born out by the radio and television industries' realisations back way whenever that people wouldn't actually pay to listen to radio shows or watch TV shows. Instead they developed the first business models that gave content away at the value which the public perceived (i.e. for free) and instead made the toll a business-to-business transaction in the form of advertising. And I think we can all agree that that model has been nothing short of a roaring success for those companies that could scale that model appropriately. Add in the extra ticket incentive of cable television and there you have it.

So, to games.

Currently most games sell themselves on the convenience model. The discs that the people buy to put in their Xboxes represent the equivalent of the album. Except not all discs will fit all boxes, a situation that fragments the market in a bad way and keeps games effectively on the sidelines culturally. While the industry wrestles over which format to support (and these are especially uncertain times in that regard), it effectively produces a natural cap for the consumer that does not want to be confused and suspicious.

The convenience model for games therefore has its limits, because the prices for new games are quite high compared to other forms of entertainment, and the selections are small. Thus the only predictable course for the industry overall is to continue building self-enclosed toy empires that extract value as much as possible from each step of the chain. The Nintendo model, basically, of which the only step that's still missing is for Nintendo to bite the bullet and open a set of retail stores. As things stand I can't see why they wouldn't.

Another fairly popular model is the ticket approach. In this model, the game is kept away from the player until he pays a toll to access. World of Warcraft is an example of this model in action, as is arcade gaming or interactive TV "pay to play" services (small disclosure: I currently work in that end of the industry). Ticket models have a significant advantage over that of the convenience model in that they can encourage repeat or continuous purchasing form the players. For their £8.99 a month, players play as much as they want, and Blizzard eventually make out extremely handsomely as the players eventually end up paying far more than they would have had they been individually purchasing the game plus updates.

Aside from the fairly small trade in gaming merchandise such as plastic figurines and cross-media applications like Halo novels and the odd movie tie-in, the main kind of memorabilia sale in the games industry is through the exclusive edition, in-game property (i.e. micro-transactions) and that sort of thing. People like a sense of ownership, particularly of something tangible.

The key thing to understand from all this nugget-wisdom above is that regardless of your feelings (as a developer or would-be developer) about piracy, your sense of self-worth, your feeling that things should have a value and so on, the public essentially doesn't care. A game is essentially the same thing to them as an album or a movie. It lacks a tangible quality and, being ephemeral, doesn't feel like it has any intrinsic worth.

Don't be depressed, because this is something that you can use to your advantage. It's just about realising that just because they think it has zero value does not mean that it is worthless. Here are some ideas:

Build a game based on ticket sales
Build a game based on sponsorship and promotion
Build a game in which the basic PC version is free, but you charge for the convenience of an iPhone version
Build a game in which tangibles mean something
Build a game which you distribute freely, but charge extra for support, etc
Sell a premium version of your game in a box with quality tat for 50 pounds a box

And so forth.

Why is the book world NOT threatened by gamers?

2008-06-08T09:18:00.004Z

I don't normally do this, but I am moved to write a response to a post on the Guardian Tech blog by the journalist Aleks Krotoski on the subject of book publishing, computer games, and asking generally why is it that the publishing industry seems so behind the times. Her point is effectively an argument for the oncoming wonders of interactive storytelling.

I have written about this before (here) and made the basic point that the differences between games and storytelling are not simply a matter of one being a restrictive version of the other, but rather that there are key differences. Editing being one, and the role of the hero being another. So-called "interactive storytelling" isn't, in my view, something that is practically achievable because of these two key traits.

She writes: "In computer games, for example, the player is the hero."

No, she isn't. This is an essential and oft-misunderstood point. The player appears to be a hero because in a movie the hero is a walking talking thing with arms and legs that does stuff, and if I play a videogame I am also a walking talking thing that does stuff. QED? No. A hero in a story is an essential part of the structure of the story. Their personality and character, bad decisions and good are what make them as much a part of the story as the setting and the incidental characters. In a videogame, the player is not a hero. The game character that they manipulate is simply a doll, a suit of clothes, a projection of themselves into a game world. The player's mind is immersed in a world through that doll, but they do not become the doll (as in adopt their actual personality, motivations and whatever).

The publishing industry really doesn't have any cause to be afraid of what's going on in computer games. While there are many fans of the idea that games represents some great departure into a branching new age of multiple stories and generative solutions, there aren't any good games that back this notion up. One of the most recent (Grand Theft Auto IV, which is fantastic, play it) is a great example of how gaming and sliced story segments can work really well together, but it isn't a threat for an author of a novel.

Hanif Kureshi has it right. From Aleks's article: "At a recent literary event, I asked author Hanif Kureshi what he makes of interactive literature - the kind emerging across blogs, social networking sites and in the virtual sprawl of computer games. He poo-pooed the idea of co-authorship with unknowns, unless he could ensure that collaboration was with someone "good", and appeared reluctant to relinquish the control he has over the narrative experience."

The implication being that Kureshi is simply being a fraidy cat. He's not, what he's voicing is experience: Authorship is hard, and it's a mostly internal process. While there is some virtue in the idea that the wisdom of crowds might be applied to editing or offering constructive criticism, the authoring doesn't really scale. One only needs to look at various efforts across Facebook and Penguin's experiments to realise that crowd-writing of fiction is generally bloody awful (whereas crowd writing and editing of fact like Wikipedia is great). It's not simply because most people who write are bad writers; it's because the fiction process requires structured imagination and experimentation to work.

In Aleks's piece, she writes "Books are the equivalent of single-player games and old-school websites. They are snapshots of information at a single point in time, where stories are created and navigated from the point of view of one person. Social media has changed the nature of information gathering and production, and multiplayer games have re-inspired collaborative play. Static media which insists on remaining static is on its way to becoming a curiosity."

Except it isn't. Games sales may be on the rise but so are book sales. We may be using utilites such as the internet to have great big global conversations, but we are usually conversing about the supposedly-boring static media. What the interactive-set hope for is essentially a future where the novel, the album or the painting becomes a fluid thing, but realistically it's just a fantasy borne from reading a bit too much William Gibson. There is no global conversation without topics of conversation. Mashups need starting points. Fan pages need something coherent to be a fan of.

We really are at the limit of where games and stories meet, and it turns out that they just don't have a lot in common. Games in reality have much more in common with architecture, the visual arts and mathematical systems than they do with stories. What I find interesting is this idea that has gotten into many journalists (and developers) that their goal is to take on Hollywood, or Big Publishing, when I think they should be looking much more at the world of modern art for their cues and inspiration.

Immersion does not have to be (and usually is not) achieved through storytelling-ish or even quasi-storytelling-ish means. It's all about ambience, vibe, triggers, music, good game controls, and true fluidity. GTA IV's genius is, and this has always been the case, that it embraces fluidity right down to the gameplay by dispensing with trying to be storytellers and instead using story snippets simply as a part of the ambience. In GTA, story is basically the thing that gives context to the missions, adds to the vibe, and generally stays very far away from trying to impose, inspire or whatever.

It's not interactive storytelling, it's interactive architecture. Kureshi need not worry.

Aggregation vs Portals: Where Microsoft is going wrong with Xbox Live

2008-05-25T09:44:00.005Z

In perhaps the most interesting news of the week, Microsoft have announced that they are going to start de-listing games from Xbox Live Arcade based on two criteria: Sales and review scores. In their view this means that they are trying to bring some overall quality back to the product line, probably because they've had consumer feedback that says they are tired of wading through lots of mush in order to get to the good games. In my view it's likely the death knell for Xbox Live Arcade as somewhere to go for great games and is leaving the door open for Sony or Nintendo (or someone else, Apple perhaps) to take their crown.

It's also a move that's been a long time coming. If anyone has spent any time browsing through the interface of Live in the last few months, it's becoming an increasingly sodden experience. There are long, poorly maintained lists of product in there. There are a few notable remakes making the headlines (such as Rez HD) but also a lot of really very bad product (such as the Battlestar Galactica game, or the unplayable port of Marathon) and the service has lacked focus for quite some time.

But why is proposing to remove the crap a death knell move? On the surface it sounds like a sensible plan because it means that the consumer experience would be improved. Indeed. But the problems are threefold:

1. Any such system is going to be wide open to collusion, politicking and will reward only those companies who are more sales-driven and ruthless about getting good review scores.
2. It reduces consumer choice.
3. It doesn't solve the main problems.

Let's tackle these in turn:

1. Collusion.
The unfortunate truth of the retail games industry is that it relies on a lot of wheel-greasing, which is why it tends to favour higher-end publishers and developers with deep pockets. It's no great secret that review scores can often be bought indirectly through the means of exclusive interviews, junket goodies and even potential job opportunities for reviewers to become game developers. It's also no great secret that reviewers tend, as a group, to have certain in-built prejudices against certain types of game, and they tend to think and award scores like a community.

This behaviour is arguably necessary in a retail environment where the buying power of the retail chain is largely concerned with what bulk orders for volume they can place. With only limited shelf space up for grabs, a publisher looking to maximise its shareholder returns has to take the view that they need their product in prime position. Indeed it would be irresponsible of them as a company not to do that, and so the only questions become whether what they're doing is legal, and whether they have genuine ethical concerns about some of the tactics that might be deployed. In most cases the answer to that second question is "maybe, but not enough to make them stop doing it". Publishers are not evil, but they operate in a difficult environment.

So this behaviour model will clearly also translate across into Xbox Live Arcade. XBLA is already a constrained retail model (See point 3 below) and the threat of de-listing only intensifies that pressure. So what will happen is that sales-oriented developers will behave like retail publishers and start taking steps to get those high review scores. They will also continue to establish their personal relationships with members of the Xbox team so that they can have a champion inside the platform itself, because it's easier to de-list a game from someone anonymous rather than from your friend at developer X who'll phone you hurt and angry.

Lastly, and far more seriously, it means that the developers will increasingly pitch for products that they think Microsoft will like, or products that Microsoft themselves might think should be on the service, and so XBLA will become a much more for-hire service. While this is a valid model for a smaller digital service like interactive TV (and is basically what I do for a living), I'm not convinced that it's a model that should be applied to a console gaming audience.

2. Consumer Choice
Clearly this move affects consumer choice. Less games available for sale means less games available for browsing, which means more of a hit-driven mentality in an online space. This will mean less sales. I don't want to bore my readers too much with talk of the now-cliché Long Tail effect, but the fact remains that Amazon, Itunes and Netflix all consistently report that they see more sales as whole from their long tail aggregate than they do from their hits.

The problem here is not that channelling consumer choice is a bad thing, it's that channelling choice should only be engaged in where it is necessary. In retail it is necessary because of the physical costs of distributing product and maintaining stores with high rent. In television it was necessary because the physical constraints of the technology meant that all interests simply could not be served (though this is now slowly changing).

In the online space it is not necessary. The cost of distribution is negligible and there are no technical constraints of broadcast technology. Ultimately an XBLA game as a product is just another small portion of data on a disk space on a RAID rack somewhere in Redmond that gets called up and downloaded as required. Delisting such product saves practically nothing and gains the consumer nothing. (And it doesn't answer the question of what happens to the consumer who bought a game which was subsequently delisted, only to have their Xbox hard drive fail at a later date: How do they get their game back?)

Which leads me nicely into:

3. The main problems
The real problems that Microsoft have (which de-listing is not going to solve) are all to do with key choices that they have made in the construction of XBLA for Xbox 360, and how those decisions are driven by portal-based thinking rather than aggregator-based thinking.

Portal-based thinking is basically the headset that tries to take the retail and magazine-based view into the internet. Portals try and push selected content out to their readers in a managed fashion. It inherently is driven by the assumption that consumers need to be sold to, and consumer-experience needs to be guided with studies of "journeys" and so forth. Portals worry a lot about managing the user expectations. Yahoo is a good example of portal-based thinking.

Aggregator-based thinking is the reverse. It's the headset that tries to provide the best tools for the readers to find what they want. In the aggregator model, the consumer and his friends are the sales people and the "journey" is unimportant. What's important is that there is enough content to be found, and that it can be accessed easily. Digg is an example of aggregator-based thinking.

Microsoft clearly have always thought of Xbox Live as a portal. This has led them to a number of decisions:

1. They have always throttled releases. This is a leaf taken out of Nintendo's old playbook with the NES, wherein you manage the release pattern of games so that every one gets the chance to shine. This results in a lot of developers clamouring to get in the door, and a lot of collusion-driven behaviour as a result. It also results in Microsoft starting to try and direct traffic in order to raise quality, which results in a highly managed catalogue full box-checking (as in they fulfil perceived genre or other criteria) bad games. In short, the throttled release decision is largely responsible for the poor quality of XBLA content.

2. They have focused the whole experience on the Xbox itself. You buy Live games from the Xbox 360, you find them through it and use it as your gateway into the wider world. This was an understandable but incredibly stupid decision made a time when they were trying to sell the new console. At that time it probably seemed to them that they really had to get people to look at their dashboard to get into the brand, but the problem is that using a console joypad as a primary means of finding and sorting large quantities of content simply sucks as an experience. It leads to short, stubby menus, long tedious scrolling lists and a general touchy-feely air to the design (remember, portals think "journeys" are paramount). It is simply not suited, nor will it ever be, to presenting large volumes of content. Imagine if Apple had created the iPod platform without iTunes and insisted that we all bought our music through the click-wheel interface and small screen of the iPod itself. That's largely what Microsoft have done with insisting on tying games purchasing to the Xbox itself.

3. The points system. XBLA points are a good idea, not dissimilar to pay-as-you-go phones and other similar models, and they allow gamers under the age of 18 (and therefore sans credit cards) to participate in the network, buy games that they want with their pocket money and so forth. The problem is that points are compulsory. In trying to manage the customer journey again (thinking like a portal) they have created a barrier for consumers who simply don't want the hassle. Also the fact that the Gold subscription for online play does work with credit cards but the purchasing of games does not probably creates consumer confusion and therefore aversion. It should be as easy as one-click to buy a game on XBLA.

It should be noted here that I don't think Microsoft are trying to be evil or mean about who gets to make games for Live. There is, after all, the example of XNA that shows that they are at least trying to embrace with the content in some shape or form. I just think that they can't seem to get the portal model out of their heads, and that's what's killing them.

So is it too late?
Is it too late for XBLA? Well I hope not, but I suspect it is. Microsoft increasingly have competition from Sony (whose online play is free after all) and now Nintendo - who have announced a very interesting scheme for WiiWare that is squarely aimed at the sorts of innovative small developers that Microsoft wanted to attract but ultimately repelled with their portal structure. Microsoft had an early-market advantage with XBLA 3 years ago, but their competitors have now matched (and may supercede) their offering. And with sales of the 360 console itself being caught by PS3 and out-classed by Wii, I would imagine there isn't much of an appetite in Redmond for large-scale changes to the system.

Ultimately it comes down to whether Microsoft as a culture really has the ability to think in an aggregator mindset, and whether they have a continued appetite to be in the console business at all.

Solutions
If I were to propose some solutions, they would be these:

1. Build a web portal that allows consumers to find, buy and recommend games to each other. Change the Xbox 360 Dashboard to allow syncing of web activity and Live activity such that if I buy a game via the web portal, my 360 will download that game automatically the next time I log on. Decoupling game purchases from the console dashboard is the one problem that they really need to solve.

2. Allow consumers to buy games via their credit card directly. This ties into the web portal idea, with the overall approach being to allow easy purchases with as few clicks as possible.

3. Don't de-list content. Instead provide better filtering tools on the Xbox's portal.

4. Provide a simple means for users to rate games directly rather than relying on professional reviewers. Tie this in with the filtering tools in suggestion #3.

5. Stop throttling releases. It is likely that throttling has built up a regular enough audience who now check back every week for the new game, but that is small potatoes compared to the damage that throttling causes.

6. Simplify the distinctions. At the moment there at least two strands of Live's online games proposition (Xbox Classics and XBLA) and soon XNA will be a third. These are pointless distinctions that make lots of sense to a marketeer or someone who works for Microsoft (again: it's "journey" based thinking) but make no sense to consumers. To a consumer it's all just "games" and it's better for them if Halo and Hexic are sitting beside each other in the list than having to understand Microsoft's logic in order to be able to overcome their own aversion. This especially applies for XNA, which, going on the current model, is likely to only ever be of interest to XNA members owing to the levels of aversion that it will cause.

7. Fix the developer deal. Royalty-changes were an accounting-based manoeuvre but they have proved horrendously unpopular with the development community. Now that Microsoft has real competition from Nintendo and Sony, developers are looking elsewhere to see which network offers the best deal. And that doesn't even begin the cover the possibilities if developers look even further afield to iPhone, Facebook and many other markets that offer a much better cut of the action.

Conclusion
As you can see, Microsoft have effectively hoisted themselves by their own petard when it comes to XBLA. In trying to manage consumers and overcome what they believed was an image issue, they have created a network that organisationally can't actually sell a lot of games. Their solution is to reduce the catalogue, but this is essentially an admission of failure on their part. With the 360 probably having peaked in terms of overall appeal and other console providers and technology companies now delivering credible alternatives, it is up to Microsoft to rethink their whole strategy and decide whether this is a sector of the business that they really want to be in any more.

Is it over for the UK?

2008-03-14T21:02:00.003Z

In the news today, a petition has been started on the Downing Street website (which I've signed) to basically ask the government to do something about the conditions that the UK industry has operated under in the last few years because times are difficult, and increasingly so. Though I support the idea, I think that it is basically doomed for the usual reasons:

1. The British public have a very negative view of games and wouldn't support it.
2. The British industry is not at all sure that they want it.
3. The other prevailing conditions in the UK (infrastructure, corporate tax rates, transport, location, standards of living, the crazy high value of the pound etc).

The British industry's chief problem is that it's full of middle aged men who have fought their way into a fairly comfortable position, and have no real need to change the way that they do things. No offence intended to any of the middle aged men out there, many of whom I am good friends with, but it is not exactly a young industry at heart and a lot of them have become suburban types with families and saloon cars, and they tend to be quite oppositional in their viewpoints.

This means that they see the industry as a big game of move and countermove, and to them the field is full of players that they already know. So for them the industry is largely a static place, so many of them don't support tax breaks on the basis that it means their enemy will get the upper hand. And to a certain degree, they are right.

But it doesn't really address the wider issues of the industry, which are things like why is it about to go bust again (And it will, now that the dust has settled on the new hardware generation and the publishers will be counting the costs of having spent so much jockeying for position), why is all the work increasingly not coming to Britain, and what does it mean for the future of the industry as a whole?

I'm sorry to say that the prospects are not good. Economic downturns are causing credit crunches, which means investment is drying up. Serious inaction on the part of the government means that places like Montreal, Shanghai and Mumbai are getting the upper hand in a variety of disciplines - all while still being cheaper than the UK industry. It's a global marketplace for skills, but the UK industry still behaves like a local one, and so does its government.

So in that respect, is it basically over for the UK as a serious source of game development?
What do you think?

Gary Gygax RIP

2008-03-04T17:51:00.001Z

Apparently so.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Gygax

Not At GDC

2008-02-17T12:56:00.003Z

Another year, another not-going-to-GDC.

Last night a friend of mine stopped over at my place, as I live reasonably close to Heathrow Airport. And why, you may ask? Well he's off to GDC of course. Lucky so-and-so that he is.

I have never been to GDC, or indeed any of the major game conferences except for ECTS (which was always a bit of a shambles to give it its due). They always seem to come along at inconvenient moments, such as periods of high business or dudgeon in my job, or low activity on the financial front. Mostly, I think it's because I've not really remembered that they're on until way too late.

I also find the whole conference circuit vaguely unsettling. A lot of my past comes from the world of rpg conventions and the like, so I know what it is to waste time in a hotel in some far-flung town getting drunk and talking crap with strangers. I'm aware that professional events such as GDC or E3 also have the illusion of business about them, but I can't quite tell if they're actually just pretending to be busy, or whether work actually gets done at them. It's quite an important question when you're talking about laying down 3 grand for a trip over to Northern Cal, especially if that ticket is not being picked up by your employer (and most in the UK don't send batteries of people over any more, as it is a lot of money).

A large part of the games industry likes to behave like as though it's the movies, with the image of deals being done and reputations being made at some grand insider carnival. Yet when you step back and take a look at the outside world, there doesn't usually seem to be a great deal of effect from the main conferences except as PR posts for the truly giant to announce their next big things? What does a small company get from sending a field agent out there apart from contacts, and wouldn't those contacts be better developed in individual sessions, trips, meetings, Linkedins and the like? Is there any actual value to what amounts to the gaming version of Sundance? Gamedance?

Why go?

Well the party atmosphere has to count for something. And the inspiration value as well. You can't forget that. Plus there is the thrill of being there, watching things happen (or at least pretend to happen). See? It's like I'm already there, liveblogging the whole thing.

Next year I'll get there. Promise.

Sudoku Blocks

2008-02-05T13:30:00.000Z

For those of you who have Sky TV, we've just released a game called Sudoku Blocks, developed by Craftwork. I'm rather proud of this game, so hence the web pimping. You can play it by accessing the Interactive menu on your Sky remote, selecting "Sky Games" and it's on the front page. All opinions welcome.

What are Kongregate etc missing?

2008-02-03T09:48:00.000Z

I've become quite the fan of "neat gaming" in the last year. Not least because it has become my job (I now work for Sky Games as a development manager of casual games on interactive TV), but also because it is simply the most interesting and alive sector of the whole gaming world bar none.

Yes, you have your console shenanigans and your managed Live networks, your retro collections and your handheld cooking simulators, and most of these are perfectly valid enterprises. For a while, casual games was somewhat mired in the realm of big portals like real.com basically squeezing value out of both developers and customers, but that is changing.

There are hundreds of portals now selling games or subscription packages for games, and distribution networks from companies like Oberon are servicing that whole fragmented sector, as well as helping to publish. The distinction between casual and self-labelled indie games is also blurring considerably, which is why I use a broader name like "neat gaming" to describe what is essentially a taste for smaller applications.

Services like Kongregate - which basically are trying to be a Youtube of gaming - are emerging and doing a good job of capturing the innovation mindset, the neat idea set and the popularity contest. And it seems to be doing all of this via advertising, which is the aggregation model that is very "web". There are even such neat things as chat clients hanging beside many of the games on such services, and attempts to place ads in-game via the likes of Mochiads.

Flash is really the technology that is making all of this happen (finally) and providing a road toward a single platform that the hardware makers and devkit-obsessed developers of the classic industry are simply unwilling to face. You can play any game on an aggregator, such as Bowman 2, for free in your browser without any fuss. It is easy to see how such a game could be converted into an iPhone-friendly format, or a DS format if Nintendo saw the light and opened the DS up to indie development with no strings attached (maybe that'll have to wait for DS2). In a world of gaming dinosaurs, Flash is the fore-runner of mammals.

The problem that these would-be aggregators have is that they are not quite there yet in terms of really embracing the aggregator mindset. They still have some of the elements of a games directory about them, and they have not yet really gathered the full power of the social network to their cause.

For example:

Kongregate places a lot of advertising on its pages and offers a Digg This link to help popularise its games. What it's lacking, however, is sharing technology.

1. There should be a link on the page that allows the players to share the game with their friends, embed the game in their blogs and so on. This is a critically missing piece.

2. Each of the games should have a Kongregate watermark or small bar at the bottom of the Flash app, and also a short pre-game advertisement in the Flash app. Thus Kongregate-hosted content can travel anywhere and be monetised.

3. Each of the games should have a facility that puts its tagging to use, recommending other games on the page. A lot of the detail on the Kongregate pages are unnecessary (such as the description text, which can wax lyrical) and instead be replaced with small icons for other games that the player might like to try.

Significantly, AddictingGames does include the ability to share games, but it doesn't always seem to work (I attempted to embed a game in this post by copying and pasting the embed data, but it didn't work).

The problem that AddictingGames has is one of layout, in that their sharing/embedding code is very tiny on the page, so much so that it's easy to miss. They are also missing the lively chat and community sense that Kongregate has, and the overall site design is not particularly attractive in terms of colour choices etc.

I think that these are mostly teething problems, however. Services like Kongregate and AddictingGames are likely the forerunners of what's to come. Between the embedded Flash game sector and the downloadable PC casual sector, the future of much of the games industry is all about what the web can do to break down the barriers. It's so much more interesting right now than anything that the traditional games industry has been doing for quite some time.

New Blood, Old Blood

2007-12-08T09:39:00.000Z

My old commander-in-chief Peter Molyneux was in the press recently making the case for new blood and new graduates in the industry, as well as advocating passion and communication skills over experience (here, via gi.biz). A fine sentiment, but I think he's not seeing the problem.

The problem that new blood has is simply one of obscurity. In any new field there is always the early-mover advantage for new blood, and by necessity the first-movers inevitably make it harder for follow-on groups to emerge. Look at the world of search engines, for example. In the early years there was room for Yahoo, then Google, and a few others to stamp out virgin territory. Nowadays although there are many attempts at redeveloping search semantically, with specialist focus, or whatever, nobody really expects the established players to become unseated.

This applies to people as much as it does to companies. The problem that new blood has is that Molyneux, Miyamato and about 50 other people and companies have already had the early-mover advantage and they eat up virtually all of the press inches with their comments. A late-mover like myself can express a hearty opinion on any subject but whatever my opinion I am unlikely to gain any widespread traction or awareness. It takes either acts of extremity to get noticed, or the stamp of big name legitimacy.

In strict terms, therefore, for new blood to emerge the old blood either has to make way or actually die off, and even then it's not guaranteed. While many game developers look to the movie industry and try to emulate that, the industry's behaviour is often much more closely affiliated to that of the comics industry.

In comics, even 60 years after their initial post-war explosion, it is still very hard to get past Jack Kirby and his long shadow. Comics and games share the common trait of having undying intellectual properties, unlike film or books. Tom Cruise may be huge but he will die, but Mario is immortal. As such, those IPs and their early creators influence and fame can very easily blanket out new blood long after their flesh and blood forms have kicked the bucket. To large companies like Marvel or EA, the IP is the thing and it actually serves their purposes in the long term to retain the legend of the old creator.

So if the old blood are serious about engaging with the new blood, what they need to look at is the idea of patronage. The advantage of having some celebrity is that you can use it to drive others' celebrity. Quentin Tarantino does this quite a lot by fronting movies that aren't his and giving other directors that he likes responsibility. We would not have seen some martial arts movies in the west without his influence, nor would we have heard of Eli Roth (which some say maybe we shouldn't have, but I digress).

Active patronage is something that we do not see a lot of in the games industry. It lies with Peter and a number of high profile developers to actually take action on it though. One example would be to try and do more through the likes of BAFTA, or even develop schemes of sponsorship and funding, like a startup foundation that promotes the people as well as the product or publisher relationship.

Xbox Live: Release the Hounds

2007-11-04T00:57:00.000Z

Why are console manufacturers afraid of developers?

It's right at the heart of their whole business model that they place developers at arms' length purposefully, first by producing steep barriers to entry and second by instituting approvals processes that guarantee that developers will shape their games to the needs of the gatekeepers rather than the audience.

I speak specifically here about the online side of the major consoles. I have recently (finally) acquired a 360 and had a chance to really have a look at Xbox Live, and the one impression that I took away from it is that of over-management.

Firstly, it's obvious that the catalogue is entirely managed, like a TV schedule. And just like a TV schedule this means that there aren't many surprises but rather a series of checkboxes being ticked. It reeks of platform-holder side meetings in which they discuss how their catalogue has holes and those holes need to be plugged to gain the upper hand against Eastasia. I mean Nintendo.

Secondly, with such a managed catalogue and antiquated business model based on the retail model as invented by Nintendo, Atari and co, it's obvious that Live is going to run out of steam fairly soon. Once you have settled on a series of catalogue categories and holes-to-be-filled, well where do you go when those holes have all been filled? Where does your audience go, more importantly.

Thirdly, the front page of Live Arcade in particular is very drab and uninteresting, and the browsing mechanism doesn't really do anything to sell games, promote games, or basically work like an enthusiastic retailer should. When compared to Popcap, Big Fish, Amazon and Itunes, Live looks almost embarrassed to be seen selling games. It seems to actively want to downplay games and instead make it all about the multiplayer retail games like Halo 3 and the like, even though the online retail is where Live would make most of its money.

The great fear, and it's the same fear that Nintendo had back in 1988 with the NES, is that opening the floodgates leads to a drop in quality. It does. Opening the floodgates also leads to a rise in innovation, however. The reason why the casual market is so exciting these days is all to do with it being essentially anarchic. No one company can be the gatekeeper of the web, and so no one company's sense of catalogue aesthetics is going to over-run a marketplace. Casual gaming is the games industry's closest example of a free market, and it is where all the life is.

Microsoft, the company that brought you the OS that anyone could develop for and they would not control, is worried sick of letting evolution play its part in the evolution of Live, and this means they are very likely to run into the same issues that Nintendo did when their managed catalogue foundered in the face of competition. Managed catalogues don't really get the job done if you want to be the number one destination.

What they should do, especially with the roll out of the Windows extension to Live, is step back. They should behave like the company they natively are, which means:

Provide the environment, and the tools, all at reasonable prices
Create a standardised contractual model that gives them a slice of game sales that is fair and not punitive to smaller companies in particular
Hire someone talented to redesign Xbox Live Arcade's portal as something attractive
Step the hell back and let nature run its course.

Really all they have to do is set up the playing field and let the developers run with the ball. An avalanche of titles, some brilliant and some shit, will emerge. Not having seen PS3 or Wii networks in action, I'm assuming that the scenario is the same. But I guarantee any reader this:

The first manufacturer that realises the need to get out of the way is the one that will own the online space, and thus drive sales of everything else.

The Death of Console Generations

2007-11-03T12:01:00.000Z

Though I am a supporter of a free and open standard console format, I don't think that it's likely to happen any time soon. First we need to get through the Age of Updates.

What this means is that the next direction for console manufacturers is clearly one of multiple configurations based on a standardised hardware type rather than trying to make a whole new leap again in 3-4 years. They spend all this time and effort developing their baseline, but rather than just let it sit there and grow old (as has been traditional), what they are doing - and should continue to do - is think like Apple.

That means constant revisions of the baseline product. Xbox 360, for example, could easily run and run with more features, better controllers, more hard drive space, HD-DVD drives and the like while keeping the common features of the console fairly static. PS3 can do likewise. Wii is probably less easily amenable and its not certain whether they have an audience that responds to that sort of constant-upgrade strategy.

Gamers clearly have an appetite for machines. Since 2000, including handhelds, there have been over half a dozen major hardware launches from the GBA SP to the PS3, and stores have become a Byzantine hive of formats with dedicated catalogues. For Microsoft and Sony this should be thought of as good news, because it means that they can tap their customers again, and regularly, perhaps as often as every two years.

Via the joys of eBay and second-hand sales in stores, customers can mitigate costs and be encouraged to upgrade to the new 360, the new PS3, with its shiny new stuff all in. They can also be assured that their old joypads and the like will still work, that the console network can update/patch any compatibility issues that arise, and possibly even transfer important data or download it again.

Of course multiple-configuration development would be more difficult for developers, publishers and QA-ing games, but it's probably absorb-able when traded off against the cost of another full generation shift.

So that's the future then. It's not Xbox 720 and PS4, it's Xbox 361 and PS3.1.
And probably Wii2 somewhere down the line.

Down on the Farm: Barnyard Developers

2007-08-11T16:19:00.000Z

I'm in the mood for a little Saturday afternoon amusement, so here goes:

I met up with a friend for breakfast this morning and we're both games industry peeps. As such, we invariably got around to the subject of the industry, developers, and all the amusement that that topic generates. In the middle of it all, I coined a phrase to describe a particular type of company, to wit: barnyard developers.

