[Jump Button is a new weekly column by Drew Taylor, written specially for GameSetWatch, that focuses on the art and substance of video game culture.]

It's almost two in the morning, I'm dosed up on pain killers and my right wrist is sprained—possibly fractured—from a relatively nasty motorcycle accident I had earlier in the day. But that doesn't stop me from wanting to play 'just one more mission' of the addictive PSP rhythm/attack game, Patapon.

The narcotic effect is partly attributable to the simple (yet strategic) gameplay, insanely catchy rhythms and clever fusion of RPG-lite and rhythm/action genres. But it's the crazy-cool graphic style of French artist Rolito (real name Sebastien Giuli) that has me gripped in a 'fever'.

I want to see more.

Visually, the 35-year-old artist's work on Patapon is like Willy Wonka meets Frank Miller's 300. A candy-shaped universe full of strong geometry and complementary color palettes. Cave paintings for a Disney-Pixar audience.

Cute, cyclopsian eyeballs on legs—armed with bows, halberds and axes—march to the beat of drums, battling giant fire-breathing dragons. Brave armies endure scorching desert sands, fight beasts of gargantuan proportions, and sail across vast oceans in Viking boats. Trees with scratchy heads dance to the sound of trumpets. Bird-riding warriors rain spears down on their two-dimensional enemies, while catapults lay siege to cowboy forts and medieval castles.

'Some of my inspiration comes from Pre-Colombian and primitive arts, but not only,' explains Rolito, in sentences of broken English. 'This spiritual/mystic aspect is rooted in my passion for mythology, antique civilizations, the unexplained and impalpable. The part of mystery is really important to me, and my work; this is—for sure—what gives [my art] that bizarre and poetic side.

'I think my characters have their own evocative power. There's no need to read any story about them; if you see them you can feel the innocence and poetry. It's a world between the kid world and the adult world, a place where everything is possible.'

Indeed, Rolito's internet sites—Rolitoland, Black Polito and his blog—are filled with the kind of art, vinyl toys, photos and flash animations that seem to transcend ages and cultures; his graphic illustration distilled down to a bold, lovable comic book of humanity.

'My art style is cute and weird, [but the] indispensable element of my work is simplicity,' confirms Rolito.

For Sony's Japan Studio—the same team that brought Loco Roco to life—Rolito's graphic style was a case of love at first sight, particularly when it came to the little tribe of the Patapon.

These characters inspired in game director Hiroyuki Kotani an image of beating drums, epic battles and great expeditions, and Rolito was quickly contracted to the new project.

'I created the Patapons in 2002,' explains Rolito. 'In 2004 they naturally became the main and animated characters of my web site. We can say that it was their first step to interactivity. To develop them in gameplay was, in a sense, a logical result.'

Logical, perhaps. But what makes Rolito's work on Patapon so special is that he is one of the only artists in the world to have a game developed entirely from their iconic graphic style.

Hiroyuki based the genre, story and game system completely on Rolito's work; Patapon being the first game in Hiroyuki's 18 years of game development where the final image of the game predated any hint of a game design document or gameplay ideas.

'This is my first time in the video games world,' admits Rolito, 'but from what I understand having a game based completely on an artist's own personal style is an unusual way of working [and making games]. It's been fascinating to have the opportunity to develop a whole graphic universe in a big project—such as a video game—especially since I was offered full freedom on the graphical style.'

On the bigger picture, Rolito adds, 'I believe there's the need for “open mind-ing” to other graphic [styles and] worlds, and not those already well known. I think that things of simple appearances can be really evocative. They may be considered by some to be less accessible than ultra-realistic 3D, but it seems to me that there are many graphical “new ways” that remain to be investigated, and which haven't been used in video games yet.'

'I really hope this kind of cross-over is going to happen more often in the future,' says Rolito, optimistically.

Rolito is onto something: the idea of putting aside the (frustratingly moot) 'Are video games art?' debate and looking at games as a method of—and vehicle for—art; perceiving games as a defining platform for the expression of art, and the exposure of different styles to a new audience.

This is not about a push-button slideshow of pretty images, an early 80s interactive CD-ROM, or 'borrowing' a visual style. This is about art and artists being the focal point through which game design is channeled.

This is about art as narrative. Art as gameplay.

This is about unleashing the genius of people such as Alberto Ruiz, Jeremyville, Nathan Jurevicius, Joe Ledbetter, Celia Calle, Dalek, Fafi, Merjin Hos, Zach Johnsen, Luke Cheuh.

Artists such as Rolito.

And this is about continuing the journey that has begun through the collaborative work of a Japanese corporation and a French artist. A journey of shared joys an visions; of opportunity.

A journey that ventures towards a brave new world of gaming design and culture.

Ask Rolito, however, about his thoughts on Patapon and the idea that it's taking his art to a new and different audience, and he answers with the same heart that sees him devote a considerable amount of his time and art to charitable causes.

'It is obviously very interesting for me to show and share my work to a wider audience, even if, at the same time, I expose myself more to the critics,' Rolito confides.

'I would just like the gamers to discover and enjoy Patapon's world.'

It's now after two in the morning, and I'm finally heading for bed, too tired to maintain the insatiable rhythms of battle.

Rolito should have no concerns, I think to myself, as my head hits the pillow. None at all.

[Drew Taylor works in the games industry in Australia and writes video game culture articles for various magazines. He is mightily thankful for full-face motorcycle helmets (without one he'd surely be lying in intensive care right now without half his nose, mouth or bottom jaw) and believes that the PSP is still being under-utilized with regards to all manner of creative media.]

Posted by Drew Taylor at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Leave it to UK Resistance to dig out an ancient Sega promotional video with UK children's TV presenters fronting it - and us to link it, of course, cementing our reputation as top journalistic GameSetLink-ers.

In slightly more sensible news, there's some fun ARG goings-on, lots of post-GDC coverage of independent games and the widening game market, and a host of other interesting material, we optimistically claim. And it goes a little something like this:

Six to Start » A grin and six tales
ARG folks collaborating with conventional book publishers, neeeet.

Ste Pickford's Blog: Demoted
The Naked War and Wetrix creator on the XBLA changes.

Teaching Game Design: Note to schools: Remove obstacles!
About "...the obstacles that prevent developers from applying" for game teaching jobs.

IndieCade Festival: Call for Submissions - TGC Blog
Three mini-fests this year, including IndieCade 2008 @ Open Satellite gallery in Seattle in July and an E For All stopoff.

UK:RESISTANCE: THE 1995 SEGA SCHOOLS MARKETING PROJECT
'Videos explaining SEGA to children! Voiced by Andy Crane! Detailing SEGA marketing during the Mega Drive era!'

Values At Play » Blog Archive » 2008 Grassroots Media Conference
'Tiltfactor Lab will be facilitating a game design workshop to help participants better understand how to analyze existing games and consciously embed values in their own games.'

Video: Indie Games To Watch Out For | Game | Life from Wired.com
Hey, a moving pictures version of the Wired.com article! Go Kohler!

Wired: Top 3 Indie Games to Watch Out For
Nice! Some neat pictures of the developers in 'widescreen' too.

The Independent Gaming Source: 2007 AGS Awards Announced
For graphic adventures, and the awards are even available _as_ an adventure. Internet, you rock.

Indie Development - Prototyping « Thank You For Playing
Some tips on prototyping, branching off David Marsh's recent Gamasutra feature.

[NOTE: Sorry to those who have been having commenting trouble of late. Our spam loads are getting so high that they're taking the machine down, even using Akismet, so we're considering some new solutions. Eventually we're going to integrate with a single sign-on throughout the CMP Game Group sites, but we're looking at some interim options.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

[Aha, G4 is showing the Choice Awards starting tonight, and so we thought it would be nice to give GSW readers a heads up - we'll also add GameSetLinks to the streaming video when it becomes available.]

Comcast's G4 TV network has announced that it will present its coverage of the Game Developers Choice Awards via its video game TV program X-Play, first showing February 29th at 8.00 PM EST (5.00PM PST).

According to the X-Play episode guide, you can also watch a re-airing of this 30 minute-long episode on March 1, 2008 at (all times EST) 1:00 AM, 4:30 AM, 9:00 AM, March 2, 2008 at 12:00 PM and 3:30 PM, and March 3, 2008 at 2:00 AM, 10:00 AM, and 2:00 PM.

Online video clips will also be available on X-Play's video channel shortly after the airing, and streaming video of the full Choice and Independent Games Festival Award ceremonies will be available on the official Choice Awards and official IGF Awards pages in the next few days.

The Choice and IGF Awards were originally presented at Game Developers Conference (created by CMP, as is Gamasutra) on February 20th. This is the first time that a developer-led award show has been available for viewing on a major North American cable TV network.

Said conference executive director Jamil Moledina, "Having a broadcast partner like G4 supports our goal of getting the leading developers in the spotlight to share ideas and recognize their creative contribution."

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Now, we're definitely aware that people have been hacking the iPhone for a while to create games, even some that use the accelerometer for gameplay by calculating what direction you're tilting your hardware.

But we here at GameSetWatch got an email from Steve D. over at homebrew/semi-pro developer Demiforce, showcasing his new title designed specifically for iPhone and iPod Touch, Trism.

We checked out the associated YouTube video and were pretty much blown away about the neatness and simplicity of his new puzzle game. See if you are too:

To recap, Trism uses the touchscreen to manipulate the triangles on the screen, but in a really smart twist, the blocks will fall down in a different way, depending on which direction you're tilting the phone, leading to some major strategic possibilities. In addition, the way you grab and manipulate the rows of triangles using touch along multiple independent axes is a really nice touch.

Anyhow, we thought we'd better chat to Steve via email to find out more about his history, why he made this, and what he's going to do from here. So here we go:

What's your background in the game biz as hobbyist or professional?

I have dabbled occassionaly in the professional game industry, but I do enterprise development for my day job (I write ATM software for a large bank). My largest contribution to the gaming scene was as a ROM hacker & translator (Japanese to English).

My group was called "Demiforce", which I incorporated two years ago and is now the name I market my product under. We translated mainly NES and SNES games to English, including Final Fantasy II (NES) and Radical Dreamers (SNES). Additionally I worked on some Gameboy Color games back in the 90s, most notably a puzzle game called "Drymouth", but unfortunately it didn't go anywhere.

What APIs did you take advantage of to make this game, or is it fairly 'hacked'?

The game is a native iPhone app (not a web app), and the current version requires a jailbroken iPhone to work. However, as soon as the official iPhone SDK comes out next month, I plan on porting it over to that framework. I would love to get this thing on iTunes as early as possible, hence the current media push -- I need to see if anyone out there can help me get this thing shown to Apple!

How did you come up with the concept of using tilting as a gameplay mechanic in the puzzle game?

All I knew when I set out to make an iPhone game was that I wanted to make full use of the iPhone, to deliver a game experience that could never have been done until now. With its combination of multitouch and tilt, the iPhone can deliver a fundamentally different kind of game than the world has ever seen before and I think people are slowly coming to realize this.

I started by making an Excel spreadsheet, listing all the different kinds of game input methods available, such as directional, directional + buttons, directional + buttons + mouse, and mouse only. Then, I listed the natural endpoints of evolution for games for each control mechanism.

For example, Tetris I feel is a natural endpoint of directional-only gaming because it uses the keyboard's functionality efficiently and to its fullest extent. The 2D sidescroller is a natural endpoint of directional + button gameplay, adding the concept of multitasking to the mix. FPSs are natural endpoints of keyboard and mouse gaming, and games like minesweeper and solitaire are natural endpoints for mouse-only gameplay.

I then added 'Multitouch', 'Multitouch + Tilt' entries to this list. I tried to think out of the box, thinking of what natural kind of game could be most at home using these types of control. I went through many many permutations of designs. In the end, I came up with an idea that doesn't use multitouch, but does make use of use tilt. I was originally worried about this, but I finally relaxed a bit when I saw how simply the game was coming together.

How long did it take to make?

The idea for Trism was realized on Feb 8th, and I started coding that day in hopes of getting it shown off at GDC. I managed to get a working prototype up by the 18th, the say GDC started. From idea to prototype in 10 days -- a personal best! Especially since it was my first piece of software for an Apple platform. I'm a C++ and .NET guy by trade, so learning Objective-C was a bit of a challenge, but not too bad.

I was exhausted! One night I think I slept from 5am till 8am, then I went in to work. Plus that whole week was IBR -- a big party week here in San Francisco. So, I was doing binges of coding, binges of drinking, binges of coding, binges of drinking... :)

What are your plans for this game?

My primary goal with designing games has always been to get as many people to play it as possible. If you can make people happy with a unique creation, that's like the best feeling on earth, you know?

From a business angle I'm looking to get this thing noticed by Apple so that I can get it out to the masses on iTunes. They haven't released information on how little guys like me are going to be able to make that happen, so I decided to leverage the media to get noticed. Being a little guy, I'm aware some big company may come along and say 'hey, that's a great game, let's take it and make it our own' so I'm really looking to move this thing as fast as possible.

Have you got any other ideas that involve the iPhone and tilting?

Haha, what do you think? :)

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (27)

[The Aberrant Gamer is a weekly, sometimes NSFW column by Leigh Alexander, dedicated to the kinks and quirks we gamers tend to keep under our hats – those predilections and peccadilloes less commonly discussed in conventional media.]

Here at the Aberrant Gamer, we primarily deal with all the ways that games become part of our reality. We fall in love with game characters and we experience a range of real feelings about fake worlds. Games entrench themselves in our sociology, psychology and sexuality, and we can have real, visceral interaction with structures based in technology and artifice.

Ugobe’s Pleo dinosaur, billed not as a robot but as a “life form,” promises to develop its own identity, to respond to user behavior, and to evince a humanoid range of emotions and responses depending on its interaction. Something about its cute face, the motion of its eyes, triggers the human sympathetic response almost immediately – but just as with a baby, there’s no instruction manual that tells you just how to provoke desired responses. Most of Pleo’s literature encourages you to just explore. It’s kind of like a game, then, hinged on experimental interaction with an evolved AI. And I decided to find out, like I do with games, just how much technology could make me feel.

The Journey Begins

Pleo arrived at my house nestled in a foam block as if asleep, eyes closed and curled fetally on himself. His distinct weight, the feel of his robotic skeleton beneath his rubbery skin, almost lent him to being cradled, even though he wasn’t yet turned on. I held the sleeping “life form” in my lap, overwhelmed by a bizarre rush of maternal instinct and a shiver of futurist glee as I thumbed the instruction manual, which told me to “begin my journey” with Pleo by waking him up.

The first thing the literature says about Pleo is that he initially has several “life stages” – from awakening, to hatchling, to toddler, the last at which he stays arrested, a perpetually curious baby Camarosaurus. “Treat Pleo as you would any living creature – with care and respect,” advises the manual. All of this window dressing made it seem almost a violation to flip the thing over and put in the battery pack. I couldn’t help gently supporting its head as I flipped it over, well aware that I was already being sucked in.

Battery in and switch turned on, I set Pleo back on his feet. Next, I was to shake him gently to wake him. Half of me thought, wake him? Are you serious? The other half of me was already gently petting the bumpy back and tail and softly calling the dinosaur’s name. I couldn’t help it.

At last, with a quiet grinding of machinery and a drowsy little purr, Pleo began to move. A little bit. This was the stage, apparently, wherein I was supposed to pet Pleo gently and continue speaking to him as his sensors… calibrated? I endeavored to allow myself to forget about technology, to suspend my disbelief and learn just how possible it was to believe I was in the company of a living, or nearly-living thing. Don’t I always write about how engaging with the story is a player choice?

Playing Along

Several minutes later, an awake Pleo began to take its first hesitant steps around the room, drowsily, its eyes half-lidded. So minute were the shifts of its motion – eyelids, legs, tail – that I couldn’t tell, initially, whether it was responding to me or not. But I found I wanted it to; I really, really wanted it to. Paging through the manual again, I wanted to flip past the part about journey and emotion and experience and life form to find the meaty, technical instructions that would tell me how to get Pleo to do what I wanted him to, but there were little more than suggestions for things to try. I get it; living things don’t have instruction manuals.

So I decided to throw myself in full-stop. It’s an interesting decision point that we often find ourselves in with video games, when we wonder, how intuitive is this really? We like when games allow us to do the things it would naturally occur to us to do, or be possible for us to do, in the real world, and we often test them to see if they can. At the same time, that can be a little challenging – we’ve been trained, after all, to think in a very specific "video game way" when in that context.

Similarly I was suspended, with Pleo, on that odd precipice between intuition and artifice, when trying to determine how or whether to provoke certain behavior. For example, the manual suggested that by holding Pleo upside-down by the tail, I would learn from his reaction just how much he disliked it. And yet I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Natural empathy? Maybe. It’s the same impulse that prevents you from being unnecessarily rude to an NPC (or at least, that makes you feel a little guilty about it if you are). Half of it is that you’re not a jerk; most of it is you’re afraid the machine will be more intelligent than you gave it credit for and will hold you to account somehow later, penalize you by shutting you out in some way from the world to which you're trying to escape.

Instead of dealing with moral quandaries, I decided to feed Pleo the little “training leaf” that comes with him. He won’t crunch on just anything you put in his mouth; sensors on the leaf let him know it’s food. If he’s hungry, he’ll hold it in his mouth and make little eating noises; if he’s not, he’ll play tug-of-war with you. Cute, and much easier than pondering player behavior. Don’t we sometimes make things much more complicated than they need to be?

Maternal Instinct

Watching Pleo wander around my kitchen, the first thing I noticed is that he can sense obstacles in his path. He found the fridge, stopped in front of it, made an indistinct sound, and then began smelling it, with a graceful dip of his head and little sniffing noises. I decided to go and bring him back into the living room, picking him up carefully around the waist.

Just a few moments later, he realized his feet were no longer on the ground and began to bleat and flail. I was horrified, and tried holding him like a baby, or a cat instead – support under the bottom, head on the shoulder, and tried to pat his head to soothe him.

My moment of feeling silly for soothing a robot passed immediately when the soothing actually worked. He made a musical little noise, settled down against my chest, put his head on my shoulder and began to sleep, with peaceful snoring noises and all.

Game-Like?

Over the next few days, I learned a few more things – my cat, who I’d expected to hate this particular experiment, was actually rather fond of Pleo, and came running whenever she heard him turn on. She found him about as interesting as a toy, though; it was clear to her that he wasn’t actually an animal.

Another thing I learned is that, despite seeming to be a good substitute for a flesh-and-blood pet, Pleo actually lends itself to shorter playtimes. His battery is short-lived; he actually comes with two, so that one can be in the charger at all times and ready to swap out immediately. He can be left on his own without getting stuck in corners or under tables. He’s mostly autonomous, but will holler if left on his own too long. And the depressed way in which he lowers his head and tail when lonesome is a challenge even for the most callous to ignore.

Nonetheless, it seems best to turn him off unless one is directly prepared to interact with him, which cleaves a line through the suspension of disbelief. When Pleo’s battery is depleted, he simply seems to go to sleep – no awkward, stilted shutdown moments. But he can be halted by carpet static – the first time this happened and Pleo simply stopped, eyes wide and staring, I actually experienced a jolt of horror, shaking him a few times before I figured out what had happened by checking the manual’s troubleshooting section.

Making Pleo squint when light is shined in his face or giggle when his feet are tickled – these are all things that I figured out that he could do, and yet they all seem more game-like than life-like. Further, Pleo can learn downloadable behaviors available on the Ugobe site – and the company will even open its dev kit to users so they can design and share their own. This provides a much more intriguing opportunity for user-generated content, emergent behavior, intuitive, exploratory play and other “game 2.0” concepts than experimenting with the functionality of a robot – which it’s hard to forget Pleo is. His machinery noise and his need for frequent battery swaps keep that fact in mind.

However, that doesn’t mean he can’t surprise you. I once left Pleo on while playing Guitar Hero -- and was quite thoroughly delighted when he toddled into the room from the adjoining one, walked right up to the television, and damn me if he wasn’t singing and dancing. It’s small things like that which make you overcome your embarrassment and stealthily pick Pleo up and hug him, maybe even kiss his little dino head – even if he happens to be switched off.

[Leigh Alexander is editor of Worlds in Motion and writes for Gamasutra, freelances and reviews often for a variety of outlets, and maintains her gaming blog, Sexy Videogameland. She can be reached at leigh_alexander1 AT yahoo DOT com.]

Posted by Leigh Alexander at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

[Posting this again, since the deadline is early next week, and we wanted to hoover up anyone who hasn't yet helped us. Since it's the only major public salary survey in the game biz, the more respondents, the better.]

The editors of Game Developer magazine and Gamasutra.com are inviting readers to complete the annual Game Developer's Salary Survey, with a final deadline of Wednesday, March 5th.

The information you provide will help inform the entire game development community, and the results of this survey - which will be kept anonymous down to the individual developer level - will be published in the April 2008 issue of Game Developer magazine. It will also again be available in overview form on Gamasutra, and in much more detailed form as a Game Developer Research report.

In appreciation of your time and effort, once you complete the survey, your name will be entered into a drawing to win one of five Main Conference Passes for your choice of the lineup of Game Developers Conference (GDC) events in the 2008-2009 cycle: Paris GDC in June, Austin GDC or China GDC (in Beijing) in September, or GDC 2009 in San Francisco.

The results of the prior survey were revealed in April of 2007, calculating an average American game industry salary of $73,316, slightly down on 2005's figure of $75,039.

In addition, the average salary in 2006 over all American game programmers was $80,886, and the 2006 average for artists was $65,107 - with game designers' average was $61,538. Following these results, this year's survey has also added support for important emerging job functions such as community manager, which will be showcased in the new results due in April.

Interested game professionals can now click through to take part in the survey. Thanks for helping us to advance the industry!

[NOTE: A separate, optional MIT Business School survey on entrepreneurship in the game industry is available to fill out at the end of this year's Salary Survey - results will also be made available in conjunction with CMP if you'd like to fill it out.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Over the next few days on GameSetWatch, we're going to be reprinting some of the more interesting GDC lectures which might have potentially got 'lost in the shuffle' of the show. In this piece, Leigh Alexander checks out Cryptic's Jack Emmert and his prognostications on the MMO genre.]

Does an MMO need 400 hours of gameplay? "Frankly, we were naive and enthusiastic, and we said, 'sure.' So we calculated everything on the assumption... that you'd have to make 400 hours worth of missions," began Cryptic Studios Jack Emmert, as he explained how City of Heroes was developed to order for NCsoft.

Nor were any microtransactions planned. But the aim was to deliver original content once every three months -- it ended up not being quite so often. On its release, the game had its strengths and weaknesses like any other. As far as the former, there were character customization options and moment-to-moment gameplay. As to the latter, there was missing PvP and an absence of new loot, on which typical MMO players thrive.

By 2004, the game's subscriber base had grown to 180,000 in North America. "But on our first update, we did nothing to address the game's weaknesses," said Emmert. Focused on bug fixes and content past level 50, the team overlooked those content absences that resulted in a loss of players. "If you don't have [PvP] at launch, you can never add it," warned Emmert.

"We tried to address the weaknesses that we had, but we really did it in a way that simply re-used content that we already had," he continued. "It didn't change the fact that there were repetitive instances; it didn't change the fact that there was nothing to do besides leveling... Anybody who was turned off by those weaknesses, we were doing nothing to help them."

And six months later, WoW hit the scene. "It's conceivable that the players would have stuck around if not for the fact that WoW came out. When WoW came out, we lost about a third of our subscriber base," Emmert explained.

In 2005, City of Heroes saw its European launch, soon followed by City of Villains. But, Emmert said, "What I really delivered was a City of Heroes experience with a slightly evil twist." He neglected to connect to what players might want from being a villain. "If they didn't like City of Heroes, there was nothing here for them... I can't even tell you the disappointment I have. It hurts."

Now the team was trying to add new content to City of Heroes -- like a PvP arena -- while keeping City of Villains in mind. "It was extremely difficult; we were just giving features to people who didn't want them," Emmert said, noting that all the PvP players were off playing WoW.

"Jeremy Gaffney of NCsoft was adamant that we should add some sort of endgame," continued Emmert. But given that few people had reached a high enough level, they decided to add new content at precisely the point that the vast majority of players were. "But what I didn't think about is that players are always looking forward to tomorrow," he said, elaborating that the content lost value three months down the road.

Challenges for the team in maintaining game balance continued, Emmert recalled, pointing out the popular nickname "City of Nerfs." "I had a theory about balance... that everyone should have, or at least should feel like they have an equal role when they're in a team, that no player feels less than another. And secondly, everyone should progress through the game equally."

In 2006, a couple of big decisions were made. NCsoft decided there would be no more retail; the live team shrank by 75 percent. "We had to drastically change what our expectations are," Emmert said. "Our expectations on the amount of content we could deliver had to change." A new lead designer, Matt "Positron" Miller was appointed, and the newly-small dev team had to trend away from content-heavy features. But, says Emmert, this turned out to be a surprise boon -- instead of adding new zones, they were forced to add depth and detail to some zones that already existed that might otherwise have been bland and empty.

The team renewed its "focus on the fan" that year, too: "No more nerfs... it was driving me nuts. I just couldn't take it anymore." Despite the forum raging and conflict, however, Emmert stressed: "No nerf ever, ever caused a statistical drop in subscription base, ever. I tracked every single one, and never, in that particular day, week or month, did more people drop the game than in any other particular month. Fascinating."

Deadlands creator Shane Hensley had a theory that one should always personally get to know one's fans, and Emmert says he took a page from that philosophy. "I really want the fans to get to know me. But the downside is, because it's the internet, people twist my words so badly... I seem like the son of Satan. But what are you going to do? I think that my customers are my customers, and they deserve some level of communication."

By 2007, the team introduced an invention system to City of Heroes and City of Villains. The nerfs were gone and the old, generic zones had been refurbished. "There is one nerf that I did that we lost a couple thousand people on," he admits. "It was called enhancement diversification... and that really did make people mad."

The net effect of the updates was high retention versus a "typical" MMORPG from month one to month two -- a rate of about 90 percent, Emmert said, high above his colleagues' two thirds loss on other games. The retention month after month continued to be static, moreover. "The people who remain, you can't get rid of them... it's absolutely impossible to do it because they're so used to the pain and agony of the gameplay that they love it."

City of Heroes/Villains never brought in a large-scale migration of new players, however. Even City of Villains only added some 60 thousand people to the player base, not a good deal in the grand scheme of things. But with the update packs, Emmert said, there was a constant period of re-acquisition as new players came back to investigate the new content. "We have such a large customer base, we sent out an email whenever an update came out, and several thousand people would re-up... so you end up staying pretty static."

So what are the lessons learned? "Don't design to the max," states Emmert. "Account for new systems. If you don't have the money or the team size to be able to ship a game with, say, an elaborate guild system, make sure you plan out what you plan to have guilds do in the future. Make sure you have an understanding of how it will happen." Second, consider the player nature. "It's a strange MMO market right now, but I think because WoW is so vast and so popular, that if you launch a game and you don't have a particular feature, like endgame, people will just say, 'ah, I'll go back to playing WoW."

"Think about how easy it is to update your systems. We created a leveling system, as well as powers, that it was extremely hard to add new things on," he said. The superpower structure in particular made it difficult to expand the level cap. "WoW solved that by saying, 'you can take the same power and rank it up.' But we basically created... a self-containing system that [made it] very difficult to get up to level 50. And expect that there will be players who go nuts."

Finally, consider player nature. "People will make it as un-fun as they possibly can if they think there's something to gain by that," Emmert added, concluding, “Worry about the players you've got. Don't worry about the players you don't have. You are what you are at launch," advised Emmert.

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There's nothing like the Internet to cheer you up, and in my post-GDC work crunch (yes, there is one, argh) a little Rickrolling in the form of a Doom mod was just what it took to make me smile.

Elsewhere in this particular set of links, we have a bunch more indie game/IGF-related articles of GDC or post-GDC vintage - mainly posted so I can remember what people said - as well as some strangely esoteric bootleg NES carts and a whole mess of chiptune videos. Have a bleepy day:

YouTube - Doom Rickroller
Poor old Rick Astley - via Waxy.

Jenn Frank's 1UP Blog: IGF is good people.
Warm fuzzy feelings abound, I'm delighted to say.

Indies start to make their mark - Los Angeles Times
Nice LA Times piece on the indie game boom.

insertcredit.com: Famicom/Megadrive remakes
Wow, lots of weird stuff here, including Titanic, Lord Of The Rings fighter!

CinnamonPirate.com examines Final Fantasy VII for the NES
Bonkers crazy Chinese pirate alert.

collision detection: LaRouche report calls me a "degenerate writer"
Suicide (in games) is painless.

Can Game Critics Cheat? « Save the Robot - Chris Dahlen
I don't even know if game critics should play through entire games.

ASCII by Jason Scott: The Feelies
Pointing out that a Dennis Wheatley novel did it far before text adventures.

Kplecraft // Blip Festival 2006: The Videos on Vimeo
Looks like the documentary crew uploaded LOTS of great live performance videos to Vimeo - this one from former Monotonik releasers and crazy sax/bongos/chiptune Japanese outfit.

BLIP FESTIVAL: REFORMAT THE PLANET trailer on Vimeo
'Trailer for BLIP FESTIVAL: REFORMAT THE PLANET, debuting at the South by Southwest Film Festival in March of 2008.'

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Following Russell Carroll's controversial opinion piece on PC casual gaming and piracy, the Reflexive Entertainment marketing director adds lots more hard statistics in this follow-up piece - definitely appreciate him being so honest with explicit statistics.]

My recent casual gaming column published over at Gamasutra, has created a good bit of stir, so I thought I'd put in some additional details as a follow-up and clarification.

For those who missed it, the first column started out with the statement: “It looks like around 92% of the people playing the full version of [Reflexive's PC casual game] Ricochet Infinity pirated it.” It went on to look at what happens when DRM is improved for the game, suggesting: "For every 1,000 pirated copies we eliminated, we created 1 additional sale."

As it happens, I ended up cutting 3 pages from that article while writing, which is very abnormal for me, but it was just too dry a read to keep all the info in. This added information should help you further with stats and context.

Reflexive's Piracy Stats, In Depth

- Firstly, for clarification purposes - on Ricochet Infinity the 92% piracy was comparing full version against full version, not any demo versions.

- Some more numbers on that game, thanks to author James C Smith:

- 43% of the downloaded copies (including demos) went online, which means we can't track 57%. These versions may have not installed or not gone online. But as I mentioned in my article, we can't assume that those who didn't go online were less likely to pirate than those who did go online.

- Full data of all the downloads (from Reflexive.com):
2.3% - Bought the game
29% - Pirated the game
14% - Went online with the demo
57% - Never went online

So the 92% is the percentage of the full versions used online that were pirated.

Conversion Rates And Piracy

- The encouraging piece of all the numbers, I suppose, is that of the non-pirates, the percentage who bought the game was a pretty high conversion ratio.