As I said adios and made my way into Kingston to lust over the new iMacs (they are very lustworthy incidentally) I thought to myself that I have encountered various kinds of company in the industry, as well as hearing stories of others. I thought it might make a subject of some humour to caricature them a bit. So here goes:

(shout if you recognise any of these)

Barnyard Developers
A barnyard developer is often a large-ish studio(or multiple studios in some cases) that literally works out of a barn, shed, or other farming-based building. More loosely it might apply to developers that work in big facilities off the beaten track, but the barn image is the nicest. These developers are often led by a charismatic member of the industry's old guard. They are surprisingly common in the UK, with many counties in South-east England having one, or maybe even two. They are usually located in this hap-hazard fashion because the leader was originally born in the area and is not inclined to bring himself to the mountain.

Barnyard developers are usually very introverted, egotistical and political places to work, rather like extended families. They usually have a culture split into what you could call lifers, parole cases and 2-year stretchers. Lifers are the long-timers who've stuck with the company through thick and thin and can regale you with stories of yore. They are usually engineers, long-standing designers and that one QA guy who sort of seemed to hang around until he became company president. Parole cases are the 6-month limited contract types, the ones who are green, new to the industry and full of bright ideas and hope. This is usually drained from them by degrees. 2-year stretchers are the ones who have been around a little longer, figure they know how the industry works and, the mad fools, are actually looking to make a career out of advancing up the corporate ladder among a number of barnyards. This usually does not go so well.

The goals of the companies are uncertain, the engines and tools that they use are often Byzantine. They don't seem to be that commercially successful any more, but rather seem to trundle on from project to project. Every project is deemed worthy mostly in the light of how technically cutting edge it is, but most of the employees, especially the lifers, are generally unsure if the project is actually any good or not. A general air of plus ca change pervades much of what they do. Even when bought, the culture remains largely as-was, though usually with the addition of fancy amenities like running water and non-power spiking electricity supplies.

Every veteran of a barnyard developer has their hilarious stories about working conditions and general conduct of the upper echelons of the company, whether it be that time when the tea and coffee facilities were taken away, to the bumpy carpet on the second floor that eventually caved in one night, to the fist-fight that broke out in reception over whose soft toys got turned upside down, placed in a dishwasher or whatever. These stories prove the subject of much amusement in the local pub, which is used copiously at lunch and other occasions.

Although located out in the middle of the countryside, away from what is generally held to be civilisation or at least the local village, most barnyard developers have about a 50% ratio of employees who can't drive. This is further compounded by a frequent crunch culture, which leads to people sleeping in the office a great deal and trying to find a take-away that will deliver at 1 in the morning when the troops are restless and hungry the night before milestone. Often the company seeks to solve these problems by bringing in a high-powered manager who brutalises the staff and makes them work like dogs until bonus day, whereupon he vanishes "to take on new and exciting challenges".

All in all, barnyard developers are quirky, amusing places in which every industry person worth their salt should spend at least 2 years to see what the good and the bad can be like. If you're a fan of the smell of damp, wall-high mold and occasional flooding, this might be the game development lifestyle for you!

Next: Rubik's developers.

The End of Novelty

2007-08-04T00:03:00.001Z

As is my wont, I shall now wax lyrical on the subject of novelty.

As some readers may be aware, I have in the past taken pains to note that the trend for novelty and innovation is not one that is self-sustaining. What I did not pause to consider when looking at, say, Nintendo last time is how wide the novelty culture goes. Actually, it is of course far far larger than gaming, encompassing user-generated content across several media (such as this one).

Novelty has been a very powerful force in recent years. It is the backbone of Web 2.0 for the most part, having spawned a variety of services that have become household names. Youtube is one. Wii is another. What novelty is exactly is saying to the audience "Bet you never thought of that before". Users love to play with novelties, like magpies,particularly if those novelties are free or reasonably cheap. They get off on the idea of little things that brighten their day as long as they continue to do so in some way.

The problem is that at some point novelty itself must give way to depth. So we can see the novelty of Youtube and all of its short films and trailers etc, but after a little while Youtube becomes damn boring to play with if you're just out for some entertainment. As a sharing tool it's useful in a holiday-video sort of way, but the sheer entertainment of it as a thing for itself is actually very low. Similarly, blogs are the for the most part airbags full of text rantings about nothing in particular. The vast majority of music on Myspace and the like is simply amateurish.

And then games, oh games, where you see ten thousand versions of the same game again, or the company that pioneered the controller to end all controllers then turning around and producing half a dozen more, as though to underscore that their innovation is, y'know, a bit lacking once you get past the joy of swinging your arm in the air.

What we can see here is that the so-called year of "You", the joy of the strange and unbridled creativity is very quickly giving way to the dawning realisation that, actually, "you" isn't very good at most things, and so "you" naturally creates a wall of content that eventually turns people off wholesale. It's the same reason why podcasting has basically failed to find a general audience in the face of radio. Amateur is still amateur, and one man's democratised content is ten men's idiocratised mess that they just have no interest in.

Of all the Web 2.0 content tools that have emerged, the only one that shows examples of depth is Wikipedia. Some people like to lambaste Wikipedia for its inaccuracies, and it sometimes is, but what they are missing is a genuine community devoted to gathering all there is to know about everything. And it proves that vetting matters, editing matters and, ultimately, quality matters. Once the novelty has passed you by, Wikipedia remains useful.

The backlash against user-generated content is gathering pace from all quarters, but what's missing from it is the understanding that it's not the whole thing that's borked, it's the essential lack of editing/vetting that makes it so. Editing is what weeds out novelty with no purpose from novelty that is an actual font for creativity.

Turning to games, what this means is that the content vetting still matters. Casual portals perform this function automatically by ranking on popularity, but the games sites and news arenas are much more important as both seeds of discussion and vetting that which is not. Yet they have the problem of being so wrapped up in the industry's press whorl that they really often become mouthpieces.

As a result, the thing that the industry actually needs is not more indie games or more access for developers or whatever (well it does, but that's a separate gig). What it actually needs is a site/magazine blog that focuses its energies on being the vetting force behind indie. There is more than enough reportage on the activities of the main industry with its boom and bust, its half a thousand cliche's and its endless wranging over meaningless theories of game design. What there isn't is an indie media mag that effectively tunes all this out and spends its entire time finding the cool stuff.

Media needs guardians and gatekeepers, because without them all that happens is that they the public simply turn away. Without some measure or means to define and gauge taste, novelty simply dries up, buzz vanishes and the ladder that helped the very lucky few at the start get established disappears for everyone else. This applies all across the spectrum, and we are no different.

So, who's going to start the magazine revolution?

93% of new IPs Fail

2007-05-11T15:57:00.000Z

According to Steve Allison of Midway (says Shacknews).

Which sounds daunting. But wait, there's more (some via N'Gai Croal's Level Up)

"If there were, 'great' games Beyond Good & Evil, Ico, Okami, Psychonauts, Shadow of the Colossus, Freedom Fighters, Prey and Midway's own Psi-Ops would all have been multi-million unit sellers. The aforementioned games are all games that average review scores of nearly 90 percent out of 100, some even higher. The reality is none has sold more than 300,000 units at full price in the U.S. and a couple of these less than 250,000 units lifetime even with bargain pricing."

And

"To rectify the issue of overlooked games, Allison suggests that developers focus on broadening the appeal of their games beyond hardcore players, crafting an on-screen experience that causes casual gamers to respond "I've got to get that" or "Bad ass!". The executive also noted that timing is key, using the example of moviegoers overlooking an asteroid film if two others recently arrived in theaters before it."

Steve doesn't get it I think.

The problem is not that new ideas have limited appeal. If you examine most media, it is painfully transparent that new ideas always have limited appeal. Even many of the darling franchises that the executive class have come to rely started out with relatively humble roots. Some IPs are immediate break-out hits, but most of them will hit a middle layer.

The first problem is this: "broadening appeal" is not something that you can just stick in and hope it works. A successful IP is more than the sum of its parts, so taking away, say, the aesthetics of Shadow of the Colossus and replacing with Tony Hawk-style graphics (but the same basic gameplay) makes it a worse IP rather than a better one. It makes the IP more likely to fail. There's an occult magic to making a new IP and you fuck with that at your peril.

The second problem is this: In most other disc-based retail media, 300,000 units sold of anything new is actually pretty damned good. Book authors would faint at the idea that they've gained that many sales of their first book. Indie movie makers would be very pleased indeed. Because, when you break that down into numbers, 300,000 sales could be anywhere from 7-15 million dollars worth of revenue at the till.

That's an awesome number. Unless you work in games, and the reason for that is that games cost way too much money to make, and the margins for third parties are less than ideal. Manufacturers have an easier time of it because they make more per copy, have a lot of prestige value riding on being seen to be cutting edge, and can market in ways that third parties can't. This is why manufacturers are increasingly becoming the sponsors and source of successful new IP.

So the overall problem is that making games is too expensive. 93% of IPs don't fail. They don't succeed enough for their paymasters to recoup all the money that they've wasted, to pay all the hands that are out looking for their cut (including the manufacturers) and the industry is too restrictive as a business to allow for middle layer development and publishing.

So the overall overall problem is free market access for small and middle-level players who are better at being efficient, an end to excessive censorious controls, and a way to build the industry into a rounded business that can cater to more levels than just blockbusters or nothing at all. It's the biggest single issue item on the agenda for developers, journalists and executives that should be being pursued because it's killing the future of the industry.

Videoplays

2007-04-23T23:53:00.000Z

According to a recent article on Next Gen, the BBFC have published a report that identifies 11 key things about games and gamers. Many of the points are rather obvious and well-repeated, but a few are interesting:

6. People view game playing as a risk-free means of escapism and feel in control of game experiences as opposed to real life.

7. Game playing is active and brings about feelings of achievement as opposed to passive forms of entertainment such as TV and film. Gamers are driven by achievement but are unlikely to become emotionally involved. They care more about progress than elements such as storytelling.

Imagine if similar research was done with regard to readers. Most of the reading done on a day to day basis is probably newspapers, websites, emails and other functional reading. After that, perhaps glossy magazines and tabloid celebrity journalism. Then perhaps cookbooks, gardening manuals and educational textbooks. Based on this, as a global picture, you could be forgiven for thinking that

People view reading as an information gathering exercise that informs them of their world.

And

Reading is active and brings about feelings of knowledge imparting. Readers are driven by the need to acquire knowledge, and care more about that than storytelling.

A mad conclusion?

Perhaps not, going on the majority use.

Of course it's mad. The reason it's mad is that we can distinguish between different kinds of reading activity. Any study would begin from the point of view that reading poetry, fiction and the sports page are different things. A poem is not a play is not a web page is not a novel is not a technical manual. We understand it because it's convention.

There exists no such convention for games. Where we see different forms of reading, surprisingly few see different forms of playing. They see "games" and they see "gamers". Beyond that they see "hardcore gamer" or "casual gamer" maybe, but that's about it. In terms of game genres they see functional categories (puzzle, shooter, etc) and also aesthetic categories (survival horror, freestyle crime, roleplaying game) all sort of jumbled together as "genres".

What they don't see is forms.

It is my suggestion that there are in fact several forms of what we call game, and what we call gamer, and that by assuming that Minesweeper and Resident Evil are the same means that we will assume a series of majority-based ideas about what all games are.

There is a difference between those who interact to "game" and those who interact to "play", and the difference between gamers and players is one of perspective, much like the difference between factual and fictional readers.

Gamers play because they see a game as a system. Their perception of interactive games is very literal, about understanding the semiotic language of a game and figuring out how it ticks, how far it goes, or a combination of the above. Gamers are not automatons, and they much enjoy the visual or auditory elements in games, but they enjoy them because of their signifier value rather than their cultural content.

Players, on the other hand, see beyond the edges of the game into fantasy. Players see an imagined world in their heads when running down a corridor, flying a spaceship or typing "Go North". A player sees a conversation between himself and the game. They're the ones who think they can see things waving at them in the distance in Another World, and the ones for who adventures and some sense of creative direction tend to matter.

Of course, we are all gamers and players in part. Most of us are habitually more one than the other and most games cannot please both types equally. That's like hoping that the latest cookbook will entertain us both in terms of what it can teach us about boiling a Christmas ham and its lyrical evocation of Greek poetry. Gamers are like factual lovers, whereas players are fictional lovers.

The problem that both types have is that they are messing up each other’s turf. At the moment we have an ongoing debate and/or struggle between gamers and players over what the direction of the videogame should be. There are those who think it should be about the innovation and those that think it should be about the creation, and ne’er the two do meet but to fight. At the moment the gamers are in the ascendancy, but the players are due for a comeback.

There is no such thing as an all encompassing label that can define everything for both players and gamers. That is an anachronistic idea that belongs in the 80s. "Videogame" in that sense is old news. There are "videogames" and there are "videoplays" and they are different.

Some of you are going to think this is nonsense. You're going to say games are games are games. It’s only appeared that way up to now, as the medium is still young and has been finding its feet. Games are games, but they're not plays.

Poetry and cookbooks are both texts written in a common language, but there the similarities end. They are two forms of the same thing: reading. Videogames and videoplays are two forms of the same thing: interaction for entertainment.

Eight Steps for Good Game Design Documentation

2007-04-13T00:02:00.000Z

1. Write with active verbs in the present tense and use consistent perspective viewpoints.

2. Use bullet points. Lots and lots of them. And indented ones. Make the document bulleted as much as possible because bullets force you to think in terms of short sharp points. Always use the same bullet point style.

3. Keep your document map consistent. Actually, step back two from that: Learn how to use MS Word Styles properly, learn what a document map IS and then keep your document map consistent.

4. Use diagrams. Lots of them. Visio-style diagrams are fine. Use the diagrams to lead your points and explain the complicated things as simply as possible, and the bullet points to support them.

5. Edit. No, really: EDIT. I honestly think no doc should be released from design until it has had at least 3 passes from first draft to final version. One for content, one for flow and the last one for mistakes. Have an editing loop whereby the original writer makes all the instructed changes. The editing loop is the single best way to make your writers better at their jobs if only to avoid feeling humiliated.

6. Build the GDD/whatever document from a series of consistently formatted and written spec documents. These can be in wiki or in doc form, whatever suits you better. Writing GDDs from scratch is a pointless waste of time. They should be built alongside prototyping. A spec doc is simple to write and revise in the face of reality. A whole GDD is a nightmare.

7. Somebody needs time in their schedule to maintain and loop old documents so that they do not become irrelevant. Somebody else needs time in their schedule to edit those changes and loop them back to the writer.

8. Design documentation should not be either fiction or technical documentation. The job of design documents is to explain, without recourse to vagueness, pretentiousness, game theory or windiness, what the player can see, do and hear in the game, how those things work from the player's perspective, and the supporting game rules (not technical specs) that are needed to do that.

Everything else is guff.

This makes me think I should start some sort of freelance documentation editing/teaching company for game developers. Documentation is as much a problem as it was 5 years ago, and sorting it out is something I'm really good at. What do you think?

Has GTA Jumped the Shark?

2007-04-11T16:39:00.000Z

I knew something ineffable had departed from the Grand Theft Auto series when I was playing San Andreas. This is a pattern that happens frequently with me. All the world gets excited over some new TV series, film, game, gadget, whatever, and I often find myself as the voice on the other side of the fence, stroking my chin, looking uncertain and feeling a sense of reality not quite matching up with collective fantasy. Sooner or later the world usually comes around to my view.

How's that for hubris?

I got that uncertain feeling with San Andreas. Whereas I had loved GTA3 to bits and liked Vice City well enough despite it's broken narrative structure, San Andreas felt wrong. It had taken its free-form logic a step and a half too far, including nonsense like beefcaking your character, over-blowing the dress-up game and producing a truly huge world that was just a pain to drive around. It's narrative was initially interesting in the first city, but quickly became a highly rambly mess. It had hip-hop stylings, but it seriously missed a beat with the radio selection. It was, as many franchises become, the extension of the wrong bits while forgetting the right bits.

Liberty City Stories brought some of that back, almost by necessity because of the reduced format of the PSP (and the PS2 port, which is the version I played). There was a sense of fine nostalgia about LCS, driving around the streets of Liberty again, checking out my old haunts, but it was also pretty pedestrian in places and omitted the inclusion of crouching (or if it did I never found out the control to do it) making many of the gun fights really plain rather than tactical.

I saw a trailer for GTA4 a few days back (here), and to be honest I found it pretty underwhelming. It's very lovely physically, a definite step up from before, but it's basically a re-creation of New York with a dash of Koyaanisqatsi. However, I get no sense of imagination. Then today I saw this, and it feels like my suspicions are justified. Removal of features (GTA has always been about features), talking about graphics and animation physics instead (GTA has never been about high polish), and key phrases like "That means there will be no rollerblades, no unicycles, probably no jetpacks and indeed no planes. Rockstar are giving choice and variety which feels right for the character." are all very grand sounding, but they also sound more like "We spent too much time and money on the graphico-techno wizardry, so something's gotta give."

I suspect that with instalment 4, GTA has jumped the shark.

Soul is something highly absent from games today. It seems that as we climb the costs tree and convince ourselves that we must compete even further, we lose something of the joy of why we make games. Like musicians who become addled by the stadium-concert lifestyle games have become parodies of themselves. They include lots of in-built expectation from fans and are built by conservative thinking that views the project as a series of nuts and bolts, innovations and interaction opportunities, and various other crowd-pleasing functions wrapped up in bloom and complex shaders.

It's a mindset that robs a game of reason to be, and so of its ability to entertain the soul rather than just the eyes. Once a game has lost its soul, all the effort put into it is not worth a damn because the game is fundamentally not worth playing. All it's doing is helping you pass the time. Filling in a series of entertainment checkboxes. Unchallenging, uninteresting and ultimately unremembered.

With GTA, I really hope I'm mistaken. Judging a game entirely on the basis on a 20-second video clip and a mag preview is hardly scientific, and it goes without saying that a lot of very hard work has no doubt gone into the project over the last 3-5 years. Looking at it though, I can't help getting the feeling that something is just wrong.

What's my job?

2007-03-06T01:59:00.000Z

I had a conversation with a friend this evening about game design jobs and what they actually mean any more. He came out with a line something along the lines of "Them coders and artists need someone to design for them". Which I pointed out was basically wrong. Many a coder founded the games that built this industry, and many an artist likewise. Hell, isn't Miyamoto an artist by trade? And what about that Will Wright fellow?

So, I asked him, what are we for?

There was (still is a bit) a period when designers were hired by companies largely on the basis of how much they could write, or whether they could wave their arms around a lot and be "passionate". This later devolved into requiring skills to place things, like triggers and objects, and check collision and basically be an implementer. Most of the "designers" that I know are actually implementers.

But going back to high ground for a second, I told him that I didn't think implementation was the be-all and end-all of what we are, and it tends to reflect nothing so much as a lack of street cred in developers and publishers. Nonetheless, I said, we do have a purpose in all this, and that purpose is?

Context.
Game designers (not implementers) provide context.
They do?

Simple really. In the old world of highly iterative, visually cheap game development, there was a lot of room to experiment, test and find out what worked and what didn't. Many games consisted of very simple structures played out in interesting scenarios. As projects grew, it became apparent that developers had to concentrate on specific areas of the project. Artists became divided into animators, character artists, landscape artists. We had coders who specialised in tools, rendering, UI and so on. A multiplicity of fields brought about a multiplicity of perspectives.

Seeing this, the gap was made for a designer, someone who would map out a vision or something. The problem was (and still is) that most of those people hired in those jobs had no basic idea how to do that, or what was required. So a lot of bad design happened that spawned a corporate culture that liked big documents and waffle about gameplay experience, but it rested the power of decision in the hands of the producer.

Which is like making an accountant the director of a show on Broadway.

So design's star rose and fell on a wave of incompetence, and today many designers are basically held in the esteem of those who are slightly above QA in the pecking order, or those who are basically in training to be producers. And yet the problems remain.

Look at many modern games that are now coming out. They are over-featured because coders always program features. They are over-visualised, using bloom all over the place and creating cling-film-o-vision or Uncanny Valley simulators. They are tedious, unadventurous and basically dull. Why? Because coders like features, artists like prettiness and producers like visions that can be sold. Nobody is saying "This just doesn't work" with the authority to change it.

That's where I come in to the equation.
What's my job? My job is to say no.

My job is to say "nice idea but it doesn't work". My job is to say "yes I understand that the desired visual effect is not being met, but no, you can't chop the levels into 1/10th their size". My job is to say "there are only 11 mechanics in this game and no more". My job is understand the gameplay of the desired game (whether it be my own or someone else's), define what the game is and what it is not, craft the design constraints of the project and then ram them down the throats of people who just want to exercise their discipline without consideration.

That's why I liken game designer to the role of film director more than anything else. What most people don't realise much of the time is that a film director's job is to say no. We have this image of them as creatively spoilt children, but often as not they are actually ringmasters of the circus. The actors all want to over-deliver lines, the cinematographers all want to make the film as beautiful as a snowflake. The director knows that he's making a simple action movie. His job is to say no.

My job is to say no.
If you intend to be a game designer, so is yours.

Guns, Germs and Videogames

2007-02-17T12:49:00.000Z

Greg Costikyan wrote an interesting post on the pitfalls of digital distribution recently, citing a couple of major worries that he and others have over the possibility of console distribution becoming even more closed combined with a potential threat by Microsoft (in the form of Vista) to effectively turn the PC market into a console-like market via Vista's means of managing security of installs and parental controls.

I've recently been reading Guns, Germs and Steel, which offers a deterministic view of man's history, saying that because of prevailing geographical, economic, social and other considerations, certain outcomes of history are entirely predictable. Although the actions of individuals may help to precipitate or delay some historical consequences, they eventually come to pass. Of course the same sort of thinking can be applied to any sort of large scale system, and it's a basic foundation idea of evolution. Conditions change and the ecosystem filters and responds to that change. Back and forth it goes.

In this sense, I think that Greg is perfectly right to highlight his worries. As the interests of the mainstream game industry have tended to gravitate toward the bigger and the broader, the threat to the Long Tail companies becomes apparent. The console industry has been on this Hollywood-isation kick for some time, and it's likely to continue, but losing the PC's ability to be the indie arthouse for games is the more serious threat.

There are some possibilities, such as a move to the Mac, to Linux, or an attempt by a client such as Steam to automate or quietly circumvent Vista's roadblocks. The problem with all of these is that computer users like PCs and they are familiar enough with Windows to stick with it regardless of whether one release is better than another. Most PC consumers are not particularly enlightened consumers, which is why Macs always remain a distant second.
Steam has its fans of course, but the Steam client has had its critics and tends to only serve a particular segment of the games community.

So what's the solution?
You're looking at it.
No, not this blog.
Browsers.

Browser technology is ever expanding, and it has the advantage of not requiring any kind of installation process to use, any kind of platform dependence, or any kind of vetting process. Through a browser, you can (in theory) access and view any information, conduct any kind of data transaction, and basically forget the OS.

The big problem is that, to date, browser technology and games have never really seen eye to eye. This is the fault of game developers for the most part, and here's why: Most people who play PC games are now likely casual players. They don't really give a stuff about performance, or graphical whoosh. They just want to click and play. They play Poker. They play match 3. They play whatever it is that they want to play as long as it is convenient for them. Most game developers are still obsessed with a much more classical idea of gamers and so their priorities diverge from their markets' priorities.

Convenience is the real key here. Where a dinosaur game developer faps over Direct X, shaders, surround sound and more textures to make your eyes bleed even harder, a mammal developer is focussed on small scale convenient fun with a wide reach. Mammal developers want their games to look nice, but more importantly, they want people to be able to play them. Convenience trumps fidelity every time.

Basing games around a browser means a complete inversion of many of the game dev community's basic notions of what it is to make games. Browsers are more suited to strategy games and simple action games. They're unsuited to FPS, and likely will remain so for quite some time. They are probably great for point and click adventures, but likely rubbish for full real world or galaxy simulation jerkathons. They basically oblige the developers to think in terms of focussing on gameplay above oomph, because oomph isn't really their strong suit.

Most of all, they support sustainability. Mammal developers need their games to have long-term availability than short-term pizazz, and browsers offer some of the longest term viability there is. So, they offer a future where Windows may no longer, and that future is independent of any one company. There is a way to go, of course, but there is also a business opportunity here for an entrepreneur to bridge the gap between browser and game developers (possibly via a plug-in a la Shockwave or Flash).

Regardless, browsers are moving forward and determinism says that where there is opportunity, it will be taken. If not by you then someone else. Wanna miss the the boat?

All Hail the Entrepreneur

2007-02-05T18:54:00.000Z

Small business is the heart and soul of any market sector, and usually it is the seat of genius. Whether in the public eye of business to customer or behind the scenes, small businesses bring vitality and evolution to marketplaces grown stale or old. This is the primary effect of liberalisation of the marketplace, and one of the goals of free trade. In technology as much as any other industry, small business has its part to play, and so too in games.

This is because entrepreneurship is the spirit of having a go and seeing what happens. Take a risk. See what you can do, what you are made of etc. A novelist attempting to get published is essentially a sole trader looking for a client, every bit as much as an indie film-maker looking for distribution or a database developer looking for corporate customers.

When there is little or no entrepreneurship in an industry it's usually a sign that things have grown old. This is what I fear has happened to the games industry, and largely because of two things. One is ignorance and the other is hesitancy.

By ignorance I mean the amount of hard facts that many people who work in the industry actually know about their industry. It is surprising how many industry workers still believe in a lot of old-school illusions, from the idea that games are taking on movies to the one that Nintendo loves 3rd party developers and wants them on Wii. There's also the one about the guys who think that all they need is a great demo to take around to publishers and they'll seal the deal for sure.

What these beliefs amount to is an inexact picture of the industry as a liberal, expanding marketplace. This really couldn't be further from the truth. There are all manner of restrictions and constraints in the industry, many hoops to jump through and a highly top-down approach. Manufacturers don't want tonnes of indie developers, they want a few choice ones that feather their nest and make them look forward thinking. They know that the real meat and potatoes quality games for their platforms have to be internally made, but that plays badly in the press.

In reality, the console industry is claustrophobic. Publishers are uninterested in the team with the demo unless that team can prove that they can actually finish the game's production (a not unreasonable demand in this day and age) and they want the IP rights to the game because that's where the value is perceived to be. They also know that there are not too many places for teams to take their demo's and ideas, so deals tend to reflect that. They're not in the business of making other people wealthy.

Hesitancy is an even greater problem, because what it means is that many people in the industry have internalised the idea that risk is bad. It is hard not to internalise this idea when all around you the message is so negative on the one hand, and painting a very safe image on the other. Franchises are the very embodiment of this idea, and the game press's enthusiasm for them and their supposed heritage value drives the point home: Risk is bad. The familiar is good. Why fight it?

Except of course this isn't true at all. Many franchises fall in and out of favour, and companies that do take genuine entrepreneurial risks often reap the rewards. Entrepreneurship belongs in every part of the industry, and should be encouraged. From systems which challenge distribution methods to developers pioneering new genres, to tool makers, engine crafters, publications with a different spin than the usual fodder, all entrepreneurship deserves to be promoted, emphasised and accepted as how things should be. With some more presence in the industry's consciousness, we might encourage more people to take the risk themselves.

Do you have a story of entrepreneurial activities in games to share? Comment them here, or email me directly and I'll compile them. Maybe we might even make this a regular outing if enough people are interested.

The Greatest Show on Earth

2007-02-04T11:34:00.000Z

My friend Cliff made an interesting post about large-scale creative projects versus small-scale lone wolf authors.

You're wrong Cliff.

Shakespeare did not work alone, neither did Austen or Tolstoy. All three (and this is true of most writers) had friends, editors, people who would read and comment. Shakespeare even had a theatre company to bounce his ideas off. JK Rowling has the editors at Bloomsbury.

You are also right to say that all movies, plays and so forth are imperfect, but what you're missing there is that they are also emergent, and that can be very powerful. Nobody really knows going into shooting a show like Galactica exactly how it's going to pan out, but that means that they can discover new ideas along the way and incorporate them.

What makes them work is strong direction, someone in the middle who makes consistent decisions from a creative standpoint. What make it difficult is when there is no strong direction, and games have no real tradition of doing that. Games have come from a collaborative sort of culture to where they are today, like a bunch of indie bands, and when looking to scale up, developers looked to software companies and their management techniques rather than entertainment companies, and that cultural choice is what makes modern games weak for the most part.

Improvement

2007-01-30T11:06:00.000Z

Just a short note to let the many of you who expressed concern at my last post know that I'm much better. I've started a personal blog (as particleblog is really supposed to be about games) instead by way of a means to talk, express and converse more generally on subjects that aren't just games games games. It's at tadhgk.com. Thanks again for your support.

Oh by the way, what do people think of this new layout for particleblog? I'm in two minds about it, as I switched it when I upgraded the blog to Blogger in Beta.

The Real Me

2007-01-13T03:57:00.000Z

It's late at night, it's dark outside. I'm tired, depressed, and I have been for a while. I'm angry, in that quiet, bottling way that won't come out except in tirades, rants and bitterness. I watch a hell of a lot of television, seem to spend many of my waking hours trawling the internet for distraction, and I feel lonely. I miss my family, who visited for Christmas, and I miss home. I think my ladyfriend Jayne must wonder that I'm on the edge, or taking life way too seriously, but I don't seem to be able to do anything else any more.

I have ideas, projects, directions and notions, but I find that I have no energy for anything. I sleep fitfully, wake up in a bleak fugue and stare at the ceiling for too long before finally dragging myself to work. My friends all seem to do likewise. Christmas provided some kind of reprieve, but the prevailing forecast is not good. I am sinking.

I spend a lot of time in particular reading motivational literature, self help sites and the like, but nothing seems to help. I buy positive books that stay on the shelf. Control your life, be a new you, up-end yourself, get shit done, set goals, be positive. They make me angry. My mother, who is a counsellor and giver of sage advice in many areas, irritates by always talking about emotions and such. I am in deep rejection mode, I think, but I don't really know how to get out of it.

My life feels vacant much of the time, futile and pathetic. I find myself in an endless cycle of half-completed tasks and meetings with no real purpose beyond getting to the next meeting. I drink too much tea in the day and have stopped eating any kind of fruit.

I hate blogging, forums and posting opinions, though I seem to do it all the time. Nothing is ever said that amounts to a hill of beans and many of the sites that I regularly visit seem to have clocked score, meaning that they're having the same conversations that they always do.

I feel pain, but it's a sort of pain that won't come out. I want to cry to get some release, but the last time I cried was three years ago when I broke up from a long term relationship. Instead, I feel a lump in my throat, a sticky sort of feeling that won't shift no matter what I do. I have no equity, some debt, and a salary in a job of which many readers of this blog would be jealous. I can't drive.

I hate "the industry". I seem to talk about nothing else. Even with family I just babble on and on about "the industry", the latest moves made, the latest trends, shifts and dramas. I sometimes feel motivated to write about a fad or throw a letter to an esteemed publication, but I frequently know that I'm just adding gas to Jupiter. I used to be interested in more than this, but it seems lost to me now, hopefully only temporarily.

I hate games. The only game that I've played with any regularity in the last three months is Orsinal's Winterbells. I don't know why. My high score is in the septillions. I couldn't care less about what console said what to who, and all the HD splash in creation is simply uninteresting to me, and yet I discuss it all the same with the energy of the dead.

I feel that I have made some bad choices in my life and some good ones, but mostly that I have drifted into the industry and all of its mores without any great direction or choice. I don't know what my reason for being here is. I struggle with this question a lot, because I always find myself in the middle somewhere. I can write, I can design, I can even hold a camera and shoot a bit of a film, but nothing is really different after I do those things. Nothing seems to stick in my interests for very long. I miss the times when I used to write lots of bad poetry.

I hate that I whine. I feel like a child for doing so a lot of the time. It is only because I am in the dead of night and contemplating a journey in the morning for which I should have gone to bed hours ago that I am writing. I think to myself "Well maybe THIS will shift something" though I'm pretty sure it's just not that easy. My co-workers would call this being "emo".

And there it is, my latest blog bonanza. This is the real me right now. All I can wonder is whether this will continue and I am going to end up drinking like my Dad. My concerns seem so ridiculous and yet feel so vast that they overwhelm me. All I can do is hide. I see it on the faces of others too. They have the same internal battle. I'm just the one who happens to write about it.

So yeah, games and stuff.
Whatever.