I've often stated that the Xbox Live Arcade conversion ratios are inflated due to the $300 barrier of entry...people had to have already spent $300 to get to XBLA, clearly they are people who spend money on games. Online we cater to people who do and who won't.

Clearly, if you removed the pirates (who, according to the Ricochet Infinity numbers, may account for 67% of ALL downloads in the casual space) the conversion ratio of the entire casual games industry would increase a lot.

When DRM Changes Affected Piracy

- Another piece of data that seems useful is when we made the fixes to the DRM, since the original article referenced this extensively:
Fix 1 was 12/15/05
Fix 2 was 7/12/06
Fix 3 was 4/18/07
Fix 4 was 12/5/07 + 12/12/07 (there was a minor follow-up to this fix)
Ricochet Infinity was released on 7/31/07

I actually had wanted to write this article months ago, but with the recenct nature of that last fix, which was being worked on prior to November, obviously, I wanted to give us at least some time to get a feel for how the results went.

Notably, that first DRM fix had dramatic sustainted results. I've mentioned this elsewhere, but that change is clearly visible in the growth charts that we keep here at Reflexive.

Incidentally, a modified version of one of those growth charts was in my Independent Games Summit slides - here's text and video links - from last year's Game Developer's Conference.

Pirates And Level... Creation?

Finally, I had planed to talk about one potentially positive result of piracy that I found interesting, but couldn't fit it into the article well, so I'll mention it here.

In Ricochet Infinity anyone can create a level set and upload it to the server and watch it become popular...or ignored. We've found that a good portion of pirates created level sets. I find that fascinating myself, and it may speak to some possibilities of using piracy to a positive end.

Conclusion

The 1000:1 ratio is really, I think, the key takeaway of the article. Several people have grasped that and started applying it to different numbers in the industry, and the results are very disappointing.

Clearly, if we could always have a big gain from a fix that maintains itself, it is worth spending the time to fight piracy. However, since that isn't always the case, it can sometimes (often?) be pretty discouraging to try and stop piracy.

I don't think that means that we should be any least earnest in our fight, but the ratio is quite interesting. Closing, I'd love to see some other portals disclose their numbers publicly to further the discussion. Anyone?

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

[Over the next few days on GameSetWatch, we're going to be reprinting some of the more interesting GDC lectures which might have potentially got 'lost in the shuffle' of the show. This time, Eric-Jon Waugh hangs out with Ralph Baer and Al Alcorn at their extremely entertaining lecture.]

Ralph “Papa Game” Baer and Atari VCS designer Al Alcorn split an hour to sit and reminisce about their roots – how their lives and social contexts conspired for them to design and build the two seminal video game consoles.

Baer started off by leaping back to the late ‘30s, the time before “electronics” was a noun. Back then, it was all about radio. Radio enthusiasts were radio hobbyists, and radios were simpler to build than a model Gundam. They were also a cultural phenomenon. Baer showed off an advertisement that read “Big Money in Radio – become a Radio Serviceman!” “Hey,” the young Baer realized. “I think this could be me.” So he spent the next few years dangling off roofs, installing wires through people’s windows.

Then came the 1939 World’s Fair, and television. From there, Baer graduated to clambering around Manhattan rooftops, installing aerials. Later, while working at a medical electronics company, Baer began to throw materials together and build his own devices – intercom systems, wave monitors.

While he was in college on the GI Bill, Baer was asked to repair his parents’ television, which had completely ceased to work. When he opened the top, he found a blackened, burnt-out tangle. In the process of isolating and wrapping up the wires, trying to repair the signal, Baer began to think about other uses for the technology. “Manipulating stuff on-screen was fun,” he said.

Coming from that experience, Baer took a job in a military electronics company, hoping for an opportunity to build a TV from scratch. Eventually he and a few co-workers did in fact build their TV. Though it took months to complete then quickly exploded, they learned a lot from the experience. Over the next several years, Baer grew absorbed in his work, designing electronics for the military.

In 1966, while stationed in Iraq, Baer remembered his old idea about manipulating TV images. On the first of September, he wrote a paper on how to play a long list of games with just a few crude symbols. This led to the notorious “480 patent”, a big stick that Baer would use frequently over the coming decades, describing the concept of playing games on a television set.

From ’67 to ’69, Baer and a few associates spent a few weeks here and a few there to assemble and perfect what would become the “Brown Box”, the prototype for the Magnavox Odyssey. From there, for the next ten years, Baer moved on to tinker with videotape, video disc, video pinball – popping back into the console business to defend his patent against a legion of imitators, from Activision to Coleco.

Fielding some questions, Baer said the biggest hurdle to development was “making sure things don’t cost too much.” Did he ever imagine that videogames would become the industry that they have? “No.” Mass laughter. “Can anyone look in a crystal ball and tell what’s going to happen?” Does he still play? “On occasion, my grandkids bring a game with them, but I don’t do too well.”

Al Alcorn also started off by repairing TV sets, and fiddling with the interiors in the process. “Some of the stuff we did was not the proper way to drive TV – but it worked.” He fell into a technical crowd, divided by age. His older friends were all interested in videotape, while the kids were all interested in microprocessors. One of the latter group, a certain pinball arcade operator named Nolan Bushnell, had an idea for crossing his coin-op business with computers.

A few well-documented steps later, Computer Space -- Bushnell’s arcade clone SpaceWar! – was a bit of a complicated flop. So Bushnell hired Alcorn to his newly-founded company, Syzygy, to design something simpler and cheaper, using digital logic. Though Bushnell gave Alcorn the basic template and a checklist of details to include, what he failed to mention was that the game was just meant as a quick throwaway project, for Alcorn to cut his teeth on before progressing to the more complicated game that Bushnell really wanted to publish.

So for months, Alcorn felt the pressure to keep adding features that went above and beyond Bushnell’s brief – sound, a score counter, varying ball speed, reflections – thinking all the time that he was failing to produce what was being asked of him. The project grew more and more expensive When Nolan revealed that none of this work was really supposed to matter, Alcorn was less than thrilled with his employer. Still, the game that Alcorn produced was well-polished, was indeed simple to play, and – as he relayed in the famous quarter-jam anecdote (where they were called in to “repair” the prototype in its bar installation, only to find that it was clogged with money) – wildly successful in its test case.

Citing a later soccer game that the “customers” (read: arcade operators) demanded yet the players did not want to play, Alcorn advised developers to go with the market, yet never to listen to the customer. He suggested the success of Pong was largely due to its open and social nature; it requires two to play, and there is no gender bias.

Soon the arcade market became glutted, and Bushnell looked for new markets to conquer. Following the above logic, in placing the end user before the gatekeeper, Bushnell and Alcorn shifted to the consumer market – which was, owing to Magnavox’s reluctance to sell directly to the end user – pretty much a blank slate.

Nobody at Atari (as the company had become) knew a thing about marketing, so they went to Sears – which was ecstatic about selling Alcorn’s VCS (as the retailer had already tried and failed to court Magnavox). That suited Atari fine, at least for a while, as all they had to do was field royalty checks.

Though the VCS was not the first, and certainly not the last, cartridge-based system, Alcorn feels it is in some ways – due to its huge, budget-influenced technical constraints – one of the most flexible platforms around. That it demands super programmers to take advantage of any of that flexibility is a reasonable trade-off, he feels, for the imagination it requires in order to develop anything in the first place. “Too much hardware support,” Alcorn said, “constrains creativity.”

Along a similar train of thought, Alcorn was initially resistant to listing instructions on his arcade games. “If you have to read instructions” – his voice began to rise – “it’s a bad game.” Furthermore, he says, current game design is getting out of hand. “Now, it’s a problem. You’ve got too much.” Back when you had one to three people working on a game, design was more personal. It was far easier to be focused, and creative.

To send off the panel, Baer and Alcorn played a game of Odyssey Ping-Pong, each consistently missing the return. Occasionally they would bounce the ball back and forth once, twice. “Geriatric video game players...” Alcorn muttered, to raucous laughter from the audience.

As everyone began to stand up, a representative from the Guinness Book of World Records commanded attention. He had a surprise for Ralph Baer, in the form of an award for “Inventor of the First Home Video Game Console”. He also used the opportunity to plug the new “Gamers Edition” Guinness book. Cue another standing ovation.

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

[Andy Baio from Waxy.org attended GDC last week as a Web 2.0/geek culture/game culture crossover' observer, and wrote about it on his popular blog and GameSetWatch. Since he was a bit busy hanging with Jonathan Coulton at GDC parties to do lots of blog posts, lulz, he's kindly given us this new interview with the ForumWarz creator as an added bonus - and it's fascinating stuff - thanks, Andy.]

ForumWarz is my newest obsession, a web-based game like nothing I've ever played. In short, it's a parody of Internet culture in the form of a real-time role-playing game. You play as one of three Internet archetypes -- the camwhore, emo kid, or troll -- and try to disrupt message boards any way you can, using your sexuality, bad poetry, cross-site scripting attacks, or simply banging your head on the keyboard. In the process, you'll meet a large cast of strange characters who will send you on missions in a very funny microcosm of the Internet.

Among those parodied: Furries, Google, script kiddies, Boing Boing, Apple Computer, ricers, 4chan, Ron Paul, gamers, Bill O'Reilly, Tubgirl, otaku, and the Church of Scientology. Also, it's almost certainly the only game to include a text-adventure minigame based on R. Kelly's "Trapped in the Closet." This game isn't for everyone.

Before reading any further, I'd highly recommend trying the first two or three levels. Warning: If you're easily offended, this game is not for you. And don't worry about getting stuck with the Jimmy character during the tutorial; you get to choose a username, avatar, and class when you hit level 2.

I interviewed Robin Ward aka "Evil Trout," ForumWarz's developer/designer and only full-time employee, to learn more about the history and making of the game.

Andy Baio: Listen, I want to start by telling you that I'm absolutely blown away from ForumWarz. Brilliantly executed, addictive, sheer fun.

Robin Ward: Thanks, that means a lot to me. When I first came up with the idea, Jalapeno and I spent a little time looking at other web RPGs. And I couldn't believe how obtuse some of them were. There was one, I honestly forget which one, that said "The best way to get started is to read our wiki." And I thought that was ridiculous, as if someone is going to sit down and read through a wiki before playing.

Is it just you and Mike "Jalapeno Bootyhole" Drach?

We actually incorporated recently, and there are four of us in the corporation. But the majority of the work is done by Drach and I. I work on it full time, and Drach has taken vacation time to work on it. The others are more casual, we have weekly meetings and we bounce ideas off each other.

I read you worked on it for over a year, and then three months in beta? I saw the original announcement on your blog from just over a year ago.

Yup. I first came up with the idea in September 2006. I was working full time at that point, and started learning Ruby on Rails. Drach is a great friend of mine, as is Jason Kogan, and we'd meet weekly to discuss and work on it. And quickly I started to notice that I was having a lot more fun working on it than I was my real job. And I'd lie there at night, thinking "Wow, wouldn't it be awesome if I could work on Forumwarz full time?"

And then I looked at my financial situation -- I'd managed to save up a bunch of money working as a developer, so I crunched some numbers, figured out a way to live really cheaply, and quit my job. So I did that Jan 1, 2007.

I worked on it full time throughout the year, with Mike's help when he took his vacation in the summer, then released Episode 1 in Beta on Halloween. Then we launched proper a couple of weeks ago, in early February.

You're the primary developer/designer and Drach writes... What do the others do?

We're all friends, who I've known since high school (and in Jason's case, grade school). So it was mostly an excuse to get together and throw around ideas. Sometimes it's nice to just have people to bounce ideas off. Jason was great at giving UI feedback, like why did you put that button there, that makes no sense, etc. And the meta-game, Domination, is basically his baby. The fourth member, who isn't so active any more since he had a child, is David Kalechstein. When he was laid off, he wanted to learn Rails and wrote a little bit of code for ForumWarz. (Mainly in displaying our leaderboards.)

We used to drink beer and go out for dinner at every meeting, but after a couple of months that got expensive and unproductive

Beer and meetings don't mix.

Hah, generally not.

Your influences are all over the map. The name's derived from classic BBS doors like TradeWars and Pimp Wars?

Yup, very few people get that actually. In terms of the turn-based gameplay and visits per day idea, that came from a door called LORD, Legend of the Red Dragon.

We wanted a name that reflected that. It was actually Drach's idea to get ForumWarz, he's the one who looked it up.

Were you involved in the BBS scene?

I never ran a BBS, but I was super addicted to them growing up. Of course when the Internet came around I jumped ship, but I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for them. When I was young, I'd come home from school and just start dialing up.

LORD started in 1989, so I'm going to guess you came into the scene the same time I did around the late '80s, early '90s?

Yeah, that's about right. I think I got my first modem when I was 8 years old, which would be 1987.

A lot of the influences in ForumWarz are from that time period. I was in love with LucasArts games, and we stole a lot from them, I think. Like breaking the fourth wall, the conversation trees. Also, my favorite parody RPG of all time, Superhero League of Hoboken, came out then.

There's also quite a bit of text adventure influence in ForumWarz. In the writing, but most obviously in the Trapped in the Cupboard minigame.

We knew very early on that we couldn't afford to make a visually flashy game, so writing was really important to focus on. Mike Drach actually writes for children's cartoons, and I've known him since high school and have always thought he was hilarious but had never had an opportunity to truly apply it.

Trapped in the Cupboard exists more because I thought it would be a fun project to port Z-machine (the virtual machine that runs the old infocom games) to an Ajax interface. I started doing that for a day or two as a break from ForumWarz coding, and quickly realized it was far more complicated than what I needed. So I scrapped it, and came up with my own Ruby pseudo-DSL. I wish I could brag that I pulled that off. :)

You've also mentioned the obscure Sierra game Jones in the Fast Lane as an influence.

Ah yes, I wouldn't advocate piracy, but it's not too hard to get from abandonware sites. It's basically impossible find in stores, even online ones.

One question I am asked often is why would you make a game about a mundane thing like the Internet? Jones is my biggest influence for that, because it's the first real life simulator I played.

When I first started trying to describe ForumWarz to friends and on my site, I realized how futile it was. It's impossible to explain what it is.

Yes, that has always been a problem. I would say 9 out of 10 people I'd explain it to just had this glazed-over look on their faces. I'm quite neurotic, and during those first few months when I was developing it like mad in a black box, it would bother me a lot that I was working on something that people thought was a totally dumb idea.

When we launched in Beta though, I felt a lot better because it resounded so well with people. It's really better off played than explained, that's why on the homepage we just want people to start playing right away. Don't sign up, just click the big button.

Are there any other web-based games that are doing anything similar? I've seen people mention Kingdom of Loathing as the closest cousin.

Kingdom of Loathing is the closest thing we have to a competitor, in that it is a web based parody game. The interface and universe are quite different. You know, ours is a little fake Internet, theirs is a fantasy world of stick figures.

I think they did a really good job establishing that there was a market for web-based RPG games. Coming into the genre late, we had the advantage of new technologies like Rails and Ajax to create our interface.

You've also spent a lot of time developing strong NPCs to interact with, through the fake email and IM clients.

Yeah, I always loved conversation trees like in the old LucasArts games. One of the first things I started prototyping was the sTalk interface, because I knew it was going to be important. The interface is basically the same as the first version I came up with, but the tools for building the chats went through many iterations.

I actually wrote a more technical article about the back end for stalk a while ago on our forums if you're interested in peeking into it.

The characters sometimes parody archetypes (obnoxious gamer, steroidal jerk, creepy pedophile) and occasionally real people, like Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow as the pop culture/privacy-obsessed Doctor O.

Yes, we love parody, and fortunately there's a basically endless amount of things to parody on the Internet.

My favorite NPC so far is Fr4gGingR1teZ, the parody of Fatal1ty. It was the last conversation Drach created for episode 1 and I think he'd really gotten the hang of it. Not only did he nail the parody, but he gave him some heart. (Especially since he had no idea who Fatal1ty was when I suggested it.)

Clearly, not everyone's going to get every cultural reference. The game's still enjoyable without it, but it just adds a deeper level of appreciation when you get the in-joke.

No way, I don't even get them all. It's important that the casual player finds it funny, but the huge Internet nerd finds it hilarious.

I mentioned in that Digital Journal article you linked to that I love Futurama, and it's great for that. They even have a name for it, something like the 1% joke, where only 1% of the audience gets it.

I was disturbed that I knew 20 out of the 21 memes mentioned during the signup process. (Everything but Rabbit-Chan.)

Ah, Rabbit-Chan is quite obscure. I'm kind of obsessed with Internet culture. Things like Rabbit-Chan fascinate me, because it's the kind of thing that just couldn't exist anywhere else. She's a teenage girl who posted some pictures on 4chan, and they became super obsessed with her. She became a "meme," in particular how people claimed to be in love with her, how every minute of every day they thought about her and had no idea how to cope.

What's weird though is hundreds of teenage girls have posted their pictures on 4chan, and yet she's the only one who got that kind of treatment. It seems that popularity can be quite random.

Speaking of the meme list, I was struck by the signup and tutorial process. Very intuitive, and you can play for 15 minutes before even setting a password. How did that come about?

Thanks, we spent a LOT of time on it. It goes hand in hand with what I said earlier about the idea behind ForumWarz being a tough sell.

Joel Spolsky talked about barriers to entry, and it always stuck with me. Like the fewer barriers to entry you have, the more people you're likely to reach. So I brought that up with the guys, and I was like, screw signing up! Let's let them play right away. By the time we require them to sign up, they'll know whether it's the kind of thing they'll enjoy.

The other thing was the choice of a quiz. Originally it was going to be used to choose your class, like in other RPGs, but soon after we started writing it we realized the whole tutorial would be a lot simpler if you just had a couple of attacks, hence the Jimmy the Re-Re character was born.

We thought it was hilarious that no matter what you answered in the quiz you always received the same class. As it turns out, that was a bad call. We've received many complaints about that, some people have even left the site because they're like, "Screw this, I wanted to be a troll!"

I noticed many people get fooled by that, including some friends of mine. I thought it was obvious that everybody rolled the same character.

Especially since when you click "No," it says, "How can I say this nicely -- I REALLY think you're a Re-Re." We've changed that message to say "Don't freak out, you can choose your class later, buddy."

Don't feel bad, everyone who freaked out was a re-re.

[laughs] Well, websites are neat in that we can change them and screw around with them at any time. We keep a lot of statistics on how many people left, and at what stage. So even though it was a mistake, we will come up with a smoother version of the same joke. It just might take a few tries before we get it right.

The game does an amazing job of teasing you further into gameplay, never leaving you confused about what to do next.

Yeah, I wanted to make sure we held their hand all the way into it. A lot of console and PC games are great at that, but few web games bother. Like I said before, "Read the wiki" is a terrible intro. We knew we could do better.

In Portal, they do a great job of training the player, helping them build a mental model of the game universe one piece at a time. As I played it, I was trying to think how that kind of effortless training would work on the web... When I first played ForumWarz, my immediate thought was that you'd figured it out. Every Web 2.0 startup could learn something from the first 10 minutes of ForumWarz.

Thank you, that's very flattering. I'm a huge fan of Portal, and Valve's work in general. Immediately after finishing Portal I started it again with the commentary, and I was like, oh, if only we had the resources to develop with constant testing and feedback.

You did three months of playtesting. Did you ever physically sit behind players to see where they got stuck? Or was it all watching the stats and reading the feedback?

I never once sat behind someone's back, it was all based on emails and forum discussions, which isn't the ideal way to do it.

How much did ForumWarz change in that beta period?

In terms of the intro, it's almost exactly the same as what we went into beta with. If anyone tested that extensively, it was us. During the beta, the game improved tremendously. We had a lot of little nuisances that we took out. Some things that come to mind are allowing people to carry forum visits over days they don't play, only counting a visit upon their first attack.

We did notice that people seemed to love the game, played through episode 1 in a week or two, then dropped off. So instead of going right into episode 2, we made the conscious decision to work on aspects of the game for people who had already finished it, hence ForumBuildr and Domination were born. I mean that's still our major flaw, in that you can get through all we have to offer fairly quickly, but it's better than it was before.

ForumBuildr is one of the most innovative elements of ForumWarz, allowing users to write and design new levels and vote the best ones into production. It really playing off the strengths of the web and couldn't be done in any other medium.

I developed the "madlib" engine fairly early on, so that we could generate random postings on the forums. Then we'd have sessions where a bunch of us would sit around in a room with laptops, generating the posts for a particular forum, and it was quite fun. I think it was Drach who suggested initially that we give players the ability to use the tool.

At first I was against it, but I think it's because I didn't really understand how we would give it to them. Then early in beta, someone posted a thread saying it would be cool if they could write their own posts, and Drach replied saying we'd been thinking of a voting system for that, and all sorts of people were like, wow that sounds awesome.

So we pushed it to the front. I spent a week making the tool more user friendly, maybe another week adding the Digg-style voting controls and we threw it to them. I was quite happy with how well it went over, even with our limited user base at the time.

The user-generated levels are playable from the ForumBuildr section, but not part of the story... Are you going to introduce the user-created threads into the next episode?

For Episode 2, we've already created some forums and will create more, but our users are now creating material much faster than we are. We have plans to integrate their forums into our storyline, as well as a generic mission system that can come up with random missions every day with a specific reward. Those forums will be very useful for that. In the meantime, anyone can play the community-created forums.

They can even be used for levelling up, although getting to them [through ForumBuildr] is a little odd. Sometime soon I plan to redo the forum list page, to add things like sorting. I'll be listing them along with the Episode 1 forums... I think it will make the Internet feel less empty. (The fake internet, that is.)

The real ForumWarz forums are just as strange, with people role-playing their characters.

[laughs] Yes, that was something that surprised us. It came out the very first day of beta. In the "Whiny Bitches" forum, people started posting as their characters and enjoying it, and then someone suggested I give them their own forum to roleplay in, and it took off like crazy.

They can be hilarious at times. I think smart people love to pretend that they're stupid. But occasionally they take it too far and bring it into other forums and stuff, which has to be cleaned up. You hear these stories of people developing software, then being completely surprised when their users use it in a way that wasn't intended. Our RPG Forums are that for me. We'll totally enable them to do that, and I'm glad they enjoy it.

I noticed there was some vandalism on the wiki, with people removing core documentation pages. Do you think people are getting too carried away with pretending to be retarded trolls? Or were they actually retarded trolls?

Hah, I'm not sure. We've banned a couple, and hopefully we can stay on top of it. I think we might need to add some moderator support soon. I put a note in the edit screen for the wiki that says "If you vandalize this, you will be banned." Hopefully that will scare some people off.

Good move. So, let's talk a little about cash money. You've decided to go with paid upgrades but with a couple novel twists, allowing players to cheat extensively, buy new characters, or screw around with other players anonymously. How did you decide on what your brownie points can buy?

A lot of it was stolen shamefully from the Something Awful forums, in terms of being able to buy avatars and prank people. New characters just made sense because people often wanted to play the game as another class to see the difference.

How about the cheats? They're extremely powerful. (Instantly killing a thread, virtually unlimited money, and no forum limits.)

The cheats are a relatively new idea. People often complain about the forum visit limit when they first start playing, because we suck them in for an hour or two of gameplay, then bam, they have to stop and come back tomorrow. So people had been asking if there was any way to buy visits for a while, and we always said no because it screwed with the competitive aspect of the game.

But then i was thinking about it, and realized there's probably a lot of players who don't care much about competition, who just want to breeze through the story. So I coded up a way to flag accounts as cheated, and disqualify them from leaderboards and Domination. It's been really successful. I had no idea how many people just wanted to get on with the game.

And you're also running ads, which can be disabled if you donate. Anything other revenue models I'm missing?

Nope, that's it so far. It's likely that Episode 2 will require some kind of payment to play, but we haven't fully sorted that out yet. And the idea of selling t-shirts or posters has been thrown around, but both of those concepts are up in the air right now.

How's it growing since the public launch two weeks ago?

Actually, first off, I should thank you for your link, speaking of growth. You, and the Wired article that followed, sent us a huge amount of users.

You're welcome! Glad to help.

Growth has been great since we launched. The beta had about 1,200 accounts, but by the end only about 150-200 were active. Right now we're closing in on 10k accounts, which is pretty good for a few weeks. The days following your link and Wired, we signed up over 1,000 each day.

I have no idea how high we can take that number. I have read that Kingdom of Loathing has 100k members, but they've been around since 2003. We typically have about 2500-3000 accounts active in a given day.

I'm very happy with the response, although I don't have much to compare it to. I know of a local venture that had a team of 10 working on a social networking site for a year, and after 3 months were celebrating their 1000th user.

Now that the framework's in place, how long do you think it will take to release new episodes?

Because the framework is in place, the other episodes should be easier to develop, but we're also being ambitious about it. We want to add new ways to play that complement the existing game.

Having said that, we really need to get moving on episode 2. I'd planned to be working at it much harder than I am right now but the sudden business of the site has meant a lot of work staying on top of bugs and stuff. Drach is going to take some vacation time soon to help out again, which helped tremendously last time.

What would it take for the site to be self-sustaining and for Drach to leave his job to work full time on it?

I can't speak for him, but I'd guess it would require some regular income. The current influx of users and income is great, but who knows how long it will last?

As a developer, I didn't feel the risk of quitting my day job was a huge one, as the market for developers seems to be pretty good. As a writer, it's much harder to find gigs. I'd think if we showed steady income over a period of months he'd be willing to do it.

Wrapping up, I want to talk a little about the technology. You've built it all on Rails, and the site is snappy as hell. Any concerns about scaling?

I have no doubt that Ruby is slow, but I tried to design the site in the best way I could, and so far I've been really happy with the performance. I've been doing web development for years, and I spent about 5 years doing J2EE stuff, and let me tell you I could never go back. I just feel so much faster in Rails, and I think that's worth the performance loss. You know what they say, servers are cheap, programmer time is expensive

I think scalability is a problem you constantly have to face, no matter what technology you use. We've had some bumps and I think there will continue to be them in the future, but I feel confident that they can be surpassed.

How's the Haml templating engine been to work with? It looks elegant, but I've never tried it.

Haml is a great product. I should let you know that I know the creator personally, he lives around the corner from me and he's well known in the local Rails community. It is not perfect for all situations. I have the odd page that uses ERB for formatting, but for 90% of the pages I write it makes me faster, simply because I don't have to close tags.

I should point out that we're running everything off one server now (rails, memcached and mysql), so we haven't even begun buying additional hardware yet. Up until thursday night we were running on 1GB of RAM too, but that wasn't enough so we added another GB.

I saw on Netcraft you're using nginx?

Yes, I use nginx as a proxy to a pack of mongrels. There are many different ways to configure a Rails stack, I'm not sure how I decided on that one, really. It just kind of turned out that way. I read a lot of blogs and stuff. I'm no huge IT person, and it seemed within my limits to configure it.

I read a blog entry that bookmarked nginx against mongrel and lighttpd, and nginx/mongrel came out on top.

I think I read a few benchmarks like that, yes. I remember reading that Apache2 and FastCGI was the fastest configuration, but that it ate a lot of RAM. And since our hosting company charges a fair bit for RAM, I went with nginx.

I wanted to ask about The Unintelligencer, the text parser you built that simulates progressively stupider commenters. Are you unintelligencing user-contributed text in ForumBuildr? Or only the stuff you wrote?

We do a little. It can be tuned with various percentages, but since we want people to quickly recognize what they wrote, it's very low on their submissions. We could probably tune the actual game back some too.

Right now, some of the text is so mangled it feels greeked. (Lorum ipsum d0l0rr.)

Yeah, it was meant to be very occasional, but I think we took it too far.

I think it works as placeholder text. If the fake comments were more coherent, I'd start reading them as conversation expecting to see replies.

Yeah, and unfortunately we can't do that. Some people have suggested we take it further, create Markov-chain based replies to your attacks and stuff. I liked that suggestion, but now I'm in that sucky period where everything awesome just reeks of TIME, and I have to just pick and choose the ideas.

You've built an extremely solid foundation and a brilliant first episode. I think it'll be a big success. Thank you, Robin!

Thanks again. It really took an enormous amount of effort to get to this point, a lot of it without any feedback at all, so it means a lot to me (and the team) every time someone has something nice to say about it.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Aha, a quick side note to point out a new Gamasutra article by David Marsh, who you may know as the creator of DevBump, but is also a former big-budget and current indie game developer - which is why he's in a good position to write the feature 'Nine Paths To Indie Game Greatness'.

As he postulated in his intro: "Many game studios are crippled by the amount of resources they require to keep operations going. I have seen plenty of companies that operate "contract to contract" with little hope of ever breaking out of the cycle. The studio growth required by the increasingly resource intensive modern crop of games is many times unsustainable. In fact, the problem seems to be getting worse.

According to a report by the BBC, "Back in 1982, the Japanese company Namco produced Pac-Man for $100,000. Now, the average PlayStation 3 title is estimated to cost $15m. Even after adjusting for inflation, that is still a significant rise. While production costs have tripled in recent years with the introduction of next-gen consoles, sales and revenue have hardly changed." [EDITOR'S NOTE: Well, game industry revenue has gone up a tad in aggregate, but we abstractly take the point, the BBC!]

Independent developers usually operate with very limited initial resources. By operating without a loan of resources, they create a development environment for themselves free from outside influences or restrictions. The only obligations they hold are to themselves as developers and the people who play and purchase their games."

In any case, the full feature on Gamasutra lists a number of specific ways indies can innovate and create with less, including 'Procedural Content', 'Avoiding Photorealistic Art Direction', and by "utilizing existing free, cheap, or open technology". All fine points (and sorry I had to use the Little Miss Sunshine graphic again!)

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

While, yes, this is still the week after GDC (hence the hangover metaphor still going), there's still a lot of neat esoteric links to be dug up - and I particularly like the Pink Tentacle link about the Japanese mobile game (pictured) which delivers real fish after you catch virtual ones.

This does a great job of linking virtual and physical worlds - much in the same way that Ed Fries' rather awesome FigurePrints lets you actualize your World Of Warcraft figure in real-life statue terms. More of this dimensional interplay, please. Anyhow, onward with links:

Video Game Venture Capital: Should VCs dare put money into casual game devs?
'More sound tactics for early stage casual game developers might include limiting distribution in exchange for better terms or favored marketing status.'

Rock, Paper, Shotgun: GDC ‘08 Brain Dump, Part One
Rossignol's GDC adventure! Also see Part Two, for the foolhardy.

Grassroots Gamemaster: The Way Forward For The Lottery Ticket Videogame Company
'Now is the time to take off the black hat I normally wear and put on my green hat - and scour the edge from my voice.' Bravo!

Grand Text Auto » Jeff Howard’s Quests
New book from AK Peters - 'an exploration of literature, computer games, and a connection between them'. Interesting!

NEWSARAMA.COM: TILTING @ WINDMILLS 2.0 #48: BRAND THINKING
Comics are different to games, yes, but trends in creative media are worth reading - this is 'direct market' 2007 sales.

Ippon Zuri: Catch-and-eat fishing by phone ::: Pink Tentacle
All about 'a unique new cellphone fishing game that rewards successful players with home deliveries of fresh, real-world fish' - yesh, only in Japan.

Crummy.com: Where Are They Now?
Looking at what happened to programmers (including a smattering of game designers) depicted in a 1986 'Programmers At Work' profile.

Joi Ito's Web: DAEMON
A new book: 'Leinad Zeraus depicts a world where a collossal computer daemon designed by a genius MMO designer begins to take over the world after his death.'

So You Want To Make A Game from 1UP.com
Indie masters, good lessons.

First Look - Airport Mania: First Flight - Blog - Reflexive Arcade
Russell Carroll co-created, influenced by SNES Aerobiz (awesome!)

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The “games for girls” strategy has taken flak from many critics, both male and female. Sure, we’d like to see a world where video games aren’t branded a 99%-teen-male, testosterone-soaked form of entertainment. Most of us think that men and women – or boys and girls – have an equal birthright to video games.

But the challenge of bringing more women into the fold has led to the birth of “games for girls” – and most of them are curious, even offensive misfires. Games with hot pink covers, Barbie dreamhouses, and titles like Imagine Babyz are often perceived, not as building a bridge for girls into the world of video games, but as creating a kind of dumbed-down, fun-free ghetto.

But let’s consider it a different way. We disparage games for girls because they’re so specialized. But specialized games also present an opportunity. What if we’re curious about the weird little audiences they cater to?

Yes, niche games are meant to exploit niches. But they can also open doors to people who weren’t “supposed” to play them. Video games already let us walk a mile in somebody else’s combat boots; but how about, say, their candy-colored riding chaps?

That thought crossed my mind when I got a press copy of Atari’s new My Horse and Me for, what else, the Wii. This is clearly a girl game – the preppie blonde grooming her horse on the cover seals the cliche – but it’s also sold as a serious take on show horse racing, endorsed by the Fédération Equestre Internationale.

I’ve had a low-level fascination with equestrianism since I was a kid, and lived in a small town in Massachusetts that was chock full of rich people with horses. They held polo matches at the country club, but the closest view I ever got was when they rode down our street and shat by our mailbox. I never “got” the appeal – but I was curious.

My Horse and Me gives you the full horse experience, from grooming to riding to changing the color of your horse’s mane to match your own. But the meat lies in the racing, and the first thing you notice there is that the game is very affirming.

As you learn to steer your horse around the stable at different gaits and around tight corners, the coach is nothing but upbeat: “You can do it!” The last shooter I played called me a slack-jawed pole-toucher and dared me to fail: this game wanted me to succeed.

But succeeding isn’t simple. Each level is an obstacle course of jumps and turns that have to be made quickly and correctly. You need practice – and poise. Sitting upright with the Wiimote and Nunchuck (even in a game this dainty, they have to call it the “Nunchuck”), you pull the controls like reins, tilting one back to turn, yanking the controls to brake, or whipping them forward to catch some speed. Sure, you can use the buttons to brake or speed up, but learning to get the right touch is incredibly satisfying.

My Horse and Me takes place at a stately, well-appointed country club. The menu system features scenes of tea and scones, and as a rider, you have to dress in preppy riderwear. To make the game even more realistic, every time you win a race, an invisible daddy buys you more clothes.

The crowds are polite but unyielding. Skipping an obstacle or screwing up even a single jump bars you from a medal. And at the end of the race, you may hear that you did a nice job – but that’s hollow praise if you didn’t even land a bronze.

In fact, when a game’s always telling you did a “great job,” it just puts the burden on you to judge yourself more harshly. For example, there’s a mini-game where you can put together an outfit from all those nice new clothes. The game doesn’t tell you if you if the camo pants and burgundy jacket don’t match. You just have to look at yourself and feel the shame of your mistake.

And there’s plenty of shame to be had here. Because while My Horse and Me starts as a fun romp with your horse, only winners make it to the semi-pro and pro leagues. Those country club crowds clap politely when you finish with two obstacles knocked over and a wrong turn that lost you eight seconds. But the applause doesn’t speak as loudly as the whispering: “Her father must be so … proud.”

So that’s the lie in “games for girls”: they don’t tell you it’s great to be a girl; they ask how great a girl you really are. They have goals and pressures, win-states and loser-states just like any game. The leaderboards, the gold and bronze medals, the feeling of failure and inadequacy – it’s all there, goading you on. They just apply the pressure a little differently and sometimes, more subtly.

That’s why I kept pushing myself harder and racking up the gold medals. And as soon as I cracked the professional league, I felt victory – and it was victory on my own terms, against people who thought I was nothing. And I did it for me. Not for you, daddy. For me.

[Chris Dahlen reviews games for The Onion AV Club, writes about music and technology for Pitchforkmedia.com, and blogs at savetherobot.wordpress.com. Contact him at chris at savetherobot dot com.]

Posted by chrisd at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

[Over the next few days on Gamasutra, we're going to be reprinting some of the more interesting GDC lectures which might have potentially got 'lost in the shuffle' of the show. From earlier in the week - Dylan Cuthbert shows off PixelJunk goodness, so glad he could turn up.]

In an Independent Games Summit lecture, Kyoto, Japan-based Q Games' Dylan Cuthbert discussed the PixelJunk series for the PS3's PlayStation Network, some of the only true 'indie' titles not funded by Sony on the service.

He revealed the four games in the series - PixelJunk Racers, PixelJunk Monsters, both already released - and coming soon, and confirmed for the first time - PixelJunk Eden and PixelJunk Dungeons. He then explained the thinking behind the series - simple, straightforward titles with three key elements - simplicity, familiarity, and originality, and also running in HD, at 1080p and 60hz.

Cuthbert then explains just why the company decided to make these titles as well as continuing to work on titles such as StarFox DS or on high-end PS3 operating system tweaks. He put it simply: "Seizing back control from the bland merchants and restoring power to where it belongs" - in the hands of creators.

He then gave the example of Sony's Ape Escape 2001, which started as a flocking algorithm concept for a game - but after the first half of the game, the marketing department decided to replace all the original characters as apes from the Ape Escape series - and then mandated that yellow pants appear on the monkey in a yellow desert level. This lack of creative freedom caused Cuthbert to leave Sony and start Q Games.

Interestingly, Cuthbert suggests that 3D games look great at 1080p, but full-HD 2D looks absolutely amazing, because of the pixel by pixel fidelity. In addition, there's a lot of screen real estate - as many as 17 screenshots of old '80s games onto one 1080p screen. This is his reasoning behind making the PixelJunk series HD and 2D.

So why PixelJunk? Cuthbert decided that they wanted a brand for their indie output, thus calling each title PixelJunk in the series, and letting consumers identify that each dissimilar design was made by the same 'brand'.

So, what of the constraints? The PixelJunk series is set to be created by 5 or less people in 6 months or less - any game design they came up with must fit this requirement. In addition, the concepts needed to be 2D in terms of design - though he revealed that Series 2 of PixelJunk will be unique ways of using 3D in games. Later in the session, he revealed that Series 2 would "...maybe take some of the old 3D looks and bring them up to the full HD kind of style."

How about the tech? PixelJunk uses a scripting language called GameMonkey, and Cuthbert mentioned that StarFox for Super Nintendo - which he co-created - even used a custom scripting language. He noted that GameMonkey used quick iteration for tweaking, goodbye to long compile/link times, safe (no memory corruption), and C-like - but with Lua-like flexibility.

Cuthbert showed an early sketch for PixelJunk Dungeons, the fourth game in the series, depicted as a top-down dungeon crawler, showcasing some potential visual styles for the upcoming post-Eden title.

He then explained the scheduling for the PixelJunk games released so far and in development - Racers development began in February 2007, and it was released in September. Monsters began in April 2007 and was released in December, and Eden began in June 2007.

In concluding, Cuthbert pointed out that the PixelJunk series is self-published in Japan, and published by SCEA/SCEE in the rest of the world. In self-publishing, he discovered that advertising is expensive, but you can get perks sometimes - he got a free week's advert in Famitsu.

He pointed out that viral marketing works - but had an interesting point on game demos. He claimed that a lot of people who had no intention of buying the game downloading the demo, and then potentially complaining about it.

He noted that on PixelJunk Racers, he was "very disheartened" by people who played the demo for short amounts of time and then slated it - suggesting that if you build up you "own little army" of supporters - and also revealed that the titles are doing well - PixelJunk Racers has broken even, and Monsters "is doing much better than that... it's already sold more than Racers."

As an ending point, Cuthbert then showed a video for PixelJunk Eden, the next in the series, and a spectacularly abstract physics-based game where you collect pollen and birth flowers as a small blob - with plenty of primary colors and combo effects.

The Q Games co-founder suggested that the title was "kind of like an organic Mario, in a way" - and its psychedelic visuals went down very well with the audience.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ah, yes, some more GameSetLinks turning this way - from Zero Punctuation's GDC skits through some fun design articles and even a Salon piece on game character fidelity.

Also notable - the new Japanese SRPG Poison Pink - which is one of the more fun names for an import strategy RPG we've seen for a while. More and more good material is getting picked up for the West (OK, mainly by Atlus!), so here's hoping this one turns up too. Here goes:

The Escapist : Zero Punctuation: Yahtzee Goes to GDC
Oh no, the horrible bleeping!

The Forge · I Hate Legal Bullying
IGE lawsuits and threatening of MMO bloggers, oh dear.

What do you look like? Designing an Iconic Main Character « High Dynamic Range Lying
'Master Chief, Gordon Freeman and the lead of Crytek’s PC hit Crysis are all excellent examples of gateways.'

Moogle.net: '3 Prongs of the Tuning Fork'
'Tuning can affect the fundamental interest level of your game, to the point where no matter how many times the player fails, they come back for more.'

National Console Support, Inc - 'Poison Pink' for PS2
Neat-looking (pictured) import SRPG - Atluuuus?

The quest for a realistic human face in video games | Salon Arts & Entertainment
David Cage, among others, speak - via The New Gamer.

Hidden Palace - Sega prototype site
Releasing over 1000 Sega game prototypes - blimey.

richardcobbett.co.uk > Richard's Online Journal > The Crystal Mess
It's a bit ARG-y, really, isn't it?

Siliconera » Out in the open, AQ Interactive owns XSeed Games
Interesting!

Speed Demos Archive - Portal
PC and console superspeed blasts through the Game Developers Choice Game Of The Year.

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So, the full IGF Awards show will be coming in due course, but in the meantime, the gods at Mega64 have posted up their three specially commissioned IGF skits, and they are really, happily ridiculous.

All three of the videos are rather 'special', but rather than trying to redescribe them, I'll just quote what they said on their official website:

"So as you may have heard, Mega64 once again provided videos for the big awards show at the Game Developers Conference. This year, though, their videos instead focused on the independent games. Was the Mega64 crew indie enough to do the game industry justice! Watch these new videos to find out!

First off, watch our Intro video, featuring a pleasant greeting from Dan Paladin, the award-winning artist behind the characters of games like Alien Hominid and Castle Crashers! And if that's not enough for you, there's even a bonus Behind the Scenes video!

Then watch our next indie game video, "I Am Independent," where the Mega64 crew speaks candidly on their independent gaming views!

And then finally, watch "Independent Inspirations" to prepare yourself to be an indie winner!"

Ah yes, and one more things from the Mega64-ers - a little vignette, if you will: "My favorite thing about GDC is how every time we go, we seem to have one defining moment that makes us realize, 'Wow, this was totally all worth it.' This year, for me, it was Jason Della Rocca, after winning his Ambassador Award, coming down to tell us that Ralph Baer, the father of modern video games, apparently looked like he was going to have a heart attack during our awards intro video.

Now of course we love Mr. Baer and everything he's done for video games, and would never wish any ill will unto him. But just the fact that we even heard that spoken to us was just a mindblower- How the hell did we get here? I mean, really? (Love you, Ralph)."

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

[Jump Button is a new weekly column by Drew Taylor, written specially for GameSetWatch, that focuses on the art and substance of video game culture.]

If Stephen King, a carton load of Barbie dolls, three glam rockers and a coin-op version of Berzerk were lashed together, set on fire and subsequently fried with one kajillion volts of electricity, then Australian musical outfit Toydeath would be the mutant offspring of the smoldering, glitching, molten plastic remains.

The band's appearance is the first indication of a lo-tech experiment gone wonderfully wrong; the Sydney-based trio taking on the disturbed, future sex-doll party visages of 'Big Judy' (Melissa Hunt), 'Disco Barbie' (Chris Murphy) and 'GiJoe' (founder Nick Wishart). But it's only when the band busts out a bunch of electronic toys and sends them into a crazy, wailing, spluttering frenzy of hyperactive melody that the true extent of the band's demented genius and ridiculously brilliant choreography manifests.

'All of our music is made from children's electronic toys,' explains Nick. 'We take the toys and modify them using electronics. ”Hardware hacking” or “circuit bending”, as it's called, is a technique where you change an existing circuit so that it behaves in a different way; you're effectively making a new instrument, or “bentstrument”. '

The critically hit-and-miss result is anything but conventional. High pitched bursts of feedback blends rhythmically with the broken neighs of a horse, while Jesus stutters out passages of Scripture to the bleeping, screeching crescendos of white noise, cheap sax guitars. fairy wands and a naked George Bush doll that says, 'I come from Texas'.

'We have a new DJ toy that's chock full of great drum sounds, scratches and beats' enthuses Nick, describing just one of the hundreds of toys he's collected. 'The bending makes it a mind blowing instrument!

'The green guitar is also an awesome machine. It instantly turns you into Steve Vai on acid. While the Hulk Hands are a perennial favorite. They're just so damn visual and they say, “HULK SMASH!”'

It's hard not to get caught up in Nick's excitement. The list of the band's instruments reads like a monster toy compendium from the last 30 years, full of classics. Toys such as the Super Talk Barbie, Touch & Spell, 'Let's Jam' guitar, Crazy Frog and Alphabet Apple.

Nick acknowledges that this retrospective aspect is a large part of what makes Toydeath so appealing; nostalgia pulses from the band's every performance in giant, sonic waves, assaulting the crowd with multicolored neon memories of childhood.

For Nick, those 'big toy memories' are mostly of building things with Mechano and Lego. 'But I also had a 100-in-1 electronics kit,' he adds, 'and it's that which got me interested in electronics and gadgets.

'It's funny to think that when I was a kid there wasn't really a lot of electronic toys. Now nearly every toy is now packed with sound making electronics. Circuit benders are especially nostalgic for late 70s and early 80s toys such as the Speak & Spell because they have more open electronics; there are so many more bends in these toys for hackers.'

For a moment I forget that Nick's talking about 'music'. His choice of words highlights the potential for Toydeath's sound massacre to hold an even greater emotional significance for those who play video games.

After all, arguably, electronic toys are the midwives and nursemaids of gamers.

Electronic toys were what we played with before we even knew what video games were. In their stilted, stuttering voices they taught us to count, to spell, to recognize shapes. They sat on our bedside tables and told us the time, and with a pull of a ripcord they repeated the lines of our favorite TV show, our celebrity idol, our most beloved creature from Sesame Street, The Smurfs, The Wombles, The Muppet Show. They played music to us when no-one would pay us attention. And they let us make our own music, even when we couldn't play a tune.

They were robots, dolls, trains, fire engines, books, sea creatures, play centers. And they taught us to push buttons, the principles of cause and effect.

Before we even knew what a joypad or joystick was, electronic toys were teaching us to play simple games.

The fact that bands such as Toydeath then take these much-loved toys and 'hack' their circuits to create something else, only furthers the affinity.

Hacking code and making mods has been a vital part of gaming's creative culture, often pushing and pulling development in previously un-thought of and experimental directions. They are also an enormous part of the collective identity of gamers, the 'criminal' heritage that has formed many of the attitudes and actions of gamers over the last three decades.

This is how gamers play. Pushing boundaries, breaking down elements, exploring possibilities.

Unsurprisingly, the emotional and ideological synaesthesia hasn't been lost on Nick. The 2005 launch of Toydeath's CD, Guns Cars & Guitars, for example, was held at an Intencity video game arcade in Sydney.

'We wanted to do something special for the launch that reflected the character of the band,' says Nick. 'All the games were in free play mode, and the place just packed out! It was complete mayhem with all the noise of the games mixing with our glitchy sounds.'

Nick has also been playing with the idea of starting a new band, one that uses gaming hardware and software in the same way that Toydeath uses toys.

'My idea comes from the “hardware hacker” ethic used to produce our music,' explains Nick. 'I was originally interested in developing a musical performance using Guitar Hero, SingStar or other musical type games live on stage. However, I know now that Guitar Hero is more like a Dance Dance Revolution style game that rewards you for accuracy rather than producing music when you play it. I need to find ways to hack games that will produce an interesting live performance, similar to the way that some musicians--such as DJ Scotch Egg--use Game Boys to produce music.'

'I'm also interested in machinima and was blown away by [Rooster Teeth's] Red Vs Blue series. I love how creative it is and its subversiveness; it's accessible and it unites gamers. Ideally our first film clip would be produced using these techniques, or something similar.'

While a fully fledged 'GameDeath' might be a short while off, Nick's keen to begin incorporating some of his game-related ideas (without diluting the Toydeath paradigm), particularly in live performances, where the band's looking for new ways to increase audience participation.

'For a while we used an animal mat as an instrument in one of our songs and it worked well,' explains Nick. 'It looked and sounded great and it left your hands free to play another toy. But we'd love to get some kind of mat out on the dance floor that punters could play. We'd also love to use more visuals in the show. It would be great to have people playing games on a backdrop. Maybe,' enthuses Nick, 'they could do Dance Dance Revolution on a projection screen behind us.'

For most bands, handing controllers over to the audience for the purpose of whipping up a frenzy of electronic interaction would almost certainly spell 'awkward creative death'. But felicitating mania at live gigs is where Toydeath excels, whether that's playing in Korea or China, at a primary school for disadvantaged kids in Utrecht, Holland, or on the back of a truck for an outdoor festival in Munster, Germany.

'Our most memorable live gig,' says Nick, 'would be [our performance] at a recent Spank party in Tokyo. Spank is a funky clothes shop that puts on wikid [sic] parties. It just goes nuts! Imagine 300 colorfully dressed teenagers hanging on your every move.'

Nick's words cause me to pause, and smile. I don't even have to try to imagine: exposed to a live performance, contemporary Japanese would eat up Toydeath like it was a breakfast cereal called Super Happy Joy Joy. And if that's what Nick and his bent trio of childhood Frankensteins are able to do with toys, there's no telling what nostalgic and code-bending evil awaits when they make their fully-fledged foray into games...

Start running now, Mario. Start running now.

[Drew Taylor works in the games industry in Australia and writes video game culture articles for various magazines. He has nightmares about Evil Otto and is currently tormented by his 14-month-old triplets' obsession with a plastic turtle that plays calypso music and says things like, 'Uh oh. Try again. Find.The.Green circle.']

Posted by Drew Taylor at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

[Over the next few days on GameSetWatch, we're going to be reprinting some of the more interesting GDC lectures which might have potentially got 'lost in the shuffle' of the show. This time - Mathew Kumar on this year's Game Design Challenge.]

This year, the Game Design Challenge 2008 at Game Developers Conference asked Brenda Brathwaite (Wizardry), Steve Meretzky (Hitchhiker’s Guide To the Galaxy) to take on reigning 2007 champion Alexey Pajitnov (Tetris) in designing an “inter-species game”.

“The inter-species game is a riff on the idea of opening up new markets,” presenter Eric Zimmerman quipped in his introduction, before showing an Arlo and Janis newspaper strip that Meretzky sent around to his other contestants as a joke about the idea – a cat unable to understand “pressing the button to pounce,” instead choosing to pounce at the TV itself.

“I didn’t want them to develop some kind of hardware that would allow a cat to play, say, Quake,” Zimmerman said, setting out the rules, establishing that the focus had to be on the play, not “some kind of space age hardware.”

Alexey Pajitnov’s Dolphin Ride

“When I got this challenge I thought that this species that I would include in the game could help the player to enjoy a new space which would be hard to get to without the help of the species. Flight was my original concept, but later I decided to go more conservative and return to the water. I’ve always dreamed of having a game set under water.”

“My game takes place in the real word with real dolphins, but in the virtual space at the same time. The team consist of one dolphin and two human players: a navigator and a shooter. It uses a special hardware which I call the dolphin saddle.”

Apparently not breaking the rules as the saddle consists of real-world parts (a simple pair of cameras, wireless transmitters, a pneumatic paint gun plus a headphone/mic for the dolphin) the game design consists of a playfield, generated by a common server: a 3D space with virtual objects with a free real space of the same size in the real sea. The virtual objects are simple balls, of three colors (precious blue, expensive green and cheap red, of varying occurrence.) The goal of the team is to take out as many balls as possible, and “shoot out” the opponents dolphins. Balls could be taken or shot by dolphins, but dolphins can only be “killed” by being shot. The winner is the one that collects 500 points, either through shooting other dolphins or other collecting balls.

Game play occurs by players seeing the real space with the virtual balls superposed, while the dolphin sees only the real space – but is led by the communication from the players.

Steve Meretzky’s TrayStation

“People have been playing games with animals forever: from fetch, to good old fashioned fox-hunting,” Meretzky joked, “which, by the way, featured animals in both a co-operative and competitive way.”

Meretzky asked himself which animals he could think of that had first of all the cognitive capacity to play games (which include parrots and bonobo monkeys) and then those that had “disposable income,”: pets, but unfortunately, while a pampered poodle could understand games, “their owner couldn’t”

He initially settled on strip poker with sheep, but found that well, “they would act like sheep!”

His next failed idea was that players like to collect things, and so did squirrels, so… “Why not use squirrels as Chinese gold farmers?”

Finally it all came down to the possible market -- why make a game for the 20 remaining Yangtze river dolphins when he could make a game for the trillion ants out there? But then, why make a game for a trillion ants, when there were so many bacteria out there?

So Meretzky developed the "TrayStation": a Petri dish containing millions of bacteria battling virtual castles on the player’s screen -- against the players “defence microwaves”. Of course, millions of bacteria would die: but those that didn’t would “level-up,” Meretzky said, reaching to a near fever-pitch: “It’s the game that makes germ warfare available to the whole family, the game that puts the fun back into fungicide,” he finished.

Brenda Braithwaite’s One Hundred Dogs

Braithwaite began by playing with Photoshop, with the crowd responding well to her ideas including Assassin’s Breed and Poop Scoopem but she began her real pitch: “I liked the idea of playing a game with my dog, and my dog being an equal and necessary part of the game, and something that really could be done.”

“So I considered things like strapping four Wii controllers to my dog, or using GPS, and then I thought: wait a minute, I’m already playing with my dog.”

She didn’t want to “strap something to her dog,” but she wanted “a co-op game, not an competitive game,” and came up with an “Interspecies Facebook ARG.”

“It’s called One Hundred Dogs. There are basically 50 players with 50 real dogs and 50 virtual dogs across 50 cities. It starts at the Westminster Dog Show. Players register at onehundreddogs.com, and there are challenges in 50 cities, including owner-based challenges and dog-based challenges. Winners are awarded points, and there’s a leader board. It was designed to build community among local players. That’s phase one.”

She continued with phase two, beginning with “Dog FiftyOne.”

“The 50 leading dog/owner groups get a friend invite from Dog FiftyOne. The social network develops and the quest progresses through a typical RPG design, where people have to do X, Y, and Z to get to Dog FiftyOne. Cities must work together to reach the next dog. The emphasis is on social net play.”

But suddenly disaster: Dog NinetyTwo never shows up after all of Dog NinetyOne’s challenges. “The game turns from competitive to co-op,” Braithwaite explained, “finding Dog NinetyTwo requires total networking: all human skills and and all dog skills from all 50 dogs in all 50 cities, working together,” until the final dog, Dog OneHundred, is found.

And the Winner is…

Judged from the audience’s applause, the winner was incredibly hard to pick between Brenda Braithwaite’s One Hundred Dogs and Steve Meretzky’s TrayStation, with TrayStation just winning out in the end by a sliver.

Over the thunderous final applause, Zimmerman invited the audience to “go out there and “make the craziest, most fucked-up games they could.”

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Woop, there's a whole bunch of GameSetLinks coming down the wire, post-GDC, and in this case, here's a few neat IGF things mixed in with much more obscure fun.

I particularly enjoy the Gallery of Undiscovered Entities retro text adventure craziness - and actually, the entire site has a lot of fun stuff on it, not available anywhere else. That's the fan-led video game history movement at work, woo. Onward:

Gallery Of Undiscovered Entities: 'Real Life - The Game'
An '80s text adventue - 'Real Life: The Greatest Adventure of All... is billed as a simulation of life, to help you figure out where you're going, or perhaps how to avoid getting there.'

The Associated Press: Black Crowes Say Maxim Review a Fraud
Notable because the same March issue has reviews of Rainbow Six Vegas 2 and Army Of Two. Wonder what versions were used for those?

Mahalo & Joystiq @ GDC - Veronica Belmont
Good IGF videocast from last week's show.

Jeff Green's 1UP Blog: Me and GDC: BFFs
The 1UP/Ziff PC supremo gives a little IGF love, yay.

The Path -------- a short horror game by Tale of Tales
New trailer for the IGF nominee, following its appearance last week.

Nothing But Fighting in 2008 - GameTap Read
Bully for you, indeed - the one-on-one fighter still endures.

Game Cabaret: Repressed Homoeroticism in R-Type
Silly, and possibly offensive - so a good start to the new group blog.

"Jennifer Ann's Group" - Teen Dating Violence Prevention flash competition
I'm helping to judge this competition for a worthy cause.

1UP's Retronauts podcast goes Phantasy Star crazy
Starring our very own Christian Nutt - lots of Phantasy phrothing, LISTEN AT YOUR PERIL!

What They Play - Guitar Hero: The Encyclopedia of Rock
Ah, What They Play has editorial now! A 30 Rock exec producer talks the music game awesome.

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So, one of the big stories from earlier this week was Kotaku's one on Microsoft apparently 'cutting XBLA royalties in half', and it's one that has caused a lot of controversy, with plenty of predictable name-calling and insistence on the death of XBLA as a viable platform.

One of the problems here, of course, is that Kotaku's report only had one side of the story - and Microsoft isn't really in a position to refute the reports, because it will not discuss original or current royalty rates in public. Which leads us to a problem to be resolved - did Microsoft really cut its XBLA royalty rates in half without _ANY_ changes to the developer package?

The answer is no, of course. How Xbox Live Arcade works is badly understood by many, but let's try to split it up. Firstly, there are two different ways you can publish your game - either via Microsoft's own XBLA producers (let's call that 'first party'), or via an existing retail publishing partner such as Electronic Arts, Sierra, THQ, and so on (let's call that 'third party').

From what I understand, third-party royalty rates - which I believe were already less than 70% - are not affected at all by any of these new royalty changes. (Of course, if you're an indie and you have to go through a third-party, you will be getting a percentage of a percentage, because Microsoft takes a cut, and then your publisher, and then you. But you don't have to worry about testing, localization, getting ratings, and so on - it may be that Microsoft is keen for a greater percentage of games to run through those parties.)

So, it's the 'first-party' rates which are changing. And I didn't really have the specifics of how until an IndieGamer post by XBLA developer Paul Johnson helped fill in some of the blanks. As he explains:

"If you had a 70% deal... for a game, then you'll get your 70% for the life of the product. There is now a sliding scale in place for royalty payouts that is sure enough less than 70% at its best, but I've always thought that 70% to be unsustainably high from the get go, not that I was going to complain about it...

In return for the more realistic but still commercially viable lower rate, you get a variety of services for free that would've cost you plenty and would previously have presented a barrier to entry. Worldwide [game] ratings, localization, etc. It's a good deal. Unless you think saying M$ makes you clever, in which case I'm sure it will suck."

So basically - yes, the rumor is essentially correct, in that some royalty deals on first-party games may now be as low as 35%. But these lower royalty deals will now apparently include a lot of the 'grunt work' in localization that the developer had to pay up front - and sometimes perhaps couldn't afford.

In the N+ postmortem at the Indie Games Summit this week, it was noted that the minimum estimated cost to make an XBLA title was $125,000. It's possible (though it's unclear) that you can reduce that significantly with this new option - so you have to pay less up front, but you'll be making less on the back end.

There are still ramifications for many Xbox Live Arcade developers, of course - which is why I think it's even more important that XBLA pricing be reconsidered. Particularly, the traditional royalty rate if you 'roll your own' localization, etc and pay for it up front is now clearly less than 70% - but above 35%.

Which is a major shame - but paying for Microsoft's producers, game submissions, and so on _has_ to be self-sustaining, otherwise the XBLA ecosystem won't work. Overall, this _is_ a blow and a sign that the initial deals set up weren't at the correct level for sustainability. We'll see how this affects things for the indie going forward.

(As for what Sony and Nintendo are trying for - I'll be writing some pieces on the pros and cons of their approaches very soon, since they're equally interesting in different ways.)

[UPDATE: veteran programmer Jake Simpson also takes on the subject, suggesting "publishers still get the 70/30 split" and that "a rate of 35% going up to 45% based on sales [for first parties] has been put in place", particularly noting:

"MS is obviously attempting to steer indies to publishers, because then their certification requirements are considerably less (in so far as a publisher will do pre-cert to make sure you only need one certification submission, not many), and publishers deal with the indies instead of MS having to."

He also claimed of the changes: "So it's either go to a publisher and have to fight hugely to own your own IP, or take what little MS have and pray to god that you make enough to break even and fund the next game, not something particularly attractive to a small indie.

Whats really going to happen is that anyone who can create a decent product is going to run straight to Sony to do it, and have it released on their PlayStation Network instead. If they self fund they can retain the IP and the royalty rates are higher and best of all there are no publishers involved."]

[UPDATED UPDATE: Some particularly whiny but still smart correspondents of mine are complaining that I didn't run the numbers this time, as I did in my previous Xbox Live Arcade post. Mea culpa - it's true, and because I don't feel I have a full grasp of the facts on what is and isn't included.

Suffice to say - there's a real-world value (which I do not know!) for the 'extra things' Microsoft is doing. If it's $1, then this is a worse deal for XBLA developers. If it's $1 million, then this a great deal. Most correspondents so far - including several current XBLA developers in the comments - seem to think it tends towards a worse deal. Please do the math from there.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (16)

   

This is something I've been tracking down a long time -- examples of Japanese magazines Yugekishu and its unofficial continuation Bug News. They are rarer than hen's teeth in Japan and tend to cost the most money I've seen thrown at old computer/game mags on Yahoo! Auctions when they pop up -- sort of the Japanese equivalent to Electronic Games and old Creative Computing, you could say.

Yugekishu, an A5-sized monthly from publisher Nihon Micom Kyoiku Center (Japan Microcomputer Education Center) that premiered June 1984 and closed up shop with its ninth issue in February/March 1985, is unlike any other PC game magazine I've seen from the era anywhere in the world.