New Year, New Directions

2007-01-01T14:22:00.000Z

(Hope you like the new site layout, it's all a part of converting to Blogger 2. Next stop: Labels, links and all that malarky.) (Also, apologies for having not written a thing method-wise for a while. It's been a very busy and somewhat demoralising time, but I hope to rejuvenate soon.)

Anyway. New Year. New ideas. 01-01-07.

I've recently had an idea for a game. It's called Exit Strategy, and the idea is this: A turn-based strategy game played for one to six players in which each player plays a faction within the Iraqi situation. One player plays the US, one plays the Mahdi Army, one plays the UK, one plays Al Qaida in Iraq and so on.

Each faction has a specific advantage and victory condition, and these victories are based broadly on winning the public opinion war. Players play across a series of regions and also suburbs within Baghdad, and they do with a set of pieces with different movement, attack and defence abilities, some special pieces such as journalists that they play against each other, and there is also some card-based event play. (This is all very rough, but you get the idea).

Now, what does that conjure in your mind? I imagine that it conjures a mix between typical video game satire (cartoony characters and old 80's and 90's in-jokes rehashed) or bravado gaming, as is the current vogue with PC action/war games.

Actually, this game is something serious. This isn't some September 12th-style interactive "artistic point", it is serious entertainment. Rather than the escapist fun epitomised by the retro-chic and innovation-happy fads, this is a game that you want to play again and again because of the strategy gameplay. Some may ask whether it's really gaming's place to do that, given the political sensitivity. Of course it is. Games are fundamentally educational, they teach skill, forethought and imagination.

The 80s saw many specialist boardgames like the 18XX train games, Squad Leader, Republic of Rome, Race to Berlin and others that actively explored history, politics and ideas by rendering them into scenarios of win or lose conditions. Often complicated, usually deep, these games bring some understanding to the table, and many of them are bone-faced serious studies of their subject. Some computer games do likewise, such as Shogun: Total War, or the Civilization games (and arguably The Sims).

The aesthetic of escapism divorces content from context to make all games non-threatening, This results in committee imagination, where the content becomes a series of checkboxes that the developers or publishers think will appeal to markets, demographics or whatever. The real use of imaginative fantasy of any stripe is to teach by providing a mirror on this world. Whether a fantasy is as far flung as Star Wars or as near as Trainspotting, all good fiction is a reflection, and gaming should be no different.

This is something that I've blogged about off and on for nearly three years, trying to convey that reflective imagination is more than something nice to stick in a game, it is in fact THE new direction. By taking sets of rules and mechanics and applying them to something larger, we create something larger than an escapist pass time. Such as Exit Strategy.

This is where I'd like to see gaming going. I want to see Exit Strategy made because of what it can teach people and what they can explore by playing it. It doesn't have to be swish, it doesn't have to be particularly pretty. What it has to be is good and serious and above all fair. Every side must have an opportunity to win.

If we ever plan to make gaming anything other than novelties at the carnival then reflection rather than escapism is the all-important next step. Games teach, people learn from them and that is what we give to the world.

Happy New Year,
Tadhg

A Method ... part two: Understanding the Paradigm

2006-11-12T21:18:00.000Z

In this, the second of my articles on a method of game design, I talk about understanding the most basic structure of video games, that being the playing paradigm. You can read the first article here if you like before proceeding.

The reason for starting with talk of paradigms in what I billed as a results-oriented method is that it helps to frame the conversation. You may think that many of the basic ideas of game design are well understood and agreed-upon by all, but you would be mistaken. Actually, even in the basics there is a great deal of disagreement, a confusing number of terms and counter-terms. Even trying to gain a simple shared understanding of a term like game-play, which everyone uses, is almost impossible.

So that means I have to start at the start, if you like.

Starting with the basics
A fashion designer cannot design effective fashion without knowing the basics of fabric and its uses, and also how the user relates to fabric. What might be described as the paradigm of the fashion literally means understanding the basic units of clothing and also how the wearers relate to clothing. Do they see clothing as primarily functional, or as a statement, do they perceive the need for clothing to cover certain parts of the body, is their experience of clothing transformational or simply stuff they wear? How does gender play into that?

Know the paradigm and you know where the useful limits of a creative subject lie, and how to work with those limits. A fashion designer, knowing the ins and outs of clothes, knows that there is likely no point trying to design a suit that builds a narrative because that is beyond the useful limits of clothing. Clothing defines an image, not a narrative, and so the best effort is likely put into creating different images and looks. Fashion is like painting, it is a presentation with impact and subtlety that encapsulates one instant.

Video games have a paradigm just like anything else. As the paradigm of watching a film rules out substantive audience interaction, so the paradigm of video games rules out certain kinds of relationships. Video games have limits just like anything else. They are physically limited, their basic mode of operation is limited and their audience relationship to it is also limiting. These are the physical basics to be grasped:

1.
Video games consist of two physical aspects: Input and output. The input device can vary from as little as a single button to a complicated multi-joystick affair, a motion sensor controller or a dance mat.

There are only so many buttons, and therefore only so many kinds of distinct action (either through one button press or a compound of multiple buttons held at once) which the player can perform. The input device always forms the basis of the physical constraints of the game.

Likewise, players can only really use some of their body parts for playing at any one time. A theoretical game that uses the player's full body and is also strategic and engaging all at once is a nice fantasy, but in all likelihood is simply over-complicated. Even in modern games, there are those which are very complicated in terms of input, and player fatigue is a problem in those games.

2.
The output device is usually a screen of some kind, along with sound capability and, in some instances, controller feedback. Output devices vary in size from the screens of a DS to a 60-inch HDTV, but their function remains the same. They pass information back to the eyes and ears of the player, which in turn informs his next action using the input device.

The screen also frames the action of the game. All video games have a limited area in which to operate, a conceptual distance that separates the player from the game, and that is defined by the screen. What happens in the game must occur on the screen because that is where the player's attention lies.

3.
As a result, all video games work in loops. Player takes action, player receives information that alters the context of his next action, player takes next action. A loop can be of any length, from fractions of a second for an action game to days or weeks for a turn-based strategy game, and the length of the loop is very important in determining whether game is strategic or tactical. A greater distance between loops creates more opportunity for a player to think.

4.
The physical component of the paradigm also creates a strong need in games for visible cause and effect. This is the principle whereby if I take an action, it should produce a visible result. If it yields no visible reaction in the output device, then it's breaking the paradigm. Paradigm breaks are usually indicative of poor design.

Some games have experimented with the idea of invisible cause and effect, but they often flounder in the territory of players feeling frustrated, or that their actions seem to be pointless. While experimentation and discovery are desirable in a game, players have a very low tolerance for experimentation with interfaces. They like learning a beat 'em up move, provided they know that the face buttons on a joypad each do something predictable.

What they dislike is a game where an obscure interface makes it hard for them to know that their actions are actually doing anything at all. Cause and effect must be apparent in any game, and it must be consistent. Because the video game is constrained with a loop of pushing buttons and interpreting results, the player has to be able to filter information in a logical fashion. Consistent behaviour is therefore a huge part of the game because it re-enforces the player's ability to filter information. Another term for cause is 'game mechanic' and another term for effect is 'game rule'. My method separates mechanics and rules and regards them as distinct.

5.
The video game needs to be controllable in terms of predictable contact points. A contact point is the element of the game with which the player can do something, and through which things can be done to them. The contact point is the player's presence inside the game. It may be consistent, such as a game character, or it may shift, such as the next active block in Tetris, but the principle of it is that this is the point in the contact through which game mechanic and rule are interpreted for the player.

6.
The above physical elements serve to frame all games in terms of a logically consistent universe with which the player can interact in specified, logical patterns that allow them to perceive action and information efficiently and play with a loop. This is what we call a game world. The contact point is what we often call the character or the bat or whatever and signifies the player's presence in the game. The upshot of these elements is that the player needs to have a consistent perspective on the game, whether that be first person perspective or high isometric. Shifting perspective is generally bad design

Result?
The result of all these elements is to establish a psychological relationship between the player and the game which is fairly consistent throughout games, and that relationship is as follows:

Video games frame a player's attention and transport it, via contact points, into a game world. Because it requires efficient transmission of information to overcome the physical input and output limits of the game, all game worlds must be composed of consistent perspectives, mechanics, rules, internal logic, loop structures and respect that the player can only handle so many controls at any one time. Within these limits, the player's psychological mode places them in the game world, so we can say that the player gets into the game, and their contact point is a conduit between the two.

Players play themselves inside a video game, they do not play characters, and they are playing inside worlds, not stories.

I can't emphasise this point enough.

Confusion
It is important to distinguish between the paradigm of games and context, genres and so on. The genre of a game is not a part of the paradigm of games. Game genres work within the constraints of the paradigm, but they don't define it. The paradigm is a consistent set of ground rules under which all games operate under, whereas genre is a set of stylistic conventions that limit the game along even further lines. Game genres shift, but the paradigm is consistent.

What does shift is the context of a paradigm. For example, there are several key differences between the paradigms of film and television. Both are similar, but film operates in a mostly single-serving theatrical setting, whereas television is episodic. And film is also usually paid-for entertainment whereas television is perceived as free, but with advertising breaks. These subtle differences constrain the writing and direction of both in different ways. I assume that the advent of Youtube is creating yet another new paradigm distinct from both the cinema and the TV, and we'll grow to know what that is in time.

By the same token, it is entirely possible that other paradigms will arise out of the video game paradigm. At the moment there is really only one, but some of the more interesting work in the field involves really trying to redefine the paradigm in other terms. I'm thinking of Habbo Hotel and Second Life here, which really ditch the 'game' aspect of the framed interaction of the game, and therefore may be able to ditch cause and effect for other paradigm rules.

These innovations will lead to other forms of entertainment in time. As we understand film and television to be different things, I think we will eventually stop trying to shoehorn everything into the one "video game" box, and instead accept that different paradigms can develop here. Maybe we'll call them "Video toys" instead.

A Method of Game Design, part one

2006-10-27T18:46:00.000Z

I've decided to write up a method of creating games from the ground up for a few reasons. One is that while debate is all well and good, translating it into action is the step almost never taken. Over the last three or so years I've talked about all manner of ideas, from removing the document from the design process to naming issues, breaking down the story barrier, the language barrier, the importance of the creator figure and other areas. These are all, in their way, fine talk, but they do not constitute anything coherent.

My second reason is that there are a lot of people out there, working in the field of game design and level design, for whom the whole debate over games has grown so vague and abstract that it disconnects from an actual method. As a result, a whole host of ad hoc methods have been adopted across the industry (especially in the West) that have no business being anywhere near the creative and innovative processes and are actively destructive.

Lastly, because I fundamentally disagree with many of the official methods that have received the stamp and seal of approval. It annoys me greatly to see a tome of supposed game wisdom talk in-depth about a method which actually doesn't work, because the stamp of officialdom in print is such that those methods become accepted practise without any real evaluation. Many design books sit on many shelves, lending the air of wisdom and finality to many a designer or producer, but in practise they are usually very far off the beaten track.

Central to this method are four simple tenets:

Fiction is important
Constraints are important
Elegance is important
Results are what matter

Fiction
Fiction is an important part of the game design process because without fiction, all you have is abstract elements. Abstract elements alone do not usually make for an interesting game because we have all played Tetris etc, the most abstract game of them all, and so all abstract games inevitably have the same overriding feel of Tetris etc. Once you have played a few purely abstract physical simulations, you have played them all. Aside from all the basic abstractions and their deceptively purist character, all games need a fiction.

Fiction breaks down into two constituent components: inner fiction and outer fiction. Inner fiction is basically the root defining idea of the game. Outer fiction is the mythology, characters, names, dates and background of the game. While almost all games need an inner fiction, an outer fiction is optional. I'll explain their relationship to the method more fully in a later post.

Constraints
The most common problem that I have seen in game design over the years is a lack of appreciation of the need for constraints. Many well-intentioned designers have traveled down the road of writing lots of idea documentation and creating large levels in 3D tools, only to find that these ideas and levels actually don't work in-game. What these designers are failing to do is to fully consider the constraints of their project. There are five general kinds of constraint:

Physical constraints
Situational constraints
Client constraints
Fictional constraints
Adopted constraints

Constraints are often perceived as limits to the designer's imagination. They are that, but the ability to work within limits is what distinguishes a designer from someone who just has a vibrant imagination. Constraints are hard limits on what can be done, but in so doing they are also enablers. The reason why so many great games come from the past of gaming is the same reason why so many great books come from cultures of poverty, and so much great music comes from the streets. Those environments naturally constrain those artists, and the same is true of constraints within the game workplace.

Elegance
Another common problem that many designers (and others) regularly fumble is the problem of special-case thinking. Special-case thinking is the practice of thinking "Wouldn't it be cool if" without considering the ramifications. Bad design is usually full of special-case ideas that don't sit well together and don't produce either cohesion or progression. A special-case idea is easily identifiable as one which the game design then has to prevent from being abused by artificial means.

General-case thinking, on the other hand, is a sign of good game design. Most special-case ideas are in fact able to be replicated in a general context, provided the constraints and fiction permit them, and the ramifications do not produce any artificial restrictions. A game design should be based on enough general-case ideas to produce results that engender cohesion and progression. General-case ideas form the basis of game mechanics and rules, and general-case thinking is elegant.

Elegance is extremely important in any project. Players relate to elegance because it means that they do not have to spend a lot of time understanding how to play the game and instead can focus on how to play the game well. Elegance is also a key factor in determining how much effort is actually involved in the project as it makes the permutations of the project easy to comprehend. Lastly, elegance helps convey the core reason to play the game and highlights its strong selling points. Most videogames are not at all elegant, and they suffer greatly for it.

Results
Lastly, you'll see me talking a lot about results-oriented design. The problem with theory is that it is all theoretical, meaning that everything sounds good in theory until you bring it into the real world. A game design document as a large repository of knowledge about the project sounds like a good idea in theory until you come up against the reality that most people do not read game design documents.

A designer must have results in mind at all times. They typically have intended results in mind but intention and actual result are two very different things. Having a results-oriented disposition means that you have the ability not only to see what an idea or constraint is intended to achieve but also how it specifically works in the game, what it will take to get it to work, and what the drawbacks of not getting it to work actually mean.

Intention, on the other hand, gets you nowhere because everyone reads intentions in different ways. A competent designer knows full well that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Follow-through and the ability to think in terms of results, plan for them and execute them is what counts.

Next week: Understanding the paradigm.

Game Development is not Software Development

2006-10-21T11:09:00.000Z

Many developers believe that games do not need a central creator figure and that customer focus and willingness to adapt are what matters. I basically disagree with this idea on the basis that games are not software applications which can be definitively made better according to an objective standard. They are entertainment, which relies largely on subjective perspectives of what works, regardless of whether they are so-called interactive or passive entertainment.

Quite a few of the myths of game development derive from ignorance. Game development is a very narrow, insular field in many ways, and is not a culture remarkable for its ability to embrace and learn from outside itself. As a result, many of its myths are legacy ideas that have developed happenstance over a number of years and clogged up its arteries with all sorts of guff. The software-analogy is perhaps the largest of them all.

What this myth concerns is the idea that the techniques of software development can translate over into game development. At the level of the lone gunman, like my friend Cliff Harris, a developer can work in whatever way he or she chooses. When working on a larger scale, such as on 'The Movies', however, things become very different.

Most games are primarily made of content, not software. In any given game
development team there are far more man hours devoted to what goes into the game and how it works as a piece of entertainment rather than the engineering of it. As a result, iteration-led development always has to keep an eye on the fact that while changes in a regular software development environment usually don't cause too much trouble if managed correctly, significant changes in a game development environment can (and do) throw an awful lot of content work away.

A simple example is a change made by code in the middle of a project which streamlines the way that a scripting system works. In software development this may have some knock-on effects in terms of user interface and documentation, but that's not too heavy as the content to code ratio of software is low. In a game development environment, such a change can throw out months of work.

Content-code issues aside, the more significant difference between the two, philosophically, is that most software development is focused on making an objectively better product through better features, better implementation of features, or both. Game development is focused on making better gameplay, which usually results from less features, a deliberate impediment to those features, or both. Software applications are built to drive productivity. Games are built to challenge and surprise.

Software applications become objectively better.
Games become subjectively better.

As a result, adopting the mindset of software development into game development is pretty much the same as adopting the techniques of telecommunications engineering as a means to becoming a better sculptor. Software and games make look similar when you're staring at the code, but they are actually worlds apart. To make a better application you need an engineer's mindset driving the process. To make a better game, you need the mind of an artist.

Creation vs Innovation
What's at the root of the software analogy myth is an inherent distrust of the creative. This largely reactionary viewpoint stems from a rejection of outsiders coming into game development. The culture has a long history of its own, and many developers instinctively feel that those people who foisted FMV and long boring talks about interactive storytelling and whatever else just don't get it. Writers, painters, musicians, what the hell do they know about games, right?

Maybe not much. But what they do know a lot about is creativity, and creativity is something that isn't just on a low par in games, it's downright absent. Instead, we plumb for talking about "innovation".

Innovation is a funny concept to apply to entertainment. Innovation is the stuff of building better products, better software, that which is more efficient and effective. You innovate features for an MP3 player, a way of building a house or kind of cola. But do we innovate in entertainment?

Well entertainment certainly goes through stages. Camera techniques in television shows, for example, change all the time. They are often highly fashion-led, however. This week's shaky cam is last week's news. Techniques are always on the move, but they are only the side show of the implementation. What matters in television shows is whether the content is surprising or not. The innovative takes a back seat to the creative.

The same is usually true of games. Most games, even many of the most successful games, are not innovative. Starcraft is the same game as Warcraft 2. GTA3 is a straight-up-and-down drive and shoot game. Bioware's rpgs have been doing the same thing since, like, forever. Max Payne does not do anything not done before. While it is true that some games have exploded onto the scene in a hail of innovation, the reality is that most of them have not, and most of the most fondly remembered games are so remembered for their creative elements. The stuff that made us laugh, swear, jump out of our seats in fright and so on is the creative parts in games.

As we go forward, the innovation angle is becoming less and less relevant because innovation is limited. Yes, the Wii is going to shake up how things are controlled for a little while, but you and I both know that in 18 months from its release the platform will play host to a variety of "look what I can do with a wavey controller" cloneware, but the really interesting games will be the creative ones.

Innovation is a way to solve a problem or explore a feature, and developers love that. Creation, however, is what makes games memorable and gives them depth. That's what them writers and artists and all the rest of them can bring to the table. We've seen it before in roleplaying games and the old graphical adventures, and we can see it again. But only if we can learn to change and accept the creative.

Otherwise it's orcs and elves, this time with 3D positional controllers, until we all get utterly bored to death.

Desire

2006-09-17T13:25:00.000Z

As a few of you may know, I have something of an interest in Buddhism. Not as a full-on robe wearing Hare Rama type, more in the techniques and philosophies that it espouses.

The 25-words-or-less version of Buddhism is basically this:

"Desire is a bad thing, stay the hell away from it and you'll become conscious."

Desire?
Actually, they take this mean desire in the broad sense, including those aspects of love that seem to make us act against our will. Obviously it also includes material desires beyond that which is functional (i.e. hunger isn't desire, it's hunger) as well as more ephemeral desires like career ambitions.

Conscious?
This means to actually be permanently self aware, a state that Buddhists refer to as enlightenment. The idea is that most of us are unconscious most of the time, and although we sometimes have moments of clarity that show us what we are really like and who we really are, 99.9% of the time we're not really self aware.

So why is desire a bad thing?
This is all to do with where you awareness is at. In simple simple terms, the real reason that desire is a big no-no is that it focusses your attention on the past or the future. Desire focussed on the past is otherwise known as regret and/or guilt, while desire focussed on the future is either hopes, aspirations or dreams.

The point is that the mind is focussed on that which does not exist, because the past and the future do not exist. Only the present exists, and in the present we have no mind. While this may initially sound anti-rational, what it means is that since our minds have the habit of keeping us unconscious because becoming conscious and self-aware is terrifying. I mean have any of us really looked at ourselves? So by having our minds wander up and down along a timeline which is non-existent, we propagate misery in ourselves.

This doesn't clash with the idea of having goals, such as working to become a doctor, but rather with the idea of desiring to be a future image of yourself, if that makes any sense. See meditation below.

So how to become conscious?
Meditation. Not just of the sitting around variety, but in fact to do the work that you were meant to do. For instance, if you feel that you were meant to write, then the act of writing as opposed to thinking about becoming a writer (desire) is the way to go. Activity that you are meant to do in the present is meditation. Whether as a doctor, an businessman, an astronaut, a parent, whatever, the point is that if it is what you are meant to be doing, then this is the thing that keeps you in the present.

Just some random Sunday thoughts.

A Permanent Revolution: Does the Games Market Need Reform?

2006-09-03T19:54:00.000Z

I'm curious about something to do with the DS Lite, and it is this: It is an incredibly sexy piece of hardware, offers beautiful performance, battery life, fits in your pocket, innovative game design opportunities, the whole bit. In many ways, the DSL is the most significant games platform of the last five years, and the mark of a real generational change rather than this fake "HD" generation (which isn't a generation shift at all, just the same one with ever so slightly more for a very much larger price tag). So since the DSL is such an amazing piece of kit that also fulfils the 'sexy' tick box, why hasn't it caught on ipod-style?.

It's popular in gaming circles, of that there is no question, but it hasn't really passed into the public consciousness, and this is puzzling. You see the latest Motorola phone being bandied about and the latest ipods get flashed around. Why not the DSL? I can understand the original DS not catching on because it is one ugly thing. I can't understand why I'm not seeing the DSL everywhere because it is such an "everywhere" product.

And the answer hits me that maybe it's because of the cost. An ipod costs 200 pounds on average. A DSL costs only a hundred at most if you haven't gotten it on a deal. But an ipod's content, the music, costs 79p per song (at most), free for podcasts. DS Lite games cost 30 pounds in many cases, 20 pounds for Brain Training etc. Sure, Nintendo makes a profit off of this model, the same model that they have used since the mid-80s and the NES (and which the rest of the industry has followed).

Higher priced games tied to media in retail outlets means that fewer games are sold per console. This is known as an attach rate, and I've heard that over the course of the time period which a manufacturer keeps its "generation" sits at somewhere around 5 for the home consoles and 2 for the handhelds. Which is why the GBA, having eventually sold millions of units was still a graveyard for many developers and conspicuously hasn't made Nintendo a hundred billion dollar corporation.

So we can see that higher priced games makes for fewer games sold. So the DSL may be a super sexy piece of kit, but it's no ipod because the content is so expensive. It's the same story with the consoles. 100 million PS2s sold, but not nearly as many PS2 games sold per PS2 as DVDs per DVD player. Same story with the Xbox, the Revolution, the 360 and so on. With a regular turn-around of hardware and new media types, perpetuation of a hardware-focused media cycle and continuing loss-leading hardware pricing, a state of permanent revolution has developed.

The problem with permanent revolution is that it isn't really free, and this brings me back to the ipod example once again. One of the key reasons that the ipod is so successful is that it is free to use. The stability of the Itunes structure, the ability of people to create their own mp3s and sell them from wherever, the liberal attitude to podcasting and so on serve to propel the platform forward, and its imitators also. It is a healthy, free market.

DVD is also a healthy market, and one that even the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray attempt is unlikely to unseat. It is easy to use, easy to publish for and with a licensing fee attached to the product that makes it all but free. DVD is a healthy, free market.

By contrast, games are a command economy. The permanent revolution breeds a devastatingly wasteful silicon war, with two sides spending each other into the grave and games really considered only in the context of platform defining titles (and increasingly internalised) or shelf-bulkers that might do well (but which end up going through "concept approvals" and all sorts of other economic hoops to get to market) and preferential business arrangements wherein the companies that pay the most or whose titles are most important to the strategy of the platform are the ones that get fast-tracked for production. And this even applies to the likes of Live Arcade, which theoretically shouldn't even need such a restriction as chip and disc printing is really not an issue.

Now, call me an amateur economist (which, let's face it, I am) but in other industries where a few key competitors basically create a permanent revolution setup between them is generally called an oligopoly, and oligopolies are generally considered bad for capitalism. As I understand it, this is because they really only compete against each other, while at the same time creating market scenarios in which the possibility of true competition from below effectively dies. The supermarket sector in Britain is an oligopoly, for example.

Oligopolies have a tendency to persist unless one of two things happen. The first is a fundamental shift in the market which pulls the rug out from under the whole industry. For example, the effect of the internet on the RIAA music publishers. The other condition is when governments intervene and take steps to correct the market, such as the British government's push for a fully digital platform which has created space for hundreds of digital channels and which is currently forcing the original terrestrial channels to branch out and change their staid old way of doing things.

Some oligopolies are likely unavoidable for physical reasons - like train companies - but many are not and the games industry is certainly not one of them. It is an oligopoly because of industrial reasons, i.e. it perpetuates because the main competitors have too much to lose if they try and change things. What is needed is outside reform, yet this is not a question that many governments are addressing. The British government, to look at them again, quite happily take many measures to liberalise the television industry, to try and prevent print media from becoming oligopolistic, and a raft of other measures, but they do nothing about the games industry. Maybe they haven't realised that there may be a problem.

Permanent revolution always descends into intractable dictatorship. Either the oligopoly lives on, or it eventually descends into duopoly or monopoly. In the process, competition at the lower end is killed, market innovation dries up, customer service eventually drops, as do jobs, growth and all the rest of it. Is this what's happening in the games market? Clearly I think it is, but what do you think?

If it is, then we need reform and we need the governments (particularly the US government) to do it. It is bad economics to allow the industry to persist on its current course. It will stall at the very least if it is allowed to do that, and that's not healthy for the economy as a whole, and the sector most especially. As a command economy, the industry can continue in this vein, but it is unhealthy for it to do so. Market liberalisation must go on the agenda, including such possible steps as outlawing concept approvals, forcibly reducing the manufacturers' percentages, creating a real market for development kit (not a pretend one like the recently announced Live venture), liberalising the manufacturing process for media to allow anyone to print their own disks and boxes etc.

It's not unheard of for companies to do this by themselves, I might add. Nintendo maintain that they are all about disruptive business practises these days, so maybe it is possible that their conversion to the Apple mentality is about to appear with the Wii, fully fledged and raring to go. Maybe no government intervention is needed after all. Looking at the DS aisle, however, I have to say that there's no real evidence of such a shift yet.

Manifesto Goes Live

2006-08-27T10:48:00.000Z

See Here.

Hope it goes well for you Greg!

Long Live the New Gods

2006-08-24T21:31:00.000Z

A little late to the party perhaps, but this caught my attention yesterday. The summarised version is this: MTV are holding some sort of interviews with some high profile game developers ("Gods", apparently). It also reminded me of this piece on gi.biz that asked why was it that we were still talking about the same people at the head of the industry (Carmack, Miyamoto, etc). And it made me realise something. The old Gods are actually dead, but the media haven't clocked this yet. The New Gods are coming.

Are you ready?

Anatomy of a God
Going all Greek for a moment, what is a God?

In many ways, Gods back then were the equivalent of brands today. Aside from the idea that someone might be abasing themselves before a poster of John Romero, or seeking out Warren Spector's old shoes as relics, what this means is that a God, like a brand, came to mean a symbol of something. The nature of a God was larger than life, the physical embodiment of an idea, and the faith in that idea. This is what brands are at their best, and those who disagree may be referred to the cults of Nintendo and Apple respectively. Gods inspire faith.

Theologically speaking, there are traditionally two kinds of God. One is the insubstantial force, the monolith representing a concept. Companies occupy this particular sort of position in modern times, with people ascribing traits to Coca Cola, McDonalds, Microsoft and Sega, for example, which stand above and beyond the sum total of the people who actually work in those companies. The Mystery cults of Roman times are alive and well in this new form.

The other kind of God is the avatar God. These are the Gods that have faces and bodies, as it were, and who embody a philosophy and a creative aspect. Avatar Gods represent the unchanging truths in our grander nature (Jung's archetypes, in many ways) in that they are not full and rounded people in our understanding of it. To be mortal is to change, to be immortal is to be encapsulated in time.

Our society is awash with these kinds of Gods. The faces of the famous and the worshipped, the stalked and the saluted are literally all around us. The pantheon is literally heaving with all sorts.

And?
So to gaming. While we gamers and game developers might fancy ourselves as aloof and rational beings, rejecting the theology of the masses, the truth is of course that we are just as prone to deification as anyone else. We have out inanimate deities with ever changing personnel like Nintendo and Sony, and we have our individuals who have become Gods. Will Wright is a figure of awe to many people, for example. Will Wright is a God. (There's a quote you won't get from me very often)

Gods are upheld by faith more than anything else. A company which has lost the faith of its consumers goes bankrupt either sharply or in slow decline. A musician whose albums turn to drek finds himself outcast from the body politic. When the Greeks ceased to be a major force in the Mediterranean, their Gods were adapted by the Romans and died after a fashion, eventually supplanted entirely by Christ.

So for gaming, the question that has to be asked is whether the existing Gods are really all that relevant, or whether many or all of them are living in yesteryear? I suspect that the answers to these questions are both "Only in so far as industry journalists keep them alive".

The Meeja
And this is where things get really interesting.

Every God needs its priests. The Mystery Cult needed its cultists to propagate the myths, just as the Catholic Church has a huge hard-on for evangelists and missionaries going to spread The Word. Like it or not, many of the games industry's publications both on the web and in print serve to carry The Word. They are the ones that bring the knowledge of the deity to us and, since all writers create false narratives no matter how hard they may try to be factual, this means that it is writers who craft the myth. All writers are essentially priests or magicians. They bring the Word or they create the Word.

So surely the question for the industry's writers is whether the Word that they bring is actually the truth, or whether they are propagating the myths long past their sell by date. While it is nice to remember the days of yore and the achievements of old, it does seem that a lot of the Gods of gaming are cooling their heels these past five years. Who really spearheaded the great games of the last few years. Are they Gods? If so, why are we not reading about them all the time instead of the usual suspects?

Who among the independent circuit is coming forward with the startling or the truly innovative, and why are we not reading about them all the time instead of yet another FPS engine refinement from Carmack or yet another negative rant about the industry from Spector? What does continued faith in the old Gods get us?

It seems to me that the answer is "Not Much" and industry journalists are being far too complacent. In Hollywood they have an expression that "you're only as good as your last picture" but in games we hold on to the old pantheon even when it seems clear that they've gone off the boil. A lack of attention for the new generation results in starvation among them, because the industry money follows the hype more than the hype following the money. Publishers will only invest in someone already familiar or someone "hot".

The New Gods are out there folks. Do you really want to write another quirky unfunny article about how Miyamoto got the ideas for Zelda from playing in caves as a child, or do you think that maybe there are new stories to tell? I know it's difficult and I know that the inanimate forces who hold onto the purse-strings are both pushing out their old God brands and less than keen for new faces to appear, but really. Is that any excuse?

Stories Etc. Redux

2006-08-12T13:02:00.000Z

I was quite happy to note that the story articles that myself and Danc came out with over the last few weeks generated quite a bit of interest, and I've enjoyed replying and refining the points with various people in forums and so on. In particular, however, I want to spend a bit of time replying in depth to Brian Green (he of Psychochild fame), as he's taken a long look at the topic.

Brian essentially makes a stab at countering my assertion (which quite a few have objected to) that all stories are structure). For example (I'm going to be doing a lot of quoting here):

I think that for most storytelling-based entertainment, the assertion is mostly correct: the best stories are fragile and complicated beasts. I really enjoy digging into the complex political stories of George R. R. Martin's wonderful series, A Song of Fire and Ice and think the stories would be diminished if they were simplified. However, I don't think the stories are necessarily that fragile. [Warning: minor spoilers in the rest of this paragraph.] You could change a few of the details and still have a powerful story. In fact, this is what I love most about the stories: you think you know the "rules" and suddenly a main character dies, or some dead character is back, or some other detail changes the direction of the story. Yet, the change fits within the book: this is a world of deep political intrigue and magic, so it makes sense that "important" people would end up dead during a war or that someone might come back from the grave. So, I will argue that stories are more resilient than the original assertion gives credit.

What I feel Brian is missing out on here is how much effort is required to make a convincing change.

Can a story be changed? It surely can. It just cannot be changed easily. How easily it can be changed is directly connected to how complicated the structure of the story has become. A great political thriller, for example, is a carefully woven mesh of pace, character discoveries, motivations, back-stabbing and so on, and these elements have to be put together in a "just so" sort of arrangement or else things stand out (like obvious clues, clangers of bad plotting and so on). The author can change the story around, but to re-weave it together so that it makes a new kind of sense can take months if not years. Story structures are brittle.

I also think that Brian's point confuses departing from the established rules with a departure from structure. In the case of good storytelling, you know that your audience expects the story to go a certain way, so when you pull the rug out from under them this is often good. This is not departing from structure, however. For a sudden shift like this to work well, the story requires even more tightly structured storytelling than if you were following genre convention. The shift has to be believable, and that is entirely dependent on the structure. It's no good suddenly dropping the mask randomly and expecting your audience not to feel like you've cheated.

Brian also gets into the subject of what he calls 'universal stories' and 'personal stories'. The broad distinction between the two is that the universal story is one that can be enjoyed by anyone (a movie, a book, etc) whereas the personal story is a private one, like a recounting of the day's events to our wife. So, for example, two roleplayers telling about the feats that their characters did, boring the pants off each other but really getting off on their own tale is 'personal stories' in action, and

In both these cases each person has a story they care about. This more than a "fiction" as Tadhg Kelly refers to it; it becomes a story when you tell it at the very least. Just because most people find the story boring does not invalidate it: it is very meaningful to me and probably to the other people that participate in the game. Unfortunately, most people share Tadhg's perception that universal stories are the important ones, and tend to overlook the personal stories.

This discussion may seem familiar to those that read online RPG developer blogs. It is, because this is exactly what many online RPG developers argue about players. Raph Koster and Dave Rickey are probably the most vocal in claiming that each individual's story is important to them. (Of course, that leads them to the conclusion that user-based content is the way to go; they're wrong, but that's a whole other post.)

So, while Tadhg is correct that playing a computer game (or a paper RPG) isn't going to create the next Schindler's List, it can create stories that resonate with the individual or group. And, I think this is still valuable to us as game developers as long as we keep this distinction in mind.

My simple answer (to the bit I've emboldened) is no, that is not correct. What Brian is actually talking about is the stories that we derive from experience, but what he's missing (in my opinion) is that these stories just derive out of the random events of life. For every interesting thing that happens with a roleplayer's 20th level paladin, there are 45 hours of trudging around killing orcs. For every day that I come home from the office with something interesting to tell, there are four where the day was just dull.

In neither case is the game nor my office creating a story that resonates with me. It's just stuff that happens. For every exciting game of football there are ten that are pretty average. The thing that made it exciting on the day was that interesting stuff happened. This kind of emotional excitement derives through happenstance. It is not created by the game of football.

In all three cases, with an office, a game of football, a roleplaying game, all you really have is the potential for interesting things to happen. The environments are not creating stories of their own accord. It is the people who create the stories, and that is outside of the control of the game designer, the office manager and the Football Association. You can lead a horse to water....

What can be done is to try and create environments that generate interesting potential, i.e. good games. A good game is one that is balanced, where the rules are easy to understand and where the fiction of the game is such that it provides an interesting context. Whatever dramatic situations and re-tellings that arises out of this are totally outside the control of the game's creator. World of Warcraft does not create the Leeroy video, it is just something that happens within the environment because the rules and mechanics of the game are such that it can happen. It does not mean that it will happen, however. And it does not happen all of the time, or even most of the time.

Brian also talks about my point of games and elegance:

I'm also going to disagree with Tadhg when he says:

* But in order for them to become more robust, they must become simpler

I absolutely disagree with this. The recent fashion has been to simplify games in order to achieve "mainstream" appeal and better sales. Obviously overly complicated rules can hamper a game, but simplifying too much can hurt the game just as much. Tic-Tac-Toe is a very simple game with easy-to-follow rules. Yet, I think few serious game developers would go on record as trying to defend it as the most robust game, and therefore the best game. Yes, this is an absurd simplification, but it demonstrates the point. I think, as with most things, the truth lies in the middle: a great game is an elegant mix of simplicity and complexity. The old saw about "easy to learn, hard to master" applies here. And, while a good game is fun and people assume fun is easy, trying to create a great game that follows that old saw is anything but simple. And, before anyone tries to argue sales figures, don't confuse popularity with quality.

So, even if we accept that stories have to have a complicated structure, I don't think this means games are incompatible. It means that games have to adopt the structure of stories, or we need to adapt stories to the structure of games.

And again, no.

Brian is right in that games are all about balance. Tic Tac Toe is simple, but it is not balanced. Therein lies its flaw and the reason why it doesn't have much potential. There is one winning tactic, and therefore all games of Tic Tac Toe are variations on the same game. Chess and Go, on the other hand, are also pretty simple. But they are balanced, and so there is not one winning tactic. As a result, all games are not the same by any means, and so the room for potential is large. Football is also pretty balanced, going into the arena of sports, although there are some discussions going on in football over the over-powering strength of defenders in the modern game, which is a situation that is slowly pushing football into one-winning-tactic territory. The people in football recognise that balance is key to a long lasting game full of potential.

At the heart of balancing a game is the ability to see what is going on and see how the elements interact with each other. So the vogue for simplifying games is not really about marketing, it's about elegance and balancing and, therefore, potential. Complicated rules make a game much harder to balance, and that's no good. At all times, simplicity is the key. You can only simplify to a particular point before things make no sense any more (which I'll be talking about in greater detail in my next article), but the overall goal of good game design is to simplify to that point.

This is entirely at odds with stories. The whole skill of writing good stories boils down to the ability to build an intricate matchstick house of elements. It's nice to suggest in abstraction that this complexity can be somewhat adapted to become more robust, but in practise what we're really talking about here are two entirely different things. As I said in one of my many replies, it's like redefining the wheels and bricks as 'part of a greater set of objects, some of which may be rounded, some of which may be angular' and then going on to theorise that there must therefore exist some kind of brickwheel because the logic dictates it from the set.

Only it clearly aint so.

Brian later addresses God of War, which is interesting because I think God of War is one of the best examples of fiction in action that I've seen in about three years. If I may summarise, Brian faults God of War in these areas:

Inflexibility: What if I don't want to be an anti-social tattooed freak with a soft spot for women
Linearity: What if I want to avoid this very blatant trap?
Destiny: What if I feel that it's more appropriate for the "hero" to slip into Hades and suffer eternal punishment for his sins?

So, yes, you see Tadhg's complaint right here: the rigid story conflicts with the more fluid nature of an interactive game. One has to win out, and it's the rigid story structure. Unfortunately, this means that some of your actions are immutable, something that is antithetical to a truly interactive game. But, this does not mean it's the only possible outcome when you focus on story...

...I think the developers did a great job establishing the characters and making the whole thing very entertaining. But, the game was limited by the story and did not allow players to do things that would harm the story.

So you see the thing is this:
God of War is not a story. It's a game.

It has rules, it has mechanics (which were doled out throughout the course of the game). It has a setting, all historical and spiky Greek stuff, and it consists of a series of threaded challenges based on those rules and mechanics. The setting, which is part of the fiction, changes throughout the course of playing the game. This informs new challenges, provides a context for opening out new mechanics and in most cases that results in new developments in the gameplay for you to grok, new excitement in the context and so on. It is a game.

How can it not be a story? Simple. It has no structure. It has a series of pockets of potential and mildly expanding rules (which expand on very methodical lines, that keep the game fairly simple). It also has, as Danc pointed out in his article, small rewards in the form of the backstory that act as pauses to the main gameplay, but they are the equivalent of the half time show at the SuperBowl. They're nice, enlightening, even enjoyable. But they're not really relevant to the playing experience. Yes, you find out how Kratos is such a bad man and a couple of questions are answered along the way, and the overall multimedia experience of the game would be lessened without them a little because the odd reflective pause is nice.

But that's basically it. Primarily, they serve their function as little bits of rewards, or enablers of new missions, things that change the fiction inside a context, and that's it. It's the same in Vice City, Max Payne 2, Grim Fandango, Zelda, Halo, Ico and whatever else we drag up. The half time show is nice, but it's not the main event, and the moment that it starts to impinge upon the main event and get in the way is the moment that players lose interest. Nobody likes the epic cut-scenes in Metal Gear Solid 2 except for their unintentional comedy.

As I said, I'll be trying to map the reasons for this in my next article, but my essential point is that God of War gets it almost exactly right and that's why it's such a great game. Inflexibility, linearity and destiny are pretty much beside the point.

Lastly, I broadly agree with Brian's points about the need for a better understanding of technique. Regardless of whether you look at it in terms of fiction or story or whatever your term of choice is, there's always room for improvement in the manner in which information is delivered. Even if it is just a better choice of camera angle, a fade-out effect or a particular piece of paper that your character discovers on the ground, there are almost always ways to do things better.

The question is more what the goal of this is in the first place and understanding the reasons for doing them.

The Busted Flush

2006-07-31T20:22:00.000Z

I'm now going to make a prediction, so get your laugh hats on.

If you've worked in the trenches of game development in the UK and elsewhere, you know that the last few years have been a case of feast or famine when it came to employment. For a period between 5 and 3 years ago, it was jobs galore in the industry. That's where any old chancer could wander in fresh from the world of amateur roleplaying game design and call themselves a game designer (like my good self, for instance). Then, 3 years ago, the party ended with a bang and closures became the order of the day. For the following year and a half leading on from that, it was hell for leather trying to get reliable work in the industry. Lots of companies died, publishers hunkered down, it was a bad time.

Then, eighteen months ago, the ice started to melt. At first it was publishers setting up campus studios that hoovered up a lot of excess people. Then came the star studio buyouts, the expansion packs of studios opening in different locations (like Rockstar London etc), even new studios started organising deals and hiring plans (such as Ninja Theory) and suddenly everything became ok again. Apparently right now it is a good time to be looking for work again, across all disciplines. Let the good times roll.

Only they won't roll for very long.
My prediction is simply that it's all going to go south. Here's why.

It's all to do with lessons not being learned and attitudes not really changing. The basic reason why contractions and collapses happen to game developers is a lack of flexibility.

Stuck With the Bill
When a game starts being developed in pre-production etc, it has only a few people working on it over time. This few slowly grows as more people are needed to take on ever growing numbers of tasks and, because the industry is pretty hit based, in most cases this then leads to a ramp-up of people. This team of people needs management, organisation and so the team grows ever larger. Add QA requirements, add full production costs and the small team can become quite large, almost anywhere from 40-100 people on modern projects.

The problem occurs when, at the end of the project, the company has a gap in its schedule. It has up to 100 excess staff, and so it either needs to have some other projects already well on the go to move those people into, or it can eat the cost of them while a new project does emerge, or it can let them go. Which option they take usually depends on the volume of work that's available, and that volume of work shifts a lot, often in relation to the console cycle. So the reason that companies are taking in a lot of staff lately is because they're all trying to get their big next gen game going.

What invariably happens after the honeymoon period of the next gen scramble is of course that quite a lot of these next gen games do not perform amazingly at the box office. This leads to the companies acquiring a less than stellar reputation, no real demand for a sequel to their game (if it made it to release even) and also a general downturn as the market for the consoles becomes split between new releases and re-releases (platinum editions etc). So far so capitalist.

The Wiseguys
What happens next is that studios close, get bought, shrink, whatever, and the employment situation changes. Big names in development like Jez San find themselves out on their ear or leave before the ship sinks or whatever. And they start up again, find new funding and they're off.

From the perspective of these made guys, that's just the way things go. They made their games, they try to make their new ones, and they did pretty well out of it. Who couldn't fault them for wanting another go on the merry go round. It's also great CV material. As for the great unwashed, well that's too bad for a bit, but they figure something out, go out of the industry, find another job eventually, whatever.

Like all cycles, however, this one isn't eternal. The ground can and does indeed change, and that's where things are going to Antarctica. Because the breaking point in all this is the amount of money that it takes to set up.

Every made guy has probably done quite well out of the industry so that they can fund their new studio up to the point of a couple of attractive demos. That is, after all, how the industry works. You put the demo together, you sell it around at the right time, incorporating the latest technology, the latest graphics, yada yada yada and you get a deal. That's how the business works if you're a made guy.

This means that the cost of demos keeps rising. Since publishers expect a full fledged demo before they'll commit serious coin, serious money has to be spent on securing these deals. So 5 years ago you were looking at a personal investment of a quarter of a million for a high caliber demo. Now, you could be looking at a mil easily. Five years from now, you could be talking 3-4 mil. For a demo. The industry's development costs have a habit of going geometric like that.

Temporary Solutions
So the solutions to date that have been settled upon are temporary contracts, outsourcing and middleware. Temporary contracts because that means you don't have to pay a lot of severance once the project ends, outsourcers because India, China and the Czech Republic are cheaper than here and middleware is a solution to the problem of ramping up technology. None of these solutions work well.

Temporary contractors (as distinct from consultants or freelancers) are tied into employment contracts that essentially are regular jobs with regular taxes and so on, and every single one of the people on those contracts are looking in reality for a permanent position. This makes them fairly disloyal if the company is not offering permanency. The reason that they want a permanent deal is because of locations.

Outsourcing, on the other hand, is a fast growing industry that is absolutely full of companies of low morals who are expert at blagging other peoples' money in exchange for the promise of something great, but who then under-deliver. This is because outsourcers, like web design agencies, always operate from a position of having too much work on and do just enough to retain contracts but not actually get the job done. A few outsourcers are professional, but guess what? They tend to be the expensive ones. As a result, a lot of out-sourced artwork has to be re-done.

Middleware is also fraught with all sorts of problems because as any good coder knows, it never does the best job for the project, it always does an adequate job. Middleware needs to be generalist to be applicable to a wide variety of problems, whereas game engines often need to be specialist to handle the unique requirements of their games. Coders always end up re-writing a bunch of middleware, which causes delays (the same applies to re-used code) and so the cost saving after the license fee has been paid is often small to non-existent.

The Real Deal
The real problem here is none of these things. The real problem is rent.

To build a studio requires a location where potentially hundreds of desks can be accommodated, where considerable infrastructure needs to be put in place. Office space costs a lot of money in some locations, and so studios operating on the made guy model tend to eschew these locations at all costs. This is why the industry is located in every ass end of the country, rather than centralised around a hub. That and a healthy quantity of 'roots put down' syndrome where a lot of the long-in-the-tooth successful types aren't really keen on moving any more because they have other commitments.

So rent keeps studios apart, and that keeps contract workers on the hunt for a better gig. It keeps the studio stuck out in the hinterlands, which makes it difficult for it to drum up fresh or passing business. Very few developers are in a position to make advergames, for instance, because they have no presence in Soho. Rent also, perversely, keeps studios big, because it turns out that firing 100 people is a hell of a lot easier than it is to hire 100 people when it comes time to ramp up production again. Ask Ninja Theory. They have had job ads running solidly in just about every industry medium for forever trying to get Heavenly Sword done. That's what happens when you locate yourself in the ass end of Cambridge, requiring anyone you hire to move house and life. For a contract on a limited term project.

Add this to the problem of finding funding in the first place from a skeptical business community - and it is pretty skeptical - for 2 mil for a demo, and the made guys' problems increase. A lack of fluidity in operations and an insistence on locating the studio in Dundee, where nobody wants to work, means that at some point the cycle breaks. Endless articles from "luminaries" on gamasutra bemoan the lack of funding, and the made guys try their hand at consulting and on-line poker and a lot of industries that they don't really understand, losing a lot of money in the process.

Campus Issues
It would seem then that the publishers would take up the slack. One of the advantages of being big, after all, is the ability to move people around. EA Vancouver, all 2000+ people of it, surely has the might and magic to retain people in large numbers and put them to good use. Well no, not really.

They can move people around, but the problems of operating at such a vast level are that the politics does not make for a conducive environment for creative people. So people don't do their best work and a lot more money is spent on what should be semi-decent titles. As with any industry, the more regimented the creative methods become, the less effective they become and the more has to be spent producing projects of internecine wars between departments and awful quality like The Godfather. It's a method that makes money for now (just) but as with all behemoths it shows the true meaning of the phrase lumbering giant, and giants stumble.

Ready, Set Go
A very few companies have the capability or management nous to think beyond this. Nintendo, for example, have managed to retain a creative culture, much as Apple have done, and on the smaller end a company like 3D Realms has also managed to stay ahead of the game by a lot of very clever business deals giving them considerable room for manouver. Most companies, even companies with "luminaries" in charge, do not have such a luxury. They have to meet their milestones like everyone else.

While the virtue of "Done when it's done" is appealing to many, in practise it is impractical for any other than those who really know what they're doing in the business (like Scott Miller seems to), have an extremely loyal pre-prepared fanbase, as Nintendo do, or are so small that they can afford long operating costs, like a few indies seem able to do. Everybody else is on the clock.

Bendyness
The only real solution in the long term is for the industry to re-organise itself and centralise in a big city.

In reality, none of the development companies of today would need to be anywhere near as big as they are if they were able to reliably hire freelance staff on a month to month basis. They might not even need to give them office space. They would be able to hire service companies if those companies could provide their services cheaply and reliably (such as QA) and within shouting distance rather than half way around the world.

The only realistic way to achieve this is if the made guys either stop repeating their cycle, or if we wait for them to retire or leave. The development company of old is an outmoded institutional sort of place with silo mentalities that have propagated as long as they have because they were good businesses, but this has become less and less the case. Publishers still very much need external creative minds doing their thinking for them, but those minds have no means to do that because all the made guys are still making little kingdoms and wondering why they crumble.

Centralisation is the key. By centralising, companies are essentially sharing a local staff pool. If the UK industry decamps to London (for example) then that means that dozens or hundreds of studios are all using the same group of people. They live a Tube ride away, so short term work is far less ugly a prospect. It is much easier to do deals both inside and outside the industry (those advergames etc) and so prospects become healthier.

Centralisation translates to flexibility. That's the central point, and flexibility sees us through the bad times and the good. With the industry's penchant for not learning lessons except by complete accident, this does not mean that it is about change just because I snap my fingers. It's going to be a slow ground-swell sort of thing. I don't fundamentally believe that any of the made guys are capable of serious change any more, and so they are on the slow path to crumbling and working for publishers eventually. This is sad for some, but in reality it is necessary. All industries need a bit of creative destruction every once in a while to make space for new shoots to grow, and we are way past time in that regard.

Naked War!

2006-07-30T20:59:00.000Z

Just a short pimping. The very excellent John and Ste Pickford have released their play-by-email strategy game Naked War. Initial reports are going from the stellar to the galactic. Get in!

.game

2006-07-22T16:01:00.000Z

I was down in my local supermarket doing the week's grocery shopping today, and I happened across a DVD bin. Lots of DVD's on sale in a 2-for-5 pounds kind of deal. Most of them were pretty rubbish, but a few were quite the curios, like Flatliners, Bilouxi Blues and a couple of others. And I thought, isn't it great that you can still get movies from 30 or 40 years ago on sale. The makers or owners of those films still getting paid for their work, even if it is only micropayments, that's a good thing, right? I had a similar thought about books and music. And then I thought of us and, yep, you guessed it, my thoughts turned to wondering whether it's not impossible to do the same.

The single format debate has been around for a little while, firstly as a response from developers to the rising cost of game development across multiple sku's, and lately also in murmuring from publishers. The economics of the games industry all support some kind of single format as a smart move, and yet nobody takes it because there is too much at stake in several camps for them to entertain the idea of collaboration rather than competition. (Yet. Give it time).

Format divisions are also at the heart of games expiring. You see, unlike the other media, a game format change happens very 3-4 years in one market or the other, and converting over game releases is impractical in that marketplace. Flatliners is available now, and will be available for another 30 years to come on different formats as long as it is cheap to manufacture. The sales will be low, but they will be consistent. It's the Long Tail in action.

Even taking a modest game, such as Wipeout 2097 for the PS1, and transferring it over to work on another system is a bit of an effort. To do it commercially is questionable economics at best because while there is undoubtedly a market for it, that market is low and consistent rather than short term. With 3-4 year format turnarounds, low and consistent means it's a loser. On the other hand, this is why franchises exist.

The publishers figure that if they can't re-hash their old property directly, they can at least make a new one. A new one will garner new press attention, will delight old consumers and new ones alight, will look nicer, and therefore will likely have legs. It is therefore a better business decision to make a whole new version of the same game rather than just port the old game.

Since the hardware manufacturers aren't ready to budge on this, and since they're focusing their backwards compatibility strictly along their own product catalogs and to their own agendas, the question that must next be asked is whether a single format can be established in all but name. This is where the .game idea comes from.

The idea is to create some sort of software wrapper or common format that future-proofs games. A set of specs that make it a hell of a lot easier for future generations of hardware to accommodate today's releases (and yesterday's if anyone wants to retrofit them), and for today's releases to be ported among different machines.

It certainly looks as though there is so much power in each of the modern consoles that would have the ability to create some kind of wrapper functionality for a lot of games. While the requirements for each next-gen release are high, we are now at the point where the extra graphics effort has become essentially indistinguishable to the average consumer (and quite a few developers too) so what is all that extra oomph being used for?

I don't know, but maybe this is a valid use.

Stories, Structure, Abstraction and Games

2006-07-15T16:09:00.000Z

I've come to a conclusion on the subject of videogames-as-interactive-stories, and that conclusion is that to call a videogame an interactive story, or to call interactive stoytelling the future of the medium, is nonsense. So that's that settled. Fantastic. We can all go home now.

Well no, of course, there's a little more to it than that.

This latest line of thinking came from an interview that I read with Chris Crawford a few weeks ago, and a debate that followed on a private industry-only forum.

Crawford, one of the industry's many indefatigable self-publicists, came out with the extraordinary contention that videogames of the last ten years (I think) were all rubbish because they hadn't progressed. Crawford has been working on an interactive storytelling engine for a million years, which he considers to be a real innovation and that has resulted in a grand total of no actual progress. (I mean there's no doubt been lots of progress in the engine itself, but there's been no progress in interactive stories). Why not?

Well there's several reasons.

What Stories Are
The basic reason is that an interactive story is actually a paradoxical concept. This is a fact that is not popular in pro-interactive story circles, but it's true.

The short version of a very long argument that I had about this is that the key tenet under which the interactive story model is supposed to work is the idea that stories, being structures, can be systematised. So if you get a clever enough piece of software running on a decent enough hardware spec, the computer is able to judge which part of a story you are at and come up with a decent following piece.

That particular piece of rationalisation is George Lucas and Mark Rein*Hagen's fault. Lucas, of Star Wars fame, is the most direct antecedent for modern geek culture's belief in the story as a series of objects (though I doubt that was his intention). Lucas passionately believes (or believed at the time, I don't know now) in the theories of Joseph Campbell. Campbell wrote a series of texts, such as the 'Hero with a Thousand Faces' and others wherein he broke down and analysed thousands of stories and came up with a model for interpreting stories, understanding story structure and so on.

Various writing teachers have adopted these theories in one form or another (screenwriting tutors are particularly fond of them) to develop schema to teach story structure. The ideas have also passed into popular culture in general, with the idea of the plot twist, the love scene, the payoff scene and the setup all being understood by quite a few people in principle.

The problem with this understanding is that it is largely veneer. Quite often the movie producer (or latterly the game producer), the hack writer (or designer) and others will spout these ideas off as a means of either justifying poor material (especially when they invoke "The Audience" as a part of that defense) or covering tracks. It's also fuel for the fire for many an internet and journalistic debate over television series. A great example of this is the current run of Doctor Who in Britain which is wonderfully produced yet unspeakably bad television, yet written and justified by the many in terms of audiences, the basic terminology of hero's quest related material and so on.

What's missing here in the gulf of understanding is that Campbell (and Lucas's) ideas are a framework, and many people have confused the framework with the content. Including the interactive story community.

One of the better story teachers is Robert McKee, who is an advocate that stories are indeed structures, partly in agreement with what Campbell suggests. McKee asserts that "All Stories are Structure", but they are structures far beyond the basic three act setup-joke-setup-joke-setup-dramatic sort of pace. Stories are interdependent structures, in McKee's thinking, in that rather that all conforming to one model, all stories start with a rough framework in mind (such as Campbell) but that they then become more and more delicately structured on their own.

For example, sub-plotting and character arcs are part of a story's structure. Symbolic development is part of a story's structure. Scene construction and pacing are part of a story's structure. The more carefully structured a story becomes, the more individuated from the basic framework it becomes. The more that happens, the more it departs from any sort of specific rules of story construction, and the more that that happens, the better the story becomes.

All stories are indeed structures.
What the interactive storytelling community have failed to appreciate is that all the best stories are brittle structures.

What does that mean?

Simply put, the more delicately structured and better a story becomes, the harder it becomes to make wholesale changes. The rhythm of a story is affected by changes in pace, in the way that characters behave and operate, and in the way that the plot, sub-plots and other elements develop. It is relatively simple to change a basic fairy tale (which is why fairy tales are often used as examples by the interactive storytelling community) and preserve the general gist of it. However it is extraordinarily complicated to change Casablanca without destroying it.

The reason that changes become such a problem is that complicated stories are only conforming to the Campbell structure in a very general way. Campbell's structure is not a system, it's a guidebook. Good stories actually function according to their own internal logic. All stories are structure, but those structures are not transposable between each other willy nilly. That's why it takes more than a year of determined effort by a team of writers to write a mere 15 hours of entertainment for a Battlestar Galactica series.

So the problem that the interactive storytelling crowd face is that they are trying to create some sort of system that tries to model a system which they believe exists (if they only had the right tools) but which in fact does not exist. All stories are structures, sure, but they are all special case structures. Through rationalising on the basis of a hazy framework, they've tried to convince themselves that they only need to be smart enough and they'll figure it out.

And Mark Rein*Hagen is largely responsible for the perpetuation of the idea that games and stories are converging.

Mark Rein*Who? Again, an unintentional yet symbolic figure on the road to here, Rein*Hagen is the name most closely associated with the Storyteller school of tabletop roleplaying games. Rein*Hagen invented Vampire: The Masquerade and a bunch of other games at White Wolf, and while he certainly was not the first game designer to conceive of the idea of games as storytelling experiences, he is the one who most directly adopted the language of storytelling.

For instance, in games of D+D, the players engage in adventures to defeat dungeons, roleplay their characters and level up. A series of adventures became a campaign. This is moderated by a Games Master using a system of dice and arbitrary judgment, and the whole experience is called a roleplaying game. Rein*Hagen and White Wolf ditched this terminology. They called their adventures "stories", they called the campaign a "chronicle". The GM became a "Storyteller", and the game was to use themes and psychological concepts to describe characters rather than the old alignment systems. Vampire, Ars Magica and other similar games from the early 90s essentially changed the language (and therefore concepts) underpinning roleplaying games (they have since reverted somewhat), spawning a generation of gamers who were more into story experiences, live roleplaying, the whole bit.

This whole chain of events also put legs under the idea of interactive storytelling in video games through the supreme feat of language conjunction. Eh? The idea that if the same word is used to describe two different things, then those different things must be related, if not in fact the same. So, "story", "game". If story means movie and game means Chess, then there's no connection. If "story" is redefined to mean "storytelling experience" and "game" is redefined to mean "conceptualised playing area" then the ideas seem closer. If you then make the leap to "storytelling game" in the sense of one kind of game and one kind of seeming story experience (as in Rein*Hagen's games) then through conjunction you can apply the reasoning through to all sorts of other forms.

So you get:

* Movies and games must be coming closer together because games have storytelling in them, and therefore characters and arcs
* The story of Chess exists because games and stories are linked. Since Chess has no audience, the story of Chess must therefore be a story that the players are telling to themselves
* And since stories are structures it therefore follows that since Chess is also a structure, and since games and stories are connected, that some kind of interactive storytelling engine is possible.
* So I can play storytelling games without the need for a Storyteller

And so on. Completely missing the basis on which the conjunction was originally formed, i.e. a re-branding of the roleplaying game to differentiate a product in a marketplace. And also missing out on one more thing. Rein*Hagen's games were never really "storytelling" games in the first place.

They are roleplaying games, just as D+D, Call of Cthulhu and Paranoia. Tabletop roleplaying games are not storytelling experiences, they are shared fantasies with a fluid and robust structure which share a fiction but not a story. All stories are structure, remember. The more structure the better. The more structure, the more brittle, the less easy to change. Roleplaying games have moments and bits where they appear to be like stories while you're playing them, but they also have many boring bits. They are games, and like all games they are robust.

What Games Are
You want to know what a game is?

A game (of any stripe) is an abstract space with robust rules in which one or more participants is able to take any kind of action subject to the constraints of that space toward a pre-determined goal. That's what a game is at a basic level. And furthermore:

* As game rules become more robust, the better they become
* But in order for them to become more robust, they must become simpler
* So a kind of elegance in game design forms, where the designer tries to use as few rules as possible to achieve the most streamlined outcome that enables players to play within the constraints of the space toward the goal. An unconstrained space is not a game. (An non-goal driven space is not a game either. It is a toy.)

And that's why Chess and Go remain as enduringly popular as they are, and why soccer is the most popular game on earth. Robustness and elegance are the key driving forces here, and they are in direct opposition to the brittleness and complexity, the defining traits of story.

Through robustness and elegance, playing a game is a real interactive experience. Because a game of football is so darned simple, players can play in whatever way they choose, and so games are never predictable. Within the confines of the game there can be titanic struggles, players sent off, dominance from one side or the other, the whole gamut of emotion. In a very real way this is an interactive experience (both for player and viewer) which sometimes provides real drama. Sometimes. Sometimes it doesn't.

In a tabletop roleplaying game, when the quest is on and the players are trying to figure out a way to storm the Castle Perilous, the rules may appear complicated, but the Games Master is on hand to short-cut all of the tedious bits, make arbitrary decisions that move the pace on a bit and otherwise get the game going where it needs to go. The Games Master acts as a counter-weight for elegance and robustness. Sometimes this provides moments of real drama. Sometimes it doesn't.

And so too in videogames. Deathmatch games of Counterstrike are no different to games of football, quest games like God of War are no different either. You have the space, the challenge and the abstraction that makes it possible to play within well-understood boundaries. To call this 'story' is utterly ludicrous.

What Fiction Is
So games are not stories and they never were. What games have, on the other hand, is fictions.

Fiction is a shorthand term that says "the imaginative character of the spaces in which games are played". All game spaces have character of some shape or description. Chess and football have a symbolic character, Tetris likewise. That is the sum total of their fictions.

Many games have more complicated fictions than this. Vampire: The Masquerade's setting, the World of Darkness, is a very long and involved fiction. Final Fantasy VII's is likewise. Most games fall somewhere in the middle in terms of complexity. The best games are those that mirror fiction and gameplay together to create a robust, elegant game that the players can functionally play with relative ease and symbolically/imaginatively enjoy likewise. Football would not be football with the crowd chants, it would be anemic. Paranoia would not be Paranoia without the whole "Glory Glory the Computer" songs and Resident Evil would not be Resident Evil without the zombiefied villagers.

The big difference between recognising the qualities of a fiction and misinterpreting it as am interactive story experience is in seeing that the system underpinning the fiction is robust (i.e. it's an abstract game) and therefore the best fictions are always the ones that are driven at the player's behest. Chess would simply be irritating if after every five moves a neutral judge read out lines of poetry, and many videogames are irritating because of their long ponderous cut-scenes that serve no purpose in advancing the gameplay or exploring the fiction. Great fiction always works at the behest of the player in a manner that furthers their exploration and advancement of their gameplay. (There is room for great writing in games, as a matter of interest, as long as it works within these precepts. The current vogue in trying to adopt movie storytelling wholesale into games is fundamentally broken for other reasons.)