How can I describe it succinctly? Let me give it a shot: You know how people sometimes whine that there's no video-game equivalent to Roger Ebert or Lester Bangs, no truly unique-sounding game pundit whose views are trusted and influential in a way that transcends whatever publication they're written for? Yugekishu (which is Japanese for "shortstop," as in the baseball position) was an attempt to attract the wannabe Eberts of video games and gather their longform reviews and commentaries into a single magazine, one meant for hardcore gamers and industry insiders. In 1984, I remind you.

(Bug News, picked up for publications by Kawade Shobo Shinsha in August 1985, kept the same theme but focused on the entire PC industry, not just games. It lasted for several more years before morphing into a Macintosh and desktop-publishing mag in the late '80s.)

What makes these magazines special? Besides the fact they cover much of Edge/Next Generation's beat nearly ten years before either of those magazines existed, it's also one of the few examples of a nationally distributed Japanese game mag that actually, uh, says things. There are, and have been, tons of game mags in Japan, but (from my admittedly removed perspective) they are in even more of a symbiotic relationship with game publishers than their US and European counterparts.

Famitsu's cross reviews are about the only chance you have of seeing any non-cushioned negativity thrown against a game in the entire mag, for example, and they can get away with that because like EGM, they've established a brand name for their reviews that goes back decades. Other mags can't, and real opinions are surprisingly rare -- often, even when they're there, they're concealed in the form of user-submitted reviews and such. To put it a more charitable way, game mags are meant to be a guide and resource that happens to be entertaining, not the video-game equivalent to Cahiers du cinéma.

Yugekishu and Bug News were different. The editors wore their biases on their sleeves -- they loved Infocom and most of the big-name American RPGs; they hated nearly the entire PC game output of Japan, which at the time was mostly porn and knockoffs of overseas games (hey, the more things change, huh?). They didn't bat an eye at writing six-page reviews of games like Castle Wolfenstein and Softporn Adventure, discussing the role of war in games and other forms of media and so forth.

They published extensive strategy guides with professionally-drawn maps and exhaustively-researched enemy and item lists. They ran multi-page interviews with industry figures, some original and others translated from Softalk, which they had an informal licensing agreement with until that mag's closure. All this in 1984!

US computer mags hated reviewing games in the 8-bit era -- the great majority of the time, the reviewers saw it as something beneath serious criticism. This mag was different. Not even the British mags of the time treated game coverage this seriously. Yugekishu was a magazine at least 15 years too early, and its existance as an obscure mag, just barely supported by a tight-knit contigent of hardcore fans in its native country, is almost as sad as the lack of a real tradition of game criticism in America.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also Executive Editor of PiQ, a new magazine hitting stands in March.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 4:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Over the next few days on GameSetWatch, we're going to be reprinting some of the more interesting but lower-profile GDC lectures which might have potentially got 'lost in the shuffle' of the show. Next up - Leigh Alexander on a great Jon Blow design lecture.]

At his GDC session, independent designer Jonathan Blow (Braid) suggested that game design might be too ambitious in aiming to add meaning to games by richening characters and developing less linear stories. Instead, he offered ten easier problems with which to begin in order to build a foundation for deeper meaning and engagement.

"I don't really like saying the same thing twice," began Blow, explaining that he had no plans to repeat the same talk he gave in Montreal in November. This talk, he said, would focus on an area that didn't get as detailed a treatment as it would have -- and yet he began with Daniel Radosh's Halo 3 review again, which said that games would need to "stop pandering to the player's demand for mastery in favor of enhancing the player's intellectual and emotional life."

"The question that Daniel puts forth is, how do we make games more emotional and meaningful?" Began Blow. The usual approaches he cited were the departure from the linear story model, the improved simulation of characters -- both in terms of AI and in terms of emotions -- and the more realistic rendering of characters to provoke sensual responses.

"We've succeeded at that latter approach," Jon said, recalling the first videos from Valve depicting Half Life's character technology. And yet, he called Episode 2 "just as robotic and lifeless a game as any FPS was in 1998, except it looks better." Blow challenged the assumption that more realistic characters would make a game more affecting and meaningful.

Another school of thought Blow cited addressed logic more than visuals, citing the example of Chris Crawford's Storytron, a 17-year work. "This is a really difficult problem to solve," Blow said, calling dynamic storytelling "the Moby Dick of the games industry."

Rather than continuing to bang our heads against the problem, Blow suggested the industry address some easier problems, for the time being, to build a foundation to more effectively approach the issue of emotional characterization.

"There are a lot of approaches to this kind of question, and most of them are analytical," said Blow, giving Raph Koster's Game Grammar and Dan Cook's Chemistry of Game Design as an example. "First of all, [these techniques] seem very sterile," Blow said, suggesting that these logical approaches can't create a game that can really affect people. Rather, he said, "They only catch about ten percent of what a game is... it's like an iceberg below the ocean."

"When I try to understand games, these aren't the kind of approaches I take anymore," Blow said. Instead, he offered ten different perspectives by which to interpret a game: A consumer product, as escapism or fun, as exercise, as communication, as artistic expression, teaching, training, a challenge, exploration or practice. Blow admitted these categories are "messy," not orthagonal and even overlapping. Ultimately, however, he suggested that we haven't yet defined game design sufficiently as a science to be so analytical about it.

Games as Consumer Products

This, Blow said, is one of the two dominant paradigms designers use to think about games -- it focuses on maximizing sales and minimizing investments. Designers implement only the features and upgrades necessary to keep a game selling, and requires analyzing the market to determine what people will buy to drive design decisions. "This is not a creatively-sourced method of game design... it's often just pragmatic," he explained.

Games as Escapism

The second of the two most dominant categories, Blow said, is a design philosophy that prioritizes fun whether or not it correlates with sales. "If you're looking at a design decision... maybe you look at some user tests or predict what users will respond to, and if they're not having fun with something you change it or cut it." Blow suggests designers can make more valuable or meaningful work by rejecting this concept. He showed a screenshot of God of War 2 as a canonical example, with enemies that exist to be killed without much meaning behind them.

"When I hear people talk about these games... I just get really put off. These are not the games I really want to be making. First of all because it's boring to make the same game over and over," Blow said. "Why are we making these things that are not even necessarily that appealing? ...I buy these games and I play them for ten minutes and I realize there's nothing in there for me."

These are the sorts of fantasies, Blow said, that Radosh was discussing -- pandering to the player's desire for mastery and fantasy. "It's all about pretending to give you a challenge and letting you win and giving you bright colors and sound effects to celebrate the fact that you won. And that's disturbing to me."

Games as Exercise

This method "grounds the fun and gives it more meaning," Blow said, noting that fun has a purpose from an evolutionary standpoint. "You've evolved to enjoy things that have positive survival value, or reproductive value, and to dislike things that have negative value."

This method provides a compass, Blow says. He noted the philosophy of fun as subjective, but with this model, fun can be judged based on its evolutionary purpose, and evaluated based on whether it's helping to further some of these drives. "Sports are a kind of fun that help make us more fit, and slot machines are a kind that's more like a parasite," he said as example.

"This perspective of games as exercise gives us a way to judge the suitability of fun, which is something that we in this industry do not do very often.

Games as Communication

Blow used Braid as an example of this method, noting that communication is one of his favorite purposes for games. "There's a lot of passive communication going on," he said, noting that Braid contained various puzzles in the platform-jumping level design that require clear understanding on the part of the player. He showed Braid's different foreground and background palettes to indicate how each part of the environment help direct and inform the player.

"The player understands this just as soon as he glances at the screen, and he also understands there's a threat... these fireballs are moving down this tunnel and he has to avoid those," Blow said. "This paradigm of communication extends all the way to the character design."

"We want the player to not be confused... in order to successfully play the game as best as possible," he explained.

"The rendering of audio and visuals is not just to look pretty. It's to communicate to the player the state of the world," stressed Blow.

Games as Artistic Expression

This overlaps heavily with communication, but is done with a different intent. "When I talked about my game, it was all about not confusing the player. But you can communicate with the intent of planting thoughts or feelings inside the player's head, and that's artistic expression," Blow explained. Those who think games are not art, "haven't played the right games."

Meaningful artistic expression may be subjective, but it comes down to what the artist gives and the player receives. "When we manage to hone games to the point where they're very effective art tools, that art will come from a different angle than other media," he said. Blow demonstrated a still from a film alongside a screencap of the poem The Waste Land, with a picture representing a string concert depicted as well. "Those media all have different strengths and weaknesses, and as humanity we are enriched by having all of them. We don't really understand games well enough to know what the expression will be like... we're a long way from completely understanding. Someday we'll be able to fill in that question mark... and we'll be richer as a people for it."

Everyday Shooter, Blow said, is "obviously art... it expresses audiovisuals in an artistic way as many games do, but it also expresses gameplay in an artistic way." Rod Humble's The Marriage is another example. "This expresses intellectual things rather than emotional things," Blow said. "That the title is The Marriage is all the backstory you have." The blue and pink squares are canonical symbols for male and female," Blow noted. "When they meet, they touch for a moment and move away again. ...You start interpreting the rules of gameplay in an intellectual way, the way that you might interpret symbols in a short story or a novel. Anyone who says these games aren't art are crack-smoking."

Games as Teaching

"Teaching is another form of communication, but it's one that unveils over a series of interactive steps to implant ideas intellectually in a player's mind. All games inherently teach," Blow said, recommending Raph Koster's A Theory of Fun For Game Design and Ian Bogost's Persuasive Games. "The reason that all games teach, though, is because you have this structure that's a goal, but you don't necessarily know what the goal is when you start playing the game."

Games make goals achievable by teaching the player, explained Blow, which allows a player to build a "mental model" of the game. Seeing a screen shot of Super Mario 3, for example, would look meaningless to someone who's never played it before, but seeing a scene from the game from experience shows information about what choices and behaviors are available in the game.

"Teaching is an interactive process that we can leverage in more ways than we do," Blow said. "It's not just edugames or serious games that teach -- all games teach. It's just a question about what they're teaching."

For example, Blow noted that in Portal, the player can learn how the portal structure works mainly by experimenting with and looking at it. "The designers of Portal were very conscious of this perspective of games as teaching."

Games as Training

"Teaching is giving you ideas, or helping you learn ideas that you're aware of and you have a conscious interaction with the game about. Training is subconscious... it's about conditioning rather than teaching you," Blow said, citing the iconic Pavlovian dog as an example.

He likened games like Warcraft to the rat-training skinner box. "That has ramifications we can think about," Blow advised. "I said earlier that the way that we teach is by giving players reward and punishment," he said. "There are natural rewards and artificial rewards... there are things that we do to try and motivate the player to keep playing." Some of these artificial incentives are MMO gold, Xbox Live Achievements and even the sound effects on Peggle. But "natural" rewards reward the player for doing something good that corresponds to evolutionary drives.

Games as Challenge

Challenge is not perhaps the right word, Blow said, but it's as close as he knows how to get. Back in the arcade days, designers wanted to "kill" the player to get them to put another quarter in. "A problem we have as the games industry is we have this idea that challenge means difficulty, it means stopping the player from going on in the game if he's not good enough." This causes problems, Blow said, because part of the satisfaction and efficacy of a story is the pacing. "If we want good, effective stories in our games, they have to be well-placed. And part of the problem with our current paradigm... is that it fights with the fact that there's a story we have to keep proceeding through. The way that designers are responding to this is that they keep taking out the difficulty... but without the difficulty, a shooter has nothing," he said as example.

"That's a problem, and I think that's due to our limited perspective," he added. There are other challenges besides mere increased difficulty that can be integrated into a game, Blow stressed, such as challenges to curiosity, social challenges and ethical challenges. "We need something less like 'challenging' and more like 'an invitation to respond effectively.' ...Once we do that, I think we'll be able to touch people in a wider variety of ways."

Games as Exploration

Blow showed the game Go for its simple rules and very complex situations for an example of this. "As you get deep into the game, you look at higher-level players and they have a sense of philosophy inspired by Go. There are things that they learn," Blow said. "They see a way to project it onto life in general."

There are other kinds of exploration -- Braid was about exploring ways to make time behave and to observe natural benefits and consequences. "I didn't start with puzzles and then try to figure out time manipulation that would create those puzzles. I started by exploring time, and then created level design that reported what I found."

Game Design As Practice

"When you play a game, you're kind of designing it in some sense, in an easy training-wheels kind of way. But the more games you play, the more experience you have. Eventually players are designing games that aren't the games in front of them."

"A practice is a lifelong pursuit that hones you as a person and can give you a new way of seeing the universe and being inside it," continued Blow. He doesn't claim to have mastered game design, but enjoys thinking about it this way. "When I look at certain things, I build corellation," he explained.

"There are similarities and there are differences... and I can contemplate [them] on a subconscious level. And someday, something new will pop up because of that," Blow concluded.

Posted by Simon Carless at 7:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, after the monster week of GDC, it's going to take a while to get back on track with GameSetLinks, given the massive amount of blog posts put out this week.

But before I don the RSS hat again, here's some things left over from during/before the week of Game Developers Conference.

Some are IGF-related, for obvious reasons - actually, Tim W. has been compiling even more of them over at our sister site IndieGames.com: The Weblog, too - so go check that. Anyhow, here goes with what I got:

GameVideos.com - The 1UP Show: Episode 02/22/08
Starring indie games, including (the pictured!) Fez.

Indies Take the Cake at Game Developers Conference
Nice Kohler piece on IGF.

GameSpy: The 2008 Independent Games Festival Finalists
One of the best IGF articles I've seen so far.

Analyze This: Hoaxer Haunts Earnings Calls - WSJ.com
Haha, awesome! Via Waxy.

Rock Band - Typography affecting my enjoyment of things. | Typophile
Font geekery of the highest order - via The-Inbetween.

Super Ghouls N Ghosts - Level 1 on Vimeo
Cute annotated capture of doing first level without attacking - via InsertCredit!

Playing Politics: Game Makers' Political Contributions news from 1UP.com
Fascinating to see who digs whom.

...on pampers, programming & pitching manure: Felt tables and MMOs, and Match-3's of a different kind
Advice 'from another 'games industry' altogether'.

The Home of Quake2DS
Latest homebrew coding monstrosity - via Waxy.

Kotaku: No Gods or Kings: Objectivism in BioShock
Who says Kotaku ain't highbrow, huh?

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

[Over the next few days on GameSetWatch, we're going to be reprinting some of the more interesting but lower-profile GDC lectures which might have potentially got 'lost in the shuffle' of the show. First up, as written by Vincent Diamante - Rod Humble on The Sims Carnival website, v.interesting indeed.]

Rod Humble's GDC session, titled “The Emergent Gamer,” was originally titled “The Golden Age of Game Design.” While many might think he would be referring to such eras as the so-called Golden Age of Arcades or the rebirth of console gaming in America in the 1980s, Humble was actually referring to now and the near future.

The ease with which games can be made these days makes today the Golden Age, and he presented EA's attempt to push this ability further: TheSimsCarnival.com.

Starting With An Epitaph

Humble began by talking about the permanence of games in our culture, comparing of civilization's oldest games (mancala, go, etc.) to the world's oldest music. He played for the audience some of the Epitaph of Seiklos, the western world's earliest complete piece of music. “We still play these old games... but less people groove to the Epitaph of Seiklos,” he noted.

After Humble rapidly went through the reasons that games are an important and meaningful part of human history (“I think sometime novels will catch up,” he mused) game developers should be worried. “Professional game design is an anomaly,” he warned the audience. “Enjoy your jobs while you can... before the people take over!” He pointed to poetry as a notable art form that relatively recently enjoyed democratization through increased literacy in the populous and the rise of the working class poet.

We already see a lot of this creation of games by the masses in player mods. Things like the nude Tomb Raider patch and the recent Hot Coffee Grand Theft Auto mod are electronic equivalents of the little mods that occurred to early games like Chess and Backgammon; in fact, the modern Chess we play is the result of numerous player mods atop the original game of Chess made years ago.

A few years ago, people within EA decided to try some experiments in making a platform for easy game creation. Released amongst themselves in the form of a MySpace-like website, 100 developers ended up making over 500 games in the course of a month. It ended up being such a hit with everybody that they evolved it into a new form: The Sims Carnival. While that earlier iteration was EA only, as of today, SimsCarnival.com is accepting sign ups for invitations into the closed beta.

One-Click Game Development

All of the games that are featured on The Sims Carnival are essentially Flash applications, and experienced developers may upload their own straight Flash games to the website. However, the biggest selling point for the site is how simple it is for complete non-developers to make their own games.

The site uses a wizard interface to allow people to configure pre-made components for integration into a game. For example, the user can simply select a genre, then a more specific genre, then select some of the types of items that are found within the genre and the quality of their effects in the game with a few clicks of the mouse.

On stage, Humble showed how a very simple puzzle game could be made with the wizard in less than a minute. A few dialog boxes later, the abstract shape assets that were in the game were replaced by some notable American politicians, much to the delight of the crowd.

For users who would like to go further than the wizard interface without becoming a full Flash developer, EA provides a tool called the AGC or Advanced Game Creator, which users can download and use to make more advanced games from scratch in a custom development environment.

Humble finished his presentation by noting that even though this could be seen as pushing the game developer out by enabling more gamers to make the transition to designers, it could also drive up the attendance of conferences like GDC.

Posted by Simon Carless at 2:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

[Gamasutra and GameSetWatch contributor Vincent Diamante has been documenting this year's Game Developers Conference in visual form. Here's his look at the 2007 Game Developers Choice Awards, held on Wednesday night at the Moscone Center - and in which Portal came away with Game Of The Year.]

Choice Awards presenter and Crash Bandicoot co-creator Jason Rubin.

A first appearance from multiple award-winners Kim Swift and the Portal folks.

BioShock gets the nod for Best Audio

ThatGameCompany and Flow picks up Best Downloadable Game.

Jason Della Rocca rocks it as the first-ever Ambassador Award winner.

Pong designer Al Alcorn introduced the Pioneer Award Winner

Computer game inventor Ralph Baer rightfully receives his Pioneer Award

Ken Levine gesticulates happily after BioShock wins for Best Writing.

Sid Meier and his Lifetime Achievement Award get friendly.

The denouement - Portal wins out for Game Of The Year.

[Other pictures of the Game Developers Choice award winners, including photos of the other winners and presenters, are available on Vincent's Flickr stream.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 7:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[As previously trailed, Andy Baio from Waxy.org is attending GDC as a guest 'Web 2.0/geek culture/game culture crossover' observer, and blogging about it on his popular blog and GameSetWatch. Here's a quick geek-out update from Wednesday night's Valve shindig.]

At the risk of turning Waxy [and GameSetWatch!] into a Jonathan Coulton fan site, he performed a short set at the Valve Software's Steam Party capped by a finale of "Still Alive" performed on Rock Band, backed by the Harmonix developers on guitar and drums.

I'm pretty sure this is the only published photo of their final score, a 5-star performance:

And yes, Coulton sang his own song on "Easy." (Afterwards, he said the Harmonix guys lowered the difficulty because thought the crowd noise would mess it up.)

Shortly after the set, I saw a tipsy geek hop on stage to copy the unreleased song from the Xbox 360 with a USB key before a Harmonix team member tackled him. I discovered he wrote up the story this morning, which was a fun read.

[SIMON'S ADDENDUM: I ran into Harmonix's Ryan Lesser at the IGF Pavilion yesterday, and in the course of our chat (he was checking out the awesome IGF music games like Audiosurf and Fret Nice!) he mentioned that full album downloads for Rock Band - my most-wanted feature - are still in the process of being worked on, yay.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

[Jeez Louise, GDC is hopping this year. Go check out the Gamasutra coverage page for GDC 2008 for the full rundown - there's literally 10+ new session write-ups every day right now, with all kinds of awesome insight.

But I particularly wanted to point out that Microsoft sent us an in-depth piece for our XNA microsite on how community-distributed Xbox 360 games work, with a lot of interesting specifics and screenshots - here's the overview.]

Following the GDC keynote unveiling of XNA-created community-distributed games for Xbox Live, Microsoft's Dax Hawkins goes in-depth on exactly how game submission, review, and posting will work for the Spring beta of the service.

As part of the new sponsored feature, created for Microsoft's Gamasutra-based XNA microsite, Hawkins explains the details for XNA Creators Club members:

"As many have foreseen – and passionately anticipated – the next step for community game development is to let creators share their games widely with others. We are pleased to announce that in spring of this year we will enable community game distribution with a beta for Xbox LIVE.

As a premium (paid) XNA Creators Club member, you’ll be able to share your games with other creators via Xbox LIVE Marketplace. (For information on becoming a premium member, see XNA Creators Club Premium Membership.) After the beta, you’ll be able to share your games with 10 million Xbox LIVE users.

This article provides general instructions on how to prepare your game for submission. It goes over the guidelines for acceptable content, describes the peer-review system, and shows you how to download and play a community game. Some of the procedures for the beta differ from the general procedures. This article will specify the beta differences."

You can now read the full Gamasutra sponsored feature on the subject, with plenty of details and screenshots on how submission and review will work, possible rejection criteria, and what the approved games will look like on the service.

Posted by Simon Carless at 5:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[As previously trailed, Andy Baio from Waxy.org is attending GDC as a guest 'Web 2.0/geek culture/game culture crossover' observer, and blogging about it on his popular blog and GameSetWatch. Here's a Thursday update on the state of the conference.]

I'm mostly a casual spectator of the gaming industry, with my experience limited to being a fan, so it's been a delight to meet the people behind the games I love at GDC. At the same time, I've felt a kinship with these indie developers, having worked as a developer (and accidental entrepreneur) in the web industry for the last ten years.

One of the most jarring and frustrating differences I've seen between the web and gaming worlds is the dominance of middle-men: publishers and platforms trying to control the distribution of games. In the web industry, there's nobody controlling distribution and I don't need anyone's authorization to launch a new project. But the gaming industry is dominated by gatekeepers.

For consoles, you can pay through the nose for the privilege to be on Xbox Live Arcade, Playstation Network or the upcoming WiiWare, and then wait months to be released into the pipeline. On PCs, there's no clear monopoly, with distribution fragmented between a handful of game download portals and distribution frameworks like Steam.

Or you can go it alone and sell directly to your fans through your own web presence but, for the moment, this is very rare. Why? There's no clear answer.

The gaming industry today feels like the music industry of the recent past. Bands were desperate to get signed to label, and financial success was elusive without a record deal. Record labels provide the funding to record an album, the marketing to promote it, and access into the well-established distribution pipeline of record stores and other retail outlets. These gatekeepers are slowly losing relevance as musicians like Jonathan Coulton, Radiohead, and Reznor have started selling directly to their fans.

Small indies like Bit Blot (Aquaria), 2D Boy (World of Goo) and Invisible Handlebar's Audiosurf are like the Jonathan Coultons of gaming -- bootstrapping their game development, doing their own promotion, and cutting out every middleman to deliver games directly to their fans. And it seems to be working, at least well enough for them to grow and keep doing what they love.

Clearly, this route doesn't work for everyone. I talked to Jonatan Söderström of Cactus Soft, one of the most creative and prolific game designers working today. He releases an interesting freeware PC game nearly every month, but is struggling to survive at home in Sweden. In desperation and "on the brink of extinction," he recently added ads to his site and asked his audience for $1 donations so he could eat.

Talking to him, he reminded me of many other brilliant programmers I've worked with -- motivated and talented, but almost pathologically uninterested (or incapable?) in self-promotion or business.

Bit Blot and 2D Boy both understand that while game design comes first, marketing can't be ignored. They work with the media, speak at conferences, keep visible blogs, and connect directly to their community online. For example, Bit Blot's "Seven Days of Aquaria" campaign offered new information and gameplay videos each day until its release. The result? So much anticipation and demand that their servers died on release day. It was a brilliant campaign that cost them nothing but their time.

As an outsider, it seems obvious that the costs (monetary and otherwise) of going down the publisher/platform route are too high. Like a record label, the publishers take a cut and try to own your intellectual property and distribution options. Developing for Xbox Live Arcade, WiiWare, and Playstation Network all have their associated costs and royalties too. Between 30-50% of revenue goes to the platform and the development costs for localization and testing are much higher.

Even if your overall sales are 20% lower by skipping the distribution channels, it seems like you'd still make just as much money, with the benefit of more control and more time to focus on actual game development. (If you're interested in the topic, Simon Carless wrote an interesting editorial earlier this month that ran some of the numbers.)

Whether you work in music, gaming or web development, the ultimate goal should be to do what you love without compromise, get recognized for your work, and not starve to death in the process.

If your primary motivator is fame and getting your game in front of as many people as possible, regardless of the cost, it seems the only option for game developers is going to a major publisher and working with the big platforms. But if you're happy making a healthy living with a more modest audience, the DIY route is more viable every day.

Posted by Simon Carless at 6:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Gamasutra contributor Vincent Diamante has been documenting this year's Game Developers Conference in visual form - here's his look at the 2007 Independent Games Festival Awards, held last night at the Moscone Center.]

Simon Carless & Jamil Moledina introduce the awards.
The Student Showcase nominees are... showcased!

Synaesthete wins out at the Student Showcase


IGF co-organizers Matthew Wegner and Steve Swink (Off-Road Velociraptor Safari for the win!)


Fez wins out, fez worn on stage.


IGF awards presenter (and Venture Artic creator!) Andy Schatz.


Petri Purho, with monocle in place, accepts the Seumas McNally Grand Prize.


[Other pictures of the Independent Games Festival awards, including photos of the other winners and presenters, are available on Vincent's Flickr stream.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

[This was the last Independent Games Summit panel, but I only just got round to posting it on here. Still, it was a really worthwhile, fulfilling group discussion, with a minimum of Jon Mak getting angry at things in an amusing fashion, tragically! Here's the rundown.]

A gigantic panel of independent developers - including Noel Llopis (Powerof2Games), Jacob Van Wingen (Gastronaut Studios), Jamie Cheng (Klei Entertainment), Jon Mak (Queasy Games), and Ryan Clark (Grubby Games)

Starting off, Klei Entertainment's Jamie Cheng (Eets: Chowdown) revealed that he's working with Nexon to make a free-to-play, pay for items title - but only with 5 or 6 employees.

He pointed out of the indie scene:"The opportunities that have come around have made us kind of come full circle" - from bedroom programmers in the '80s back to simple bedroom programmers. He suggested indie developers can, if they choose, make mass-market games that aren't quirky.

Following on, Noel Llopis of Power Of Two Games tried defining the independent genre: "Indie games are like porn... you know it when you see it", he quipped at one point.

Grubby Games' Ryan Clark continued with a discussion on the ethos of making games for an audience, mentioning that the expanding audience, but noting: "It's hard now... and it will still be hard in the future to earn a living making indie games."

This then moved into a discussion about whether people would make games if there was nobody else to play them, with Clark suggesting he wouldn't, but Everyday Shooter's Jon Mak vehemently disagreeing, revealing: "I have a Star Control II clone that nobody has ever played."

Gastronaut's Jacob Van Wingen then chimed in discussing the history of downloadable games for console, noting that "it's hard to get games on the Xbox 360 as a developer", but explaining that he makes the kinds of games that are meant to be played against people on a couch - thus his decision to use Xbox Live Arcade.

Finally, Jon Mak then discussed the history of indie gaming in his signature eccentric style, pointing out that in the past, "You had to really love computers to make a game", but that new technology and game making software is making it ever easier to create games.

Some of the Everyday Shooter creator's final thoughts? "Just code the game that you want to make... There's only two genres that you need... cool and not cool."

Posted by Simon Carless at 7:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Now you're playing with portals! Congratulations to Valve's awesome puzzle-actioner for grabbing Game Of The Year at the Choice Awards tonight.]

Valve's genre-blending first person shooter/puzzler, Portal, was the recipient of three honors including Game of the Year at the 8th annual Game Developers Choice Awards, presented at a ceremony this evening at CMP's 2008 Game Developers Conference (GDC).

The game -- one of three new games on the developer's Orange Box, alongside Half-Life 2: Episode 2 and Team Fortress 2 -- also took the prizes for Innovation and Best Game Design.

Also taking three awards was 2K Boston/2K Australia's blockbuster shooter, Bioshock, which won for Best Audio, Best Visual Art and Best Writing. Realtime Worlds' Crackdown, Thatgamecompany's Fl0w, Crytek's Crysis and Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass were the recipients of the remaining awards, taking home one honor each.

Produced and hosted by GDC and presented by Gamasutra.com and Game Developer Magazine, the Game Developers Choice Awards honors the creators of the best video games released during the previous calendar year, as well as awarding key figures from the video game community.

"The Game Developers Choice Awards stand out from other game industry prizes by being open to all games of a calendar year and by recognizing the individual developers behind each celebrated game," said Jamil Moledina, executive director of the Game Developers Conference. "We are thrilled gamers at home will be able to meet the people behind their favorite games when our first ever television broadcast special on the awards airs soon on the G4 television network."

The recipients of the 8th Annual Game Developers Choice Awards are:

2007 Best Game Design
Portal (Valve)
Kim Swift, Realm Lovejoy, Paul Graham

2007 Best Visual Art
BioShock (2K Boston/2K Australia / 2K Games)
Scott Sinclair, Shawn Robertson, Andrew James

2007 Best Technology
Crysis (Crytek/Electronic Arts)
Cevat Yerli, Douglas Binks, Timur Davidenko, Martin Mittring

2007 Best Writing
BioShock (2K Boston/2K Australia / 2K Games)
Ken Levine, Emily Ridgway, Joe McDonagh, Susan O'Connor

2007 Best Audio
BioShock (2K Boston/2K Australia / 2K Games)
Eric Brosius, Pat Balthrop, Emily Ridgway, Justin Mullins

2007 Best Debut
Crackdown (Real Time Worlds / Microsoft Game Studios)
Ramon Gonzalez, Violetta Sanchez, Rafael Diaz, Jose Guerra

2007 Innovation
Portal (Valve)
Kim Swift, Erik Wolpaw

2007 Best Handheld Game
The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass (Nintendo / Nintendo)
Eiji Aonuma

2007 Best Downloadable Game
Flow (thatgamecompany / Sony Computer Entertainment)
Kellee Santiago, Jenova Chen, Martin Middleton, Hao Cui, John Edwards,
Nick Clark

2007 Game of the Year
Portal (Valve)
Kim Swift, Erik Wolpaw

Recipients for the evening's special awards were:

Lifetime Achievement Award
Sid Meier

Pioneer Award
Ralph Baer

Ambassador Award
Jason Della Rocca

"It was an incredible year of innovation, top-notch explorations within known franchises and introductions of great new properties," Simon Carless, publisher, Gamasutra.com and Game Developer. "The whole community mobilized to express their admiration for the best works, and we are proud to present these meaningful peer awards."

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Actually, I could have done with a portal gun when I got stuck in the hotel elevator about 45 minutes before the awards (yes, seriously. We pried the doors open to get out!) And congrats to all winners - you guys rock.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 3:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

[Wow, these awards were a real blast to help put on. And now we know the results - congrats to Petri and all the other worth winners, and thanks for bringing on the swearing, the monocles, and the style - in what was another super-memorable awards show.]