Interactive storytelling, on the other hand, tries to square the circle, regarding players as actors, games as sets of stories, and lots of other misguided notions that derive from linguistic tricks, misunderstandings of the principles of both games and stories, and a healthy invocation of the Technology God as a lodestone of possibility.

Mostly, however, the notion continues to propagate because it keeps a variety of people in the news and mentioned in magazines. Like many other sources of self-propagating publicity (of which the industry has too many), it should be actively debunked. But that's a subject for another article.

HL2: It's Not You, It's Me.

2006-06-04T19:26:00.000Z

I've just completed Half Life 2, and it is another game which has left me pretty cold. Read on to find out why:

I have a personal sort of tradition, or unconscious habit, in that I am frequently the last to arrive at the ball. While everybody else is off sunning themselves in new consoles and graphics cards, latest releases and so on, I plod along behind somewhere, just sort of pootling along, playing games in particular as and when I get around to them. So, to Half Life 2, a mere 18 months after its release. My excuse? I didn't have reliable broadband for a long time and I think my then-PC would have fainted at the prospect.

Anyway, something that I find interesting about playing games after the hype cloud has passed is that I often come away from the playing experience with a pretty different take on events than the zeitgeist had frothed about back then. This works both ways, in that sometimes I find I like a game a lot more than the powers that be decreed, and sometimes I find that it's the opposite.

Half Life 2 is very definitely a case of the latter, and I feel ugly for saying it. Lush, good gameplay scenarios, lots of colour and thought, very few bugs. And I just couldn't get down with it at all. In fact, it reminds me in this of my reaction to Resident Evil 4. I found both games very very impressive as technical achievements, but could not connect with them on an emotional level whatsoever. There's just something.. missing for me.

What is it that's missing?
Fiction in a word. Both games fall down on the fiction front.

As I've noted before, one of the bad trends in game writing and fiction in general is that of excessive appeals to the heroic nature of the player. The general theory goes that the player, being as he is the main character in the story, occupies the role of hero. This is usually taken to mean hero as in narrative hero, and so much of the Hero's Journey style thinking goes into the writing. As I've noted before, this is an incorrect context from which to operate because the player is always an unreliable hero at best. Video game narrative is at its best when it doesn't try to emotionalise direct to the player.

Emotionalise? What I'm basically talking about here are the parts when characters like Alyx talk to you, confide their feelings in you, say Go Gordon Go, and Thank You So Much and so on. This is the equivalent of exposition in screenwriting, and exposition is a terrible sin. Exposition is when two characters have a conversation that is clearly designed to tell the audience the plot. Or worse, straight-to-camera talking that is direct about the plot and nothing of the character. Videogame emotionalising really really hacks me off, because it is so obviously fake that the moment it is uttered I am blown right out of a scene.

And I hate that about single-player games. HL2 and Resi 4 fall firmly into the Type 2 game, the adventure that the player plays through because he is interested in seeing what happens next. Narrative thread is very important in Type 2 games, and part of the genre contract of these games is that the spell should not be broken. Ok, of course it can't be bent a bit - especially for games where an in-joke is appropriate, but only so far. The contract of the Type 2 game is one where the player gets to open the magic door.

Emotionalising breaks the contract because it robs the player of their power. Like watching bad comedy and being told when to clap, the purpose of playing the game becomes null and void when other characters start trying to make you feel things. It feels falsetto.

So, looking at the title of this piece, the point is that HL2 breaks the fiction of its own world by far too much emotionalising, mistaking the fact that Gordon Freeman is not some hero, some person on screen full of derring do. Gordon Freeman is not some objective You. Gordon Freeman is Me.

The emotionalising just becomes irritating, and you know that something is wrong in a game when in its penultimate scenes you find yourself wishing you could get out of the trap you're in to punch Alyx in the face, or you wish there was some 'Drop that Girl Down a Well' option in Resi 4 so you could go and kill everything that needs to be killed and then, you know, rescue her or something.

So what does work?

God of War works. It saves the heroic talk for segments between large areas of game play, and when it does go into the character of Kratos, the way it does it is, as the writers would say, mostly Show rather than Tell. Grim Fandango works, because in the moments when we are reflecting on Mannie's problems in life they are done so in an understated, wise-cracking sort of way. Max Payne 2 works very well because it deflects most of its exposition and emotionalising behind a very stylised mode of telling, and an almost self-effacing voice (such as the part where you discover the tape of yourself calling call girls - genius). Ico works by telling you almost nothing at all. Deus Ex works. None of these game turns to you the player with a signpost that says "Feel Bad Now".

Aesthetically, both HL2 and Resi 4 are very very strong. I really liked a lot of the touches like the organic helicopter things in Half Life 2, and some of the levels were inspired. The villages and villagers in Resi 4 are really creepy and deserve some sort of award. The gameplay in both games is varied, interesting and well paced (well, the vehicle control isn't great, to be fair, but it does ok).

And yet because the fiction breaks down, the whole premise of the games break down. I just don't CARE between levels what the overall tone of my actions will entail. I have no sense of discovery in either game because between the emotionalising and the structure, I know that it'll all tediously play out in one way or another. There is no sense of emotive surpise, of discovery on a gut level, and so the ultimate question is What's The Point?

The point, in all Type 2 games, is discovery. The essence of adventure is not being able to predict what comes next, not seeing the plot turns and not realising until you figure it out for yourself that something more is going on. Discovery is a hard act to keep going and is best done subtly rather than openly. Don't have an NPC tell me everything that's going on and handing me my mission objectives like a laundry list. Leave things for the player to find, to draw their own opinions so that when the laundry list does come, it feel believable.

A sense of game writing is what's missing here, as opposed to applying the principles of screenwriting to games. It's an evolving artform, to be sure, but there are pitfalls, and emotionalising is a big one. Let us banish it from our presence, never to be seen again!

A question for those who work in publishing

2006-05-25T21:17:00.000Z

There's something I don't understand about software publishers at the moment, and it is this:

* It's clear as glass that the business is becoming increasingly difficult in publishing because of costs. Even EA are spending a massive amount (slightly less than a billion) in development next year, and there's no end in sight.

* It is clear that this is caused by the generational leap. Said leap being brought about by three hardware companies changing the rules on the publishers. The so-called generation cycle is primarily driven by oligopolistic competition between the main players, and this means that their priorities effectively dictate the business of everybody else, and also take the lion's share of the profits.

* This places the manufacturers in the increasingly envious position of being the only ones who can afford to spend money on new and interesting projects, as they make the most profit from their release per copy (not having to pay a license fee to themselves) and can afford to pay for them from everyone else's hard work.

* In short, meaning that the 3rd party publishers are slowly getting boned by being unable to compete.

Here's what I don't understand. Why aren't the likes of EA and Activision actually doing something about this, either through some sort of collective pressure, through the spectre of legal action, through anything that would establish a market and lessen the oligopoly's hold? I don't understand their inaction.

In the film industry the content owners have commonly exert their influence in the market to bring about such things as the DVD Forum because they realise the value of collective behaviour on issues that affect them all. Why aren't the non-manufacturer gaming publishers doing the same?

The Expectations Trap: Halo 2 and PS3

2006-05-10T23:44:00.000Z

I know that it's bad form among the gaming cognoscenti, but I really like that Halo 3 trailer. I know it's a trailer, I know it's video and not the real game, I know I know. But oh my what wonderful music, what swells of epicness and portentous quotes of "This is the way the world ends." I also know full well that the trailer is pretty standard stuff, what with the flickering Cortana intimating that there's elements of the Master Chief's past involved, every trilogy ends at its beginning and so on and so forth.

But the thing is.... Well, I have a confession to make.
I loved Halo 2. But it's a lesson in what happens when the expectation machine goes awry. As is the PS3.

I truly loved Halo 2. In some circles, that's enough to end a conversation right there, with a volley of "How could you not see its shortcomings, the failure to meet expectations, the cheese, the blah blah blah". I loved it. I loved the levels, I loved the visuals, I loved the two-weapon thing. I loved the Arbiter sections. I wasn't so sure on one or two of the mechanics of the game, and I thought the ending was a bit "Time Gentlemen Please!"

But overall, I loved it. It was my favourite game of 2004 by a considerable margin because, warts and all, the fact is that it was the game that I wanted to play when I got home from work, the pub, whatever. I simply loved it. I should add here that I'm mostly talking about the single-player game, not the multi-player which I only had marginal contact with as I don't have Xbox Live.

Reactions to Halo 2 really confused and angered me at first, because they varied so wildly. Some people seemed to dig it like I did, but there was a lot of negative reaction out there. Some people talked as though the game had been a complete horror of Driv3r proportions, that it was such a disappointment, a let-down, whatever. I felt bad for the guys over at Bungie. I mean here was a game that had been whooped and hollered at the year before at E3 with that gameplay video,
with all of that stuff included, and the reaction of the gamer community was totally overblown in the negative as though the game were a crime.

Driv3r WAS a crime, not least against journalist's review standards, but Halo 2's crime was simply this. It was an excellent game, but it did not meet up to some gamers' expectations. It must surely rank as one of the greatest cases of inflated hype meeting reality in modern gaming, and it shows how dangerous playing the expectation game really is.

And the reason for this is simple. Expectations are a fantasy. Sony are currently experiencing the brunt of gamer wrath in much the same way, now that it has become apparent that the PS3 may well be an empty shirt after all. Some of us knew (or strongly suspected) of course that the purported games of last year's E3, most especially Killzone 2, were likely to be nothing more than animation videos, but the bomb that they set off was enormous. And now the backlash is coming thick and fast.

My overall point in this ramble is that we gamers (and we game developers too) have a tendency to fantasise, and a common trajectory of that fantasy is that the final product never lives up anywhere close to our expectations. It's as I wrote a long while back in my essay 'The Gamer's Dream', we are very prone to an idealistic take on the world of video games, always reaching for the belief in the perfect game.

In the real world, nothing can ever hope to reach that. Try as a company, developer or artist might, playing the expectation game can never successful. Especially not when you put out the key features of your new product a long time before release. Microsoft's big mistake with Halo 2 was that they released their footage so far in advance of the release that it built up to messianic proportions. Sure, they sold 6 million or so copies in the process.

Now they'll find that they have a harder sell with Halo 3. Now we are "post-expectation" when the expectation has become one of failure in some peoples' minds. Unlike the idealistic expectation, the failure expectation is one that is always achieved. That is the expectation of looking for the bugs and the cracks. I loved it, I love that trailer with its wonderful music etc, but I already know that the cat-calls will start. Halo 3 is destined to be an argument.

As for PS3, the news seems worse if anything. Reactions to the Sony conference have ranged (from what I've read) from muted apathy to staggering disbelief at the price, the gimmicks, the two versions, the joypad, the marketplace, and the lack of decent gameplay footage a mere six months before launch. And no sign of Killzone 2. Sony have committed the grevious error, like Microsoft did before, of shooting their load way too soon and, unlike Microsoft, appearing to not have the goods to back their original hype up after all. In the course of one 48 hour period they've gone from hero to zero.

Now the expectation is that they'll be on the back foot from here on out, relying on their 'brand' according to some journalists. Well brands change and shift in the public consciousness all the time, and that comes chiefly from reputation. They've handed a massive fall in expectations to the magazines, the gamers, the podcasters, the bloggers, everyone. For the next six months the story about Sony is going to be how can they compete against either Microsoft or Nintendo where it counts, why would anyone want and PS3 now that GTA4 is multi-format with Live exclusive content, and the expectation becomes 'waiting for the inevitable'.

These are not mountains that are easily climbed.

The Growth Gamble

2006-05-05T19:49:00.000Z

Hey, have you heard the news? Apparently development costs keep on rising, and there's more rises down the line with next-gen technology virtually guaranteeing teams of over 100 as necessary now. You haven't heard the news?

Well apparently neither had Michael Pachter from Wedbush Morgan Securities until just recently when EA announced that their development budget forecasts for 2007 are expected to hit $900 million dollars, compared with $758 million for 2006 and $411 million in 2003. (source: gamesindustry.biz) Pachter apparently describes the $900m as speechless, and complains about the sustainability of it. EA's answer? They expect large growth. Pachter forecasts $3.46 billion in 2008.

This seems to be the answer for a few of the big companies now. Don't worry, it'll all turn out well in the end because, in case you haven't heard, the games industry is growing by 500% every quarter and will soon become the biggest baddest medium in the world and so on. As many others have pointed out, the 'eternal growth' model of the industry is predicated on one of many myths, the chief one being that the industry is in fact a big mainstream medium now.

Rant over.

Why the Games Industry Needs a Union

2006-05-03T09:52:00.000Z

Class action lawsuits seem to be creeping out of the woodwork, so far mostly in the US EA's just had a couple, Activision seem to have one or more on their hands now, and these are the ones that we know about. The reaction from publishers is pretty much what you'd expect (according to friends on the inside etc), which is to implement overtime policies in those specific areas that have resulted in legal damages, while at the same reinforcing the no-overtime-here policy in their other territories.

It's all very legal, but these being the days of email and web-based news, of course the news gets out there, leading to more grumbling and - no doubt - more lawsuits in other territories. The terror of outsourcing might serve as a discouraging whip for some, but in the long run that is just another mitigating strategy. Putting off til tomorrow what is hoped will not surface today etc.

What we're looking at here is a big mess, in otherwords, and it could very easily become an acrimonious mess (it arguably already has) that continues to drive talented people out of the industry into other fields, propagates worsening conditions, and continues to effect the downward spiral of the quality of the industry's output. And therefore ultimately hit the bottom lines of these companies.

It's for reasons like these that the game industry needs an effective union.

You might point to the IGDA as the game industry's equivalent, but the IGDA is not really a proper professional organisation. It's full of academics and students, which tends to dilute any sort of professionals-only issues, and it is less concerned with action that advocacy. The IGDA is essentially a valuable research and debate organisation, but despite several calls from within its ranks and from the outside as well, it has on several occasions specifically said that it will not take on the mantle of any kind of union organisation.

Unionisation conjures up a variety of Dickensian misery or Arthur Scargill-style strikes (see here if you don't know who Scargill is), combined with suspicions of socialism. It also conjures up fears for jobs, in the sense of companies adopting no-union policies, outsourcing, the fear that unions automatically mean strikes, and so on and so forth. These images may well have a place the developing world and manual labour industries, but not in the modern world of technology and knowledge workers.

Many high-skilled industries have unions although they are often called something else. An example are the Writer's Guilds that cover the field of screenwriters working in television and film. Another is the International Union of Operating Engineers, or the Union of American Physicians and Dentists.

These are professionals-only unions, essentially, and their job is to negotiate on behalf of professionals for their fields. Unlike a miner's union or manual worker's unions, professional unions tend to be light-touch, negotiating in areas of importance while retaining the flexibility for individual workers in their field to negotiate on their behalf.

A manual labour union will often heavily negotiate for pay increases, ranks of pay, hours worked, working practises and that sort of thing. These kinds of unions are essentially trying to nail down every aspect of their profession and obtain what they think is a fair deal across the board for their members.

A professional union, on the other hand, doesn't take such a heavy handed approach because that approach is not what their members require. What they require is representation in key areas, but independence in many others. The Writer's Guild of Great Britain, for example, negotiates basic rates with the BBC and other major media organisations for individual writers. Under WGGB regulations and negotiations, the BBC are mandated to pay a certain minimum amount to any writer. However, the WGGB does not dictate terms outside of those minimums. Writers are free to negotiate for themselves, and working practises are frequently left to their own discretion.

Another thing that the WGGB does, which is also common to professional unions (especially in contract-based industries like the games industry is slowly becoming) is that they organise help and relief for members. Writers, in this case, are not the sort of people who work consistently, so obtaining health insurance or mortgages can be very difficult for them.

These issues are becoming more pertinent for the games industry, especially when the current trend of campus studios starts to falter. The industry is currently consolidating a lot and trying to internalise studios all over the place into giant places like EA Vancouver. But the day will come, and not too far off, when EA and the like realise that this system is an inherently flawed way of working because it lacks necessary flexibility in a world of fewer, more high profile releases. It's a lesson that the film industry learned a while ago, and it's coming our way too, probably within 3-5 years.

The real issue is that it's becoming more and more in the publisher's and manufacturer's interests to support an unionised industry than not. While on the surface that may seem like a perfectly insane statement, there is a logic to it. As lawsuits continue to gather pace, this means that the various companies are going to come under attack. Bad press for shoddy treatment of workers is not one of those things that is easily spun, and with every case making its way into the headlines, another company takes a hit on its stock rating, becomes a place that high-profile candidates are less likely to want to work, and overall a bad reputation carries. The best way to avoid all this mess is to draw a line under it by negotiating an agreed set of fair guides that both employees and employers can live with. That means that the employers need someone to negotiate with.

Some thoughts on how to shape an industry union in a few days.

How to Find a Good Game Designer

2006-04-29T00:08:00.000Z

Hiring good, experienced designers is hard. It is so because design is seen as such a nebulous stitching-everything-else-together task that it's not as easy to evaluate via the interview process. An animator can bring his showreel, a coder can bring his samples, and an artist can bring his album. Hell, even a producer can bring his sample schedules and track record of games produced on time and on budget etc.

What does a designer bring? Levels that they've done (assuming that they're level designers), perhaps articles or books that they've written, videos of their former games in action, a meta-critic score, a list of linkedin endorsements, a list of titles? Do any of these actually tell you anything?

Levels actually tell you very little. A level video is played at optimum speed, often edited and the prettiness of the art etc can be quite distracting (in both good and bad ways). The level design of many of the corridor sections in Halo is basically corridor-enemy-corridor-enemy, for instance. How do you show that it's "good", especially in an interview setting, and distinguish its goodness from, say, the enemy AI scripting or the balance of the game's weapons which you may have had nothing to do with?

Articles and books can be misleading. They show a mind at work, but not necessarily the right sort of mind. Quite a few journalists and academics have forged into design, only to find that they aren't good as designers. Speaking as an author of a few airy articles in my day, does my output really tell you anything about whether I am actually able to sit down and design a game? Not really.

A list of titles and achievements can mean anything and it's very very easy to big up one's involvement in a title to sound more than it is. For instance, judge

"I designed half of the levels for platform game X".
versus
"I designed over 50% of the crucial levels that proved critical to the testing and implementation of the gameplay as well as developed the narrative backbone of the game."

Academic qualifications can similarly be over-emphasised, software skill lists are nice but rarely relevant as most design-related software can be learned quickly enough, and references invariably say nice things. Previous experience in other disciplines is also nice to have, but again no real indicator of anything in terms of design skills.

While all this material is good to bring along and everyone expects an interview to have a bit of razzmatazz and spin associated, they can all be faked to a great extent. It's an easy lie to say that a bit of design work in a game was yours. Who can really gainsay that you were the one that sorted out the balance issues with the plasma rifle, or that you were the one that set out the length of the levels, or drew the 2D maps and workflows. Who can really say exactly how much of the sample GDD that you've brought along is actually your work, or the copy of the design wiki?

With the best of intentions in the world, what these different standards of screening design candidates do is reward presentation-oriented candidates. Presentation is itself an important skill for a designer, but the interview process doesn't address the other important skill. (I.e. can they design a game?) And there is much of a consensus across the industry that there are a lot more people who think they're good designers and can craft a spiel about how good they are rather than actually being good designers.

So what to do?

A lot of game designers have good secondary skills, and those are the ones that appear most in the interview. Very few have good primary skills because they're simply not tested in the interview in the same way. Here's the skills breakdown:

Primary: Abstraction, Rules, Mechanics, Constraints, User Interface

Secondary: Scripting, Feedback, Databases, Playtesting, AI, Balancing, Gameplay analysis, Progression, Writing, Enemies, Characters, Maps, 3D environments, Diagrams, Cinematics, Documenting, Pitching, Talking, Scheduling, Idea Management, Market Research, Focus groups, PR, Direction

In my view the interview process lets a candidate demonstrate their secondary skills, but we have no means of examining primary skills. So, we often end up hiring designers who are good on paper, but actually bad designers. The solution is to devise a test. Since the primary skills are all really about fundamentals, a test should also be about fundamentals too:

The particleblog design test
Place the candidate in a room and give them the following items.

1 deck of cards
4 six-sided dice
A pad of paper and three pens of different colours
1 pack of index cards (blank)
1 whiteboard and eraseable marker pen
1 bag of 50 black tokens
1 bag of 50 white tokens
2 table-tennis bats
1 table-tennis ball

And you tell them that they have 4 hours to create a game.

Here are the rules of the test:

1. The game must only use the components presented.
2. The game must be in a playable condition at the end of 4 hours.
3. The game must be playable by anyone (i.e. no obscure knowledge of trivia etc)
4. They do not have to use all the components. If they just want to create a puzzle game using only the whiteboard and the tokens, that's fine.
5. They must not replicate a game which already exists
6. They must write out the rules of the game, because...
7. They don't get to present the game

Rule 7 is absolutely vital, because it removes the personal sales pitch from the process. Ideally what the designer should do is hand the rules to the interviewers and go home, leaving the interviewers to learn and play the game for themselves. The objective of this exercise is to test raw talent.

If the game that he invents is fun (or potentially fun), then he has talent. If it is not, then he does not, and all the pitching and documentation and PowerPoint presentations in the world are useless in the design context. That candidate would probably be better suited to a PR, production or creative writer role.

The game that the candidate invents would also be highly indicative of the type of designer that they are. A candidate who invents an interesting sport, for instance, is likely to be a good Type 1 designer. Whereas, a candidate who creates dungeon-crawling roleplaying game is probably going to have good Type 2 skills. A candidate who creates a game about building little societies would likely be a great Type 3 designer, and one who creates co-operative game for several players would do well in a Type 4 environment. It's like a Rorschach test for game designers.

At least that's my guess anyway.

So is anybody up for the challenge?
If you are, assemble the components, set yourself the time limit and make the game. Afterwards, post the rules here in the comments section and we'll evaluate them.

Gamasutra

2006-04-10T21:49:00.000Z

I appear to be famous.
Bow down before me mortals.

It Tolls for Me

2006-04-09T09:57:00.000Z

Well I finished with Lionhead on Friday, a little earlier than most of my team-mates on account of having made plans to fly home for Easter long before the consultation process started. But essentially all of us are on our way. In many ways, this has been a turbulent month. But on the up side, it has been the best kind of letting go that I've heard of in the industry.

Having been on the receiving end of a company decision a couple of times (almost everyone in the industry has), I'm well positioned to compare and contrast, and in this case the comparison is favorable. Aside from the standard range of emotions going up and down, from anger and resentment to acceptance and sadness, my overall feeling is that it offers me the chance for something new, so now at the end I feel a mild sense of relief and acceptance. I've started making plans.

Those plans involve taking a big risk, going out on a limb and starting up something of my own. Like everybody in this industry, I have those ideas for games that I secretly harbour. I have a project in mind, I hope to be telling all you about very soon, as I think it's going to be something special.

Looking for Macbeth

2006-04-06T00:40:00.000Z

So I made a short film. It looks a bit better in avi form than Google Video's rendition of it. I may put together a torrent of it or something later if people are interested.

Warren Spector response

2006-04-04T20:51:00.000Z

I posted this in response to Warren Spector's latest article about the future of gaming in the Escapist.

"I think the answer to all of Warren's ills can be summed up in one word: indie.

Simply put, what he's lamenting is the lack of Spielberg-equivalent power (relatively speaking) with independent sensibilities of content and exploration of those themes. In this regard he's not alone by any means. There are plenty of developers who are struggling with what amounts to a paradigm shift in their business and their creative lives.

However, there is hope. There are engines and tools on the small end of the scale. Not everything has to be about AAA, and no idea requires AAA levels of production to work. Warren mentions that he has ideas from 15 years that he feels can only be done now. I ask why is that. Graphical punch aside, what are the key traits of these ideas that make them so tech-necessary? A lot of even the supposedly important advances in games technology are just layers and layers of effects, and Warren's own Deus Ex remains to this day the most interesting fps adventure game (not the sequel though, sorry Warren) for the last ten years. It does so on what is a comparative shoestring compared to the 20 million club.

Any idea can be developed at any level. It just takes belief and the ability and willingness to work within constraints rather than growing angry or disillusioned at their existence. What Warren needs, it sounds to me, is a little faith."

10 Ways to Engage

2006-04-02T21:56:00.000Z

I said this already, I'll say it again. Escapism and 'fun' as a goal for video game design is killing the medium stone dead. Only through engagement can a future of any sort be realised. Here are some ways to start engaging.

1. Watch and read the news. Learn in-depth about the world around you rather than the pithy version that comes through your company mailing list and forums.
2. Create something. Not a game. Paint something, write a poem, go outside and take some photographs.
3. Meditate. Learn to just sit and listen to the world around you without thinking.
4. Socialise. This may be hard for most of us, but go out with friends more often, non-gamer friends. Don't talk about games, sci-fi, the latest laptop that you bought. Talk about them, their jobs and their lives. Find out about their relationships.
5. Dance. The sight of geeks dancing may be horrible, but dance nonetheless. And sing too, if you feel like it.
6. Do some charity work. Go and serve soup to the poor, or volunteer at an Oxfam shop, or something that puts you in contact with real people.
7. Go to a match. Go and sit in a soccer stadium and cheer on Arsenal or the Bears or whoever you like. Go with sports-fan friends if you can.
8. Cycle. Or run. Or even walk. Get out into your environment, climb a hill, trek through a forest, canoe down a river.
9. Gallery hop. Go take in some culture. Modern stuff, old stuff. Try and regard it all with an open mind rather than your standard 'modern art is nonsense' face. Take a wander around some architecture.
10. Now take all those feelings and discoveries and construct a fiction for a game that you think you would like to play.

Spiritual Gaming

2006-03-29T17:38:00.000Z

The Guardian website printed a really interesting article on the subject of inspiration, talking specifically about the uncontrollable nature of it, the associations that it was with religion, and how we can set the right conditions for it (for instance, through ritual or habit or self discipline), but that its appearance is arbitrary and often apparently easy. Which vaguely brings me onto the topics of products, spirit, religion, creativity and video games, roughly in that order.

I first ran across the idea of using the methods of product design via Daniel Cook's blog, Lost Garden. Dan is exploring the idea that games can be viewed as products, and so there is a lot of use to be had from the techniques of product design. Dan's not just talking about just marketing surveys etc, but rather a far more complex and in-depth field that seeks to determine what it is that customers really want, and understanding what kinds of products appeal to what kinds of customers through various focused exercises. He talks a lot in terms of value propositions (what it is that the game is offering the prospective customer), and warding the would-be game developer against committing the sins of weak product design, half-way house innovation, and opting for the cheap gimmick that appears to offer good answers for products, but which, in fact, don't (like always opting for visceral feedback).

His is what I call a "positive-capitalist" approach. What that means is that he's trying to explain a means of resolving the desire to do good work versus the desire of the market by teaching the would-be creators about the real world, but in a positive re-enforcement sort of way. Make that world war one strategy game, he might say, but make it in a way that people might actually find appealing. In this respect, he reminds me of Joel Spolsky.

However, I'm not convinced of the central thesis that games are in fact a product.

Products are all about love. People love their ipods. They love Google. They love their Thinkpads. They love Paul Newman's range of pasta sauces. They love Coca Cola. They even love Big Macs. In every case, the successful product inspires devotion. The kind of love that products inspire is one of reliability, security and in some cases a sense of wonder. You always know that a can of Coke will give you a certain buzz, that your ipod and Itunes will not let you down, that Google will help you find what you want and that Wikipedia will open up a whole world of knowledge to you.

Entertainment media have never enjoyed this sort of relationship to any great satisfaction, and they have always had a difficult time fitting into the product mould (much to the irritation of their owners). News media has, magazines are usually fairly easily identified as products, but after that it gets murky.

Television, for instance, is often the best example of attempts at product-centric entertainment. Shows are regularly syndicated and run for years, becoming very reliable brands in the process (Friends, ER, The Simpsons). Audiences are profiled, rated, dissected on the basis of advertising slots, and so TV executives are always asking themselves what it is that people want to watch, and then trying to fill that gap.

Yet the television industry has found no better means of finding new hits in all its years of operation other than showing a shed load of pilots across a blizzard period from September through November, and keeping the few shows that make ratings gravy. Every year, more than a hundred new shows broadcast all across the American airwaves, and - if they're very lucky - 3 or 4 strike it rich, most of the rest get cancelled, and a few remain on the bubble. The TV industry spends a lot of money on audience research, yet at the end of the day its still a craps-shoot.

The film industry was a similar story until DVD effectively raised the profitability of pretty much every release. Until a few years ago, studios would regularly field over a dozen big-budget films every year in the forlorn hope that one of them might strike some sort of note with the public and be enough to carry the rest of the loss-making ones. DVD changed that to an extent (secondary income streams, as did packaged deals with satellite broadcasters etc) so that many more films now make their money back, but at the same time cinema attendance is down, there haven't been any huge hits in a couple of years, and the economic bubble of DVD is slowly readjusting.

Book publishing is a venerable industry that has thrived for hundreds of years safe in the knowledge that the public are more or less unpredictable when it comes to its reading tastes. There are some reliable imprints like Mills and Boon or Dragonlance fantasy novels, but these always do fairly minor business compared to a Helen Fielding, Iain Banks, Norman Mailer, Isaac Asimov or whoever. Thousands of agents, publishers and editors are always on the hunt for new talent, but once again the best method that they have found of securing new books is the slush pile. And again, this is not for the want of research on the part of Random House etc.

What does work in entertainment is branding. Authors, movie stars, musicians and TV Shows are brands, and the successful ones carry enormous power. Tom Cruise, JK Rowling and the Rolling Stones have crossed over the threshold into the public consciousness and they are now reliable. The problem is that these brands all come about by seeming chance. There are a thousand other children's fantasy authors out there, so why is it JK Rowling's work which gets picked up and not the others?

What also works in entertainment (to an extent) is cloneware. Once JK Rowling broke through, the various publishers scrambled over each other to find children's writing, with some success. When a TV show like the X-Files blasts a hole in the ratings, the other networks move to create their own mystery shows. Sometimes a cloneware piece of entertainment manages to carve enough of a distinction niche to stick around (the Monkees cloning the Beatles, for example), but that doesn't mean that the publishers are able to go out and create a new "product" with any great ease.

Where product design *appears* to work in entertainment media is when limited distribution becomes a factor. Tightly controlled access to only a few channels creates a sort of splash effect where either/or choices effectively create support for one product or another. However, this is rather like saying that the Republicans and Democrats are fully serving the needs of their customers (i.e. their voters). They're not. The electoral system generates a landscape such that often there are no other credible choices, and so electorate apathy is the result.

Restricted-access media paint the same story. When there are only thirty singles paid for and played on the radio from a mixture of new and old groups, MTV and so on, then somebody will buy them. It's not a function of the product at that stage, it's a function of limited choice.

The restricted-access system also seems to serve particularly well when targeting younger customers. The reason why the advertising industry so heavily goes after the 18-year old market is that they find them easily swayed. Similarly, the reason that the music industry is always on the hunt for teenagers is that they know full well that although mature adults listen to plenty of music, their tastes are diverse and difficult to render into products.

In an open forum, restricted access vanishes and predictability goes out the window. To nick the famous quote from William Goldman, "Nobody Knows Anything".

Love Affairs
So why does entertainment have such a hard time of it in the product-design universe? The answer is that while entertainment does inspire a love relationship, that love is founded on something other than security and reliability. Like traditional products, part of entertainment's allure is based on wonder, but the other half is based on surprise. We watch X-Files, read Harry Potter and listen to Queen because we find them pleasing, but also because we find them surprising. New.

Product-based love is like the love of family. It is the stuff of bedrocks, of centering, of security. Entertainment-based love, on the other hand, is like steamy passion. It comes from somewhere inexplicable, it leaves us feeling confused as to why exactly we love it, and when it disappoints us (like when a favored band produces a duff album) we are full of denial and devastation. Entertainment is inextricably tied up with risk on the one hand, and inspiration on the other.

What then is inspiration?

Well, if you read that article that I linked at the top of this one, the answer seems to be that nobody really knows. Its existence is real enough, yet it seems to be completely outside of our control. Two equally talented artists can work on the same sets of paintings for years, training their minds, and yet one may become inspired but the other does not. Inspiration is also difficult to explain without veering into the realms of the spiritual and the religious. So let's veer into them.

The word inspiration literally comes from 'in-spirited', a spirit of some kind coming from quarters unknown unbidden into the mind and fills it with a sense of energy. Many artists and writers speak vaguely on the subject, effectively saying that they don't really know where they get their ideas from. They can work at them, but sometimes they don't come. And then at other times they're sitting on the bus and suddenly a whole novel pops into their heads whole and complete (JK Rowling famously says that she had the idea for Harry Potter while on a train, and the whole thing came to her in one jolt).

When people talk about 'spirit' in this context, they aren't necessarily talking about ghosts or the Holy Spirit. They could be talking about a spirit of adventure, for instance. But they aren't ruling out the notion of the other-worldly, the invisible and the Mystery either. Creativity and the spiritual sense are closely linked, which is why many artists and entertainers - even in the age of post-modern deconstruction - struggle with God (or Gods) in some shape or form, often seeing themselves as conduits rather than innovators. Some, like the writer Julia Cameron, see this relationship as overtly divine. Some regard it as a function of their unconscious minds. Most aren't entirely sure one way or the other.

Either way, the result is the same. Certain people operating in certain creative fields become inspired in the course of their work. Some of them work very hard, others seem to have a light touch and a ton of talent, and the result is that they produce entertainment which the public seem to enjoy. And then everybody else piles in after them hoping to exploit whatever new trend the inspired person seemed to have hit. There may be a better way to do it, but a lot of people have tried and nobody seems to have figured out how yet.

So what about games?
Of course, it goes without saying that the hardware devices that power these games are all products much as televisions are products. Which is as it should be, but the big question is whether the video games themselves are a form of classical product, or of entertainment. It depends on their type.

I recently wrote an article positing that there are four very different video game types, each very different from the next in terms of the role of abstract gameplay versus fictional elements.

Type 1 games are abstract contests within a defined area.
Type 2 games use fiction as a window on a world, often in a quasi-narrative way.
Type 3 games are care and creativity-oriented games, toy sets for the imaginative.
Type 4 games are virtual worlds.

Understanding whether each of these types conforms more to the product model or the entertainment model is dependent on the surprise vs security value inherent in each.

Type 1 games are more easily regarded as products. A type 1 game sets up a situation of player vs player or player vs environment using a defined scenario (like shooting the bugs, arrange the blocks, terrorist vs counter-terrorist), so in a Type 1 game the rules and the mechanics are open and transparent. Usability is important, innovation of mechanics are important, but most important is the emergent effect of gameplay.

For this to exist, the player must come to really know the game, and therefore to love it as is. That is the kind of love associated with products. Counter-strike would be no fun if the rules kept changing, and Tetris would likely just piss people off if it did likewise. Surprise of an entertainment variety is generally not liked in this game, and often equated with cheating either from an opponent or from the game itself. Type 1 games like FIFA and Pro Evolution Soccer compete with each other on the question of which is the better football game, and this is no different from car manufacturers competing over their sports car models.

Type 2 games are almost completely the opposite. The most frustrating kind of type 2 game is one where the fiction is blase, because they often as not feel like one is going through the motions. A really good example of this is FEAR, a game which has a very accomplished engine, physics effects and good set of weapons etc, interesting use of bullet-time mechanics etc, and yet is pretty dull to play through if you're looking for more than just visceral kicks.

Interesting discovery is at the heart of the type 2 game. It should feel that there is a reason to go on through the game, but the problem with that is that familiarity breeds contempt. This means that the game's developer is more less placed on a path of trying to developing something that is, in and of itself, surprising like any other piece of entertainment, which requires inspiration rather than pure product testing. It is unlikely in the extreme that Shadow of the Colossus came out of a series of Sony marketing exercises. Somebody somewhere woke up in the middle of the night and said to themselves "What about a guy, a horse, and a hundred-foot tall giant?"

Type 3 games function more in a product mindset than the inspirational one, although from an entirely different kind of value proposition than a competitive type 1 game. The type 3 game is really at root about providing the player with a garden that they shape to be their own. So you give them some azaleas, some rose bushes, some tools, a pair of wellies, show them how to plant seeds and send them on their way. Or, if you're Will Wright, you give them a whole clanking universe.

Key to this type of game is the notion of enchantment through enablement, teaching the player how to do something that they've wanted to do, and showing them how to be the best painter/dog handler/movie director/doll's house owner that they can. There is also some enjoyment to be had in discovering little secrets in the game (like watching their Sims dance and sing etc), and no doubt some of these have an inspired quality much as some of the features of an Apple Mac have an inspired quality, but overall the objective here is to get the player to entertain themselves. A type 3 game enables you to much as an ipod enables you.

Type 4 is really the hardest of the four to pin down, possibly because they are still so new that the real traits of the form are still only emerging. Certainly on the surface, they are more like products than vehicles of inspiration, encouraging players to come together and play together in the kinds of worlds that they have always dreamed of.

But they also have the potential to be inspiration-based as much of the fun in these kinds of games lies in discovering the new and unexpected, whether created via the developers (like WoW) or the community (like Second Life or EVE). The real question for the type 4 game, and it is an open question, is what value the players find in the world itself and therefore what kind of relationship they have to the fiction. If they purely regard it as a skin covering a series of stats that they use to communicate with each other, then the product design method is probably of great use to them.

On the other hand, if they're playing it because of the fiction, because their actions are driven as much by the desire to explore and find out the mysteries of the game as purely by the mechanics, then inspiration must play a part in that.

Conclusions
Settling on the best methods of creating games is a difficult task. We have so much to learn still, as much about ourselves as creators and designers, inspiration seekers and methodical analysts. With so many kinds of game and so many kinds of game player out there, it frequently happens that any method or classification system that emerges is usually incomplete.

What can be said with certainty is that anyone who rejects the ideas of product design as they apply to games is going to look foolish. Whether you are creating a small shooter or a multi-tiered on-line world, it pays to know whether your game is about discovery or competition, whether your goal is to enable the player to entertain themselves, or whether you see yourself as the entertainer.

Neither is correct, nor the right answer. Each is an expression of the different forms that this video game medium (or meta-medium) can take, with very different design goals and passions driving them. It's my belief that a bit further down the road the separation of the different types of game will become more and more real as time goes on, and we will see a clearer understanding of the right method to use in the right situation.

So whether you are one of those who believes in the spirit from beyond, or one who believes in looking to the people for guidance, the future is surely bright.

"Video games are meant to be just one thing: Fun."

2006-03-23T22:37:00.000Z

That was the closing line at Nintendo's GDC presentation, according to Gamasutra. The presentation was one all about the company's resurgent success on the back of 'disruptive' business practices. Through their long standing innovation strategy, Nintendo are all about making the industry less black and white, and they should be lauded for getting in there and mixing it up.

But "Video games are meant to be just one thing: Fun." can be read in one of two ways. Either it can mean that "Video games are capable of anything and everything, for they are liberated. Their only constraint is fun". Or it means "Video games are just meant to be fun, they have no other purpose".

The key word for me here is not 'Fun'. The concept of fun is well understood, I should think, after many years of games and many hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of releases. There are theories of fun, analyses of fun, examinations of the fun of one aspect of a game or another, and whole schema devoted to separating out different kinds of fun.

No, the key word for me here is 'meant'. Meaning is an interesting concept, in both positive and negative, because it suggests purpose or exclusion. Saying that a product is meant to be a certain way can implicitly imply that it is not meant to be another way. Big Macs are meant to be tasty pleasures, they are not meant to be nutrition supplements, for example. They are designed with that intent.

What I'm driving at here is a kind of pre-judgment, and video games are unique as a medium (that I'm aware of) in that the greater majority of its creators, designers and producers otherwise actively pre-judge themselves and their work according to a 'fun' standard not as a key trait of enablement, but as the end goal in and of itself. I have always found this to be a very strange sort of ideology, and yet it persists with great tenacity. Most developers and designers that I've worked, discussed and otherwise engaged with hold the view that the goal of the video game, its meaning if you like, is fun.

To me, it's like saying that the goal of music is harmony. "Music is meant to be just one thing: Harmonious". And the development community often extrapolates that to also mean that video games are actively not meant to be, say, tragic, or serious, or reflective on the real world. Video games are meant to be fun. Only. Period. Take yer high-fallutin ideas of idea expression and concept vehicles and shove 'em. Fun is the Alpha and the Omega.

Film-makers think that most films should probably have a story, and that they need to engage an audience for however long the film is on. This doesn't mean that they think that films are meant to entertain, however. They need to engage, but the 'meaning' of that engagement is left open to question.

Novels need to be readable. Their basic craft requires that readers are invited to keep turning the pages until they get to the end. But what are novels 'meant' to be? Nothing. They're meant to be whatever the author intends for them to be. Ditto music, ditto poetry, ditto television, sculpture, comics and so on. In all these forms, the basis of aesthetics or pace or whatever are regarded as the core necessity.

Video games are not meant to be fun. They need to be fun.
If they are not fun then they are by definition boring.

They need it in order for the player to keep going, keep discovering new areas, levels, bits of the story, whatever. Fun is the baseline, not the end point. As with the novelist who needs his reader to keep turning the page, the experience has to be interesting, enlightening, educational and emotional. It has to be fun or they won't play.

A novel that is purely based on page-turning is usually not a particularly good novel. Such novels are the barnstormers, the airport books and thrillers and erotica that regularly pile up the shelves of stores. You can read them, you might even find them enjoyable. But they are not the best that books can be, and they are also not the best that the book business can be either. Rent-an-action movies are likewise. They can tick all the boxes, as they say, for action, one-liners, special effects and so on, but they ultimately are not very memorable and likely not very profitable in the long run when cost effectiveness is taken into account.

By focusing only on the core necessities, a piece of entertainment runs into several problems:

It's competing in the same space as a lot of other, similar pieces. The action movie and the bonkbuster novel are heavily over-subscribed genres which have a couple of well-established key names that dominate while everyone else becomes a bottom feeder. Bottom feeding is rarely a worthwhile business activity.
It encourages audience self-selection, meaning that you get stuck with servicing a clump of the audience rather than the whole group.
That then doesn't offer a lot of room for different ideas. There's a reason why almost all action movies from the 80s basically take their cue from Rambo, and the ever-increasing sense of weariness that pervades the genre as it progressed into the likes Stephen Segal etc doesn't seem to let up. A similar thing happens in games, in that developers are very very prone to cloning one another.

Or, more simply, the problem is that there are only so many ways of focusing on the same thing before it gets dull. A romantic thriller focusing only on its core necessities is going to be like every other romantic thriller focusing only on its core necessities. For Nintendo, this is not a problem. They keep changing the format of the fun every few years, which gives off the appearance of change, but quickly thereafter the basic forms of fun will all have been mapped out in the Rev (probably to Nintendo's great profit) and then it's back to cloning again. As long as Nintendo can keep changing the field of core necessities, they are safe.

But for everyone else, this means a continuance of bottom feeding in the long run. What the games industry needs is designers who are looking to innovate beyond fun.

In entertainment, what really changes things is depth. A comedian can stand up on stage and do one of three things. He can make you laugh. He can rant and make you bored. Or he can make you laugh and think at the same time. The first comedian is the type who stands up and tells good jokes, funny little stories and so on, but you won't remember his name a week later. The second comedian is just the tedious type who wants to use the stage as some sort of venting platform, and you probably won't even stay til the end of the show.

The third comedian is Bill Hicks, Steve Martin, Richard Pryor, Whoopi Goldberg, Eddie Murphy, Eddie Izzard, Bill Bailey, and so on. What these entertainers do/did is mix their natural talent for making people laugh with funny stories and combine them with stories and perceptions that resonate. Comedy needs to be funny, but it's not meant to be only one thing: funny.

Resonance is a trait in entertainment whereby the audience recognises or identifies something of themselves. Resonance is a recognition of truth, and truth is sometimes hilarious, sometimes uncomfortable, and sometimes both. Resonance is often easier to achieve by using real-world settings and ideas, but it applies to any kind of fiction that you care to mention. The best entertainment is truthful, and it is innovative in so doing.

So when I say that the industry needs designers who are looking to innovate beyond fun, what I'm really saying is that the industry needs designers who are looking to show the truth. Fun is an enabling quality in our medium, but by itself it is just escapism. Escapism is amusing, but without some element of depth and resonance, it becomes very bland very quickly, necessitating the developer to spend a whole hell of a lot of money making their game pretty to compensate. Nintendo's business strategy derives from wanting to stay ahead of the innovation curve, and so should every good game designer who wants to do good work.

However, for game designers this means innovating away from the idea of just another round of escapism. Escapism has become boring. It's time for engagism. But it must be fun. Bill Hicks without a wicked sense of humor is just an angry addled drug addict ranting about how he hates the world. Who needs to hear that? Without the humor, there is no comedy, no show and no engagement.

There's a lot out there in the world to engage with. There's political struggles, terrorism, vast opportunities for satire coming out of the White House. There's little stories of peoples' lives, hopes and ambitions. There's the state of the economy, there's crime, drugs, occasional wars. Why aren't we making fun games based on these? Why aren't we lampooning famous people in our medium like they do on South Park? Why aren't we making sarcastic games about modern combat rather than the usual round of gun porn like Battlefield 2? There are goldmines of opportunity for fun in the world around us. Why are we cloning Zuma instead?

As I see it, the reason why the mainstream games industry is not doing this is obvious. Costs, lack of proven markets and so on are perfectly reasonable grounds to not want to rock the boat heavily. This is common in all other media as well. What these media do is turn to their independent sector for fresh ideas and direction. As should we.

But a lot of indie developers don't want to hear that. To them, innovation means Spore. It means millions of dollars spent researching complicated interaction models and in-depth procedural animation technologies. It means crafting complicated AIs, years of work overcoming technical hurdles, and so on and so forth. And of course they can't afford that, so their instinct is to go back to match-three games and the so-called 'casual' market.

But technology is not the only kind of innovation. There's social innovation, meaning using the structure of a game environment to create situations. There's fictional innovation, such as creating a roleplaying game where the hero is gay. There's opportunities for humor, such as making a 2-d top-down game of the battle for Fallujah where the opposing sides are represent by Yahoos and Houyhnhnms. There's lots and lots of room for innovation of ideas through engagement.

Conclusion
Video games need to be fun, but they are not meant to be fun. They can be engaging or escapist, basic or artistic, simple or incredibly complicated, tragic, comic, and so on, but the independent sector needs to lead the way. The mainstream industry can't do it because it needs to pay a lot of pay-cheques, and Nintendo can only offer different models to create new genres which will, ultimately, go to seed quickly. What's needed is for the people who don't have to spend a lot of money and don't have to spend years figuring out in-depth models to stand up and take a look around in the world.

This medium, like all media, is about entertainment above all else, and the best entertainment is about resonance. Stop escaping. Engage.

Ludonarratology

2006-03-17T17:41:00.000Z

The Escapist has a nice little article in its current issue about the old ludology/narratology debate, essentially a mini-interview on the state of the debate. What's interesting is that the likes of Frasca and Juul are now all saying the debate was always meaningless. Huzzah, I say. It's always been silly to try and argue an either/or dichotomy in any artform, and games are no exception.

In other news, the latest Consolevania is out.

Ask Not for Whom the Bell Tolls

2006-03-05T00:35:00.000Z

So I've been asked a few times in the last two days. 'Oi Tadhg,' goes the mail, 'Are you on that Lionhead consultation period list?'

And the answer is, sadly, yes.

Over a specific period of time in the next few weeks, a period of consultation will determine who can best be kept on and placed in one of several studios, and I shall not publicly speculate on what I may be eligible for, how many positions there are exactly, nor the fate of myself or my colleagues. This is post is not about that (though I will give credit to Lionhead in the manner in which they are handling what is a difficult situation), I'm merely using the news as a jumping off point. Which is to talk about the job culture in the industry in general.

I was down the pub with two developer friends of mine on Friday (after the bad news), having what we like to call a 'swift half' (which became a swift three) and we were talking about what a difficult place the industry is to work in. It's perrennially uncertain, but also caught half way between two problematic poles.

They are the need to have staff resources close to hand while at the same time not being able to maintain them. It's a problem that affects the whole industry once it goes beyond the 4 or 5-man team level, and the reason for the problem is that game development is basically one big game of pass the parcel.

Suppose you figure that to make a big 3D space arcade game, you're going to need 40-ish people. Those people will, very roughly, consist of 15 audiovisual people (artists, animators), 15 technical people (code, tools, scripting) and 10 design and production people (producers, lead designer/game director, designers, mission-level designers) plus maybe 1 sound guy and an indeterminate number of testers.

It stands to reason that the animators will not be busy during the early days of the project, and the engine coders will really be down to the level of fixing occasional annoying bugs toward the end. So the solution is to hire people onto the team gradually, which is what most teams do. So the teams grow slowly over time, sometimes more quickly than others depending on the production management and financial concerns, but the upshot is that at the end of the project there's usually quite a few people who've been hanging around.

In fact, my theory is that even under the most optimum conditions, no development team is operating at more that 40% busy at any one time. What is happening is that individual departments grow more busy, followed by less busy ('polish', if you like), and so the aggregate of being busy is about 40%. Which leaves a lot of people essentially hanging around.

But why have them hang around?
Why not hire them contract and let them go when they're not needed any more?
Because hiring people is actually difficult.

Suppose you are an animator being offered a six month contract at a studio in Leamington Spa through a recruiter. This involves several factors for you, the most pressing of which is that the company is asking you to move your life for a six month period. To Leamington Spa. How likely are you to do it?

You're likely to do it only in one of three conditions.

1. The first is if they offer you a LOT of money, plus moving costs and various other benefits thrown in. This makes you and your recruiter very happy.

2. The second reason is if you are green in the industry and therefore looking to cut your teeth. There are a lot more green people in the industry than veterans because of this, because veterans decide that they don't want to move house unless its for a ton of money, and developers think that maybe two students can do the same job as one veteran.

3. The third, and pretty remote, reason is if the project itself is something that the animator is genuinely passionately interested in, they may make the move. Although it has to be said that this is a pretty rare occurence.

So it would seem that the solution for the company is therefore not to make itself so difficult because of location in the first place. Actually, not so. Given that teams tend to swell as games develop and projects try to complete, the problem that developers have is facilities. The rent in an office in Leamington Spa is considerably cheaper per square foot than it is in central London, and games being as they are longer-term projects than your average piece of post-production work or TV ads, the economics come down on the wrong side for a development company. Centrally located developers tend not to last because they can't pay the rent.

The upshot is that a lot of companies big and small end up trying to hire people permanently, or on a rolling contract at the very least. Be they big publishers, or mid-size developers, the juggle between people hiring and rent keeps them in an awkward middle ground of pass-the-parcel either within teams, or between teams. It's the middle way.

The problem with the middle way is that it is not flexible. When your company is permanently committed to having a staff and possibly a tools division, requisite administration staff, and so on, it becomes a lot less flexible again. Companies of that size have to become much more formalised affairs, but at the same time the atmosphere in these companies can become like silos, as I mentioned in my last article.

There are several potential solutions to this problem, though each is not without its downside.

The first is Don't Grow. Develop a working structure that means you simply refuse to hire new staff for almost any reason. Some jobs (like audio, or dialogue) can be contracted out ad hoc as needs be anyway, so you do that, but in the main you keep a fixed number of artists, programmers, designers and so on plus or minus the odd guy. What a company that does this is doing is creating a family environment where everyone is in it for the long haul, and such companies adopt the 'It's done when we say it's done' approach. 3D Realms, for instance, would appear to be pursuing this strategy - but it does mean Duke Nukem Forever may take an Ice Age to turn up.

The second solution is Find a Steady Income. Game development is not, by nature, a steady income business. It's a pulse-driven business, where large cash injections cover long periods of losses (if all goes well) and therefore difficult. Steady incomes do exist, however, and they are called 'subscriptions' and 'pay-to-play'. Subscription-based gaming is becoming a more and more interesting proposition as time goes on, catering as it does to loyal long-term customers and focussing on a gradual but steady wad of cash coming in the company doors. MMOGs are one example, but so too are the huge rise in the likes of poker sites, niche games like Puzzle Pirates, and accessing another world in Second Life.

The third solution is Grow Like All Crazy. Rather than remaining modest, in this strategy you hoover up investor cash, Wall Street cash, whatever you can and you create twenty teams, each passing around common resources like animators. This strategy basically demands that the developer find a usable product line that can fund such an expansion (A GTA or a FIFA), and then pour the cash into opening offices world-wide, creating large teams etc, and becoming a publisher. EA do this. Take Two have taken to doing this since they struck it lucky. Unfortunately this isn't a solution that many have the opportunity to use, but it is a solution for the lucky few. Whether it works or not is another question, as such growth tends to mean importing full corporate structure and a whole management class pretty darn quickly, and that can have devastating effects.

The fourth solution is Look To India. Outsourcing, basically, in one form or another involves trying to defray the costs of all this by getting cheapo lackeys to do it overseas where everything costs so much less and they are increasingly very well educated. It's a solution that several companies are pursuing vigorously, and one that they are also discovering is not as easy as it first looks. Outsourcing typically requires a lot of hand-holding and a heavily focussed management, and even at that is questionably reliable at best.

The fifth solution is Pay For Work, Not For Time. In this scenario, the development company stays very small, focussed on production and design and core technical staff only, and everything else is sought elsewhere. However, rather than the typical 6-month-contract staff approach, the company contacts individuals (or vice versa) and contracts them for individual pieces of work based on flat fees. Rates are negotiated as in business, and payment on completion according to strict criteria ensures work quality. This is the Stubbs the Zombie method, basically, and though Stubbs itself didn't really fly as a game, the method itself has strong potential, as it doesn't need large offices or facilities. Most everyone in game development has a home PC of their own, after all, but why oh why game development companies aren't taking advantage of that fact is a mystery.

The sixth solution is Devolution. This relatively new piece of thinking has it that the traditional silo-structure of companies doesn't really match up with the far more flexible knowledge worker of today and tomorrow. Rather than having teams where 60% of the staff are relatively idle (as an aggregate), what the development company does is split itself into several companies along discipline lines rather than project lines. So you have an audiovisual company (art and animation), a tools company, an engine company, a design company, a sound engineering company, and all these companies maintain a high degree of autonomy, though still connected to the whole through a central administration and production company. The different companies are responsible for their own profit and loss, and this means that they go out and look for work. So when the audiovisual company is not particularly busy working on the company's internal project, it can be busy working as a for-hire anim studio. Designers can consult, tools companies can make software and sell licenses to other studios, and so every discipline becomes a part of the value chain in and of itself.

The seventh solution is Game City, where the development and publishing industry centralises to the point that there is no one single developer any more. This solution is esentially like 'what would happen if al the companies devolved in the London area at once'. What would happen is that all the separate companies would become so nimble among each other that the industry would become completely broken down into sub-blocks freely moving among one another, and this is possibly what will happen by default in the long run.

Either way, I don't envy development companies one bit as things currently stand because the current way that pressures work serve to eventually drive the best and brightest out of the industry into IT, film, and any other industry where security, compensation and other factors are far better and more sensibly organised. It's a tough road ahead for many.

OpenEngine

2006-02-21T19:02:00.000Z

A recent discussion that I've been having on a private industry forum regarding openness and secrecy has gotten me thinking about the issue of secrecy and openness in game development, and I've come to the conclusion that the industry could really do with opening up a lot. I'm especially talking about codebases, game engines and tools.

You've heard it before, both from here and other places, that a huge portion of the effort that happens across many developers is this issue that they continually reinvent the wheel. Most development teams, whether independent companies or in-house publisher teams, spend a great deal of time redesigning game engines, making tools on top of tools, and essentially managing these huge code beasts that they then intend to use to to make multiple games.

In many cases, the actual usage value of these engines is limited, especially in re-use, and so while you will see multiple games built upon the same base, the base itself changes over time to the point that it eventually has to be redesigned. This is a classic symptom of a closed-shop mentality, because it relies on the judgement of a few programmers and designers (who may move on, new ones get recruited etc) and it basically means that all the work done is special-case.

The biggest solution to this problem that has been mooted is, of course, middleware, ranging from the simple end like a plug-in rendering engine or a bit of physics code, to the full solution like Unreal 3 or all the bells and whistles of Renderware. However, there are two pretty large problems that middleware encounters which really detract from its status as a real solution.

The first is that it tends to be expensive. Middleware isn't just an application package that you license for use in your company in general. It tends to be a per-title license, for a huge fee (north of a million bucks) or a tasty cut of sales, or some combination of the two. That means that the middleware solution usually costs as much as the development of own-generated software anyway.

The second issue is whether it's really any good. Many programmers that I know are unhappy with working with middleware because they end up having to figure out what it does for a long time and then realise which bits of it don't work. Support becomes a real issue for middleware as a result, as does openness over how it works, how to evaluate its usefulness in regard to your game's needs, and so on.

At its root, I think that the problem that developers have with the cost of their technology is a solvable one, but it's one that they've generated for themselves. The reasons that many developers hold on to their technology with such secrecy and closed-shop mentalities (and keep re-inventing that wheel) basically derives from the belief that having their own engine technology is a valuable asset for the company. A codebase makes up a part of their intellectual property, in their eyes, and is therefore something to be treasured and protected. Many developers essentially look to id, Epic and Valve and see that those companies are making a good fist of licensing their technology, and in the truest tradition of the industry they seek to emulate that success.

IP

Let's start with why developers are so concerned over IP, and what IP IS exactly.

According to wikipedia, "Intellectual property (IP) refers to a legal entitlement which sometimes attaches to the expressed form of an idea, or to some other intangible subject matter. This legal entitlement generally enables its holder to exercise exclusive rights of use in relation to the subject matter of the IP. The term intellectual property reflects the idea that this subject matter is the product of the mind or the intellect, and that IP rights may be protected at law in the same way as any other form of property."

IP is a handle often used in the games industry (especially in the last few years) and has basically become synonymous with the idea of 'value'. Companies that have IP have value. That means that they have an appreciable price tag that is born out in the marketplace, where development companies that manage to generate their own IP are highly valued, whereas those that are pure license houses are not.

Let's be clear on this, though. 'Generate their own IP' means conceive of an original idea, get it funded, get it made, retain the rights to it, sell it in stores and make enough of a splash with it to warrant a sequel. And that's what gives the company its value and usually makes a publisher come calling with a chequebook.

Developers and publishers also treat the software that underpins their games as part of their intellectual property. The idea goes that since the software is part and parcel of the package, it therefore follows that it too is IP. This rather romantic notion does not really bear up to scrutiny, however.

Firstly, the value of an IP is not in the code that runs it. It's in the brand, and this is demonstrable with the longest-running franchises in the world. Zelda and Mario, for instance, are brands. There are many games that they have featured in, and the code of all those games has differed radically over the years. There is not a stitch of code from Super Mario Brothers left in Mario Sunshine. It's the characters that are the property. The same is true with most franchises good and bad.

Secondly, the price of developers that have created their own engine tech but no good games from it is vastly lower than those that have used existing engines to create amazing games (such as Rockstar). A lot of developers operate under the idea that the codebases etc have inherent value, but the market tends to not bear this out. While middleware vendors who have specifically created their engines and tools with the intent of having others use them do generate value, an engine developed for a particular game usually requires so much work to be made generally useful that in fact it has very little real value.

So what you have is a load of developers who have a lot of codebases that do broadly similar things in different ways, who regard all this code as an intellectual property. That it may be in the most literal sense, but it's a worthless property for most. It never gets sold to anyone and so it has no value.

Worse, the continual maintenance and rewriting and redesigning of said 'intellectual property' is actually a net drain, so the intellectual property becomes like a decrepit old building that's always in need of repair, built on land of very little worth.

The Development Silo
So it doesn't make a lot of sense, I think we can agree, to pour millions of dollars in hundreds of companies down a collective drain so that they all do roughly the same job as each other. Indeed it does not, but it's exactly the sort of result that emerges when companies don't talk, and that describes development companies to a tee.

There is a lot of back-channel talk in game development, such as secret industry forums etc, but in the official light of day, developers do not talk to each other. Most development houses, whether independent or inside a publisher, are protective, insular affairs where real information is at a premium, and they tend to develop their own fairly neurotic cultures. It doesn't help that these developers tend to be located in remote areas (like Rare's famous barns in the middle of the countryside, or EA Chertsey), but mostly the neurosis comes from habitual secrecy.

Development companies are like ICBM silos. Rumours filter in, information comes guardedly from the top down, and suspicion of what the other silos are doing is rife. Everybody's got their big missile (or IPs if you like) as against the eventual day when it's put to use, but in fact it never does get used. In most silos you have the warily suspicious who are looking to get promoted to a better silo, you have the unquestionably loyal who stick close to the letter of the place and hear no outside argument, and you have the powerless grunts who know that sooner or later the place is going to get bombed or decommissioned.

The problem with the silo mentality is simply that it encourages narrow perspectives. Drips of news that come via gamasutra or gi.biz are treated with over-compensated importance, and the silo fuels the imaginary arms race. We must have bigger and better shaders, we must have more and more horsepower, we must have more realism and kinetics and whatever other nonsense phrases because the other guys do. This causes numerous problems:

1. It means that evey developer feels that they must do everything themselves if at all possible.
2. It means that developers must retain artificially large staff levels all the time.
3. It means that that developers spend an inordinate amount on recruiting new talent and training them up.
4. It means that the culture eventually encourages the brightest sparks in the company to leave.
5. It means that making games becomes massively expensive.
6. It means that there's a lack of trust both internally and externally
7. It means that the developer is weakened in the eyes of the rest of the industry, and can have terms dictated to it so much more easily.

But mostly, silos encourage developers to regard each other as enemies rather than fellows because they come to believe that they are in competition with each other. Silos are good only for the companies that exist at the top of the food chain, the manufacturers, but in practise, silo-ification is bad for everyone else. But when you have an in-grained narrow perspective that dates back to the 80s, it's hard to convince some developers of that. They witter on about the good nature of competition etc while watching their prospects sink like stones.

Bunker busters
Many developers still have a very 80s sense of capitalism and competition which the silo mentality creates. In the rest of the world, collaboration has become a part of regular business, particularly collaboration on underpinning technologies. Groups of companies regularly come together to try and solve common problems that enable their whole industry to flourish because they understand 'Game Theory'.

Not as in the theory of game design. The theory of how multiple collaborators can work together toward common goals and common benefit as pithily explained in the movie 'A Beautiful Mind'. Game theory holds that there are many situations in business where competition is harmful to all sides.

The classic example is 5 guys and 5 girls hanging out in a park. The 5 guys each fancy one of the 5 girls. They have two choices. They can compete against each other to try and get one of the girls, but that is as likely to produce a result for none of them despite a lot of effort as the girls get repulsed by such blatant posturing. On the other hand, they can work as a team, in the hope that their co-ordinated and much more effectively targeted practises will net a result for all of them.

Game theory is the idea that underpins the DVD Forum, for instance. A whole lot of companies involved in movie-making could have gone all their own ways. They could have produced a dozen disc formats, all with proprietary content, on proprietary technology, but the upshot of that would be that nobody wins. By collaborating toward a common goal, the movie studios and the hardware owners created a market in which everybody wins, everybody is able to make more money individually than they would have if they had not con-ordinated. It's capitalism, because Warner Brothers and Fox are each still competing to sell their movies, but it's a positive kind of capitalism.

Similarly, HTML, various technical standards, the Human Genome project, OpenOffice, Firefox, many other collaborated technical efforts produce positive results, and they do so far more nimbly than silo solutiuons. A healthy dose of game theory is, ironically, exactly what the games industry needs. Collaboration between developers is vital, openness is vital, honest information flow is vital.