Crayon Physics Deluxe, Kloonigames' 2D physics puzzle game that allows players to experience what it would be like to transform drawings into physical objects, was named the winner of the $20,000 Seumas McNally Grand Prize at the 10th Annual Independent Games Festival (IGF) Awards, presented at a ceremony this evening at CMP's 2008 Game Developers Conference (GDC).

Other major winners at the IGF ceremony included physics-based puzzle action game, 2D Boy's World of Goo, which won the awards for both Design Innovation and Technical Excellence, and Audiosurf by Invisible Handlebar which won the $2,500 Audience Award, after receiving the largest share of more than 3,500 votes cast online over the past two months at IGF.com.

The IGF awards have been described as the Sundance Festival of the videogame industry, and offer both global exposure and over $50,000 in cash prizes to the developers of the winning games.

Other award recipients included One Ton Ghost's comical treasure-seeking adventure Iron Dukes, which took the award for Best Web Browser Game, Kokoromi's Fez, which won for Excellence in Visual Art for its presentation of a 2D character exploring a 3D world, Invisible Handlebar's Audiosurf, a game that lets players experience their songs in real time, in full color, and in 3D, and which took the prize for Excellence in Audio, and, winner for Best Student Game, Synaesthete, a music-driven arcade-style shooter developed by students at the DigiPen Institute of Technology.

Another notable award given at the IGF ceremony was The Gleemax Award for Strategic Gameplay ("The Gleemie"), presented by IGF Platinum Sponsor, Gleemax, Wizards of the Coast, Inc.'s community for gamers. Three games were awarded "The Gleemie" prize package, which consisted of a custom designed trophy accompanied by a tiered prize package. (1st - $5,000, 2nd - $3,000, 3rd - $2,000).

"As the video game industry grows bigger by the day, it becomes even more important to give a voice to the independent developer," said Simon Carless, chairman, IGF. "This year's Independent Games Festival winners are showcasing how important independent games are -- both as an artistic movement and as accessible titles that are really damn fun to play."

The IGF awarded the following games in each category in the main competition -- each received a cash prize of $2,500 as well as sponsor-related prizes, and the Grand Prize winner was awarded $20,000.

Seumas McNally Grand Prize:
Crayon Physics Deluxe, by Kloonigames

Best Web Browser Game:
Iron Dukes, by One Ton Ghost

Design Innovation Award:
World Of Goo, by 2D Boy

Excellence in Visual Art:
Fez, by Kokoromi

Excellence in Audio:
Audiosurf, by Invisible Handlebar

Technical Excellence:
World Of Goo, by 2D Boy

Best Student Game:
Synaesthete, by DigiPen Institute of Technology

Audience Award:
Audiosurf, by Invisible Handlebar

Gleemie Awards:
-- First Place: Desktop Tower Defense, by Handdrawngames
-- Second Place: Skyrates, by Team Skyrates
-- Third Place: Quadradius, by Quadradius

The IGF was established in 1998 by the CMP Game Group to encourage innovation in game development and to recognize the best independent game developers, in the way the Sundance Film Festival honors the independent film community.

With a record-breaking 173 entries from all over the world, the 2008 IGF reflects how global the game development community has become. The IGF jury included journalists from MTV News, Kotaku, Newsweek, Wired, and Joystiq; the creators of previous IGF winners Aquaria, Braid, Flow, and N; and veterans from across the game industry.

Posted by Simon Carless at 6:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Kicking off day two of the Independent Games Summit, Kyle Gabler - co-founder of World Of Goo creator 2D Boy, and Kyle Gray - working at EA Tiburon on a "quasi-indie title" - discussed how the two CMU grads and Experimental Gameplay Project had diverging paths but both innovative ways of making independent-minded games work.

The session was hilariously honest - and filled with Powerpoint captions and puns on the perils of working at a big company and at a tiny start-up developer respectively.

Firstly, Gray showed a Flash-based EA prototype he did at Tiburon called Monkey Business - clearly designed for the Nintendo DS - in which the top screen featured a 2D side-scrolling action title with a British explorer fighting with monkeys and powering up with giant robots made out of Big Ben. The bottom screen is a block-shuffling pzzler, and platform game actions affect the blocks that appear in the bottom of the screen.

The project - in modified form, but still starring the British explorer, sometimes called 'Hatsby' - was then seen by the newly segmented EA Casual, which greenlit it. Gray finally showed a video "for an un-named platform" of the latest version of the game - clearly the Nintendo DS - with the same dual-screen gameplay, and classic 2D side-scrolling goodness - complete with an opera-singing boss and other quirkiness. He quipped in questions: "It's this weird new face of EA... they're actually looking to do new things now."

As for Gabler, his first game as 2D Boy was The 100 Year Tree, where he modeled an eco-system - but after seeing a Russian developer 'borrow' the Tower Of Goo concept for a Pocket PC game, they decided to make an enhanced version of the concept in the form of World Of Goo - which is one of the two most-nominated titles for this year's Independent Games Festival Awards.

The title is still in negotiations with publishers, but is confirmed to appear initially on PC and Nintendo's Wii. Gabler made it clear In questions that the title is not yet confirmed for WiiWare, and hinted that they might be considering different type of distribution in different territories, but noted after dealing with publishers: "I cannot speak more highly of WiiWare."

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

[As previously trailed, Andy Baio from Waxy.org is attending GDC as a guest 'Web 2.0/geek culture/game culture crossover' observer, and blogging about it on his popular blog and GameSetWatch. Here's his first dispatch from the wilds of San Francisco.]

I'm already overwhelmed at my first Game Developer's Conference, and from what I've heard, things don't even really get moving until tomorrow! The first two days are dominated by a number of excellent summits and tutorials, but apparently, the real action doesn't start until tomorrow when the game competitions, expo floor, major announcements, and big keynotes all begin in the morning.

I'm very interested in the parallels between gaming and web, and how the lines have blurred between game-like social software and social games. With that in mind, several people told me Worlds in Motion summit would be most relevant to my interests with sessions that "delve into online worlds, social gaming and media and player created activity, providing insight for developers of all backgrounds into how the game industry is collectively building socialization into games and integrating personalization and player-generated content into gameplay."

Instead, I've found the most inspiring and innovative talks have been in the Independent Games Summit. Unlike the companies in World in Motion, these tiny two-person startups and student projects are operating on a shoestring budget and exploring territory that the big guys aren't.

It seems like most of the interesting new projects are happening on the web or as PC/Mac downloads, partly because they don't have the funding or support to acquire dev kits for the consoles and partly because it gives them more control over their own fate. (For example, Xbox Live Arcade costs a minimum of $125,000 to create a game. The overhead for a Flash game, like starting a website, is mostly your own time.)

And because they have so many resource constraints, they're developing gameplay that's often experimental and completely unique. The IGF finalists are a laundry list of intriguing gameplay ideas (many of which I've mentioned on Waxy before):

• Audiosurf, a rhythm/racing/puzzle game that analyzes and visualizes your MP3 collection to create a dynamic 3D racetrack with characteristics pulled from tone, tempo, and volume.
  
  
• The Path, a horror game based on Little Red Riding Hood, with ambient music by Jarboe. If you follow the path before you, you lose the game.
  
  
• World of Goo, a construction game using physics to attain
  
  
• Crayon Physics Deluxe, an adorable game that instantiates anything you sketch to solve puzzles.
  
  
• Poesysteme, breeding words with Darwinian evolution.
  
  
• Goo, like Go with liquid dynamics.
  
  
• Fret Nice, a platformer that uses the Guitar Hero guitar to control the character in time to the music
  
  
• Fez, the 2D character stuck in a 3D world

Several speakers have discussed how the art and design are more important than the technology, that games are more about conjuring emotion than showing off graphical effects. Aquaria co-creator Alec Holowka described game development as a Zelda Triforce, with three parts of Art/Design, Business/Marketing, and Technology. Some games, like movie-licensed games, are led by business but have poor technology and design.

Others, like many big-budget games, are led by technology. Indie games need to support their work with honest marketing and solid technology, but it's the creator's voice, vision, and passion that ultimately make the game resonate with an audience.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to playing and meeting this year's finalists tomorrow when the IGF Pavilion opens tomorrow.

Some notable quotes from the first couple of days of the show:

Gabe Zichermann on Facebook and eBay as MMOs: "I think we need to acknowledge there are things in life that are fun that game designers didn't make... People are engaged in playing all the time -- they're not fake worlds a game designer made... Everybody plays games all the time, whether we as game designers make them or not."

Raph Koster on virtual worlds: "We're building theme parks instead of parks."

Tracy Fullerton from USC Game Innovation Lab: "Indie's not about finding a backdoor into the industry or building games on a shoestring budget. It's about tearing down walls to create a new culture."

Posted by Simon Carless at 1:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Going to be cross-posting a few of the Indie Games Summit talks from today, since they're readable and stand alone fairly well in a GSW context. Enjoy, or else.]

In an afternoon session at the Independent Games Summit on Tuesday, Newsweek's N'Gai Croal and MTV News' Stephen Totilo discussed the state of independent games in the media, and their personal opinions on how to get noticed in the indie game business.

Starting off, Croal quipped of the state of indie: "This is right around Sundance started up... but before Sex, Lies & Videotape."

The expectation of the independent movement right now, according to Totilo, is: "This is going to be different... because now there's going to be no filters." This is sometimes true - but as the duo stressed, you need to find a unique selling point.

Totilo also noted that PR plans for XBLA and PSN games are "not nearly as aggressive" as retail ones, even when Microsoft and Sony are sending out information on behalf of those indie developers.

Obviously, the above isn't always the case, and Croal particularly noted that it's all about "...teaching people who make indie games about the PR process.... you have to be both an artist and a hustler, but you can't confuse the two."

As he noted even of his own personal efforts to promote his own Level Up weblog to a select band of higher-end influencers and key outlets: "I spam some of the journalists I respect the most."

Moving on, Totilo underlined that the story behind the game is as or more important than the game itself - particularly to the mainstream media, and increasingly in the industry in general.

Croal chimed in on this that you can look to other industries, ending on a bit of a boggling but fair comparison in terms of people who have woven personal stories into great media messages: "50 Cent is an interesting story... Jonathan Blow is an interesting story... Jonathan Mak is an interesting story."

Overall, the duo urged, above all, that if you have a unique message and you target independent-minded journalists and influencers, indies can get noticed through the crowd of even mainstream games.

Posted by Simon Carless at 6:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[The ceremony for the mobile part of the IGF was held during GDC Mobile today. Though I couldn't be there thanks to Independent Games Summit responsibilities, I heard it went really well, yay - with happy developers, and video of it due to be posted online after the show.]

CMP Game Group has announced the winners of the inaugural Independent Games Festival (IGF) Mobile awards. IGF Mobile is the sister event to the Independent Games Festival, held at the 2008 Game Developers Conference, taking place February 18-22 at San Francisco's Moscone Convention Center.

The IGF Mobile showcases innovation in handheld and cell phone gaming, including the Sony PlayStation Portable and the Nintendo DS platforms, in addition to mobile handsets.

Among the winners for this first-of-its-kind event are KnowledgeWhere's PhoneTag Elite, winner of the Innovation in Augmented Design Award, Presented by NVIDIA. PhoneTag Elite is an elaborate version of "hide-and-seek," using the GPS built into the user's cell phone. Capybara Games' Critter Crunch, winner of both the IGF Mobile Best Game and Audio Achievement awards, takes on the puzzle genre with refined graphics, animation and addictive gameplay.

The finalists for the IGF Mobile Competition will be showcasing their games at the IGF Mobile Pavilion alongside the tenth annual IGF Main Competition and Student Showcase, taking place February 20-22, 2008. All finalists will be featured in playable form within the special pavilion on the Game Developers Conference 2008 show floor.

Out of a distinguished field of 20 nominees, from an overall field of 50 entries, the following winners were selected:

* IGF Mobile Best Game: Critter Crunch
* Innovation in Mobile Game Design: EGO
* Innovation in Augmented Design - Presented by NVIDIA: PhoneTag Elite
* Achievement in Art: Kodo
* Technical Achievement: Steam Iron: The Fallen
* Audio Achievement: Critter Crunch

The Platinum and Founding Sponsor for the IGF Mobile competition is NVIDIA. The IGF was established in 1998 by the CMP Game Group to encourage innovation in game development and to recognize the best independent game developers, in the way that Sundance Film Festival honors the independent film community. IGF Mobile likewise serves as a venue to highlight the bourgeoning talents of the mobile and handheld game industry, rewarding and recognizing the innovation and advancement of the space.

"When the IGF first opened 10 years ago, few could have seen the impact that the festival would have on the future of gaming," said Mathew Kumar, IGF Mobile Content Director, "Years later, we’re seeing the explosion of the downloadable content and online distribution, and with it, IGF-alums-turned-mainstream titles like Fl0w, N+ and Everyday shooter have become commercial hits. We've now seen that the mobile IGF has further ignited this same drive for innovation, creativity and craftsmanship. We congratulate all the winners, as well as the talented developers behind all the amazing nominees and entries."

For more information on the Independent Games Festival Mobile, please visit the official website.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Honestly, I'm a little tired here to think straight, but just wanted to pass along the stuff I personally wrote up from the first day of Gamasutra's GDC 2008 coverage - specifically the Indie Game Summit stuff - but check out the above links for LOTS more awesome coverage.

The first day of IGS seemed a little uneven in places, careening wildly from Introversion discussing branding to some pretty high-end Mak/Santiago/Koskinen design talk to Tom Buscaglia adlibbing.

But everyone had something important to contribute, and there were particular highlights in the Aquaria postmortem and Q's Dylan Cuthbert revealing the frankly gorgeous-looking PixelJunk Eden. And here's the write-ups:

- IGS: Q Games' Cuthbert Reveals PixelJunk Eden, Postmortems Series
"In the final Independent Games Summit lecture of Monday, Kyoto, Japan-based Q Games' Dylan Cuthbert discussed the PixelJunk series for the PS3's PlayStation Network, revealing the first-ever video of psychedelic PSN title PixelJunk Eden."

- IGS: The State Of Flash Games
"The Flash games panel at the Independent Games Summit on GDC at Monday showed an interesting dichotomy of different approaches to making money from Web browser-based games - though it's clear that the monetization angle is still being explored."

- IGS: N+ Creator On Game Creation's 'Unique Knobs'
"In an afternoon Independent Games Summit talk, Metanet's Raigan Burns (N+) discussed creativity and the making of unique technology to make unique gameplay, referencing games from Portal to Braid in his quest to discover how simple tech concepts can grow into great games."

- IGS: Inside The Making Of Aquaria
"In a well-received Independent Games Summit lecture, Derek Yu and Alec Holowka from Bit-Blot discussed Aquaria, the IGF Grand Prize winner from last year, presenting a postmortem of their critically acclaimed 2D underwater action title."

- IGS Keynote: Flow, Everyday Shooter Creators Talk Gaming Ethos
"In an intriguing and wide-ranging Independent Games Summit keynote, ThatGameCompany's Kellee Santiago (Flow), Queasy Games' Jon Mak (Everyday Shooter), and cult mod maker/previous IGF finalist Pekko Koskinen took three short presentations to showcase in-depth concepts on independent game design."

Posted by Simon Carless at 1:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The editors of Game Developer magazine and Gamasutra.com [EDITOR'S NOTE: And even, yes, GameSetWatch - we know a bunch of you guys are actual developers, too!] invite you to complete the annual Game Developer's Salary Survey. The information you provide will help inform the entire game development community.

The results of this survey will be published in the April 2008 issue of Game Developer magazine, and will again be available in overview form on Gamasutra, and in much more detailed form as a Game Developer Research

In appreciation of your time and effort, once you complete the survey, your name will be entered into a drawing to win one of five Main Conference Passes for your choice of the lineup of Game Developers Conference (GDC) events in the 2008-2009 cycle: Paris GDC in June, Austin GDC or China GDC (in Beijing) in September, or GDC 2009 in San Francisco.

The results of the prior survey were revealed in April of 2007, calculating an average American game industry salary of $73,316, slightly down on 2005's figure of $75,039.

In addition, the average salary in 2006 over all American game programmers was $80,886, and the 2006 average for artists was $65,107 - with game designers' average was $61,538. Following these results, this year's survey has also added support for important emerging job functions such as community manager, which will be showcased in the new results due in April.

Interested game professionals can now click through to take part in the survey. Thanks for helping us to advance the industry!

[NOTE: A separate, optional MIT Business School survey on entrepreneurship in the game industry is available to fill out at the end of this year's Salary Survey - results will also be made available in conjunction with CMP if you'd like to fill it out.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[In this special feature, former God of War combat designer Eric Williams breaks down 'cancels' - the ability to end one combat animation early by beginning another - explaining how God Of War II did it and Ninja Gaiden and the Devil May Cry series handle the concepts.]

As he explains in his intro: "A lot of the questions I've been asked in the past regarding God of War have always swirled around some of the attacks Kratos has in his arsenal, namely the L1+ Button special moves. These questions usually stem from the inability to “cancel” these moves - thus rendering them useless, so to speak. Instead of just defending those moves, I am going to examine the entire concept of move canceling - from its early days in fighting games, to its cross-pollination with action adventure games."

Birth Of The Cancel

Let’s start with the granddaddy of them all: Street Fighter 2: World Warrior. There is a legend that one day, during early tests of this game out in California, a guy named Tomo Ohira was destroying people in the game with some crazy technique. He could link certain moves together that normally could not be linked together - thus creating a combo by canceling.

I was a kid in Ohio when I heard this, so of course I believed it, because Tomo Ohira was the best American Street Fighter player at the time. However, I later learned that this was a “bug” in the game - known by the development team in Japan. They thought executing it was too difficult to be useful, so they left it in the game.

As it turns out, that “bug” was the birth of the Cancel-and-Combo. The best example is roundhouse sweep cancel-to-fireball with Ryu, which I view as the catalyst for many other Street Fighter cornerstones, such as zoning and footsies.

What Is It, Exactly?

Let’s define a cancel, just so we're all clear: It's the ability to end one animation early by beginning another animation, when the user manipulates of a series of branches in an animation tree through controller inputs. Without diving into all the nuts and bolts of a combat system, let's break down cancels by type and method.

Cancel types fall into 2 core groups; “Partial Cancel” and “Complete Cancel”.

A “Partial Cancel” allows an animation to be canceled at specific windows during the animation. The two most common conditions for a “Partial Cancel” are Pre-hit frame (the animation can be canceled any time before the first frame of the hit) and post-hit frame (the animation can be canceled any time after the last frame of the hit).

A “Complete Cancel” allows an animation to be canceled at any time during the animation. I'm generalizing, and there are special nuances that exist in certain games, but for the most part, these conditions are used 99 percent of the time.

Two methods of canceling account for the bulk of all games: "Buffer" and "Instant".

The "Buffer" method stores and executes the user’s command when the cancel window is valid. The "Buffer" method, in a well-designed game, can be canceled itself with other commands before the cancel window is valid, to ensure the highest quality of responsiveness.

The "Instant" method accepts and executes the user’s command on the frame of input when the cancel window is valid. The "Instant" method allows the player to delay the timing, which adds to the overall responsiveness of the game.

Now, for an example: Let's say we have an animation called “Square01” that is played when we press the Square button. The animation is 60 frames long and has a hit frame window from frame 15 to frame 20. See the pseudo combat scripting below:

//60 frames
Animation = Square01

//hit frames
On = 15;
Off = 20;

//attack cancel
Anim = Square02; Button = Square; On = 0; Off = 21; Method = Buffer;
Anim = Square02; Button = Square; On = 21; Off = 60; Method = Instant;

//block cancel
Anim = Block; Button = L1; On = 0; Off = 60; Method = Instant;

What does all that mean, you might be asking yourself? Notice the On/Off parameters - these are frame values that determine the range of the cancel window. The method parameter assigns the type of cancel - see the definitions above if you have forgotten already.

We can now determine that “Square01” can never be canceled with the square button Pre-hit frame, since the frame range is 0-21. Instead, the square button can be buffered until Post-hit frame 21.

We can also determine that “Square01” can be instantly canceled at any time Post-hit frame, since the frame range is 21-60. It also says that the L1 button can cancel “Square01” instantly at any time, thus making it a Complete Cancel, since the frame range is 0-60.

If this makes any sense at all, now imagine doing this for every possible animation a character has in their arsenal, and how it relates to gameplay systems such as parry, block, counter, walk, run, jump, double jump, magic, throw, and reactions. To give you a little perspective, Kratos had roughly 4000 cancel branches in God of War 2, with many more parameters to be tweaked per cancel branch.

Bored yet? I promise to stop being technical right now!

The Effects Of Implementation

What can a well-implemented cancel system add to a game? First off, it usually determines if a game has that lagged-out feel, or is crisp and super-responsive. From a defensive point of view, it creates that feeling of "a good offense is the best defense." The player can just bang with the enemies, but guard cancel to generate new holes in the enemy’s game.

Guard canceling in Soul Calibur is super fun, because it has Pre-hit frame canceling only - which allows the player to fake attacks, creating a whole new layer of mind games. Street Fighter 3 and the Marvel series make great use of super move cancels, which looks flashy in the traditional Capcom vein, while promoting heavy offensive-style gameplay.

Also you might note that cancels are so good in some games that they actually require meter to perform, like in the Guilty Gear series. It's almost impossible to factor all the changes one type of cancel system can have on a game.

One such case is CvS2 and the infamous "Roll Cancel," where certain moves can become invincible based on a cancel bug - talk about an oops. Ultimately, though, it comes down to fun versus abusiveness. But mostly, a great cancel system equals depth, and allows the player to be super creative, which helps increase the fun and sense of achievement.

Here some thoughts on the top three games in the action adventure genre, in no particular order: Ninja Gaiden, Devil May Cry, and God of War. (Placing the game I worked on for nearly 4 years in the top three will surely drum up some interesting comments - can’t wait. This is why I do not write about the games I work on, if at all possible.)

Getting Technical With Ninja Gaiden

Ninja Gaiden is very strict when it comes to canceling - so strict, in fact, that not a single animation that I am aware of can be canceled Pre-hit frame. I feel this is a great rule when trying to build a solid foundation for the combat gameplay, but it also adds to the difficulty. The player knows, when they press a button to attack, it must complete its hit frame before another animation can take place.

Here's a funny thing about that rule: it is so true that the player cannot even pause the game, because they could swap weapons and cancel before the hit. Don’t believe me? Try it out. The game is made to be hardcore, and for the hardcore, so they use rules that help establish a fair play field if the player is willing to learn the system to the point of flawless execution. I applaud Itagaki and Team Ninja for their effort and contribution to the genre!

Devil May Cry In Style

Devil May Cry follows many of the same rules that Ninja Gaiden does, but in true Capcom fashion, they have to drop the style bomb all over rules and add in some broken stuff just for fun.

The main cancel system that drives DMC is the alteration between Melee and Projectile attacks. I believe that all Melee attacks are all Post-hit frame cancels, and the Projectile attacks are governed by the rate of fire. Since there are between 5-6 Melee and Projectile weapons, the combinations create quite the learning curve. When you add in the styles, the possibilities are staggering. Depth is the result - but in a much more chaotic and flashy manner then the technical presentation found in Ninja Gaiden.

There is no doubt that DMC is an acquired taste, from the dark, moody art to wisecracking, cocky Dante himself. Nevertheless, when you get it, you get it, and the rabid fans of this series will always let you know they get it!

God Of War And Its Intended Audience

God of War, unlike the other two games, allows for many Pre-hit frame cancels, and incorporates several of the methods found in the other two games. The main difference is that it is not trying to be a hardcore game from either a technical or flashy point of view. It’s just smash-and-kill fun.

It still has some goodies tossed in under the hood, of course, for the fans of the other games that gave us a shot while they waited for the next installment of Ryu’s or Dante’s saga. The rules for canceling are all over the place - but for good reason. Our intended audience does not want to learn the techniques. They just want the game to play the way they think it should, because combat is not the only focus unlike the other two games.

So what about the L1+Button specials, and why can't they be canceled?

The moves in question are by far the strongest damage-inflicting attacks Kratos has that stem from a simple button command. They hit many creatures at once in most cases or leave the creature in a vulnerable state -- and in some cases, both. The moves also serve as a little flash, and make beginners feel really powerful when they see the blades spinning all over the place.

Like I said before, the other games only have Post-hit frame canceling, and use this to teach the player, "watch before you attack." God of War allows almost all of the basic attacks be canceled anywhere, including Pre-hit frame, to make life easier on the player.

The L1+Button specials, though, possess enormous damage potential in certain situations, and thus are not able to be canceled until Post-hit frame for balance reasons (infinite lock down loops, mostly). Moreover, for novice players, they are used to teach the concept of risk vs. reward, without placing this burden on the basic combat, which would make the game much harder for the average player.

I know this can be argued from many different angles with regards to balancing - but trust me, I have heard them all, and this was the decision we made. Feel free to tell me how foolish we were anyhow.

At the end of the day, you have to look at your intended audience, and I think we captured our audience the best we could. To those that were left upset and disappointed because of 4 little moves in the game that cannot be canceled earlier, then I am sorry you missed a much greater experience.

It’s easy to say God of War is flawed, but the fact remains that it is the only American action-adventure game ever to get the attention of the Japanese. I grew up playing their games, and wanted to make a game that felt like a Japanese game, but played balls-out like an American movie, and God of War allowed me to do that. It is not perfect, but it spoke to some people, and that is all we can hope for as game developers.

By the way, God of War has some serious fun with cancels. Press square once, then try any of the following if you don’t believe me.

Walk (Navigation) = Post-hit frame
Jump = Pre-hit frame
Roll (Evade) = Pre-hit frame
Magic = Pre-hit frame
Throw = Pre-hit frame
Guard (Parry / Block) = Pre-hit frame
Weapon Swap = Post-hit frame"

[This article was adapted from a piece originally printed on Eric's 'Pushing Buttons' weblog - thanks to Eric for permission to reprint it here.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

[Conducted by Tim W. over at our sister blog IndieGames.com: The Weblog, here's an informal chat with Petri Purho, the developer of IGF finalist Crayon Physics Deluxe, amongst a host of other neat indie titles.]

Hi Petri, how about a little introduction for the readers before we begin with the questions?

Well, I'm Mr. Purho and I'm probably the best known for being the guy behind Crayon Physics. Also I've made couple of other lesser known and more sucky games, which I've published on my blog: Kloonigames.

Do you keep count of how many experimental games you've released so far? Any favorites besides Crayon Physics?

I think there are now 17 games (I'm not sure), and there have been a number of favorites besides Crayon Physics. I seriously like SM Word a lot, but apparently I'm the only one :) Pluto Strikes Back is probably my other favorite and Amazing Flying Brothers is quite fun also. And I really kick myself in the head every once in while for making Daydreaming in the Oval Office.

What's the status of Crayon Physics Deluxe, any updates on that? Will you be releasing it as shareware or freeware, and when?

Officially the status of Crayon Physics Deluxe now is release 13. Don't know what that means, but that's the official status. The game is in the works and I'm still the only developer doing it. Hopefully it will be out sometime, but it could take a while. I'm planning of releasing it as an shareware and I don't have clue when it's ready. I seriously don't.

After I get back from GDC I'll write some kind of status report on Crayon Physics Deluxe, as there are a lot of people who have been emailing me about it and asking if anything is happening because I haven't blogged about it. I just figured it's better to keep your mouth shut than to yap all over the place like you're Peter Molyneux.

You'll be headed for the GDC in a few days' time. What are you looking forward to the most?

Meeting all the fellow indies. I mean I get to meet Cactus, Joakim, Dylan, Ron, Tale of Tales folks, Sean Chan, Cryptic Sea guys. And hang out with Kyle and Phil... It's gonna be fun.

I probably forgot someone, but there are so many people in the finals :)

Who are your favorite indie game developers?

Of the top my head Kyle Gabler, Jonathan Blow, Jonathan Mak, Cactus, Joakim, Phil Fish (Fez just stole my heart).

On that topic, have you played World of Goo, Braid, Everyday Shooter, Noitu Love 2 and Fez?

I've played Braid, Fez, World of Goo, and tested Everyday Shooter (I wish I had a PS3). I can tell you those games are going to rock when they come out; I'm sure there will be an indie revolution.

Name your favorite game from cactus.

Mondo Medicals, Psychosomnium (I had to check how you spell that) and Seizure Dome. Also I enjoyed Clean Asia, but it was too hard for me.

Which are your favorite IGF final entries? Any picks?

Don't tell the other developers, but my favorite would be World of Goo. But if they ask I'm loving Audiosurf and Synaesthete also very equally. And Gesundheit! also.

Seeing that Audiosurf is now available on Steam, and you've mentioned that Crayon Physics Deluxe will be shareware, have you considered taking the same distribution route?

Well that would be a good option, but I haven't heard anything from Valve yet, so if Gabe is reading this email me.

When you've started out Kloonigames, how long did you plan to stick with the experimental idea? How many more years of experimental games can we expect?

Well I was quite pessimistic at the time I started out Kloonigames. I thought I'd be very happy if I made it through the first year. And honestly I thought I'd quit there. But it kinda grows on to you. You can't go over 30 days without making a game. It's impossible :)

Don't know how long I'll keep on doing it. Probably as long as my life allows me to.

Have you noticed any other developers attempting the same?

Well I found out that someone had ripped of some of my blog posts and was running a very similar blog. Then there's the other rapid developers, but honestly I think the rapid development comes from the CMU's Experimental Gameplay Project.

Are you happy with the response for the site?

I've been extremely happy with the response. It's been much much better than I could have ever hoped. I never thought I'd go to GDC. Let alone be an IGF finalist there.

What do you think of IGF itself? And the indie games development scene?

I think it serves it's purpose well. I heard some criticism about some art games not making it to the finals. I assume they were talking about The Zoo Race. And if that's the case then I agree with the criticism. The Zoo Race should have definitely been nominated for every category.

Seriously, I'm all for the art games. I honestly like them and I wish they would get more exposure. If there was an art game conference/exhibition somewhere I would definitely want to go there.

Played any good indie games lately? Anything deserving of mention?

The last two games were Sean Chan's qrp and Mark Johns' Shit Game. I liked both of them, but for different reasons :)

qrp especially was very inspiring, but somewhat limited. I'm not sure I figured all the there was to figure out about it. Also I finally played Passage properly and I enjoyed it. My late games collection is quite artsy. Especially with Shit Game being there.

We're two weeks' away from the end of the month. Any ideas of what you'll be creating next? Do you plan to release the updated version of Grammar Nazi before GDC or after?

Yeah I've been planning of doing (and actually I've worked on it already) a game about web hosting companies. I had to quit working on it, because I was afraid I'd never get my files back from my ex hosting company if I released it :) My lawyer told me to say that the game has nothing to do with the hosting trouble I had couple of weeks ago. I did Grammar Nazi as a replacement game. I originally meant to do it 2 hours, but that didn't work out too well :)

I'm hoping of releasing the (Grammar Nazi) update before GDC. I was actually supposed to work on it today, but then you harassed me into giving you an interview. So you're to blame for it being late :)

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

[In a fiery opinion piece also printed over at Gamasutra, game designer/author Ian Bogost examines NPD chart trends to suggest that Sony's lack of unified message on PS3, Blu-ray and the 'average consumer' is rendering ineffective its pitch to users.]