OpenEngine
And the form that that collaboration should take is that of a common-ground development engine and tools. As I was talking about a few dozen paragraphs above, the process of building and maintaining and redesigning every developer's own personal engine system is a massive drain on each of their resources. Middleware is an expenisve solution that all too often solves nothing. But a collaborated engine, possibly even an open source engine, is a concrete way to get away from that. Developers may be in competition with each other to get publishing contracts, but they could save themselves an absolute fortune if they decided to collaborate on the technical basis of their industry at the very least. If Warner and Fix can do it, why can't we?

Some of the benefits of this effort are:

1. Better engine
What many of the open source community have found is that exposure of code to a relatively non-political environment has remarkable effects in terms of honesty of opinions and innovative solutions. Put more simply, the more exposure the software has, the easier it becomes to fix what's wrong.

2. Focussed staff
Not less staff, but better-used staff. One the one hand it means that staff can mnore directly be applied to the problems of production rather than endless proto-stage development. Production becomes a more standardised and efficient affair so the developer can get more done.

3. Ease of recruitment
It is far more straightforward to hire someone into a position if they have skills in the standard systems that an industry uses, and most technology industries recognise that. Unfortunately, the games industry invariably has to retrain everyone that it hires for an excessively long period of time. Every studio has its own engine, its own set of awkard tools. Imagine an industry where the tools are standarised to the point of easy. That's what openness can provide.

4. More open design
If the common-ground engine is well understood, then basing designs off its known technical constraints are also well understood, and so design becomes a more straightforward sort of affair.

5. Co-operative spirit
In the film industry it is common for producers from different companies to help each other out, do each other favours and so on. This is because film is a fairly standardised medium, established through co-operation, and so business conditions are favorable to the point that taking a punt is not always a matter of risking everything. There is no similar spirit of community in the games industry. Hollywood may be cut-throat, but the games industry's silos are in many ways much worse because they offer no flexibility. Wouldn't it be nice to see EA take a punt on a small indie game because it basically costs them very little to do so because the whole thing is developed in standard open tech?

6. Empowerment
Collaboration means that the different software houses will come to realise that they are actually all alike, that they have the same problems, and it will empower them to find solutions to them. It will also help them realise that some of the external forces, such as hardware manufacturers, are being unreasonable. Sony's PS3 devkits are, on the grape vine, a complete nightmare to work with, but nobody can say in open court what it is that's wrong with them, or indeed fix them. It's all back channels. A collaborative development industry could make Sony try harder for them rather than keeping them on its leash (which is what happens with silos)

7. Getting back to the games and not the tech
This is the games industry. The GAMES industry. Yet the amount of effort and marketing devoted to talking about the technology is ridiculous. Collaboratiom enables developers (And journalists eventually) to stop so much with the shiny-lights talk and focus on competing where it matters. Making games.

8. More focussed businesses
Similarly, it's better for the companies involved because they can focus on expanding their markets with clear objectives rather than fuzzy ones.

9. Creating an easier path into the industry
All those students studying for game degrees could be obtaining valuable skills that will eventually yield dividends for the developers.

10. Forcing commercial providers to get their act together
Standards make for a more open evaluation environment for already-established tools. For instance, hugely expenisve 3D applications. Does the industry really need all the bells and whistles of Max and Maya presented with such tediously provided interfaces that they increase the workload by a large factor? Not if it's a collaborative industry it doesn't. A collaborative industry can decide to make a *better* 3D modeling package based on what it needs rather than a general solution that's based more on what the film industry needs, but does for games sorta kinda. The same is true for all sorts of providers.

But collaboration is the key. Come on developers, make friends with each other and help yourselves out of this hole. Nobody else is going to do it for you.

Design formats for non-designers

2006-02-14T14:19:00.000Z

A question to those people who don't work in design, but rather work with it (i.e. programmers, artists, audio guys, animators, producers, dialogue writers - if we have any here -, whatever).

Game design is, as has often been stated, a fractious hotly debated and often disrespected end of the industry, and many's the time that a studio has had to face a design which is in the monolithic GDD format of no use to man nor beast.

I for one think that, much like in other industries, design could be abstracted out into a separate discipline, possibly even a separate company (I think the same is true of most disciplines in game development actually) but that for this to happen a truly standard design format needs to be developed.

Most other industries have developed a system of standardised documentation, from the architectural plan to the stitching diagram to the screenplay, and a common theme between them is that said documentation is standardised in such a way as to be useful to the craft practitioners first and foremost. Architectural plans are detailed on several levels, for instance, representing the necessary beams and electricals, but they contain none of the presentational guff for what the architect intended with the building. Screenplays are completely devoid of many of the elements of regular fiction (such as telling us how the character is supposed to feel) and are a literal image-by-image account of what the film is on-screen.

We lack this standardised approach in the industry. As I've blogged about before at length, design documentation in video games tends to be a pell mell mix of descriptions, business references, woolly ideas of how AI works, marketing spiel, maps, lots of paragraphs about how things are supposed to feel, what players are supposed to think etc etc and so on all put together in a haphazard way with the result that they are often not read. They tend not to serve their purpose as a result, and instead appear to please only other designers.

So

What do you need to see in a design?
What do you not need to see in a design?
Do you prefer having one document, do you prefer having lots of smaller docs per discipline?
What format would like to read a design in?
How big or small should it be?
How literal vs explanatory should it be?

Please try and be as specific and detailed as possible in your answers.

Game 5.0

2005-12-19T18:27:00.000Z

A little theory that I'm working on:

Game 1.0 is abstract videogames with minimal or no aesthetic form (or 'fiction' as Jesper Juul defines it) beyond simple representation, where the objective of the game is contest-based, and essentially overtly like real world games and sports. Examples: Tetris, Chess, Virtua Fighter 2, FIFA, Counter Strike, Battlefield 2. The largest minority of video games past and present are probably game 1.0.

Game 2.0 is where the fiction acquires a purpose. In either exploratory or led forms, the universe that the player is playing within acquires more than just functional representation, and the player may well start to make play choices that result from emotive rather than analytical concerns. Players come to love and hate characters within the game itself (if there are any), and the game does not necessarily have an overall goal (although it usually does). Examples: Ico, Elite, Grand Theft Auto 3, Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Halo (single player), Resident Evil and Starcraft (single player). Game 2.0 games also make up a large minority of the video game lexicon, and between 1.0 and 2.0 we have probably over 90% of games today. Some games have aspects of both 1.0 and 2.0 like Halo's single player and deathmatch modes.

Game 3.0 sees the player affecting the fiction in a self-motivating manner, as it involves taking on the mindset of the creative and the carer. While the challenge element may still be present within game 3.0, the concept of winning or completion is much reduced or non-existent as compared to the over-arcing involvement ethic. Character empathy may still be a strong influence within the game, if the game has strong characters within it. Examples: Sim City, Animal Crossing, Startopia, Nintendogs, The Sims, The Movies.

Game 4.0 moves the player into the realm of a society. While other versions permit players to play with or against each other (teams in Counterstrike, co-op mode in Halo, item trading in Animal Crossing), game 4.0 expands the fiction to include the multiple, often many multiple, and so the fiction takes on a life of its own largely outside the creator's purview. This can also happen with game 3.0 (people coming up with novel uses of The Sims to create houses of horror spring to mind) but the difference is that game 4.0 is completely beyond the control of any one person. While creators or maintainers of the game may add to or modify the underlying structure of the game, the resulting landscape rarely comes about as predicted. Examples: Planetarion, Ultima Online, World of Warcraft, EverQuest and Second Life.

So why the numbers?

Well it's as good a grouping as any, and corresponds very very vaguely to the order in which they emerged as forms. (I know that some people might start dragging out a million historical examples, such as trying to pin down when the first MUSH came about, but again, I mean it in a loose sense).

There's also a sense of progression behind the order, in the sense that the key trait that it highlights is the ever-growing development of fiction in the video game, and the stalling of the abstract and the mechanical concerns. It does not mean to imply a sense of new-killing-old however, as that would be a preposterous statement given a cursory examination of the shelves in any games store. Game 1.0 and game 2.0 rule the roost there.

No, the key point here is talking about how the fictional element of a video game has gone from an abstract representation of something to shoot at to a multi-layered player-created world, and how this fundamentally changes the relationship of player, game, goal, gameplay and so on. It highlights how the terminology and ideas that underpin one version do not necessarily hold for another.

Game 1.0 is wholly dependent on gameplay, for example, because the whole structure is an abstract simulation designed to encourage players to compete and to win (or survive as long as possible). Game 1.0 advocates therefore champion gameplay and gameplay innovation over everything else. Control, response, reaction and rules are the things that really matter in game 1.0.

Game 2.0 also relies on gameplay, but the sense of gameplay is different. In game 2.0, gameplay comes to mean the broader idea of progression, of specific threaded challenges that can be set up one after another and which might even involve rule changes of the sort that goes against the concept of game 1.0. Discovery, opening up the fiction of the game to see what's there, is what keeps game 2.0 interesting. As a result, game 2.0 can survive and prosper on entirely non-innovative gameplay as long as the fiction is interesting.

Game 3.0 relies more on interaction than gameplay in the 1.0 or 2.0 sense, in that a breadth of options and creative tools constitute the game, and while the fiction of the game is mutable and reactive, it is not so in the sense of stated kill-or-be-killed goals. The play in game 3.0 consists partially of unlocking the fiction, but more about learning how to use the fiction. Game 3.0's play is centered on creativity and maintenance as its main goal.

Game 4.0's play is almost entirely reliant on the players and the society that they create. While the rules and structures of game 4.0 might help to induce certain styles of play (like levelling up), these often give way to purely social interaction, and creative group behaviours. The furthest along type of this game are efforts like Second Life, where all pretence of the need for such rules - except for an incentivising economy - are abandoned. In Second Life, players are encouraged to just be. Evaluating game 4.0 on the basis of game 1.0's sense of gameplay is therefore completely meaningless.

There is also a huge difference in players between each of the 4 versions, which is something that often goes unrecognised. The games industry and hobby are notoriously loose with their langauge and terms that mutate depending on the speaker and the listener.

The ur-phrase of the industry, 'gamer', is one that is about as misleading and ill-understood as it gets (and the subject of endless raging miscommunications masquerading as debate on the internet). What one MMOG player means when he's talking about what gamers like, for instance, is worlds apart from an arcade freak who loves his Streetfighter 2. They may both play games, but what they even mean by the word 'game' is enormously different. As such, I think these 4 types of game describe not only four different concepts of play, they also describe 4 types of gamer.

Type I gamers are probably best called 'competitors'. They are only interested in the competition, in the abstract scores and the achievements associated with that. To the competitor, whether the space invaders are ships or apples is unimportant, whether the two teams in Counterstrike are terrorists or dancing Scotsmen isn't really relevant. And whether the opposing sides in Chess are silent or scream when taken just doesn't register as more than a momentary giggle.

Type II gamers are better called 'adventurers'. Their general motivation is exploration, discovery, and getting to the end of the game if there is one. This may or may not involve a story or some other narrative thread, but the key is that these gamers are engaged with the fiction of the game as much as the abstracts. Adventurers tend to dislike games that break the 'spell' by reminding them that they're not in a fiction, but are rather just playing with a set of virtual objects.

Type III gamers are better called 'growers'. They're playing their games because they want to play with them rather than against them, to make and do and look after the game like an organic pet or toy. They may want to defeat the challenges in the game, not to win, but so that their creation can be better.

Type IV gamers are better called 'actors'. They're playing to be a part of the game, which can mean active roleplay or (more often) as an extension of themselves via an avatar in another place. They form relationships, bonds, engage in teamwork, sometimes fight, sometimes build, and essentially just become a part of the fiction itself.

None is the true 'gamer' and none of them holds precedence over the other, though they do fight each other and call each other names out there in webland. They're all gamers, but they're as completely different as hip hop and metal fans, and each attracts its own cultural tropes, its own gender balance, its own type of media coverage and so on.

The types are also not wholly exclusive. I think I'm an adventurer for instance, but I am sometimes partial to a bit of FPS deathmatching, the odd racing game, and I used to very much enjoy a multiplayer game of Medieval Total War.

Now who wants to have a go at the fun part?
Game 5.0

PS:This is probably my last post before Christmas as I'm flying back to Dublin for some family celebrations and old-friends shenanigans. So a Happy Christmas to all!

John Spencer RIP

2005-12-18T20:02:00.000Z

At least once every other day, my girlfriend and I sit down to watch a batch of The West Wing on DVD and experience genius. The first three and half years especially are pure gold, and even though the series did decline somewhat in the post-Aaron Sorkin/Thomas Schlamme/ Rob Lowe era into a more event-driven politics show, it has remained a firm favourite. In particular, I have always had a strong affection and affinity for Leo, the chief of staff, a father figure played by the amazing John Spencer. So I'm greatly saddened to hear that Spencer died recently.

But there's a little more to it than that for me on a personal level. I've always identified with this actor more because he reminds me of my father. There are some striking parallels. He was 58, my dad is 63. He was a recovering alcoholic as is my father. They're both actors, and they both have that post-AA way about them that can be inspiring and infuriating in equal measure. What was amazing about Spencer's portrayal of Leo was of course that he could bring so much of himself to the role (or so I believe) and in many ways the character seemed to be the most realistic portrait of a recovering alcoholic that I've ever seen.

The tragedy of it of course is that Spencer was only 58 when he died, and that frightens me for my own family. While change is inevitable and death comes to us all, we always want to think "not yet". We always want to stave off the inevitable present where things change irrevocably, but there is nothing that we can do to stop it. The challenge in change is not that it comes. We grow sick, our loved ones get killed in car crashes, our kids die of leukemia, we get AIDS, we lose a leg, we lose our financial worth. The challenge is how we deal with it.

In writing this post, I'm trying to write out my thoughts to understand what feels like an abstract loss and yet a personal one. John Spencer the actor, the man who lived in Los Angeles, meant very little to me. John Spencer the archetype who filled a heroic role in my daily life meant a lot. Mythology and story have always played that important role in our minds, and mine is no different. We relate to the media space as a mirror of ourselves, both in the news and in fiction, and this is why it matters to us so much. This is why there are outpourings of grief when symbols die (like Princess Diana).

So I've lost a symbol, and that makes me very sad. I've also felt the closeness of death in a strange way as it makes me reflect on what I have within my life, how my real-life Leo that is my father is important to me, and I don't want to lose him yet. It makes me reflect on the importance of the present (see previous post) and how this really is all that we have. In a year that has seen a lot of symbolic 'good' people die, this is a poignant and personal way for it all to end. And I do hope it is the end.

So, yes, I hope that Spencer rests in peace and found peace in his life. I hope that we can all find that sort of peace in our lives and find a means to become what we can be and what we are meant to be. I hope that we are all able to understand the challenge of change when it comes, and we can all live for today. AA teaches that living for each day is important, a faith in the wider picture is important, and the present is important.

Live in the present, my friends.
Live.

Uncreativity and Generation Zero

2005-12-12T22:06:00.000Z

So I'm having an msn chat with a friend of mine all about why there are so many license movies and games these days. Specifically, I'm talking about movies like the entirely blah Narnia, and he's pimping the teaser trailers for Superman and the new X-men film. Remakes seem to be everywhere, in music, in film, in re-set comics universes and games. Licenses likewise. It seems impossible to get a new idea out of the gate these days if it is not based on something that is already known.

We hit onto the topic of creativity in general. Weirdly, given the amount of power that recognition value seems to hold over us, we live in a time when we are inundated with creative options. We have PDAs to write our novels, DV cameras to make our movies, software that can create virtually any music that we choose, programming languages to create any game we can think of. We have the broadcast means via the internet, p2p networks and so on. We are literally sitting on an embarassment of creative riches.

Our societies similarly have come to embrace openness of thought and idea in ways that were impossible for previous generations. From this modest-priced PC in my room I can access a vast library of information. I can get news from anywhere, I can find discussion groups and forums on any subject. I can order any tool that I need and the modern media is highly free thinking in any one of a dozen directions. I can read anything and I can write anything, and no subject is taboo. I have gay friends, Buddhist neighbours, an empowered vegetarian girlfriend, it's all going on.

And yet we seem to be a profoundly uncreative generation. In the games industry the hot topics of new game creation all center around product design methodologies. In film, it's focus groups and properties. Music seems built on three pillars these days: the pop cover, the dance remix and the hip-hop rip-off. It goes further than this. We seem to have lost the idea of creativity with depth, so a lot of the material that is original is corny and based not exactly in the recognisable, but close enough. Like WW2 games that seem to spend their days copping a feel of Private Ryan's nuts. Or the Incredibles.

There are even a few noble examples amongst all this. My previously cited example of the new Galactica show is good one. The X-men movies actually make a good fist of it too, and some of those dance remix/resamples are cracking tunes. The Zelda games continue to inspire. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comic is basically a really cool mash-up.

Our society reflects a strange dichotomy of the possible and the old though. You will see more superhero movies, you will see Terminator 5. You have seen an exploitation of the Exorcist property and the Omen remake is around the corner. Where the film-from-a-book was often a derided practise except in Kubrick's hands (and he basically remade them from the ground up), now we are reviewing and praising these films based on how faithful they are to the source material - regardless and seemingly unaware of how bad or good the resulting movie is (usually turgid).

And here's another realisation. This past-mining trend works. It works and it works really well. Between the combined sales of DVDs, theatre tickets and merchandise tat, a known property can make an absolute fortune. We are not Generation X, we are Generation Retro. We think almost subconsciously about our entertainment in terms of whether we recognise it first and foremost. We objectivise what we see, which almost ruins the chances of good ideas making a splash, and we almost 100% predictably plum for recognition over new.

Some of this is wrapped up in sales technique, no doubt, because it's easier to make a trailer that starts with 'from the novel by' or 'from the creator of' or 'inspired by the hit show' or whatever. I don't blame the studios for buying into a trend that is palpable, because they are there to make a profit.

It seems to me that the problem lies with us ourselves. Despite our liberal outwards and our new society which values multiculturalism and our new technology that literally places the world and our talents at our fingertips, it seems we are in fact an incredibly conservative generation. This may come as no surprise to some, I guess, but it seems as though not only have we opted for safe over strange, we've done so to such an extent that we've forgotten what strange is.

Maybe the root of the uncreative problem is the embarassment of options itself. Maybe it's a profound lack of a spiritual connection that our generation seems to have tapped into robbing us of any sense of courage for the future. Maybe there's some weight to the idea that art and suffering are very deeply linked, or maybe the problem is that we are so media literate now that we only understand reference.

Ironically, if we look a bit further back into the past, we can see that this sort of thing has happened before many times. Modernism constituted a reaction against a staid late Victorian mentality. Postmodernism constituted a reaction against a conservative and violent 40s and 50s. Romanticism was a quite revolution against the intricate establishment aesthetic of its day by re-introducing natural poetry over highly knowing referential poetry before it. The creative bubble of society seems to wax and wane depending on trying to get out from under the binding and increasingly brittle precepts of the old.

Generation Retro seems to me to be the tail end of the postmodern idea. What started out as a movement to break down the intricate symbolism of the past has now resulted in a generation that reveres a set of disconnected symbols instead and has gotten to the point that self-reference is built not on witty ground, but on the ground of faithful recreation and solemnity. How ironic in and of itself that many have chosen to call this decade the 'Noughties' when they are anything but. More like the 'Zeroes'.

And yet even calling for a change of ideas and new theories is in and of itself a postmodern idea. It's objectivising the creative, no matter what level you look at it from, to say 'what we need is a new Romanticism'. In the age of everything recycled, even thinking in the terms of 'what we need is a' is already buying into self-defeat and propagation of the product design/IP idea. It's a profoundly non-new way of thinking to say that what you need is a new way of thinking. Everything becomes a new branding exercise or theoretical discussion or Wired trend. A few have tried punching through the barrier, such as the transhuman idea or the posthuman idea, or even the transmodern 'bring back spirituality' idea, but these are all still inherently postmodern notions. It's all still mash-up, it's not creative.

There's one idea in Buddhism that particularly intrigues me, which is the idea of turning the mind off. Buddhism in general fascinates me, but in particular I had always assumed that meditation was in fact the act of quietening the mind by essentially taking the time to close your eyes and let your thoughts sort themselves out. Not so. Buddhism seems intent on dissolving the conscious mind in total, or rather, allowing a kind of true consciousness to emerge rather than a mind-dependent awareness. Buddhism seems to advocate a stance that most of us are actually unaware and unconscious all the time, that our minds and our egos are so busy reasoning and rationalising everything that we have no true awareness.

I think that there's something in this idea as regards Generation Retro, because the second thing that I've picked up from this is that the main reason that the mind is so engaged is because we fear change. We like control, we like our computers that we never use, our PDAs that sit idle for months on end, our PSPs that become toys for about three months and our DV-cams that we use all of twice. We like the sense of power over our own destiny that all this capability brings, but what we don't like is change. The reason that the retro-themed marketing works so well on us is that we want it to remind us of safety. It's a scary world out there, after all.

Mostly, what I think I'm talking about here is connecting with faith and instincts here. Not so much faith in God, just faith in faith. And instincts as in learning to understand what we feel rather than what we say to ourselves that we feel. There is an expression which says "Those who know don't speak, and those who speak don't know" which is humourously relevant to me while typing all this, perhaps telling me how little I know (after all, I am quite the talker).

Does it even matter that we are an uncreative generation anyway. The world is wracked by AIDS, impending wars, oil shortages and hurricanes. Does it matter so much that Joe on the street likes to go watch Narnia and maybe think back to nicer times?

Yes, I think that it does. Quite aside from the psychological unhealthiness of the symbol of living in the past, and the flip side that the technology promise makes which constitutes living in the future, we seem desperately unable to connect with reasons to live in the present. With all manner of Office-style grind on display and an increasingly vaccuous middle ground in most areas of society, I think creativity matters very much. I think self-acknowledgement matters a whole hell of a lot too, and we're losing track of both. Depression is up, stress is up, terror from planes crashing into office blocks leaves us unable to raise a passionate and clear argument as to why torture is a bad idea. We're all off in a hundred other places other than this one.

Generation Retro is all about being elsewhere.
Generation Zero could be about being right here.

So what is it I'm saying? That we need a new way to think?

No, I'm saying that thinking is the problem. Reasoning and rationality is itself the problem. Articulating meaning and quantifying creativity is the problem. Methodical attitudes are the problem. Self-prescribed rule structures for how things are made is the problem. Reference itself is the problem. Reaching to define our new era with the tools of the old is the problem. Casting creative efforts in an IP/genre/X meets Y framework is the problem.

We need to stop being overly rational and media-aware and start becoming conscious and actually-aware. Unlike in the modernist era or the post-modernist era, the pressing need of today is not to frame our era nor understand the frame. The pressing need is to stop looking at the frame and start looking at the picture. Stop recasting ourselves in the cloaks and symbols of bygone decades and start realising that we don't live in the 20th century any more. We should be conscious of the present, centered in the present and engaging with the present and leave the past and future be for a while.

The Three Rs

2005-12-07T08:00:00.000Z

A revolution is a moment in history when the existing political order gets up-ended entirely, new thinking and a new sense of values, power and social order emerge, and is often preceded by violence or generally associated with same. For example, the French Revolution.

A reformation is in many ways the opposite of that idea, as a reformation is an attempt on the part of one or several segments of a society to reassert an original set of founding ideas or aesthetic and essentially re-establish what was (or what is believed to have been). Again, often violent in nature, although a restoration is a gentler form of reformation. For example, the Protestant reformation of 16th century Europe.

A renaissance is somewhere between these two extremes, and usually non-violent. A renaissance is essentially a period of rediscovery of older ideas, but also of putting those older ideas into new uses. Renaissances don't, on the whole, involve the large scale return to the old ways that reformations do, nor up-ending everything like revolutions, but rather pick and choose the best of the old and make some great new as a result. Such as, of course, the renaissance.

So which way is the video game headed?

Well, on the one hand we have the Revolution on the way (although whether it actually is a revolution or not is an open question). On the second hand, we have quite a few seriously 'old skool' indie developers trying to get us all back to the way things were, which might be classed as reformation. Lastly, we see the re-issuing of some old classics in new forms (Prince of Persia, Resident Evil 4), which might, at a push, be called renaissance games.

Is the video game heading any of these ways?

Game City

2005-12-02T16:51:00.000Z

I've been talking to a friend of mine about his job and having been in it only a short while, he thinks that he's not gong to stick it out because of the commute. For reasons that are non-negotiable, he's not able to move close to the job, but he's able to get there via car or train. This being Britain though, that basically means a 4 hour round trip. I sympathise, and I asked him whether they would allow him to distance work for some or all of the week. He doubts it.

In Britain especially, game developers and publishers have a singularly annoying tendency to locate themselves off the beaten track, preferring to set themselves up in small towns and on the edge of cities and so on right across the whole country. There are usually a combination of reasons for this. The first is the cost of renting, but the second is usually something like it's the company founders' home town (especially in smaller companies). Thirdly is the confusion that many developers and publishers seem to still experience over identity. They want to be like entertainment companies in the marketplace, but still instinctively use much of the methodology of software engineering firms without realising the enormous differences. The games industry is an entertainment business, not a technology business. It's amazing how many developers still don't accept that.

This is the sort of behaviour that is fine for young startups, but there's a real problem that the industry has to face up to, which is that development staff tend to move around between companies because of costs, but they also get older, form relationships and families, and it's unrealistic for companies to expect them to move house every year from Aberdeen to Cardiff, Cardiff to Brighton and Brighton to Birmingham any more.

At the same time, it's unreasonable for the prospective employees to look for long term (or even permanent) employment contracts with games companies any more, because of the costs issue. This is what leads to a strange scenario where games companies are on the hunt for staff who'll move across the country for 6 months. Fine enough if you're a youngster, but once you hit 30 it becomes about as attractive as scabies. It's one of the chief reasons why something like 90% of games industry workers leave the industry within 6/7 years, never to return.

It's also hugely inefficient for the companies to work this way. Hiring is an expensive and time-consuming process, and has become even more so with the proliferation of employment agencies charging their 20% cut to get the people in the door. Maintaining large office spaces is also not for the financially faint hearted, and the impact on schedules from sudden departures, staff who don't work out, and sundry other reasons is hard. Finding quality staff tends to become very expensive as a twenty-year experienced programmer will charge the Earth for his services and you'll have to pay it if you want him to move to your office in Slough or Leamington Spa or Croydon. Add in travel costs to visit publishers, problems with an inability to find very short term workers (like quality sound engineers), and the companies have painted themselves into a corner where everything costs a fortune without any flexibility. Development companies (and publishers lately) can moan about costs and industry conditions as much as they like, but it's their own strategic decisions of location that breed these problems.

In the US, Hollywood is known as the place to go if you want to work in the movies. New York is the center for the financial industry, the news industry and business in general. San Francisco is where you go if you want to work in technology development. In Britain, London is where television is at. London is also where magazine publishing largely operates out of. In fact, in many industries, especially entertainment industries, a common location is vital to the relative success of everyone, and with good reason.

A common location reduces the price of doing business by encouraging flexibility.

It makes hiring staff much easier and cheaper because they demand less and are more willing to work under shorter term contracts. This allows both developers and publishers to maintain smaller facilities and thus be more flexible if projects collapse. A common location allows for a better freelance culture to emerge, which encourages workers to stay in the industry for longer. If I, as a worker, have three four-month contracts during the year then I am much more likely to be excited by the prospect if each one is commutable from my house. If, on the other hand, the first one wants me to move to Swindon, the second one to Scunthorpe and the third one to Dundee, I'm just not going to seriously entertain the idea.

Common locations increase contactability between publishers and developers, allowing for a much more co-ordinated industry. It allows for real business networks to develop and a community of companies to establish themselves. It encourages better working practises as the reduced timeframes encourage more focused work and therefore productivity. It makes the prospect of using remote workers far more palatable and therefore reduces the inherent risk of moves like outsourcing. Mostly, it encourages both competition and collaboration on a realistic level. Development companies can collaborate on projects, for example, if they're only up the road from each other, while it also facilitates the creation of service businesses like art and animation houses, design consultancies and engine specialists. A common location would encourage PR agencies to seriously court the games industry as a set of viable clients in ways that e-mail communications never do, and also encourage a more vibrant and in-touch industry media to develop.

The best part is that all over Britain, urban regeneration projects sponsored by local councils are practically crying out for industries to set up in their area, providing all manner of discounts and tax-rebates to businesses that do choose to relocate.

The big question is where should Game City exist. Realistically, it should be a major city that has international airports. It should be a city that has representation in other media industries on whom the games industry relies for much of its licensing etc. It should have good transport connections so that staff can get to and from work with a minimum of fuss. This realistically means that the Game City should probably be London, possibly Edinburgh, or maybe Manchester at the outside. Or, if anyone feels like a trip abroad, Dublin.

London is not as scary as it sounds. While the rent in London is supposedly high, south London is less expensive and is replete with councils looking to get business to move in. Southwark, for example, is only just across the river Thames and yet the rent there is really very cheap by comparison to the rest of the city. Southwark is also 15 minutes by Tube from Soho, Shoreditch and the media capital of the UK. Or there's Lambeth, Croydon, or any one of a number of areas in East and North London.

Regardless of which city and which council, the question is whether the British industry has the sense to club together for change. There is an enormous lack of trust in the British games industry, and a deep level of organisational inertia pervades many companies that have gone too far down the route of establishing many remote studios (a costly and questionable move). There has also been an enormous level of closures and company collapses in recent years in the UK, and would-be industry-wide associations like Tiga are hugely worried about the permanent prospects for UK development yet heavily mistrusted by the companies themselves.

The key word here is 'entrenchment'. The established UK games industry is too entrenched, stuck in its old form thinking and essentially being torn apart by its own intransigence. This applies to managers and employees, publishers and developers alike. They're just too cynical perhaps to do it differently. Nonetheless, I think Game City will eventually happen. Old companies will die out, new companies with more nimble philosophies will rise in their place and they won't be so tied to the old garage days mentality. There's a younger generation of creative staff who never worked in the bedroom coder universe, and they have less qualms about trying something different.

This is why I think 5 years from now the UK games industry will rise again in a new form, a better form representing a shift in the generational mindset. As the winds of the current and next generation continue to blow their harsh message, these proto-company owners are experiencing first hand what it is to work under the current regime and they know that things can work much better if they are only given a chance. That chance will come soon.

The Final Generation

2005-11-19T19:47:00.000Z

Here we go again. Hardware launches ra ra ra. Hardware-centric branding pushing a false generation war ra ra. Hardware promises co-opting the language of game developers to sell a nonsense vision (online, super-realism, emotion etc) ra ra.

Here's what the next generations are offering for real. More polys, more pixels, on-line play and a controller that lets you, you know, move stuff about on screen. Whoopdefucking do.

I am so... tired of this nonsense. I am so bored of watching the same little bit of history repeating, with the same cod arguments, the same lies, the same messages and the same complete lack of anything really INTERESTING happening. I'm tired of watching developers prostrate themselves before the temple of marketing and watching formerly perfectly good creative people turn into hollow replicants of their former selves. I'm tired of watching journalists become ever more complicit in the squeeky wheel and grease show, and I'm tired of watching an industry regularly deceive itself, blame external forces and otherwise try and pretend that nothing has ever changed.

And I'm jealous.
I'm very jealous of watching other media move on. I'm watching the new Battlestar Galactica today for the first time (always last to the party, I know) and I'm loving it. Normally I regard any remakes as suspicious (this is something that the games industry teaches you after a while) but in Galactica I'm watching a properly conceived bold attempt to really work with material to make something new. I saw Serenity the other week and had similar feelings. I watch US drama shows all the time (Lost and Rome being current favourites) and again, I am amazed at the way that this medium has moved on. And it makes me very jealous. And wanting to make my own shows - but that's another story.

It's a real Gordian Knot that the whole field of videogaming finds itself in because there are several competing forces at work here, none of which is actually healthy for the games. These forces are what drive the generation cycles. PS4 is already on someone's drawing board, as is XBOX5, DS3 and whatever else. Yet any fool can tell you that the current direction of the industry is ultimately going to lead to the death of everyone bar the hardware makers themselves.