Sony is a global conglomerate which is significantly different from its hardware competitors in the video game industry. It makes consumer electronics ranging from telephones to computers to GPS units.

It publishes video games, movies, and music. It also maintains an army of support businesses, including banks, insurance providers, facility management companies, staffing services, and packaging providers.

The business strategy makes sense: control as much of the market for both electronics and the media we use them for. That’s why Sony purchased CBS Records and Columbia Pictures in the late 1980s; they wanted to own part of the content people played on their Walkmans and VCRs.

The problem is, Sony’s corporate subsidiaries don’t work well together, on a scale far worse than other multinational conglomerates. The company is more feudal state than networked global multinational.

Sony, Divisions, & Co-Ordination

I’ll give you just one example from a previous life consulting for Sony Pictures Entertainment. The first installment of Spider-Man was about to come out, and Columbia Tri-Star was really banking on it; unlike many other studios, Sony didn’t own a film franchise. ImageWorks, the studio’s visual effects arm, was doing all of the CG for the film.

Their offices sit across the sidewalk from what was then called Sony Pictures Interactive Network (SPiN), which developed interactive properties for the Sony Pictures Entertainment companies. But when SPiN wanted to use poly-trimmed Spider-Man 3D assets to create games and other interactive applications, personal politics made things impossible.

This wasn’t just Sony, but also Hollywood, where everyone jockeys for the next job up the rung all the time. When you think about it, it makes sense from ImageWorks’ perspective; who wants their highly crafted, high-poly character models looking crappy online before the film’s release? The same thing happened when Columbia Tri-Star marketing wanted to get their early film exclusives on memory sticks that ship with Sony electronics.

These are good ideas for the company in general, but troublesome ones for individual units whose executives and managers don’t want to rock their own boat to support someone else’s. There are many more stories like this; just ask your friends who used to work at a Sony division but left or were laid off after one of their many reorganizations.

Sony's 'Mirror Stage' In Effect

In one of his earliest innovations, French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan suggested the name "Mirror Stage" for the moment in a young child's development in which it recognizes its own image in a mirror. Before this time, the child has no sense of its own body as a whole, but only as a loose assembly of fragments: arm, hand, leg.

So, while sometimes we might be tempted to say that Sony is one of the dumbest corporations on the planet, it would be more accurate to say that it's one of the most infantile. Sony is like a baby that doesn't know its own arms aren't alien beings smacking its unwitting face.

The situation has improved somewhat over the years; early copies of the PSP shipped with a copy of Spider-Man on UMD, for example. But the company’s head still suffers at the bludgeoning of its limbs. For example, despite the relative popularity of film licenses, very few films from the huge Columbia Tri-Star and MGM back catalog have been adapted for videogame.

Blu-ray's Mirror-ing Issues

But now Sony’s videogame fiefdom has found an unexpected servant in the Blu-ray format, which, ironically, may end up saving them in the long-term.

Back in October 2007, market research firm NPD Group reported PlayStation 3 sales that trailed behind every other console, including the PS2. Nintendo sold over four times as many Wiis that month in North America, and Microsoft over three times the number of Xbox 360s.

But according to the latest NPD report, 269,000 PS3s left store shelves and entered American dens in January 2008, only 5,000 sales fewer than Wii and 39,000 more than Xbox 360. From bottom of the barrel to leading contender in a fiscal quarter isn’t bad - even if some other hardware firms are claiming shortages.

A major factor in the turn of the tides is the Blu-ray optical disc format. Before and just after the PS3 was released, Sony defended the machine's high price by citing the built-in Blu-ray movie player as a consumer motivator. Yes, the system is more expensive than its competitors, they admitted, but it can also play high-definition movies.

Despite these claims, Sony never really marketed the PS3 as a home theater system, and the company itself probably had very little to do with the PS3’s recent success. In early January Warner Bros. endorsed Blu-ray exclusively. Blockbuster Video, Netflix and Wal-Mart recently announced that they’d carry the format exclusively, effectively dooming HD-DVD.

Anyone who had been on the fence about high-definition home theater now has all the reason they need to climb over to the Blu-ray side. After all, a cut-rate Sony Blu-ray player costs $400-500 list — the same price as a PS3. By all accounts, the PS3 is a great deal, almost a two-for-one videogame/high-def movie system.

Where's The Blu-Ray/PS3 Marketing Crossover?

So why hasn't Sony followed through and marketed the machine more directly as a Blu-ray player? For one, they don’t have much content worth tempting mom and dad, grandma and grandpa. After all, there are plenty of Blu-ray movies, and they run across the whole spectrum of film genre: everything from Ratatouille to 300, from Planet Earth to Casino Royale. For someone who might not otherwise buy a PS3 but enjoys HD movies, maybe they would also enjoy Madden or The Simpsons Game.

But Sony hasn't exactly made it easy to know that would be the case. And there are essentially no PS3 titles for, let's say, more sensitive souls. FlOw might be the closest thing, and there's no way you'd know it even existed unless you read the game trades. And even then, it's too abstract for my mom, and it can only be purchased from the arguably less-than-usable PlayStation Network Store.

Despite market research reports that suggest the broad expansion of game playership, the incremental advantage of a videogame machine would be lost on a whole segment of buyers. Those other folks are buying Wiis instead.

PS3's Casual Need?

Here's a speculation: the PS3’s future success is tied partly, and perhaps strongly, to the availability of games for the less experienced, more casual player, who is part of a household in which high-end home theater is valued. Yet, as far as videogames are concerned, Sony has ignored both casual gamers and home theater buffs.

The situation for casual games is quite simple: what few casual PS3 games exist are hidden intractably in the PSN Store. Things are more complex when it comes to home theater fanatics. Think again about Sony Pictures huge back-catalog. Everyone who bought a DVD since the late 1990s now has to consider buying it again on Blu-ray.

Take 1982’s Annie, for example, a Columbia Pictures release that is also Amazon’s top-selling DVD musical. Wouldn’t a new bonus feature like a PS3 game offer an incentive, not to mention an interesting format and constraint for film-to-game adaptation? Don’t hold your breath: home video falls under the auspices of yet another division, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.

Conclusion: Sony As Colossus

One of Sony Computer Entertainment’s best titles for PS2 was Shadow of the Colossus, a game in which the player battles huge mythical creatures to resurrect a young girl.

In a press release about the January sales figures, Sony Computer Entertainment America CEO Jack Tretton praises his division’s accidental success: “The PS3,” says Tretto, “demonstrated continued momentum.” But even this tepid word is too strong.

Unlike the awesome colossi, with their formidable and deliberate brawn, Sony lumbers through inertia, not momentum.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I'm sure regular GameSetWach readers recall the four limited-edition GameSetApparel T-shirts we launched last month, and have insisted on making a lot of noise over in recent weeks.

Well, GameSetApparel sales have been going pretty well from our secret mothership that is mail order, but we wanted to bring the shirts 'to the people'. And we have succeeded!

Therefore, this week, all four shirts will be available for $20 per shirt at the merchandise store of the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco's Moscone Center - specifically, on the second floor of Moscone West.

We have M, L, and XL versions of all the designs right now - look for them in the book store half of the set up, which is just close to the escalators at the Moscone. And please tell your friends, naturellement.

Posted by Simon Carless at 11:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So, the engines are revving up, and GDC is just a few hours away from getting off the ground. In fact, tomorrow morning you'll see Gamasutra's special GDC coverage page quickly getting up to speed with all kinds of goodness from the various Summits on Monday and Tuesday - before blasting into high gear from Wednesday to Friday with the main session content.

In fact, we've started off with GDC Conference Director Jamil Moledina's 'best-of' session picks, including some at the end there which you might want to check out for 'surprises' and other reveals, shh.

And GameSetWatch itself will be updating throughout the week with some lighthearted posts from me (when I have time!), and hopefully some neat crossposts from guest GSW editor Andy Baio of Waxy.org.

But in the mean time, let's have a quick wander through some of the top game design and interview articles Gamasutra and sister sites posted in the run-up to the show, eh? Here goes:

- Expressing The Future: Tetsuya Mizuguchi
"Q Entertainment's Tetsuya Mizuguchi is best known for titles spanning Space Channel 5 to Lumines, and following the release of Rez HD for XBLA, Gamasutra quizzed him in-depth on the game's significance and the future of gaming."

- Stories From The Sandbox
"In this in-depth design article, veteran game designer Sorens examines the 'sandbox game' genre, advocating - with plenty of practical examples - that "designers can and should do more to exploit... player-generated stories"."

- Designing Games That Are Accessible To Everyone
"In this Gamasutra feature, AudiOdyssey co-developer Glinert explains why usability and accessibility are vital for creating tomorrow's hits, focusing on design principles for targeting and satisfying the disabled gamer."

- GamesOnDeck 'Road To IGF Mobile' Features
Ahead of Tuesday's announcement of the first-ever IGF Mobile winners, check out Mathew Kumar's final chats with some of the neat independent mobile developers making innovative, good-looking or otherwise not-boring cellphone and other mobile device games - yay.

- Persuasive Games: Videogame Vignette
"In his latest 'Persuasive Games' column on sociopolitical games, designer/author Ian Bogost analyzes the 'vignette' that is Hush, a student game which movingly chronicles the massacres of the Rwandan Civil War."

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Waahh! It's getting warm outside in Houston already, but not warm enough for the damn cockroaches to leave me alone! What part of "I set off a bug bomb" don't you guys understand, you spiny bastards?!!

Things are busy as always in magazine land, and so click on for all the new mags that hit shelves in the past two weeks... with some exceptions. (The new EGM's on shelves but I've been receiving it very late in the mail lately. There's also a new issue of Beckett Massive Online Gamer but I can't be bothered to go out to the car to fetch it.)

Game Informer March 2008

Cover: Aliens: Colonial Marines

The cover is exclusive this and exclusive that, and it's pretty hot names, all of it, especially for a March 2008 issue of a video-game magazine. But the Aliens feature inside is about two spreads' worth of content stretched out over five; it reads like the author copied the PR guy's presentation verbatim, and there isn't even much commentary from the developers, save a few quotes here and there from creative director Brian Martel and design lead Kevin Schuler. The pictures are nice, of course, but the text is purely "IGN exclusive preview". The same deal with the Champions Online and Red Faction pieces, both of which has an enormous, boring text deck on their opening spreads that all but tells you to flip fo the next article.

Overall I wonder if the middle of the magazine could've been better off with the GTA4 piece headlining the Previews section getting bumped up to feature status. It describes a bunch of neat little pieces of minutiae I haven't read anywhere else, which maybe coulda made for a neat EGM or GamePro-style change of pace.

Connect is wonderful as always, the highlight for me being the interview with Eidos US head Bill Gardner (who looks a dead ringer for my father). EIC Andy McNamara's editorial also touches on the topic of review scores, since Shoe is hardly the only editor accused of payola in this business:

"People always seem to assume that we are somehow being paid for our reviews or that we simply don't play the games. The idea that these things are even brought up at all blows my mind... In my 17 years of being here at Game Informer we have never been banned from a company for a poor review, and there is a simple reason why. Companies may not always agree with what we say, but we back up our reviews with research and insight that explains our position and why we like or dislike a game... Sometimes you agree with us and sometimes you don't, but don't ever accuse us of not being honest or passionate about video games, because at the end of the day that's our job."

I have the impression this is a little easier for Andy to say than Shoe since just about the only controversially poor reviews I've seen from GI are for certain Nintendo series, and Nintendo is famously hands-off about this sort of thing. But an EIC's job is nothing if not stressful -- you can never satisfy everybody, or even most people.

Nintendo Power March 2008

Cover: Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World

Hey, when did Casey Loe start working for Nintendo Power? He wrote the cover piece this month and it's not bad, although the game's still early and the non-interview text falls into "I'm writing for IGN" mode pretty quickly itself. Other features on Speed Racer, Bully and baseball games are all-right reading in and of themselves, and this issue is also the one when NP finally gets around to its 2007 awards.

Magazine dorks unaware of NP's yearlong "20 Years of Nintendo Power" series are totally missing out, by the way. This month Scott talks about the best and worst covers in NP's history, where he mentions Zelda: OOT's cover as "one of the best" and the "Wi-Fi Connection" cover from January 2006 as "quite possibly our worst cover ever." It's great stuff because not only is he listing up this stuff, he's also explaining his choices from a publishing-industry perspective -- it's like a crash course in game magazine design, if you're sick of reading my crap.

PlayStation: The Official Magazine February 2008

Cover: Far Cry 2

This issue seems enormous, but it's 100 pages as always -- the thickness is thanks to Cellplay, a heavier page stock than Future's other mags (is this on purpose?), and a few advertisements and inserts printed on even heavier stuff. A piece on LittleBigPlanet promised last month didn't work out in the end, so instead we have a preview on Far Cry 2 which is pretty good readin' and a "2008 PS3 Game Planner" which is pretty obvious filler. (Yeah, I know, there are only two full-time editors and one full-time art guy who also writes, it's a drag, but...)

Most interesting are the front and back ends of the mag, where you get some more interactive content going -- and interview with the PSP marketing guy at SCEA, a look at the guy who did a remake of a GTA4 trailer in the GTASA engine, and so on. But still, get some more content going, gentlemen!

Official Xbox Magazine March 2008 (Podcast)

Cover: Left 4 Dead

A giant preview-feature issue! Noooo! :-O This is the first time a Left 4 Dead piece has looked interesting enough to read, but man, when a mag preview is under 100 words and there's like 20 of 'em, woss the use? This, plus 2007 awards, plus Cellplay, make this OXM an issue without any real features to speak of, the first one in a long time. I hope next month's better!

Games for Windows: The Official Magazine March 2008 (Podcast)

Cover: Battlefield Heroes

This is my fave mag of the past two weeks. Again GFW is demonstrating a fervent, unflagging desire to make a magazine that does something nobody else does in print. So you've got a cover feature that goes beyond the PR bullet points and explores the trends behind DICE's design choices; you have a 2007 awards feature that sums up the previous year in important advances and moments rather than game titles (Play's roundup did this too and I apologize for not mentioning it earlier); you have a handful of small features about topics like MMOs for little kids and covering Middle Eastern conflicts in games.

I think this single issue represents many of the ways I'd like print mags to go, and I think all of you should pick it up for that reason alone.

Video Game Collector #9

It's been just about a year since Shawn Paul Jones and Chris Cavanaugh released an issue of this US-based classic game mag, one that got distribution in Blockbuster stores for a while (I don't know about now, though). This issue is being distributed to subscribers as more-or-less free by way of apology, and the editors promise a new and bigger issue very soon.

In terms of design VGC is undoubtedly a fanzine; in terms of content it's very text-heavy and the pictures are obviously all taken from Google searches; and half the magazine is still useless checklists. Retro Gamer out of the UK is better than it in literally every way imaginable. Grr, grr, grr.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also Executive Editor of PiQ, a new magazine hitting stands in March.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

[In this detailed opinion piece, veteran programmer Jake Simpson explains the 'most loathed' game programmer tests often used as part of game industry interviews, outlining possible methods and his recommendations for good results on both sides.]

Programmer tests are generally one of the most loathed parts of the interview process, on both sides. But every game programmer interview should include some kind of test to make sure the applicant can walk the walk as well as talk the talk.

There are a few types of tests a programming applicant can expect to see. The first is a pre-interview test, which may be given by email and may either come before or in conjunction with a phone interview or screening.

The second is an in-house test, which is given as part of the face-to-face interview and is completed on the spot.

The last type is a take-home test that's given after the interview, which asks the candidate to complete longer assignments that are usually very closely connected to the day-to-day work the applicant can expect to see when employed, although these are more generally given to content creators (creating a level and so on) than to programmers.

How these tests are handled matters immensely, both for the candidate being grilled and the panel of smug arms-folded engineers doing the grilling. Are the interviewers asking the right questions to get the answers they need to make a good judgment call? Or are they just trotting out their favorite trick questions so they can feel vaguely clever that they know the answers and the applicant doesn't?

Now from the point of view of the technical testing, this engineer is firmly of the opinion that pre-testing is the way to test basic programming competence.

With most job applicants, the interviewers have only one day in which to base a judgment call that can impact the applicant's life. Changing jobs can often mean moving, packing up family and so on -- and for the interviewers too, since they'll be working with the new hire day in and day out for possibly years.

Sticking an applicant in a room to complete a technical written test, letting her chew her pencil and desperately try to remember what C++ operators can't be overloaded, is probably not the best use of that small amount of time.

Technical tests need to be like filters. They need to help the hiring company figure out which applicants they should spend their time and money on bringing in house.

Be aware though, that this process is negative filtering. Someone who does well on a technical test isn't necessarily a good programmer and won't necessarily fit with the group, but someone who does poorly definitely won't be a good programmer.

The idea is to find out whether that someone at least sounds technically competent before they set foot in the studio. At that point, the hiring company is making a few assumptions about the person and can safely move along to other things when the interviewee shows up.

What is a Written Technical Test?

The first thing is to understand the purpose of a written technical test. Its purpose is to

1. test domain knowledge
2. test general programming acumen and
3. give the interviewers an idea of the candidate's experience.

It's not designed to reveal how applicants think, uncover their deep knowledge of STL edge case implementations, or see how they react to logic problems.

What's in this Mythical Written Test?

Written tests usually contain a range of questions. They typically include:

* algorithmic questions ("Write a function to do such-and-such.")
* language questions ("What's the construction order of an inherited class?" - whatever that language is)
* domain-specific questions ("What does a vertex/pixel shader do?" "What's the equation for specular lighting?")
* and basic trig math ("What's a dot product, and what is it used for?").

When it comes to the basic trig math questions, it's considered good practice to allow the candidate to write solutions to functional problems in a given range of languages rather than just C++ or C#.

Domain-specific questions are usually broken up into several sections, which might ask the applicant to answer all the questions in just one of these sections, since it's not right to expect graphics programmers to understand A*, for example. The domain-specific stuff is the hardest to write since only the hiring team knows what their studio requires. Sometimes questions can even be written for the specific person being interviewed.

How deep the questions go is a shop-by-shop decision. But be aware that just because the quiz-makers can answer their own questions doesn't mean they should expect the average programmer out there to be able to as well. This can be a problem in some programming tests, and applicants shouldn't be discouraged if they encounter this problem. It's not about (or at least it shouldn't be about) how clever the test maker is. It's about how clever the company expects its prospective employees to be.

Another problem that sometimes arises in programming tests is a logic bomb trick question. A classic example is a question that asks about the weight of an anchor in and out of a boat. With these kinds of questions, either the respondent has heard the riddle before or hasn't, and either knows the answer or doesn't. Because most respondents can't work out the solutions on the spot, the questioners don't get anything out of asking -- except maybe a little power trip. Plus, nothing is gained if the respondent does answer correctly.

When I create a programmer test, I tend to intersperse some essay questions with code ones, requiring the candidate to use his or her own voice in some of the responses.

Some applicants will cut and paste directly from the internet, which is what the essay tests are designed to catch - mostly direct cut and pastes are obvious since the style and verbiage drastically changes in each answer. Even if the applicant converts other peoples answers into his own words, that's ok, because you have to understand the answer in order to do that, which is what the test is about in the first place.

Speaking of the internet ... Some companies administer take-at-home tests, which some people fear allows the job candidates to look up answers. Well, sure, but that's fine. That's how they're going to be working day to day, by looking stuff up, so why not let them do it on a test, too?

A good programmer is not defined by whether she remembers the code for a dot product; it's defined in how she uses it. There's definitely some value to programmers who understand the root of what the equation means, but that's very hard to test in a written exam. That kind of stuff needs to be done on site.

What to Expect

Timed tests should be the norm, whether given in-house, via email, or as a take-home exam. When not done on site, these timed tests may give the interviewee a few hours or even a full day to turn the test around. Companies generally don't give applicants more than a day or two to complete them, as the goal is for the applicant to be able to solve the problems or look up the answers independently, not troll the internet for days on end or have someone else answer the questions for them.

Something else applicants might see is a section on each question that asks how long the candidate predicted it would take to answer the question, how long it actually took, and the relevance they judged the question to have. Applicants may be asked to send back answers to their "predictions" immediately so that they cannot go back over them afterward and make the answer reflect the actual time taken.

A feedback section for open comments might also appear. These sections give the employer further clues as to how the candidates think and communicate, as well as giving direction to how they can more finely tune the test in the future.

Finally, the most important thing from the employer's perspective is to be able to interpret the results. What do the answers mean? Only the exam-makers can judge what level of answers are accepted. Companies that are very experienced at giving programmer tests often have several different people grade the tests rather than just one, which helps to ensure that the grading is fair.

[Jake Simpson has been in the industry for longer than he cares to remember, although if he starts waxing on about working on Elisa, just buy him another beer and tell him to stop talking rubbish. He's been involved in making games for everything from the Commodore 64 all the way to the modern PC, with stops along the way to work on arcade machines for Midway in its golden era. Currently he works for Linden Lab making a second life for everyone, although as he confesses he often has his hands full with just the first one. Email him at jakesimpson100(at)yahoo.com or through his blog http://blog.jakeworld.org/.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The February 2008 issue of Game Developer magazine, the sister print publication to Gamasutra.com and GameSetWatch.com, and the leading U.S. trade publication for the video game industry, has shipped to subscribers and is available from the Game Developer Digital service in both subscription and single-issue formats, as well as a single physical issue.

The cover feature for the issue is 'Postmortem: Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction' by John Fiorito, and it's explained of the exclusive postmortem:

"Ratchet & Clank Future was Insomniac's second PlayStation 3 game, and indeed one of the first second-generation PS3 titles period. From scope woes to preproduction pitfalls, this postmortem illuminates some of the process behind this "second party" development cycle."

Another major feature for the new issue is 'Difficulty Is Difficult' by game designer Daniel Boutros, of which it's explained:

"If done well, difficulty can make a game quite addictive. If done poorly, the game can become an abject failure for consumers. This design article dissects various elements of difficulty tuning, and proposes potential solutions."

In addition, the February issue also looks at 'Big Waves' by Adi Bar-Lev, described as follows:

"Game Developer has featured articles on water before, but never massive, interactive waves. Building off a primer for general in-game water creation, this technical piece shows practical techniques for the creation, smoothing, and perfection of big waves in-game, as seen in Ubisoft's Surf's Up."

Another major piece for the issue is 'Community Roundtable' by a host of MMO and online game community managers, including April Burba, Christian Schuett, Jonathan Hanna, Richard Weil, Sean Dahlberg, and Victor Wachter, and it's noted:

"Community management straddles the line between developer and fanbase, and as a result is often misunderstood. Herein, your questions are answered by community professionals, as their jobs become more important to game development."

The issue is rounded out by an interview on Halo 3's 'Legendary' difficulty level, as well as the customary in-depth news, code, art, audio, and design columns from Game Developer's veteran correspondents, plus product reviews and editorial columns.

Worldwide paper-based subscriptions to Game Developer magazine are currently available at the official magazine website, and the Game Developer Digital version of the issue is also now available, with the site offering six months and a year's subscriptions, alongside access to back issues and PDF downloads of all issues, all for a reduced price. There is now also an opportunity to buy the digital version of February 2008's magazine as a single issue.

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A little more GameSetLink-age up your wazoo, and there's some fun stuff here - and I actually really like the fake SomethingAwful article from Hunter S. Thompson on the Spike VGAs.

Sure, nobody can really emulate the gonzo originator (even you, Rogers!), but it just shows that personal experiences need recounting more often in video game surroundings - even if they're fictional discussions of journeys through Bat Country, perhaps. Anyhow, onward:

Zen of Design»Blog Archive » Great Moments in Community Management
With a crapload of great comments adding to the three starters.

VIDEOLUDICA: Game On exhibition hits Melbourne
...with new sections on MMOs and machinima, apparently.

Sirlin.net: The Mysterious Grassroots Gamemaster
Sirlin likes him a bit more than me, but I agree with the 'come out and play' comment.

SomethingAwful: Hunter S. Thompson Files His Belated Report on the 2007 Spike Video Game Awards
This is oddly moving - via Leigh.

NCSX: Oshiri Kajiri Mushi no Rhythm Lesson DS: Kawai Ongaku Kyoushitsu Kanshuu
'In Sega's upcoming Rhythm Lesson DS, the insects serve as music teachers where rhythm exercises on virtual instruments are all that's needed to become somewhat musically inclined.'

insertcredit.com: 'Barnyard Blast out Friday'
The sardonic hand of Gamasutra's Brandon Sheffield helped out with writing on this DS oddity.

Habitat Chronicles: Chip and Randy cut loose!
Yahoo! lays off the original graphical MMO creators - who were working on something skunkwork-y. Iiinteresting.

Game-Ism: 'So What Do You Do?'
A game creator laments: 'For some reason, when I’m out in public, with the rest of the general population, I hide what I do at my job.'

From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games: US Army Sniper School in Halo
Army sponsorship for Halo 3 tutorial videos, I think?

Cult Classics: PlayStation 2 Article // PS2 /// Eurogamer
'...recommended for adventurous souls with a taste for the eclectic.'

PC Feature: The Many Deaths of Lord British - ComputerAndVideoGames.com
Cute idea.

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

[We sent Games On Deck editor, IGF Mobile co-ordinator and Gamasutra contributor Mathew Kumar to cover the N+ for Xbox Live Arcade 'almost launch party' in his adopted hometown of Toronto, Canadia (that's how you spell it, right?) This was the torrid but awesome result.]

N(ipples)+ Everyday Hooters

So a few weeks ago, roughly seconds after I got an invite to Metanet Software's N+ launch party at the Gladstone Hotel (which I immediately promised to go to, as I missed an earlier PR event arranged by Microsoft) I received both an IM from Simon Carless (our benevolent overlord) and an e-mail from Brandon Sheffield (Insert Credit’s not-even-vaguely benevolent overlord) asking me to go and cover it.

In what capacity, I wondered?

“I don’t know,” was the response (from one or the other) “Just write 300 words or something on it.”

So, without much of an assignment I just decided to be as sensationalistic as possible (even though GamesetWatch doesn’t pay for hits). As you’ll notice from the picture above, the N+ launch party was a night of wild debauchery! I won’t reveal the identities of the developers caught in the act of flashing us even though we asked (nay, begged) them not to, but the caption should give you some hints.

The crowded masses at the event. Notice the fellow to the left there, gesturing as to how large something is! We’ll leave what to your imagination. (The hand on the right is describing how large it really is.)

People play N+! Note the special N+ Xbox 360 faceplates.

Mare (Sheppard, she of Metanet software) made them. They’re very neat.

Jim Munroe (director of Freeware Rebellion, and of the Artsy Games Incubator) brought a baby. The beer is the baby’s, because that's just how wild things were.

There is something hilarious about this hat, I'm sure, but I was too far away to find out.

Everyday Shooter’s Jon Mak drinks Irish whiskey and looks sleazy.

This is the stack of drinks tickets that were on hand for people to get totally blotto on (which they did.) Note the sweet N+ pins. I didn’t get one, because I wasn’t paying attention at the time, sadly.

Raigan (Burns, also of Metanet) plays his own game. The first thing he did was kill himself, which makes it seem likely that he’s not going to be at the top of the leaderboard on Xbox Live on his own game forever like Jeff Minter was. Later, he would talk for about 40 minutes on how NHL 2001 was probably his favorite game ever. He even liked the original Driver! All the other indie developers are going to mock Raigan at the Indie Game Summit now I’ve revealed this, probably.

All in all, everyone had a lovely time, N+ is excellent (though, obviously, brutally hard) and it’s probably going to be released next week. Unless Bill Gates changes his mind.

Posted by mathewk at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)

For those paying attention, a recent GameSetWatch article centered on my delighted discovery that the successful computer company in Douglas Adams' practically psychedelic book Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency - was called WayForward Technologies.

This, of course, is the same name as the game developer behind Contra IV, Shantae, and a host of other neat handheld/other titles, so I mailed my contacts there and waiting for a reply from company owner Voldi Way - who has the same last name as Dirk Gently character Gordon Way, heh.

And I did indeed receive an email all about it from Voldi, and am sharing it with you:

"Good catch! Our name was, in fact, inspired by Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. it was early 1990, while i was still contemplating starting a game development company, that i happened to be reading that book.

It's been 18 years since i read it, so please forgive me if i'm remembering the details wrong, but as i recall, Mr. Way (Gordon, not Voldi) developed MIDI software for Windows and Macintosh. Well, back then, i was developing software professionally for Windows and had been playing with Macs as a hobby. On top of that, i had ambitions of becoming a rock-star (like most 19 year-olds), so i had a lot of MIDI equipment. I had even been writing my own MIDI sequencing software on the side.

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Gordon Way's company did indeed release the MIDI software 'Anthem', which is, according to Wikipedia, "...designed as a spreadsheet, but also has a unique feature to convert corporate accounts into music" - though it was designed by protagonist Richard MacDuff for Gordon's company. This is still an awesome idea that somebody should do, incidentally.]

In any case, the similarities were just too astounding, so when I officially started the company on my birthday a few months later (3/1/1990), i chose the name WayForward Technologies as a tribute to Douglas Adams. at the time, i half expected to fail and have to start over as WayForward Technologies II, which would've been even more fitting [since that's what happened in the book].

In a weird way, even that turned out to be a parallel. We got bought by a book publisher in 1995, and a couple years later, they realized they were better at selling books than software, so they liquidated us and all of our assets in 1997. We managed to buy back all the equipment for pennies on the dollar, but we lost the rights to all of our IP. So in a sense, our current incarnation could be considered WayForward Technologies II, although we haven't been mentioned in the same sentence as companies such as IBM and Microsoft (or was it Lotus in the book?)

Anyway, you've inspired me to dig up my old copy of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and re-read it for old time sake. It'll be especially nostalgic since any hopes of another sequel have passed on with Douglas Adams."

Ah well - as Adams fans know, there is, at least, The Long Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul to be read, though that can only be described as an _extremely_ tangential sequel, and as comments in the previous post noted, The Salmon Of Doubt has fragments of another Dirk Gently book in it. But it's nice to know Adams' legacy is living, namewise, in an entirely unrelated entity.

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

[As previously mentioned, we now have all four GameSetApparel T-shirts available for individual order. We're going to highlight one tee per week here on GSW - though you can buy any/all of them now! Being highlighted this week is the completely awesome 'Grabungadung' shirt by European development superstars Schadenfreude Interactive.]

GSA104 - 'Grabungadung' - Now Available

Also now available in GameSetApparel's limited-edition 'Games That Never Were' series, which is strictly limited to 111 copies of each tee, is 'Grabungadung' by Schadenfreude Interactive (legendary German Accordion Hero creators).

Regular GameSetWatch and Gamasutra readers may know Black Forest-based game developer Schadenfreude Interactive from their appearances on both websites, most recently for a weeklong guest appearance on GSW while site editor Simon Carless was guesting on Kotaku.

In any case, from that guest stint, when discussing their classic '80s beginnings, Karsden and Bruno reveal where this T-shirt, Grabungadung, got its design from:

"GRABUNGADUNG (1982)
Karsden: This game was Dig Dug, without the silly Fygars. Instead, they were dung beetles. But I suppose it was similar enough, since we eventually got a cease-and-desist letter from Namco, and so we made Grabungadung II, which was more like Ripoff.
Bruno: We ripped off Ripoff.
K: Basically you are the beetle and roll your dung ball around, accumulating as much dung as possible, while fending off flies and other beetles who will try to steal your ball.
Bruno: In a way it is a metaphor for life.
K:We made a coin-op version, which was very popular in Southern Germany. It was a “cocktail” arcade machine, with a large brown ninepin ball as a trackball.
Bruno: And then we did another dung beetle game, years later…because you are so fond of these dung beetles.
K: Yes, that is why we made Dung Ho!, which was a bit like Katamari Damacy.
Bruno: But much less colorful.
K: Brown is a color!

"

The high-quality sky-blue Schadenfreude-designed shirt (available in XL, L, or M, with only 111 in total over all three sizes) is the result, and interested parties can now order the GSA104 'Grabungadung' T-shirt design in multiple sizes from the GameSetApparel store.

[BONUS LINK: Reader 'L'Ombre Du Z' ordered all four shirts to the fine country of France, and blogged about it recently - according to the Google translate version: "The result, four t-shirts quality unique, colorful illustrations and pimpantes shifted... A new brand to monitor therefore, for the geeks as for lovers of tees." So there - pimpantes!]

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sometimes, publishers and developers send us here at GameSetWatch (and Game Developer and Gamasutra) neat seasonal stuff - most recently a plethora of Xmas cards, of course.

However, only one company was sweet enough (in more ways than one) to send us a Valentine's Day gift - and that's D3Publisher, the U.S. division of the folks who published Puzzle Quest, and bust out heaps of Simple 2000 budget titles in Japan, including the immortal Earth Defense Force series. Here's what they sent:

This is actually a hexagonal box entirely made of chocolate, with the D3 logo on the front, and the following inscription: "The couple that plays together stays together. Enjoy Valentine's Day with your favorite D3 duo."

The characters on the chocolate lid? Looks like characters from the already released Puzzle Quest: Challenge Of The Warlords, Cartoon Network license Ben10, and Naruto, as well as from Digital Extremes' upcoming Dark Sector. Neeto.

Finally, some specially designed D3 truffles inside the whole caboodle. High wackiness. Is this the time to point out a a new D3 game in Japan: "Yasetore DS (short for Yaseru Training DS: "Weight Loss Training") includes diet and exercise help for the short term." So where is 'eat honkin' great D3 chocolate box' in that whole setup, hm?

And yes, I guess this could be construed as cocoa-based press bribery, but honestly, it's not going to make us all cave and cover D3 titles incessantly from here to Kingdom Come. Still, if you see Game Developer magazine giving Dark Sector 11 out of 10, you'll know it's worked!

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Wow, you know - GDC is coming up really soon now, and we're all scrambling to get ready here. In the meantime, some wonderful GameSetLinks, including Jason Scott on King Of Kong (one final time!), and a Forbes article on the future of gaming that may or may not be well-informed.

I also enjoyed Cliffski's Bit-Tech article on game genres and why we should freestyle it just a little bit with regard to conventions. I think he's right that it's great to be different, but as he points out: "When I try to see how my turn-based strategic life-sim game Kudos is selling, I often have trouble finding it as nobody knows which category to put it in." Lack of pigeonholing = reduced sales, pretty often, *sigh*.

Cryptic Sea: Blood Car! 2000! Deluxe!
'A great work of art or the greatest work of art? You decide.'

bit-tech.net | The Curse of Genre
Democracy's Cliffski sez: 'the problem is we have got so used to slotting games into genres we have all but forgotten how cool it was before they existed.'

The Future Of Videogames - Forbes.com
'Within 10 years, guilds formed on "War of Warcraft" or other online games will become offline political forces.' 'War Of Warcraft'?

IGN Blogs - N+ - Freeware!
Raigan and Mare using their IGN developer blog to spread the good freeware word.

FilePlanet: Independent Game Festival Finalists Portal
Wow, thanks, FilePlanet guys, this is awesome - we didn't even ask them!

Waxy.org: Oscilloscope Fun and Games
The Assembly demo (complete with sine scroller!) is great - Geometry Wars for oscilloscope is my Lazyweb suggestion for the day.

ASCII by Jason Scott: The King of Wrong: Final Words (Many of Them)
Last words, yes, and that's very plural :)

The Racoon City Times: Danny Interviews Patrick J. doody, one of the writers of silent hill 5
Some interesting new info - via Chris' Survival Horror Quest.

Blogspot: 'Skater Boy Tell 'Em' gaming insider blog
In my opinion, this is a smart person without any major inside knowledge, as opposed to Surfer Girl. Could be wrong, of course.

Arcade Renaissance: Street Fighter Online Mouse Generation details and customization screens
'In a lot of ways, SFO: Mouse Generation is essentially being marketed as the Smash Brothers of the Street Fighter universe.'

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

[Just wanted to reprint this release in full, because it's a pretty big deal for game awards in general - and the IGF and Choice Awards in particular. This is the first time that an indie game awards or the Choice Awards have been televised (though they have been streamed in previous years), and G4 is available to 64 million North American viewers through cable and satellite, so.. yay.

Personal bias notwithstanding, I think this is good for the industry. I also heard there are IGF-specific segments on the finalists airing during the week - neat! Thanks to Jamil and other colleagues for making it happen.]

LOS ANGELES, February 14, 2008 - It's where the videogame industry's great minds meet and the only way in is through G4. For five consecutive nights, "X-Play" will deliver G4's exclusive coverage of the week-long Game Developers Conference (GDC), the annual gathering of industry professionals, where the most talented and influential share their ideas about the past, present and future of the gaming industry.

Broadcasting directly from the show floor and reporting on the biggest developments and most important keynotes, "X-Play," the most watched videogame series on television, will premiere never before seen gameplay, introduce viewers to the biggest developers, participate in hands-on demos of next-generation games, and take viewers inside with exclusive coverage of the eighth annual Game Developers Choice Awards and the tenth annual Independent Games Festival.

This coverage will culminate in a Special of the Awards Night, featuring the IGF and Choice Awards, to be broadcast shortly after the GDC. "X-Play" presents "The 2008 Game Developers Conference," beginning Monday, February 18. Coverage continues nightly through Friday, February 22, at the regularly scheduled time, 8 pm ET/PT.

Attended by more than 16,000 programmers, artists, producers, game designers, audio professionals and others involved in the development of videogames, GDC regularly features many of the year's biggest game announcements. "X-Play" hosts Adam Sessler and Morgan Webb will provide in-depth updates on all of the event's news, and introduce viewers to the people behind the most popular games through exclusive interviews from the floor. G4 will also have coverage of all the major keynotes that reveal the future of gaming and the most eagerly anticipated hardware and software.

"GDC is the first and most important industry conference of the year, where the most innovative minds in the industry swap ideas and begin developing the games of the future," said Adam Sessler, host, "X-Play."

"'X-Play' viewers want the inside scoop on their favorite developers and we're there every night to make sure they get it," continued Morgan Webb, host, "X-Play."

"Having a broadcast partner like G4 supports our goal of getting the leading developers in the spotlight to share ideas and recognize their creative contribution," said Jamil Moledina, executive director, Game Developers Conference.

Highlights from "X-Play's" five nights of coverage will include:

* Game Developers Choice Awards - the game industry's only open, peer-based awards show where the recipients are chosen by those who know games best -- their creators. G4 will present highlights from the show, including the first interviews with the ceremony's big winners.

* Independent Games Festival - the largest competition for independent games highlights the innovative achievements of independent developers. G4 will introduce viewers to the teams and showcase their games.

Additional coverage will be available online at http://www.g4tv.com/xplay, including:

* Interactive elements such as polling, chat and video viewer mail, allowing viewers to interact with the broadcast in real time.

* The best of the on-air coverage, as well as web-exclusive interviews, breaking news, keynotes, game demos, previews and more, on the site and via streaming video.

* Video On Demand will feature clips and highlights from the broadcast and online coverage.

For more information on "X-Play," and online coverage of the GDC, please visit http://www.g4tv.com/xplay.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[The Aberrant Gamer is a weekly, somewhat NSFW column by Leigh Alexander, dedicated to the kinks and quirks we gamers tend to keep under our hats – those predilections and peccadilloes less commonly discussed in conventional media.]

Last week’s column wondered how games might mature enough to allow for believable sexuality, and concluded that aiming for intimacy is a good start. Plenty of games already use intimacy, or the emotional connection created for the player between their character and another, as a story element, and romance has been a key driver in game stories and character development, at times even successfully.

What makes a good game love story? Surely, the same recipe that works in other media can be extended to the game world – well-developed characters, a few key, stirring moments, a protagonist with which the player can empathize, and a love object that the player can feel something about through that empathy.

But games also require certain elements that static entertainment media don’t. After all, the most blunt differentiator of games from other forms of entertainment is interactivity – and given that love is all about interaction, games have the possibility of creating more engaging romances than any of their sister media.

Just like we learned last week with sexuality and intimacy, games might not have explored all of their potential yet. That’s all right; it’s a young, adolescent medium, and adolescents are not the smoothest operators. But in the spirit of Valentine’s Day, let’s look at five game romances that are really on the right track.

5. Tidus And Yuna

In particular, the RPG genre often features a romance or two, and the Final Fantasy series is no exception. As that sort of game is intended as an epic story, tracking the development either literally or metaphorically of a hero from boy to man, love often plays a role. But FFX, in its time one of the heralds of a new console generation, evolved the RPG romance a step beyond anything we’d yet seen in Final Fantasy. Perhaps it was the arresting fantasy-realism of the character faces, for its time unprecedented. But Tidus’ relationship to Yuna played a significant role in investing the storyline with weight – she was a well-crafted, empathetic character whose fate was ostensibly in the player’s hands.

Final Fantasy characters are perhaps so popular among their fans because they’re not too thoroughly or obtrusively drawn, thereby leaving room for player imagination. Yuna was framed in a way that led the player to care for her, creating the relationship between her and an otherwise forgettable hero. FFX was much more a story about the nature of humanity and the philosophies of religion and war than it was a romantic drama, but where that series’ stories sometimes compound their scale until they become implausible, this point of a smaller, more human struggle helped FFX retain relevance.

4. James And Mary

This column has in the past sung the praises of Silent Hill 2’s thematic complexity. Several layers in, it’s perhaps the furthest thing away from a love story as you can get – it’s a horror story, one man’s trip through limbo into personal hell. But despite the chilling revelation at the core of James Sunderland, it seems to be his ache for Mary that dazes him in the surreal, mist-shrouded Silent Hill. The player can actually be saved by how many times Mary’s strange letter is viewed.

Mary’s much trampier doppelganger actually manifests herself in Silent Hill, seeming to demonstrate all the traits that, deep down, James resented his dead wife for not possessing. This isn’t romantic, but it’s realistic, as are James’ complicated and often contradictory emotions of lust, guilt, disgust and resentment surrounding the loss of his wife. It may be the most mature portrayal of a human relationship in any game, in all of its possible ugliness.

3. Gordon Freeman And Alyx Vance

Blame her fantastic AI. Or credit the fact that very little is actually known about Gordon Freeman, letting the player see every nuance of Alyx only through his eyes. Either way, it’s clear that Half Life fans love her far beyond any interaction that is actually presented in the games. In a first-person shooter, one doesn’t expect character relationships to play a significant role, and it’s true that any relationship presented between Gordon and Alyx mostly leaves itself open to suggestion – and fingers-crossed hopefulness.

Perhaps Half Life 2’s FPS gameplay actually reinforces the player’s – and therefore, Gordon’s – emotional attachment to Alyx. She frequently appears as a point of respite after trigger-finger chaos, and during the fast-paced and high-stakes points in the plot, the player knows that Alyx is doing her part to make sure you survive. The storyline in particular fosters a sense of “you and me against the world,” and given how cute Alyx is, that’s just enough.

2. Yuri Hyuga And Alice Elliot

The first two installments of the often overlooked and under-rated Shadow Hearts are distinguished from the often indistinguishable morass of RPG characters right from the start, each of them carved in much more detailed and endearing nuances than is common. At first blush, it’s not an uncommon pairing – a smartmouthed young man with demon powers against a properly salvation-oriented girl who looks like an angel. But where most RPGs suffer under the very principle we discussed last week – the infantilization of sexless fantasy -- Shadow Hearts was a much, much braver game than its peers in that it was willing to depict its characters in the shades of adults.

In addition to bravery in characterization, Shadow Hearts advanced the paradigm for thematics and even for humor, in terms of its maturity. Perhaps it’s because of this pleasant surprise that the player’s tendency is to invest more fully in its storyline and endearing characters. Additionally, alongside the more traditional fantasy story, a parallel, smaller-scale drama of one doomed man’s battle with himself plays out. As the player is led to weigh the storyline and characters with more sincerity, Yuri’s relationship with Alice can no longer be just another RPG salvation story. Moreover, in Shadow Hearts 2, Yuri’s characterized throughout the game by Alice’s impact on him in a visceral, believable and often painfully intense way.

1. Ico And Yorda

We discussed Ico and Yorda last week as an example of a significant step in the right direction for developing sincere intimacy in a game, and that it was. In the huge scale environments of ICO, empty save for their perplexingly minimalist puzzles and the lurking threat of shadows coalescing, the simple protect-and-lead dynamic between Ico and the ethereal princess Yorda took center stage.

It’s hard to pin down exactly why this works so well. Protection and rescue missions, or situations wherein one needs to get a partner NPC to behave in a certain way, are historically frustrating, even loathsome. And in ICO’s day, we hadn’t nearly the AI tech that we have now, so the luminous little lady was prone to wandering off, or dawdling right off of the very button she needs to remain standing on. But somehow, that perceived absent-minded helplessness on Yorda’s part was actually endearing. No matter how often she got herself seized by shadows, the player never lost that immediate impulse of genuine motivation to go and rescue her. Again.

The delight of that pairing lies in a few small details – the fashion of holding Yorda’s hand, for one thing, or the way both characters could drowse innocently side-by-side on the stone couches that act as save spots. Ico’s manner of speaking echoed the tonal patterns of real language, without forming recognizable words, contributing to the environment of suggestion without explicitness. Even the height disparity had a certain implacable charm in suggesting their ages as similar, but their physical development as less so, as is often the case with children that age.

Which brings us to the irony – this list’s favorite and most sophisticated relationship is wholly innocent, between children. Which adds to its charm and sincerity, of course. The “aww” factor with young love is its touching simplicity, and ICO’s attention to detail for those simple gestures like head-on-shoulder and hand-holding was able to bring those elements to life beautifully.

We’ve got plenty of inspiring seeds sown for romantic intimacy in games, and these are only the author’s personal favorite examples. Each instance on this list highlights some key features, from empathy to simplicity, that we hope will continue to be built upon in future titles – after all, don’t we all love a little romance? Happy Valentine’s Day!

[The header image Wii valentine comes from the excellent 4 Color Rebellion. They've got plenty of game valentines to choose from, so check them out! For maximum effect, deliver them to your sweetie with a "romantic" pick-up line from Sexy Videogameland.]

[Leigh Alexander is editor of Worlds in Motion and writes for Gamasutra, freelances and reviews often for a variety of outlets, and maintains her gaming blog, Sexy Videogameland. She can be reached at leigh_alexander1 AT yahoo DOT com.]

Posted by Leigh Alexander at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (19)

[Not sure if we're almost done with Tim. W's fun 2007 indie game best-ofs, but this one rounds up a bunch of the random, wackier indie games out there - including some of the most innovative/interesting titles fitting into the 'other' genre. Here goes!]

The sixth of the 2007 Best Of Features here on the IndieGames.com.blog, we're proud to present ten more notable Flash and freeware games released in 2007.

Best Freeware Games (Others) 2007

  1. Rose and Camellia
  2. Ratmaze 2
  3. Too Many Ninjas
  4. Streets of Rage Remake
  5. Dot Fighters
  6. Crayon Physics
  7. Hammerfall
  8. Toribash
  9. Sumotori Dreams
10. Coaster Rider

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

[The bar for game technology, development budgets and consumer cost is driving ever higher while the hardcore audience is beginning to age, leaving a bit less room for games in their lives. Something's gotta give, and Gamasutra and Worlds In Motion's Leigh Alexander explains why a future in episodic content may be inevitable.]

Episodic content is to traditional gaming what TV is to movies, one supposes. Initially, movies were only in theaters; initially, games were only in arcades. Then, it became possible to watch movies on a home projector; similarly, it became possible to play games on a home console. The next step for cinematic content, of course, was TV broadcasting -- now is the next step for games broadcast content?

Some would definitely say so. Each new console generation historically has amped up the bar for just how much graphical, processing, production value and general power needs to drive a game, and that means ever-growing development teams and ever-swelling development budgets. We're fast approaching that zero point where consumers will no longer buy games for a price at which game companies won't lose money.

And with price points in this console generation initially ranging from the mid-$200s to $599, we learned, essentially, that very few people will buy a game console for $599. What if, in the next console generation, the "budget" console is the one weighing in at $400? How many people will buy the higher-end competitive consoles then -- no matter how many extra media-oriented features are included?

There's a chance, of course, that innovation and hardware consolidation will eventually make consoles cheaper, as occurred with home computers. There's also something to be said for adjusting for inflation. But largely, the current format, wherein every few years we buy a more expensive new console and all of the higher-priced new games for that console, is absolutely unsustainable.

With some exceptions (Rock Band, Guitar Hero) consumers are likely to resist price points for a single game that exceed $60 or so. But, given pioneering innovation on the indie front, we've also seen how very small and simple games can be very interesting, very enjoyable and very marketable, so there are no guarantees that graphical sophistication and prices will necessarily continue driving up concurrently.

Nonetheless, no matter what the case, we're reaching a ceiling, and something's gotta give. So what are the other factors in the space right now? Three big ones. First, the so-called "rise of a new audience" of casual gamers, or at least, lighter-engagement gamers outside the traditional hardcore demographic. Second, the increase in digital distribution and connected content; third, the success of the free-to-play biz model.

Let's look at these factors one by one, to get an idea of the kind of results they might produce for the industry down the line.

The "New" Gamer

Everyone has heard more times than they can count all about how the Wii created a whole new audience of gamers, and how more and more people are into casual games, and it's a whole new group of people that have never really been into games before. But given demographics, that might be semi-fallacious.

Think about it; some people define "hardcore" as 18-35, but the most active and committed sector of the market is really probably something like 14-22. They're the ones that have the time. They've also got no bills and no rent, mostly. But after that age, they start going to work, needing to manage their own expenses, and generally developing more complex adult lives.

At the very minimum, they have less time and less money for games; on a broader level, they've matured somewhat, and likely have a broader spectrum of interests, without desiring to invest so much of either resource in a single relatively time-consuming hobby.

Definitions, though, aren't so black-and-white as "hardcore" versus "casual." A good chunk of these "older folks playing games" that the market's all abuzz about, this so-called "brand new demographic," is simply the traditional gamer who is beginning to age.

If they loved grind RPGs all through their teens and early twenties, they're not going to suddenly switch to Zuma just because they don't have so much time anymore. They're going to want a complex, engaging and familiar experience, only with a shorter time commitment and less cost. Something like the difference between a three-hour mafia flick and watching The Sopranos once a week, for example.

And for all of you reading this -- can you imagine losing interest in games completely in ten years? The market is set to "broaden" even more when the Atari babies who were raised by Nintendo start getting on in years.

Death Of The Retail Box?

I'm not nearly the first to predict that the traditional $60 box on a shelf is on the way out, because of rising costs, broadening audiences and a wider array of payment options for consumers. Warcraft, and possibly LOTRO, are the only MMOs, for example, that clearly manage to continue surviving in the long-term without being free.

For online games, this means there are a higher number of products that users can at least dip their toes into at no cost, and then only pay if they want to invest further. Imported ideas from the East, like microtransactions, are increasingly allowing consumers to pay for a game exactly what it's worth to them. Game companies will also continue to make unprecedented amounts of money from in-game or wrap-around ads for as long as that bubble lasts, enabling online games to continue being free, or nearly so.

So consumers right now have two choices: download something for free, or nearly free, and maintain control over both cost and user engagement -- or roll the dice and pay $60 at retail for a finite number of enjoyment hours, hoping you turn out to agree with that reviewer who gave it a 9. I think it's pretty clear which way things are going. For consoles to survive another generation, they'll need to take a page from this book.

They've already begun, in large part. Xbox Live has some pretty sophisticated multiplayer and social networking features, free downloadable demos, and plenty of smaller, simpler downloadables on Live Arcade. Sony's got the downloadable thing too, with plenty of simple yet well-designed indie games available digitally -- and they've made it clear they're aiming to catch up in the social connectivity department, too. How much further of a stretch would it be to divvy up major new releases into shorter, cheaper installments and offer them as episodic downloads -- no box, no disc required?

Tune In

You can already look at some current offerings -- the Half Life episodes, or even a game like No More Heroes, to see what this might feel like.

No More Heroes is structured around a series very dramatic assassination missions. Without giving anything away, there are ten or so of these, and each mission plays like its own little episode -- you get the background, you prepare, and then the fights are both cinematic and climactic. There's a satisfying conclusion when you win, and it feels just like you've watched an installment of your favorite serial television show.

The game's comic tone, stylistic elements and real "character's characters" help with this, too. There are plenty of things to mess around with outside of the mission structure, so there's more to do if you have more time -- but everything generally can be digested in one tidy bite if you haven't. And the depth of experience doesn't suffer, either.

How cool would it have been if each of No More Heroes' missions was released separately, once per week, digitally? And you and all your friends who were interested in the game could get excited together looking forward to the next crazy part-time job, the next larger-than-life boss character, and then all tune in together for the latest? Then the next day, you hit the official site to see a sneak peek of next week's fight and blabber about it -- reflect, speculate, enthuse, complain -- on the forums? Would be fun, eh?

And, given that kind of setup, I doubt anyone would feel any less immersed and involved than they would playing a sixty hour graphical wankfest all by themselves.

Not to eschew the 60-hour marathon solo-play game. That's what I do on the weekend, after all. And just like there's still a thriving audience for movies even though we can watch HBO at home now, the traditional hardcore game will not likely ever totally disappear.

And everyone's probably got one game experience that, if done right, by the right developers, the industry could name you its price. But the days when they could set the bar that high every time, regardless of any other factors, will soon be over.

This kind of format would be good for games, too -- just use this article as an example. Sort of long, isn't it? What if yesterday I'd presented an idea and then asked you to read the rest today? Assuming you were interested, you would have found it much more digestible. And how many more people do you think would read the entire thing if it had been presented in two shorter pieces? Worth thinking about, yes?

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yoiks, all kinds of new GameSetLinks here. And while I'm here, can I mention - the sheer amount of wonderful weblogs about video games nowadays pretty much beggars belief. From developer blogs through micro-niches and beyond, it's awesome.

And that's why, even if I don't have as much chance to do original pieces or research thanks to work craziness, I'll always be busting out well-considered pieces from friends, acquaintances, and game bloggers from all over.

And that's my manifesto, folks. Here wii go:

Channel 4 gets ready to educate | Games | Guardian Unlimited
Alice 'WonderlandBlog' Taylor is doing really interesting pseudo-public broadcasting stuff with games using TV budgets in the UK - see Six To Start below.

Beyond the Box: Orange Box Afterthoughts from 1UP.com
Gabe Newell is always worth listening to.

Escaping to the Land of the Baffling Pull-Quote (Magical Wasteland)
Oop, The Escapist gets some gentle poking.

Teaching Game Design: Everything I Need to Know about Teaching Game Design, I Learned in Kindergarten
Barnyard developers, innit?

Looky Touchy: Mini-Rant: The Orange Box
On why The Orange Box shouldn't be treated as a game for awards purposes - we agreed, which is why we split Choice Awards nominees (Portal, Ep. 2, TF2) out from the Box.

Autobiographical Neuropsychology: I Was Programmed by Tetris to be a Better Person
Lisa Katayama: 'At a young age, my brain was hijacked by the game of Tetris. Now it helps me navigate through life.'

VIDEOLUDICA: Into The Pixel exhibit in SF during GDC
Open until March, didn't know about this!

ARG start-up Six to Start wins £100k investment | Media | guardian.co.uk
Perplex City folks doing some fun things, we fear.

YouTube: 'Super Mario Fusion' movies
Lots of fangame vids for the cute Mario Vs. Halo project.

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Just how rampant is piracy in PC casual gaming? In a startling instalment of his regular Gamasutra column, Reflexive's director of marketing Russell Carroll (Wik, Ricochet) reveals the 92% piracy rate for one of his company's games, and what worked (and didn't work) when they tried to fix it.]

“It looks like around 92% of the people playing the full version of [the pictured] Ricochet Infinity pirated it.” It’s moments like those that make people in the industry stop dead in their tracks.

92% is a huge number and though we were only measuring people who had gotten the game from Reflexive and gone online with it, it seemed improbable that those who acquired the game elsewhere or didn’t go online were any more likely to have purchased it. As we sat and pondered the financial implications of such piracy, it was hard to get past the magnitude of the number itself: 92%.

In the casual games space, where the majority of the industry is tied to an internet-distributed product, piracy is a common problem. Search for any casual game through Google, add the word ‘crack’, and the search engine will help you find and illegally acquire every casual game you can imagine.

One way to fight the search-engine facilitated piracy is to work to remove the ever-expanding number of links to illegal copies, but in many cases improving the Digital Rights Management (DRM) system to be more secure can be more effective as it renders a large number of those links obsolete. This is tricky to be sure, because improving the security must be done without making the DRM so onerous that it keeps honest customers from purchasing games.

Reflexive, where I work, is in a peculiar position in this regard. Whereas most of the casual games industry licenses their DRM from a vendor, Reflexive has its own in-house DRM. Over the years it has undergone many improvements, including several changes made specifically to combat piracy.

With that background, my penchant for actual numbers, and a lot of help from Brian Fisher, Reflexive’s king of number crunching logic, let’s tackle the question of the 92% piracy rate on Ricochet Infinity. Could we realistically assume that stopping piracy would have caused 12 times more sales?

Beating the DRM

Pirates beat DRMs through Exploits, KeyGens and Cracks. Each of these approaches is distinct, and requires differing amounts of effort. A brief description of each, in order of least to most effort involved to make them work, can be found below.

Exploits
Exploits are holes in a DRM that can be circumvented without downloading anything to the computer. For example, going into the registry to delete a time limit on a game demo, renaming a hidden .exe file, or using task manager to ‘quit’ the DRM are all things that have been done in the past or can be done currently to circumvent casual game DRMs.

KeyGens
Most DRMs work around an encryption system that delivers the full game to players but limits them to a 60 minute trial. The full game can be unlocked by entering in a serial-type key into the game. Keygens are programs that illegally create serial keys to unlock a portal’s games. They are distributed in multiple ways, often shared among friends, as well as being sold or provided free of charge on websites around the internet.

Cracks
Cracks are perhaps the most commonly mentioned type of piracy. In this case the entire game is made DRM free by the addition of a file that impedes the DRM. Closely associated with cracks are ‘cracked games.’ This refers to a DRM-free version of the game that was cracked and then distributed by pirates. Obtaining a crack or a cracked game requires downloading files to the customer’s computer from locations that are clearly illegitimate.

Fixing the DRM
Over the last 2 years, Reflexive has made a number of security updates to its DRM that were designed to make one or more of the existing DRM workarounds obsolete and thereby turn the people pirating games into purchasing customers. While the updates haven’t made the system unbreakable, they have made it so all known or search-engine-findable piracy tools ceased to function.

Fixing The Holes - The Results

Below are the results of Reflexive.com sales and downloads immediately following each update:

Fix 1 – Existing Exploits & Keygens made obsolete – Sales up 70%, Downloads down 33%

Fix 2 – Existing Keygens made obsolete – Sales down slightly, Downloads flat

Fix 3 – Existing Cracks made obsolete – Sales flat, Downloads flat

Fix 4 – Keygens made game-specific – Sales up 13%, Downloads down 16% (note: fix made after the release of Ricochet Infinity)

From the results above, it seems clear that eliminating piracy through a stronger DRM can result in significantly increased sales – but sometimes it can have no benefit at all. So what does that mean for the question about whether a pirated copy means a lost sale? The decreases in downloads may provide a clue to that

As we believe that we are decreasing the number of pirates downloading the game with our DRM fixes, combining the increased sales number together with the decreased downloads, we find 1 additional sale for every 1,000 less pirated downloads. Put another way, for every 1,000 pirated copies we eliminated, we created 1 additional sale.

Though many of the pirates may be simply shifting to another source of games for their illegal activities, the number is nonetheless striking and poignant. The sales to download ratio found on Reflexive implies that a pirated copy is more similar to the loss of a download (a poorly converting one!) than the loss of a sale.

Though that doesn’t make a 92% piracy rate of one of our banner products any less distressing, knowing that eliminating 50,000 pirated copies might only produce 50 additional legal copies does help put things in perspective.

The Future of Piracy in Casual Games

Certainly in casual games the issue of piracy isn’t going away anytime soon. As the casual games industry continues to combat piracy, there are many battles still to be fought. The question most of the portals ask themselves isn’t whether or not to fight piracy, but what is the best way to fight it.

Casual games is an industry still in its adolescence, and certainly as it matures, more and more lessons will be learned about what the best approach is to fighting piracy, and what the realistic returns are of doing so.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (14)

As part of the continuing "Road to the IGF Mobile" feature at Gamasutra sister site Games on Deck, Mathew Kumar talked to the staff of Punch Entertainment, including founder and CEO Tobin Lent and Creative Director Steve Nix about the IGF Mobile 2008 Best Game and Innovation in Mobile Game Design finalist Ego.

The game is a rather interesting online mobile virtual world, particularly because it's trying to integrate heavily social elements into the cellphone gaming experience, something that hasn't really been done successfully to date. Also, the art style is kinda interesting. Anyhow, here's the interview:

What kind of background do you have in the game industry or in making games?

Tobin Lent: The team at Punch has been making mobile games since the beginning of the industry in North America. We created some of the very first games to go live on US carriers such as Astrosmash, Defender and several Intellivision titles.

We then went to work on several innovative and high-profile titles over the course of the last five years, numbering over 75 titles collectively. These include award-winning and top-selling titles such as Fox Sports Racing, Fox Sports Football, The Incredibles, Finding Nemo, NCAA Football, Mega Man, Ghosts 'N Goblins, King Arthur, Space Invaders, NBA 3 Point Shootout, and Tron 2.0.