On the one hand, the business forces have absolutely come to depend on hardware sales now and second hand sales to offset the public's increasing weariness. There's the manufacturers, whose dominance struggle is beginning to look desperate on all sides, and who are now launching new hardware seemingly every other month. There's publishers, who are increasingly looking for ways to look sweet enough to be bought because they know full well that the costs problem which killed developers by the thousands over the last three years has come knocking at their door. There's the small developers, who've gotten bought themselves, or sidestepped the main industry to go off into mobile land, casual land or budget land - and are finding the same problems there. There's the indie developers, who's belief is driven by a need to return games to their past, and who focus on making 'true' games. And at the center of all this is the sense that maybe the problem is simply that there isn't enough money to go around.

If history has taught us anything, it's that this sort of pack cannibalism is not something that can exist as a permanent mentality. With virtually everyone in the different corners of the industry now entrenched in their position and playing an extended game of Russian Roulette, the industry won't survive in the same shape in which it currently does. As with any form of media entertainment from wrestling and porn to modern art and cinema, these things have a tendency to balloon, burst and then reinvent themselves in a new form.

Well we need our reinvention, but it isn't going to happen before we balloon and bust first. This new generation, as with other generations, is just another turn of the screw. It's not something that *can* be solved by untangling the strings and everyone being reasonable (as is often expressed in forum discussions on the fate of the industry).

We see the same threads and blog posts again and again talking about the nature of the industry, and if only the industry could be made to see sense, and if only it could be made to do things in a reasonable manner, and if only and if only. It can't.

The parties are too entrenched. Like the first world war, the conflict now seems so insane, and yet the fact that the enemies of every faction are all staring each other down compels them all to fight to a bitter end that may or may never come.

Alexander the Great didn't solve the Gordian Knot. He just cut it in half with his sword. The symbol is obvious. Sometimes messes get so convoluted and mixed up that the only solution is a clean break. There are times when the only sane course of action is an unreasonable one.

So we head into generation six or seven (I forget which it's supposed to be) full of fear. Fear for our hobby, fear for our direction, fear for our jobs and livelihoods. The trench guns are firing, the mad charges have begun. The clarions are ringing around the ramparts, and there we are. You, me, a bunch of other guys, dressed in regulation hoodies and sneakers, with shaved heads, mortgage payments or rent, our thirtieth birthdays whizzing by with maybe a kid or two. We all know that it's madness, but we're going over the top anyway.

See you on the other side.

Label names

2005-11-14T13:48:00.000Z

I've gottten a lot of interesting feedback on the trade label idea, both in comments forum posts and through private email. It seems about 50/50 in replies. Some people really like the idea, some people thin it's elitism writ large. A lot of people are worried by the idea of who exactly would do the voting, and more than one poster has questioned the sheer validity of the idea at all.

Which is all fair enough.

The simple goals behind the suggested project are to draw the eyes of consumers to games, films, books and whatever that they might find imaginatively interesting. There really are no snootier ambitions to it than that.

So I've been thinking of what the name of the label could be. I wanted to something light-hearted enough that it didn't sound pretentious, something straightforward but slightly witty, but ultimately as easy-to-understand as "Fair Trade".

I like the name "Not Dumb".
What do you think?

A Trade Label

2005-11-06T02:14:00.000Z

I've had an idea in the back of my mind for a little while which I think I'll share.

One of the things that annoys me about our culture (and especially the media within it) is that there's an increasing dumbing down/juvenalisation of the whole thing. You have increasingly intelligence free music, games and so on taking up more and more of the shelf space, and the consumerism inherent in that sort of culture essentially does what it does in any other market: It makes it harder to find the more interesting, niche stuff.

I for one believe that there is such a thing as Quality in culture, an indescribable sense of creative thought manifest, from Ico to West Wing to whatever, but I think it's getting harder to figure out where the quality is at.

So I thought: In the food industry you see these specific labels now popping up, like 'Organic' and 'Fair Trade' which are intended to draw the concerned consumer's eye and point them toward quality. In the first instance, quality food, and in the second instance to let the consumer know that the food was not procured by bleeding some farmers dry. Both are successful minority initiatives. They haven't dominated the landscape, but they help.

So I'm thinking, why not start a trade label like Fair Trade which tells media-buying consumers "This media actually has some creative brains behind it and will speak to you like an adult". Not a judgement on the content from a political or whatever standpoint, but simply a message label that says "We think this is an honest attempt at art and/or entertainment".

Ordinarily that would be the province of reviews, wouldn't it?
Well in recent years it seems to me that the whole structure of reviews and review journalists has essentially become untrustworthy. There are too many rent-a-reviews floating around now to give any clear indication of anything, and while sites like metacritic provide a summary, they're still poviding a summary of a skewed data set.

So what I'm suggesting is anonymous groups of maybe 30 people over the age of 25 who evaluate pieces of media and vote whether to approve it, according to a set of criteria (there may be a group per subject, or several if it gets popular, though not split by genre). At first its unlikely that such an effort would be taken very seriously, of course, and its recommendations would likely as not just sit on a website for people to browse.

But over time the idea would be to allow the label of this group of people to be used by manufacturers under a free copyright license on approved products only, be they books, films or whatever.

Interested?

Comment spam

2005-10-11T11:03:00.000Z

I'm going to have to turn off comments for the moment to stop the spam.
If you have any comments on any articles, feel free to email me and I'll compile a proper post of feedback etc.

Cost/Benefit Analyses

2005-10-04T15:23:00.000Z

Dean Takahashi recently gave a speech questioning why it's so hard to fund videogames (Why is it so *****g hard to fund videogames) and brings up some interesting points about why the videogame sector, whose software market is worth 18 billion dollars a year worldwide, should be funded in a proportional manner to the film industry (which Dean pegs at 60 billion dollars). He especially wonders why it is that the mobile games industry seems to gain a lot of attention, despite the fact that its market is currently a good deal smaller.

Firstly, I think that Dean's got his figures for the game/film comparison wrong. It is very difficult to gauge accurately, of course, but I've read that over 3000 films had been released worldwide in 2003, and figured the size of the market to be somewhere on the order of 180 billion dollars worldwide. Dean's figure of 60 billion is, I think, the size of the Hollywood chunk of the market. So what he's doing is comparing the worldwide games industry to the American film industry, and this creates a false impression, much like comparing the games industry's total hardware and software does when comparing it only to box office revenue or something similar.

It seems that the worldwide film industry dwarfs the worldwide game software industry by a factor of ten. So that might be one reason why films get funded and games do not. On three thousand titles, the film industry makes ten times the income that maybe half the titles across all console and PC formats do.

On the other end of the scale, the mobile industry may be much smaller, but the games themselves are very cheap to produce. Mobile games are a return to retro in many ways, in quite a few cases literally through ports of old games. This allows for wide portfolios of cheap product which the consumer can then buy for what seems to them to be a small fee, yet which in reality translates to an awful lot of business for the mobile provider. It is therefore potentially a hugely profitable sector of the market, and that's why investors love it.

The key phrase here in understanding why mainstream console and PC games have it so hard is “Cost/Benefit Analysis”. It's the central phrase under which all business operates in the world today. What does the product cost? What is the potential benefit? Does one justify the other? Simple.

The cost/benefit analysis for films is a good one. Contrary to popular opinion, most films do make their money back in the long run. If you only read the popular press, it would be easy to derive the impression that a film which tanks at the box office is effectively a dead duck, and that the film industry operates on the basis of trying to score one big hit in order to pay for nine loss-makers. This used to be the way that the film industry worked back in the seventies and early eighties, but the arrival of home movie formats (like DVD, pay-perview) changed all that.

Every film that hits the cinema, no matter how bad, will then make its way onto DVD and pay-per-view. Once films have been produced, they become and eternally recyclable property, and that long view approach is the reason why films can have budgets of 200 million dollars and be considered unexceptional. A lot of films from the fifties, sixties and seventies are still making money for their owners today.

The videogame industry's problem is that their cost/benefit analysis does not work for any sort of outside investment model. Videogames are not eternally recyclable properties because the hardware formats keep changing. Videogames need to be updated, ported or emulated if they are to be kept current, and this costs too much for too little return for most publishers. The market for videogames is small, yet the costs of the games has pushed very high compared to the size of that market. This creates a cut-throat and risky market where games which get released and sell 500,000 units are in fact considered to be failures. This is why licenses and other properties hve become so important.

The film industry can turn 3000 titles a year on budgets that are unlikely to average more than 10 million dollars (think of all the Bollywood, B-Movie, Asian cinema and so on) and rake in 180 billion off the back of that.

The games industry, whose market is only ten percent of that size, should be looking to work with equivalent budgets. The average cost of a game in the PS2/Xbox/Cube era should in fact be no more than 1 million dollars. Mobile games are cheap, budget games are cheap, casual, indie and web games are cheap, and all those sectors show vitality. Console and PC games, however, are sickly, strained and increasingly pressurised because they simply cost too much to make. The cost/benefit analysis in those sectors is very bad.

If we look back to the PS1 era, it was a happier time. Game development was still a good busines to be in, with good prospects. It resulted in a lot of games, both good and bad, and a liberal investment culture where publishers were far more easily disposed to funding odd ideas and seeing what stuck. The cost/benefit analysis was good because the costs were cheap.

Today, though, the cost/benefit analysis works against us, not for us. Costs have raised 300% while the market has increased maybe 50%. Whereas companies could afford to take the hit on a couple of loss making games just to see which ones became hits, now they are terrified because every release that doesn't score big is likely to bust them. Any investor worth his salt knows a bad deal when he sees one, and the mainstream games industry of today is a bad deal.

So what's to be done?

Two things:

1.Costs must come down
2.Games must become eternally recyclable

The cost and benefit must improve.
The big question is HOW?

Nintendo: Breadth vs Depth

2005-09-16T20:50:00.000Z

I assume that I don't need to tell you the news. Yeah, the controller.

The very presentable Satoru Iwata stood up in front of the world (well, the gaming press) and unveiled a controller which aims to be as intuitive as possible, and produced a device that combines the basic intuition of a remote control with a 3D sensor arrangement that facilitates physical gaming. This is an idea that has been gaining currency in the industry for a few years (see one Eyetoy, for example).

He then made a very strong argument of the need for games companies to stay innovative above all else. Without constant innovation, Iwata claims, the games industry runs into the brick wall of boredom. If we don't stay constantly innovative, then the gamers will walk away.

Hmmm.

The reaction of the games press, blogs and forums has been (from what I've seen) overwhelmingly positive. There are a few flies in the ointment, mostly people wondering whether a controller like this is doomed by the way that might cause arm fatigue, or deadpan decriers calling it essentially a Powerglove. A few have pointed out that the big mountain to climb is that Nintendo have to convince developers to develop for it instead of, say the xbox 360, because it'll be so different that simple porting won't do it.

But on the whole, as positive as a plus sign. Everybody wants one. The Guardian gamesblog commented "Yowza - breaking free from the PlayStation benchmark or what?!" Meanwhile Kieron Gillen exclaimed "Whether they get it or not immediately divides the entire gaming universe into cowardly, tedious luddites who are perfectly happy to sit in their squat-like holes forever and Good People. If you don’t like the Revolution controller, you are fundamentally part of the problem and killing the fucking art form."

Hmmm.

Physically, I think that the object does look like a brilliant controller. I can really see how the motion that it works with will require a whole new way of thinking in game development. A classic example being the suggested beat'em'up wherein the player swings a sword. This is the sort of controller that allows for kinetic gaming within a 3D environment. So yes, it is going to be a challenge. And the fact that it will be included in every box ensures that new development will happen. It's not like a light gun or a dancemat in that respect. So a change is coming.

Hmmm.

My question is this: When does the games industry get beyond the need for novelty and grow up?

Grow up?
Yes, grow up.

Here's the thing: Nintendo are essentially painting the future of gaming as one of simulation and re-creation of activities etc. It's the natural progression from the EyeToy, from the enthusiasm for physics-based games, and so on. Increased interactivity and intuitive interactivity are very much the rage in games.

But I think that there is positive here, but there is also negative. This quest for the ultimate interactivity is leading development on a certain path, which is to attach their futures to the idea of the game that can do anything. In actual fact, every manufacturer is pushing this technology-based vision for gaming at the moment. The more fully interactive a game can get, the better.

I disagree. I think that what the interactionist camp are doing is sacrificing progression for interaction, and what they will end up doing is sacrificing the deep single player experience for a broader list of options. In otherwords, breadth rather than depth. Our gameplay may only last for two hours, but look at all the different stuff you can do.

Gillen makes the claim that people who think that the controller is a negative are killing the art. Really? I don't think so. What IS the art really? Is the art to come up with ever-more-convincing and fully featured ways of playing the same games that we've been playing for twenty years, or is the art taking the limited canvass that we have (and it will always be limited in some form or other) and actually making something with meaningful depth? I think the latter.

The thing about novelty is, it gets boring. If you're selling yourself on breadth all the time, there comes a natural terminus where you run out of options. If gamers are only used to novelty then, then THAT is when they will get bored. Battlefield 2, case in point. What on Earth is the next step forward from Battlefield 2? Even more vehicles, even more guns, even more even more even more?

Depth is what is ultimately interesting in games, not breadth. Mission design, progression, how the concept develops over the course of playing it, that is what's interesting in games. Breadth of novelty is not interesting in a long-lasting way. Eyetoy: Play is only short-term interesting unless you're one of the few who likes to master everything. Most don't, and that is where I fear the path of novelty is taking us. To jaded players who don't really find much long-term play in games, and come to assume that all games are thin.

Of course, I may be utterly wrong. It's so early in the development of this and the other consoles that it is hard to make predictions that do not sound either gushing or dire.

Well done Nintendo, you've done it again.
But what exactly is it that you've done?

Hmmm....

Gaming for Columbine

2005-09-09T20:00:00.000Z

Question: How long before someone in a studio (either publisher or developer) flips out and shoots up their office?

Actors in Games

2005-08-31T13:01:00.000Z

A few years ago, as long as ten maybe, when console and PC games entered into their CD-ROM era, videogames had actors in them. They combined film footage with gameplay, to mixed effect. You had some passably good ones, like the Wing Commander 3 and 4 stuff – which though not high drama was at least watchable – and you had some pretty awful stuff, like the interactive movie fad. And then games stopped using actors (for the most part) to tell their stories.

Obviously in some cases there was no need, like Grim Fandango, because the game was largely in the 'animated' style anyway. In many cases, games moved into the territory of trying to recreate humans for their stories using animation instead. As games increased in their technological oomph, they could get more and more realisitic characters on screen. Voice acting remained, but increasingly the action consisted of these cgi people talking and shooting and whatever.

Today, actors have all but disappeared from the visual side of games, although many are doing quite well out of the occasional voice acting work that they garner. Games like the Metal Gear series, the Grand Theft Auto series, Max Payne, Resident Evil, Halo and many others now use exclusively animated actors to tell their stories, costing millions of dollars in animation and time.

The problem is that they don't really work.

Emotional Connections

Game directors want more emotional connection in their games. Emotional connection, it is thought, is the key to games becoming successful in the wider media. If we can enjoy games on a more-than-just-fun level, then they and we are the better for it. This I broadly agree with (although not with the idea that the emotional connection is therefore a heroic one).

Cinematics and the emotional connection idea of are often closely tied. In the last few years, some of the most powerful games have featured a variety of cinematic moments. Ico and Rez, for example, use sparing but well-judged scenes to maximise impact. Grim Fandango is far more famous for its characters and story than its puzzles.

What these games, and many other like them, have in common is that the characters in them are not realistic humans. Grim Fandango's characters are all skull-dolls and big demons. Ico and Yorda are very ethereal versions of a boy and girl. Go further afield from videogames to CG animation in films and you see a similar trend. Sully, Gollum, Woody and Buzz and, yes, even Jar Jar Binks are all successful 3D animated characters who are not realistic humans.

Compare the emotional connection of those creations with any realistic human. There is a noticeable difference. Re-created humans look weird. Their lips don't quite fit, their eyes aren't quite right, their hair doesn't feel real, their body weight seems floaty. They get more and more detailed, yet still all we can seem to notice is that they're not quite correct. It bothers us.

Even today, we have the upcoming release of the Godfather game, with that picture of the CGI Marlon Brando. He doesn't look quite right, but why exactly? We watch the extraordinary lip-syncing and such in Half Life 2, and yet it doesn't quite work. It seems a little spooky, and we can't quite get into the story as we might because of it. When watching the demo video for 'Dawn of War', does anyone else find it odd that the orcs seem more real than the humans?

And yet, when we look at Monsters Inc the lip syncing of Sully with John Goodman is just as imperfect. The hair is very impressive but also seems a bit floaty. Criucially, it doesn't really bother us. We can get on and laugh and enjoy the film immensely. The same is true of The Incredibles. Whereas Final Fantasy the movie just seems very odd for reasons that we can't quite place.

Frankenstein

An animator friend of mine told me that the reason for this weirdness is nothing to do with the animation skills or technology problems. He calls it the 'Frankenstein Effect'. It's a psychological problem.

Our brains devote a lot of effort to visual processing, and of that a significant proportion is given over specifically to recognising human faces. We instincively understand faces as patterns pretty much from birth, and we associate feelings with them. Our recognition routines are very sophisticated and are what allow us to read subtle expressions, recognise people from afar, and so on. And we are able to recognise when something's not right about a face. That's how we know when people are lying to us. Wrong faces make us instinctively suspicious.

My friend's explanation is that because we are looking at realistic characters on screen, our minds instinctively move into 'human face recognition' mode, especially for close-ups etc. And because we have a lot of our mind devoted to that specific task, we are hyper aware of imperfections. The more realistic the character becomes, the more we become aware of the imperfections.

That's why The Incredibles doesn't bother us. The characters are exaggerated and their expressions are suggestive rather than simulacrum. Pretty much every successful animated character works on the basis of an exaggeraed aspect of humans. Things like huge eyes, spindly limbs and very wonky teeth etc produce exaggerated expressions, and these we emotionally respond to (Gollum, for example). Caricature artists tend to find that their customers usually recognise exaggerated versions of, say, politicians than realistic versions of same. It would seem that exaggeration and animation go hand in hand, something Disney figured out a long time ago. It gets around the Frankenstein effect. That's why the orcs look more real than the humans in that Dawn of War video.

We instinctively know the difference between art and reality. With a realistic character, our brains are all the time flagging that something is not right, and because we are in a suspicious mode, we aren't really able to emote with the character. It's hard to feel empathy for a liar.

So, the obvious question is, if you want to make game stories involving realistic people, why not do what the film industry does. Why not use actors? The usual first answer is 'transitions'.

Transitions

It was common when playing a game circa 1995-98 to have FMV (full motion video) sequences between gameplay sections of a game. You would be playing a shooting game, for example, and in between each level you'd have someone like Christopher Walken or Mark Hamill or some rent-a-day actor do their bit, followed by a long loading screen, where'd you'd go back to your character who didn't really look a lot like Walken or Hamill or rent-a-day. So it was thought that those were disassociative.

This didn't really stop Square producing Final Fantasy VII with clear differences between the animated cut-scenes and the gameplay sections. Plenty of noticeable transitions, and yet no-one was bothered. So perhaps the problem with FMV was not the mechanic of disassociation, but the material. Back in the FMV days, most game stories were just plain awful. However, the idea that the whole FMV mechanic was bad took hold because of 'transitions'.

EA's The Two Towers shows that transition issues were not that big of an issue any more. Using shots from the film of the same name, the game would then overlay the action with an animated sequence of lower quality using the same moves, and then the player would be in control. It worked very well and made for quite a fun and epic game which captured the spirit of the film. You watch Legolas fighting, you see the change into animated Legolas, and bang, you're in the action without having the time to think about loading screens.

So if transitions can now be done well and actors can be placed inside fully CG backgrounds (Sin City), then why not use actors? Why are Konami continuing to create more and realistic Solid Snakes, at greater cost, with increasing Frankenstein problems, when they could hire a half-decent action star and film their sequences to much better effect? Control.

Control

The second counter-actors argument is the idea of control. I.e. if you can fully control every aspect of the production of cut scenes, from the movement of the camera to the expressions on the characters faces, then you can get exactly what you want. You get the exact emotional impact.

There are two problems with this approach. One is that the Frankenstein effect is still present, no matter how much control you have. The second is that this much control deprives material of spontaneity, and if you want an emotional connection, then spontaneity is vital. For example, both “The Phantom Menace” and “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow” are very unemotional films to watch, but the reason why is not clear.

The scripts in both films are not great by any means, but then this never stopped many an 80s action comedy from being basically entertaining. These films should be more entertaining than they actually are, and yet they fall very flat. I'm not the first one to suggest that the reason for this is the controlled way in which they were made. Both films are almost wholly made in blue-screen, with an actor mostly delivering lines to empty air. They were both made in very controlled circumstances, in otherwords, and they lack spontaneity.

Contrast this with Sin City, also shot largely in CGI but, crucially, with a lot of group acting scenes and with some amount of sets. It was also directed in a very informal and specific way, between Rodriguez and Miller, whereas George Lucas's creation was very much “It want this. More intense. More intense. More intense” sort of direction. Sin City gave its actors enough room to breathe, and made for an excellent film as a result. Phantom Menace treated them like dolls, in much the same way as the hypothetical 'total control' argument for game cut scenes. Why would we expect any different results?

I think, secretly, we all know that we wouldn't, but that there is a larger issue that this actor issue is masking, and that is to do with control over a whole project.

Hollywood

It's easy to live in denial and say that things like the Frankenstein effect are just temporary problems, to be overcome by technology. There is no evidence of that. Games remain on the cultural margins, game stories are far less emotionally engaging now than they were in the Lucasarts adventure game days. As the technology develops to make more realistic skin tones, eyes and lips, the situation is getting worse, not better.

A good example is the promo video for Fight Night (I think) for PS3 (I think) which I saw again recently at an EA party. There's a lot of shots of fighters getting hit slowly in the face, and a speaker talking about how this is making the emotional connection more visceral and real etc. When in fact it just looks weird.

Denial is covering the real reason: The deeply held fear, especially on the part of developers, of Hollywood. In short, nobody wants the games industry to turn into the movie industry. Nobody wants movie stars calling the shots.

This is just hugely irrational. Game developers are, apparently, quite a conservative lot. They fear change. Even the indie side of the industry is largely devoted to trying to re-create the past. Game developers really don't like the idea that a Brad Pitt or a Tom Cruise might come in a make all sorts of unreasonable demands, charge a giant fee and then ride off into the sunset.

The answer to this is very simple. If you're terrified of movie stars, don't use them. There are scads of TV actors, stage actors and so on out there who'd kill for a break in a big game and they'll do what you want for reasonable fees.

It's more a reflection of our lack of experience and practicality issues as an industry that we'd think it better to spend 2 million making freakish movie sequences with not-quite humans than to just hire a few actors and facilities for a week and shoot what we need for 250K. It reflects our continuing problem with getting in touch with reality, a problem that is rife across the games industry. It also reflects a deep trust issue, also an industry staple.

The Cost

Costs more than anything else are the convincing reason to start using actors again. They are cheaper and far more 'real' than any CG Solid Snake is ever going to be. What studios need to do is get their heads around the fact that there are better and cheaper ways to do the same things, and that now that we don't really have transition problems any more, what we are doing with all of our money is essentially inefficient and unworkable.

Why go through the heartbreak and failure of trying to recreate reality for the game's story when you could simply hire a writer, a director, an editor, a blue-screen facility and some actors and just work professionally instead. And that, more than anything is why we need the actors back. The current method of realistic game storytelling does not work because the principle element is suspiciously unreal.

It's time to let the past be the past and move on from these destructive denial issues that cost so much and pay off so little.

A Game By...

2005-08-16T12:55:00.000Z

It is an accepted wisdom in the games industry that franchises are what matter. A franchise, in case you don't know, is a line of games which are held together by a common brand. Usually that brand is either a name or an identifying character, or both. Some great examples are games like the FIFA series, the various games that Nintendo have attached Mario to, the Championship Manager series and so on.

And of course, it works. When people in the industry talk about the need to control and own Intellectual Property (IP) and how the business is an IP-centric business, it's brands and franchises that they're talking about. Licenses are an extension of this, where a brand from another medium (usually a movie) is borrowed to fill the gap, create customer recognition and so on. Customer recognition is key to the whole franchise idea.

However entertainment franchises are only at their most effective in younger markets, most especially the teenage and early twenties market (the "immature market"). The immature are especially open to the kind of unreasoned love that franchises thrive in, possibly because young minds haven't developed critical faculties to the extent that a fully grown adult has (somewhere between the ages of 25 and 30).

As a result, the more widely broadcast a franchise is, the greater the chance of its success, because the core customer, doesn't really know any better. They have disposable income and they are far more likely to herd around what they are told has quality rather than what they determine for themselves has quality. The franchise business therefore works best for larger companies rather than smaller ones because they have deeper pockets.

Pop music is an excellent example of this. As is the wargame market and Games Workshop's near total domination of it in Britain. As is EA's strategy, and that of the comics industry. The strategy of these companies is pretty simple:

1. Create a core brand and branch products off it.
2. Promote the hell out of those products.
3. Don't worry about the long life of those products or the physical quality of them (as opposed to the perceived quality).
4. Realise that your customer will grow out of your product, so don't try to retain them more than a few key years.
5. Instead, focus on recycling the product for a new generation, because there is always a new generation.

The franchise entertainment business is built on the idea that there are always new customers and that it is far more important to capture new customers than to retain old ones. Old customers mature and move on. They always do. 98%* of Games Workshop customers don't play Warhammer after they turn 21. A lot of people grow out of eating fast food by their mid-twenties (or at least of relishing the prospect).

(*educated guess)

The result of the franchise business is that the products themselves stand still. FIFA has been the same game for years. Marvel Comics are never going to let Spiderman permanently die. The Big Mac is immortal. Pop groups may die, but the formula remains intact (and the songs recycle).

So what? You may regard it as evil or bad or whatever, but it's simply a reality. You sell to the young, you do it with recycling unchanging franchises. That's what works.

The problem lies for those of us who don't want to make games for the immature. If you're interested at all in evolving the medium of games, if you're interested in getting the hell away from an eternal cycle of sweaty teenagers and increasingly dreary E3 graphics-athons, tediously 'exciting' console releases and more 10/10 reviews than you can shake a stick at, what do you do? Hell, even if you're just interested in opening up a new market, what do you do?

I believe that the answer is authors.
Or, to put it another way, people.
Or, to put it another way, the phrase "a game by"

You see, as the immature market responds to franchises (and the small amount of adult gamers who can live with them), the mature market sees through them very quickly. As a quick example, how may cynical thirty-something gamers do you know? Mature adults value film directors, they value novelists and they value musicians. They are far more interested in who wrote, directed or composed a piece rather than what its name is. Why?

The mature entertainment consumer is wise enough to know when they're seeing the same thing repeated. They have perspective, and look for genuinely new ideas. They start to search out who or what is behind the brand. When you get to a certain age, you start to look for signs of intelligence out there. You start to look for art and soul, and you come to realise that you find that by following the artist. It's more 'real'.

But who is the artist of a videogame? That is the industry's real problem, as it applies to addressing the mature market. (For the immature market it doesn't really matter).

It used to be the case ten or fifteen years ago, before money became seriously involved, that some development teams were distinctive. As a music band can be identified as having an artistic voice (Pink Floyd, for example), so too you could really derive a sense of individuality about a developer's output. You knew a Sensible game or a Bullfrog game or an id game when you saw it. However, unlike a band, the actual members of the developer often went anonymous bar one or two figures. A band performs on stage. They can be seen. A game development team, on the other hand, is essentially an anonymous company.

This meant that development teams were vulnerable. They could be bought. They could be dismembered. Members of the teams could be fired without the public ever knowing, and figureheads could arise who may or may not have been worth such celebrity. As the game media found out, it was increasingly difficult to pinpoint what the celebrities did exactly, and so
you got a profusion of ludicrous claims, outright lies and increasingly non-specific 'rockstar designers'.

The teams also grew. The bands went from being four guys with guitars and a drum to ten guys with guitars and a drum, to twenty guys with guitars, drums, violins and sound board. Now it's a hundred guys with a variety of instruments, organised into departments with contract arrangements, and management committees. The scenario is well-understood, but the upshot of it is that greater numbers lead to a diffusion of distinctiveness, and everything becomes faceless. Modern developers are essentially mini-corporations. Rather than bands, they have become orchestras.

The real survivors in the indsutry are and continue to be personalities. In Britain alone you have Peter Molyneux, Archer Maclean, David Braben, Jeff Minter. In the US you have Will Wright, Warren Spector, John Carmack etc. In Japan you have Miyamoto, Kojima, Suzuki etc. What these people have managed to do is become individuals who are recognised. They are the ones who have been able, as a result, to pull teams together, to collect long-term fans, to give consistent interviews over a number of years and, essentially, to build public trust around them as, for the want of a better word, authors. Whether they count as conductors in the modern world is another issue, but the key point here is that they have a durable presence and that is worth far more to their respective companies than just an IP.

It's very easy to think that a game designer is the natural person to turn to as the 'artist' of the game, but I think that this is misleading unless that person is also the one that drives the project to completion. Often, game designers do no such thing. They do a lot of document writing, they do a lot of preparation and figuring-out, but often it stops at the documents. They are often involved also in the testing and implementation supervision, but at an equal level with folks from other departments. Game designers, like scriptwriters, are often imagining and designing based on the briefs of others, and they usually do not have overall control. Many of them lack the personal skills necessary to lead a team anyway.

This is where the notion of a game director comes in. This is seen more in Japan than in the West, at the moment, as western studios are often as not wary of putting someone creative in charge of everything. I think this has much to do with a fear of egotism, a lack of respect for ideas, and an assumption that a director is essentially just going to be some bossy fellow who teaches everyone how to suck eggs. Not so.

A game director, like a film director or a stage director or a chief archictect, directs people. It's cheap and easy to say "they look after the vision" like some monk in a cell, but in reality what this means is mastering an understanding of all the disciplines involved in a modern game, understanding how the game is going to be put together, and then figuring out what to get people to do and how to do it. It's an incredibly responsible and time-consuming position, and an absolutely vital one.

Someone who sits in their office all day long and holds the odd meeting with team leads to see how things are going is not a game director. Someone who is up and about with the team all the time, always watching what is being done, always keeping people focussed, directing teams as to what he wants to see in detail and providing feedback and real decisions is a game director. It's a very demanding job, but an absolutely vital one.

In film, direction is everything. You need a great script, but a script is just words on a page without someone to bring it to life. In games, you need a great design, but you need someone to steward it into a brilliant prototype, to bring that through pre-production and production, and to be involved every step of the way. Not a producer, a director.

The director is the artist of the videogame. We should have no shame in pushing this, as by doing so, we push our creativity out there. The old argument goes that the game development process is reliant on so many people that it is unfair to single out one person as the creator, but this is both unrealistic and a straw man. You never hear who the editor of the Harry Potter books is, you never find out who the studio producers of Sting's latest album are. You never really pay attention to million-and-one people that go into making a Spielberg film happen. You don't know how many people make John Rocca's outfits.

Yet in all these media we have no problem identifying the creative force. In games, we do, but purely because of old habits which died hard. This used to be a medium for bands. It isn't any more. It's time to recognise that.

There is no issue with the continuation of the immature franchises. They are what keep the industry going. But if the medium is to broaden both commercially and creatively, it's going to take some vision on the part of a publisher or a developer to realise that the mature market is different. If you want find a new business angle, then you have to innovate in business.

The comics industry moguls did not realise this and as a result its franchises were the very thing that marginalised them. Games Workshop nows exists largely as a marginalised hobby and company, where they turn a profit but they have run out of avenues for true growth.

The same could very easily happen to video games unless a second front is opened. Keep the franchises coming boys, but we need to be looking outward as well. Artists, unlike franchises, have the capacity for change. They have the capacity for real reinvention. Artists have the capacity to generate real penetration in a way that no franchise can. You could never see the Master Chief on Letterman, but you could see a game director there. A game director has the possibility of turning a customer for life. No franchise can ever hope to do that.

A Post By Tadhg Kelly