As Punch we've released titles such as Bam Koala: Jungle Hero, Hunting Unlimited, NBA Slam, Gunslinger and the upcoming Mobile Battles: Reign of Swords, the first in our Mobile Battles series of multiplayer battle games. We are very excited about this game as well.

What motivated you to make your game?

TL: Punch is focused on community-based gaming for mobile phones. We believe the mobile games industry is moving into its next phase of evolution. Phase I was dominated by ports from other mediums such as PC, arcade and console. We think Phase II of the industry will see highly innovative applications that are specific to mobile.

We believe that heavily viral, community-based games that take advantage of mobile's strengths (mobility and connectivity) will be the most successful. As a result, we wanted to create a community game that was fresh, easy to get into, fun to play, could be shared with other people, and was made just for mobile.

We came up with the idea for Ego by focusing on these elements through several brainstorming sessions. We had a lot of fun brainstorming ideas and came up with a lot of crazy stuff. We eventually landed on Ego, because it could leverage mobility through social connections, and we could have the Egos participate in all kinds of fun games and activities.

Where did you draw inspiration from in its design and implementation?

Steve Nix: The inspiration for creating Ego came from a desire to design a game that provided players with a fun way to meet new people and keep in touch with them. The game needed to combine modern communication methods of text messaging, blogs, and social websites into an entertaining experience where the player's avatar developed by interacting with the rest of the community. The game's avatars needed personalities that immediately revealed something about their owning player, so that they were their representative to the community even when the player was offline.

Evaluating these game design goals immediately led to the interesting question, "What determines and defines a person's personality?" The short answer to this question was, "An individual's choice of behavior and the behavior of their immediate social circle."

This answer guided the development of Ego's personality attribute and icon systems. With these game systems, player avatars (Egos) could grow and evolve their attributes by interacting with each other, but the matter of quickly expressing their personality in a snapshot was still needed.

To describe the current state of an Ego's attributes, the common personality archetypes found in psychology felt too clinical to use in a game setting. Instead, the classic archetypes of high school seemed a better fit and expressed more information about how that Ego might behave or who they might get along with.

Another bonus to using the high school model was the unique visual look that each archetype possessed, which led to the game's reward system of unlocking archetypes to gain new visual customization choices. With the archetype and visual customization systems in place, a player could now reveal in a snapshot not only their avatar's current personality but their entire personality history by mixing in the visual elements of previously earned archetypes.

The core game of Ego was complete, with the rest largely devoted to making communication between players and their Egos as fun and easy as possible.

What sort of development tools have you been using in the production of your game?

Kyle Poole (Technical Director): The great thing about programming for mobile is that most of the tools are open source and well-supported. We used the NetBeans IDE with carrier Wireless Toolkit SDKs, which allowed us to quickly test on the phone emulators during development. The complex character animations were created with a custom Ego Animator tool, which allowed the artists to visually create the animations to be imported into the game.

What do you think the most interesting element of the game is?

TL: I think the deep level of interactions Egos can have with each another is really interesting. Egos can fight with each other, make out, flirt, dance, argue, give gifts, compete, play games, chat, send messages, et cetera.

I haven't seen this deep level of interaction in too many casual avatar-based games, and definitely not in mobile. It's a lot of fun and there's really no limit to what Egos can do. We'll continue to add more activities, games and things for Egos to do. It's really limitless.

I also think the fact that Egos have their own unique abilities, stamina and emotions that can develop over time creates a lot of unique gameplay and interactive elements.

SN: The fact that a player's social circle and the Ego community at large have a huge impact on how a player's EGO evolves. While a player is offline, their Ego is still growing by interacting with other players. When the player next logs on, they get to watch replays of their Ego interacting with buddies or meeting new people. In a sense, the player is always connected to the community through their Ego.

Spencer Chi (Project Manager): The ability to socialize with another person based on some simple search criteria has a lot of potential.

How long have you been developing your game, and what has the process been like?

SN: The core design of Ego was written over a period of four months, with a part time focus along with other games in development. The design was then tweaked and improved upon over the course of a year's development time. The process was very iterative, as new technical breakthroughs were discovered that would improve the game design.

TL: Since Ego is such a new concept, we were constantly testing the game, playing the game, and then tweaking based on our own experience and feedback from other people. Ego really evolved a great deal throughout this process, and everybody at Punch contributed ideas.

If you had to rewind to the start of the project, is there anything that you'd do differently?

SN: I'm very pleased with the final design for Ego. The benefit of rewinding and starting again would certainly be in the speed of the game's development. There was a great deal of uncertainty due to the technical constraints of the mobile devices on just how much we could fit in and still provide a good experience across different handsets.

This is always an issue with mobile development, but as Ego was really trying to push the limits on what a mobile game could provide the development process was slow and extremely challenging.

What are your thoughts on the state of independent game development in the mobile industry, and are any other independent mobile games out now that you admire?

TL: There are actually some great mobile games out there by independents, but the problem is that they are difficult for the average consumer to discover due to limited promotional opportunities on carrier decks. Distribution and marketing channels for mobile are terrible right now. Critter Crunch and Nom were cool games, and I'm eager to play some of the other IGF finalist games. I really like our own Mobile Battles: Reign of Swords game as well.

SN: I'm happy to see more games being designed to take advantage of the unique advantages of mobile, rather than in spite of them. As a pure game platform, the mobile phone has overpowering competition. As a social or communication platform, the mobile phone is on top.

SC: Independent game development in mobile is difficult without industry veterans who understand how to design, execute, and distribute on mobile. Porting costs are probably several times over what people think they are. Even understanding all that, it still requires a really innovative product that can be discovered by the consumer in channels outside of the carrier decks.

The only mobile game I've ever admired is Mobile Battles: Reign of Swords. The game is very deep, but does not require a big time commitment. It's the only mobile game I've seen that can be played competitively against another player while not requiring the players to be connected live. I get excited to see responses to my challenges or new challenges awaiting--it's incredibly addictive.

You have 30 seconds left to live and you must tell the mobile game business something very important. What is it?

TL: The size of our industry is small compared to where it could be. The key to meeting our industry's potential is to develop fun games that leverage mobile's strengths and can spread among consumers effortlessly. We think community and social connection are central to this idea.

There are a lot of problems to fix in our industry. It's going to be a long, hard road. But I think the journey will be worth it in the end.

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Save the Robot is a biweekly column from Chris Dahlen crafted specially for GameSetWatch, dealing with gaming as pop culture and cult media.]

It's periodically chic in Hollywood to worry about the fate of Africa. But in the games biz, we'd rather blow the whole place up. At last fall's Penny Arcade Expo, I caught one of the first Far Cry 2 demos, presented by Creative Director Clint Hocking to a packed room of journos and nerds.

Far Cry 2 takes place in Africa, in a made-up but realistically war-torn country. Trees and foliage swayed across the screen; explosions and fire filled the air.

A rocket shot from the player's shoulder flew all the way up to a mountain and then, right before it shrank to nothing, took a dip, and knocked down a tree. The crowd went, "Whoa."

Then there's the fire. While recovering from a bout of malaria, you have to traipse around a 50 square kilometer gameworld taking out the enemy, and one of your best weapons is fire - which you can set in the brush and grasses, where it spreads to surround enemy bases and burn across the landscape. During the Q & A, one fan got right to the point: “Is it possible to incinerate the entire game world?”

If Bono had been there, he would have winged his sunglasses at the kid's head.

Last year, the games biz was not kind to Africa. From Halo 3, where the Elites "glassed" half the continent, to the infamous Resident Evil 5 trailer that showed one white man gunning down mobs of (initially thought to be African, possibly Haitian) zombies, games used Africa not as as culturally-nuanced, contextually-intriguing backdrop, but as an exotic new place to stage gunfights.

In Hollywood, they take Africa and its troubles a little more seriously. But I'm not here to argue that gamers are callous. Rather, in the many efforts to turn Africa into a simulated free-fire zone, we might have found a useful contrast to Hollywood's coddling.

While the world owes Africa a debt, we often make the mistake of seeing it as the same place we heard about from Bob Geldof's Live Aid or Sally Struthers' old TV ads - starving, miserable, and to be avoided at all costs. But instead of treating the entire continent as something to pity, games give us a way to engage.

While the Africa MMO never shipped, we've seen safe, safari-style virtual tourist games like Wildlife Tycoon: Venture Africa, or Sony's upcoming Afrika. And Darfur is Dying became a breakthrough message game, though it's not exactly fun to play: it's next to impossible to win, and the UN never gives you a cheat code.

But games could bring us even closer. Imagine if mainstream titles took their regular old gameplay to the new continent. Instead of setting Burnout Paradise in a bland American sprawlopolis, Criterion could have taken it to Cape Town. Darwinia already approximates a refugee flight situation. The compulsive roofhopping of Assassin's Creed's Damascus and Jerusalum could be even more eye-popping in Nairobi.

And the greatest breakthrough would be a Grand Theft Auto set in Africa, that wove an intricate simulation around the foreign investors, the local gangs, and the challenges of daily life. I'd love just to run taxi cab missions over there; the radio stations alone could say more than a hundred Hollywood message flicks.

Of course, this isn't about world peace. They'll still make us blow stuff up; that's just the nature of the medium. That kid I mentioned above, who talked about burning down all of Far Cry 2, probably wasn't a neo-imperialistic sociopath: he just wanted to study the place by taking it apart.

Build us Mount Kilimanjaro, and we'll raze it; give us a life-like shantytown, and we'll admire the way the bullets richochet off the metal. Gamers show our respect for something by trying to blow it sky high. And along they way, they may surprise themselves with how much they care for the survivors.

[Chris Dahlen reviews games for The Onion AV Club, writes about music and technology for Pitchforkmedia.com, and blogs at savetherobot.wordpress.com. Contact him at chris at savetherobot dot com.]

Posted by chrisd at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Normally, we'll wait until the weekend to link neat stuff on sister site Gamasutra, but this one seems so provocative and GSW-y that it can't really wait.

Specifically, in a new essay published on Gamasutra, former game journalist and current Electronic Arts producer Jim Preston (EA Game Show) argues that cultural diversity has nullified any concept that the 'games as art' debate is even relevant.

Preston, who worked for magazines such as PC Gamer before moving into the industry, and also holds a Ph.D. in philosophy, ruminates on the worry that many gamers feel as follows:

"Most gamers think of their plight this way: there’s this really great club downtown called the Arty Party and all the cool people are in it. George Clooney is getting drunk with Oscar Wilde; Chopin is playing foosball with Allen Ginsberg; and Picasso is hitting on Emily Dickinson -- it’s the best.

Meanwhile, we gamers are out here on the sidewalk in the rain with the comic book guys and the graffiti sprayers and we can’t get in because that cranky bastard Ebert won’t let us through the door. Ebert, and others like him, man the door and glower at us, not letting us in to this one big party.

The problem with this picture is that it isn’t even remotely close to reflecting the state of art in 21st century America. To think that there is a single, generally agreed upon concept of art is to get it precisely backwards. Americans' attitude towards art is profoundly divided, disjointed and confused; and my message to gamers is to simply ignore the "is-it-art?" debate altogether.

Note, however, that I am not saying anything about art per se, or anything about art in any other culture. Rather, I would like to suggest that the U.S.’s constant influx of immigrants, exiles, and refugees has led to a current artistic landscape that is so widely varied that the "is-it-art?" debate is almost meaningless."

The full Gamasutra essay on the subject includes plenty more rhetoric from Preston - and there's already a lot of interesting comments, as well as a rebuttal coming later this week from a prominent game designer. Opinions?

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Back for the week with a multitude of new GameSetLinks, headed by Matteo Bittanti's questioning of a few recent articles - particularly the new one in EGM - about PS3's 'revenge'.

Bittanti suggests of PS3's apparent renaissance: "You'll realize that the argument is completely based on speculation and "what if" scenarios. In other words, we are fully immersed in that realm of speculative fiction also known as gaming journalism".

Mind you, he also says that "...the internet has a great memory." While old websites and the Wayback Machine do, actually, I think most people who consume the Internet have _terrible_ memories, and are swept along on the latest trend. Including myself, yay! Anyhow, here's stuff:

mbf tod@y: When a preview is not a preview?
'I find vaguely ironic that the gaming press, en masse, has now decided that the PS3 is going to rule the universe.' I've noticed this trend too - though not to this extent, perhaps.

Ratings Watch: Mr. Driller Online and Assault Heroes 2...again. | XBLArcade.com
Oo, Mr. Driller, there's a game I'd love to play on XBLA.

Action Button's Tim Rogers reviews Portal
Obligatory auto-fellatio 'portal' discussions are fortunately included.

IndieGames.com - The Weblog - Freeware Game Pick: Qrp (Sean Chan)
Like a commenter says: 'Not much of a game, but terribly cute.'

Gamefly's official description of Unreal Tournament III for PS3
'When the game says "Unreal," you know it's too good to be true.' Haha, they did NOT mean to make it sound like that, oddly prophetic as it now is.

Media Molecule blog » Blog Archive » Sackboy. Fo’ REAL.
More and more developers getting RSS-worthy blogs.

Rocking: Guitar Rising for Real Guitar Heroes
It's an amazing idea, but we'll have to see if the final project works out well - when I played an early version for the IGF, it had some execution issues. Also, it uses Stepmania as a tech base, interestingly.

NAMM Oddities 2008 - Guitars
Worth pointing at because surely the Guitar Hero custom guitar wave is going to break hard soon? I know there are some already...

The Shifted Librarian » Dance Your Fines Away
'Last year, I noted a librarian who waives the fines of patrons who play DDR against her. This year, the Wadleigh Memorial Library makes it an official part of its Patron Appreciation Day.'

Billionaire Boys Club Blog » New Web Releases
Pharrell Williams and Nigo from Bape's clothing label has a 'car crash' T-shirt (scroll down) that looks very Gizmondo Ferrari to me. Just $80!

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

[In order for us to run the Independent Games Festival every year, sponsors have to step forward to help us out, and this year's Platinum Sponsor is Wizards Of The Coast - who you might know from Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons, but are getting into digital games in a major way.

Here's their announcement of their own sponsor-backed awards to be given out next week at the ceremony during GDC. Quite apart from the extra money/prizes for worthy indies, it's particularly neat to see they've picked both IGF entrants and finalists to contend for their own Gleemie Award. Here's the press release.]

"In a world of stagnating digital strategy gameplay, Gleemax™, Wizards of the Coast, Inc.’s (NYSE: HAS) community for gamers, consisting of social networking, online gaming and game related content, today announced the finalists for The Gleemax Award for Strategic Gameplay (“The Gleemie”).

Prizes will be awarded to those representing creativity in innovative strategic game design at the 10th Annual IGF Awards Ceremony on February 20, at CMP’s Game Developers Conference (GDC). GDC, the world’s largest industry-only event dedicated to the advancement of interactive entertainment, takes place February 18-22 at San Francisco’s Moscone Convention Center.

“We live in a world where independent developer creativity gets handicapped by limited budget and resources,” said Randy Buehler, Vice President of Digital Games for Wizards of the Coast. “Through Gleemax and the Independent Games Festival we want to recognize Indie developers’ hard work and ultimately give them and their games a chance to flourish.”

Three of the seven finalists will be awarded “The Gleemie” during an awards ceremony consisting of a custom designed trophy accompanied with a tiered prize package. All three winners will walk away with a cash prize (1st - $5,000, 2nd - $3,000, 3rd - $2,000). In addition, all seven finalists will get the opportunity to sign distribution agreements worth at least $50,000 in total.

The finalists for “The Gleemie” were selected from a field of more than 170 game submissions based on strategic and innovative game play. The seven finalists for “The Gleemie” are as follows, in no particular order:

Game 1:
World of Goo by 2D Boy
World of Goo is a physics based puzzle/construction game in which players control millions of goo balls to build structures and manipulate objects with the objective of rescuing as many of the lovable goo balls as possible. The game features five chapters, each one consisting of 10-15 challenging levels all taking place in a beautiful World of Goo.

Game 2:
Crayon Physics Deluxe by Kloonigames, of Helsinki Polytechnic Stadia
Crayon Physics Deluxe is a 2D physics puzzle game that lets players experience what it would be like if the things they drew became real. The goal in the game is to collect yellow stars by manipulating the world through the use of objects drawn with a red crayon ball. The game is not only a test of skill and strategic game play, but of creativity as well.

Game 3:
Skyrates by Airship Studios
In Skyrates, players are airborne privateers that need to fight, trade and explore their way to fame and fortune in a fantastic world of floating islands. Every action players take has an effect on other players in the thriving online game world. Skyrates is an experiment in sporadic play, meaning the game can be experienced in several short play sessions rather than one large chunk of time. This accommodates players interest at all levels, regardless of whether they choose to be a peaceful trader, a careful diplomat or a bold fighter.

Game 4:
Depths of Peril by Soldak Entertainment
Depths of Peril is a single player action role-playing game (RPG) with strong strategy elements set in a fantasy world. As barbarian leaders, players protect the city of Jorvik by destroying threatening monsters and completing challenging quests. But defending the city is not the only goal as rival barbarian factions use diplomacy, trade, and at times, civil war to see who will ultimately rule the city of Jorvik.

Game 5:
Quadradius by Quadradius
Quadradius is a two player, head-to-head internet game that pits strangers and friends against one another in a battle of skill, strategy, luck and bluffing. Set in an industrial arena, players compete to destroy each other’s squadrons. The acquisition of various Power Orbs scattered throughout the game board adds an additional layer of strategy to the game. The Power Orbs allow many tactical combinations that can be used to attack, defend, or foil opponent's plans.

Game 6:
Desktop Tower Defense by Mandible Games
Desktop Tower Defense is a puzzle/strategy game that challenges a player’s desktop against waves of cute, but relentless invaders called “Creeps”. By strategically building towers to defend their desktops, players can shoot, trap, and lead the invaders through fiendish mazes as they try to overwhelm the desktop’s defenses. The object of the game is to stop as many invading “Creeps” as possible.

Game 7:
Polarity by Carnegie Mellon University - Entertainment Technology Center
Polarity is a 2D platforming/puzzle game based on magnetism. The goal of the game is to navigate environments and solve puzzles by using your suit's magnetic properties to attract and repel objects. Players can boost the suit’s magnetic strength or instantly switch its polarity throughout the game.

As part of Wizards of the Coast’s continued commitment to provide creative and innovative strategic game play to today’s gamers, the winning games will have an opportunity to be published on Gleemax’s game portal, a portion of Gleemax currently under development that will host a finite number of Indie third party digital games, each having received the Wizards of the Coast seal of approval for strategic game play.

Along with being published next to the best-of-the-best in Indie games, the games will be promoted to Wizards of the Coast’s robust strategy game playing community made up of more than 6 million unique gamers who visit Wizards of the Coast’s sites regularly.

For more information on Gleemax and its presence at the Independent Games Festival, please visit www.wizards.com/igf."

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sometimes I think that people don't keep up with the interesting goings-on in the game journalist world, so it's good to see that Tor Thorsen pointing out some notable shifts on the GameSpot News blog - relatively unread by media types, I think.

Firstly, on the San Jose Mercury News' Dean Takahashi: "Speaking with GameSpot at the D.I.C.E. Summit, the longtime newspaperman said he had decided to devote himself fulltime to blogging on VentureBeat, a new site dedicated to Silicon Valley finance." And indeed, there's a note on Dean's blog and on VentureBeat, where the site's editor notes: "Yes, Dean will be doing games. But he’ll be doing lots of other fun stuff too."

Secondly: "This afternoon, popular game-news destination Shacknews announced the departure of veteran game journalist Chris Remo, who had been its editor-in-chief since 2005. Remo told GameSpot he hasn't decided on his next position yet, but is actively pursuing opportunities in game development and publishing." (For those not seeing the Shacknews announce, apparently it was a confirmation in comments of a G4 interview in which Remo was called former EIC for the site.)

It's testament to how vicious the anti-GameSpot corps have got that a bunch of the GameSpot news comments ignore the story - which also references the recent 1UP editorial shuffle which has James Mielke (pictured) assuming the EIC spot - to requestion editorial integrity yet again. Which is a bit of a broken record, to be honest.

One thing that _is_ interesting, though, is that these two folks are transitioning out of full-time game journalism (actually something Dean had done a few months back when he became more of an active tech columnist for the Merc News), and it brings up a good question - how many brand new, full-time game journalist jobs have been created in the last couple of years?

With the exception of GameTap's staff - whom I still think are a bit of a dubious value add for the service, despite being v.smart folks - there's just about no new jobs out there, because volunteerism and contracting rule the day. Not necessarily bad, but definitely a radical sea change.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[SECOND UPDATE: Nuts, Pixish took the challenge down because they're refocusing on 'illustrations', and there is some debate about whether what we submitted is one or not. Mail us if you still have an entry.]

So I was excited to see Pixish, a rather neat new website which allows you to set up visual competitions and challenges in a Web 2.0 stylee. Seems like something we might want to use in the future, so I thought we'd try it now with a special GameSetWatch challenge.

[UPDATE: Now I've got a hi-res 'GameSetGuy' EPS and a hi-res GameSetWatch logo EPS to help artists with better source materials. Yay.]

Specifically, the deadline is February 22nd to devise some cool-looking wallpaper for GameSetWatch, and as we noted on the site:

"The overall winner will get $100 in cash, a lifetime physical subscription to Game Developer magazine, and their desktop wallpaper featured on GameSetWatch.com. Any other entrants deemed of sufficient quality will also appear on the site in exchange for a lifetime digital subscription to Game Developer."

Most interestingly, the site allows you to vote on submissions with 'Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down', so I guess we'll see what people think of any submissions that pop up on the site over the next few days. Here's the full rules:

"Alt.video game weblog GameSetWatch - made by the folks who bring you Game Developers Conference and Game Developer magazine - is looking for a cute desktop wallpaper image.

Here's the ground rules:

- The illustration should be starring GameSetWatch's very own GameSetGuy mascot, whom you can see at our website.
- The blog is on an alternative 'more obscure/undiscussed side of gaming' subject, so you can either just draw GameSetGuy in an interesting style, or put him in a surrounding with characters/situations that reflect that.
- Please don't use any copyrighted game character designs, such as Pac-Man - parody characters in a similar style are fine, though, of course.
- The image you upload should be 1280x1024.

The criteria for voters is 'do I want this as my desktop wallpaper?', of course. May the best person win!"

So go ahead and enter the competition at your leisure, and we'll see what fun stuff appears over time - I'll update and point to it if anyone uploads anything fun!

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

A lot going on on the GameSetLinks RSSes recently - well, when I say 'a lot', I mean a lot if you're into ephemera, developer-related goodness, and intelligent features, rather than 'OMG breaking news'. Which we are!

Some highlights - Steve Purcell's new picture blog, Eurogamer on open world games, and a whole host of other fun, only a few King Of Kong related - here goes:

ASCII by Jason Scott: The Adventure Library
Some books about text adventures, yay.

WFMU's Beware of the Blog: Massive Subculture Reveal: Bemani
Hadn't seen the YouTube embedded video with how ridiculous Beatmania (pictured) is at its hardest nowadays.

The King Of Kong, continued: Donkey Kong champ Billy Mitchell calls The A.V. Club out of the blue | The A.V. Club
Some more fascinating updates in the documentary 'controversy' - via Shih Tzu.

Teen Scores Big with Online Game - News - Springfield Connection
Flash fun, with some mini-quotes from me.

WorthPlaying - 'Dr. Reiner Knizia's Brainbenders' (NDS) Announced
Haha, the board game designer 'becomes' a brain game expert magically.

Twin Galaxies Forums :: View topic - re: Steve Wiebe on G4
Twin Galaxies' Robert Mruczek discusses possible _final_ high scores for Billy Mitchell and Steve Wiebe on Donkey Kong - awesome if you've watched King Of Kong.

GameOfTheBlog.com: Twisted Metal: Head-On: Extra Twisted Edition: Secrets
ARG-like hints on Twisted Metal PS3!

Grumpy Gamer: Purcell Pirate Paintings
Oo, Monkey Island pics, and Steve Purcell has a pic blog, awesome.

Born Free: the History of the Openworld Game - Eurogamer
Good to see EG bustin' out the wide-ranging articles.

The Escapist : What If Everyone Could Make Videogames?
Mark Deloura has some neat, inclusive thoughts.

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I must admit to not paying a lot of attention to Retromags, a project to scan up old, historically interesting game mags and distribute 'em over the net. I feel a little ashamed because they've uncovered more than a few things that surprised me, because I hadn't really seen examples of them elsewhere. Case in point: all the places the name "Nintendo Power" showed up where you wouldn't have expected it.

  

Nintendo Power Flash was Canada's equivalent to the Nintendo Fun Club News, a free newsletter distributed to NES buyers that sent off for it. The difference is that the seasonal, 16-page Power Flash is quite a bit younger than that, premiering with the Summer 1988 issue and continuing on for at least five more installments until 1990, when the US-based Nintendo Power received official Canadian distribution.

Why didn't they just publish Nintendo Power up there from the start? Because Nintendo of America had no Canadian distribution until 1990 -- they handed that job over to Mattel, as they did with certain parts of Europe. I have heard that the Canada arrangement came to a halt when Mattel sued NOA over grey-market imports of NES hardware and software over the US border or something like, though I haven't found any details behind this claim.

Regardless, Power Flash is an interesting anomaly, partially Canada-made content from readers and partially a clone of NP content, right down to the screenshot maps and Japan-style original art (except the art's different from what was in NP itself). I'd like to get some issues of my own, but they seem to show up only rarely on eBay and it's not like I'll just happen to run into any here in Texas.

Neither, likely, will I run across examples of this Australian edition of Nintendo Power, another 16-page newsletter that was presumably distributed for free to buyers. This summer-1991 issue is the only one I've ever heard of; the content is mostly straight from the US Nintendo Power, so I assume it's an official publication from whoever distributed the NES in Oz at the time. (I have to assume because there's no contact information within the mag itself, which claims to be "edited" by Mario in the table-of-contents page.)

Finally, here's something I'm a little embarrassed hasn't been in my collection until now -- Pocket Power, a free booklet distributed by some theaters to anyone who bought a ticket to see The Wizard (as shown in this TV ad). Pocket Power is essentially a 40-page edition of NP, offering a couple features on the movie and Fred Savage and filling out the rest of the pages with quick, NP-style game previews. The content seems to be sponsored (every page features large company logos in a way that the real NP never would), but it's also mostly original, which makes me wonder if you can really call an NP collection complete without this little thing on the side. I wonder how many of these they distributed?

Regardless, thanks to Phillyman and the other people at Retromags for bringing this stuff to my attention.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also Executive Editor of PiQ, a new magazine hitting stands in March.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

So, while we've been posting about all kinds of randomness on GameSetWatch, my colleagues have been posting some neat features and special reports from DICE in Las Vegas, over on big sister site Gamasutra.

Therefore, here's the major features from this week - including Kurt Kalata's Dragon Quest history adapted from HG101, and a neat Rare-written education feature, plus Richard Garriott and Digital Extremes interviews - here goes:

- Interview: Richard Garriott Is From Mars
"You may think you know Ultima and Tabula Rasa creator Richard Garriott, but do you really understand Lord British? Gamasutra goes off-topic to chat to Garriott about games as art, his influences, and much more."

- Maximizing Your Job Hunt At GDC
"Looking for a job (or a new job) in the industry at Game Developers Conference? Game HR veteran T.J. Summers pinpoints the key things you can do to maximize your efficiency and accomplish your objectives at this year's show."

- Academic Expansion - How Rare Recruits Graduates
"In this in-depth piece, senior Rare developer Nick Burton explains how the Viva Pinata and Perfect Dark developer works with academia to nurture graduates, warning against 'cherry picking' and explaining how your developer can grow the pool of skilled game creators."

- Into The Sector: Digital Extremes' Steve Sinclair
"Digital Extremes' PS3 and Xbox 360 action title Dark Sector is a vital title for both the Canadian developer and backer D3Publisher - Gamasutra quizzes project lead Steve Sinclair on next-gen development and its storied history."

- The History of Dragon Quest
"While Final Fantasy can grab a lot of the limelight, the Dragon Quest/Warrior games make up one of the most important RPG franchises of all time - Gamasutra goes in-depth to chart the series' more than 20-year design evolution."

OK, and here's the DICE neatness, all clustered in one wonderful place - the exec summit took place this week in Las Vegas, and Gamasutra staffers Brandon Sheffield and Christian Nutt were there to report the following:

DICE: Mass Effect, Bioshock, Rock Band Devs On Developing Narrative
DICE: Matsuura Sees More Possibilities For Music Games (Matsuura pictured above!)
DICE Keynote: EA's Riccitiello On A New Future For Publishing
AIAS Names Call of Duty 4 Game Of The Year
DICE: Namco's Hector On Character From Sonic to Afro Samurai
DICE: ESA's Gallagher Urges Industry To Strive For More
DICE: Mizuguchi Talks Artistry And Commerce In Concert
DICE: Team Blizzard On Building Its 17 Year Success
DICE: Microsoft's Kim Takes Tough Questions On Console War
DICE Fight Club: Industry Vets Debate Retail Vs. Microtransations
DICE Fight Club: Budgets, Not Consolidation Edging Out Innovation
DICE Q&A: Verbinski Talks IP Challenges, Innovation
DICE Keynote: Gore Verbinski Urges Creativity, 'Madness'

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Continuing Gamasutra's 'Road To The IGF' feature, Patrick Murphy talks to Large Animal Games' Wade Tinney about his 2008 Independent Games Festival Design Innovation Award finalist Snapshot Adventures: Secret of Bird Island.

This is one of the more interesting finalists, because it's definitely a casual title (if you want to get into inane genre classifications), but it nonetheless a bird photography game with some really fun, 'different' gameplay that he says was inspired as much by Spore as Pokemon Snap.

What kind of background do you have in the game industry or in making games?

Wade Tinney: Well, my biz partner Josh Welber and I started making games in graduate school in 1997. Afterwards, we were both making web games for different clients before starting this company in January of 2001. So, neither of us ever really worked in the game industry proper. Honestly, I think that lacking that particular type of experience probably served us well.

Coming from a web publishing background, we were pretty focused on just getting stuff made and putting it in front of people. We never even considered the notion that we should go out and raise a bunch of money so we could develop a big console game or something. We were blissfully naïve, so we just dove in, started making stuff, and gradually pulled the company up by the bootstraps. Do you know how difficult it is to even find bootstraps these days?

What motivated Large Animal Games to create Snapshot Adventures?

WT: We were looking for interesting subject matter that had not been explored in a game format, had an existing audience, and would appeal to a wide variety of players. In our research on popular hobbies and pastimes, birding kept popping up, so we ran with it. Now I own a few dozen books about birds and a sweet pair of binoculars. Oh, and my Dad and I have something to talk about besides cars.

Where did you draw inspiration from in its design and implementation?

WT: The main inspiration came from real-world birds and birdwatching. I really developed a love for that pastime and a greater appreciation for birds in general. Birding is a very game like activity and I recommend that everyone give it a try at some point.

Beyond that, we were heavily inspired by the concept of pollinated content that the Spore team has talked about at the past few GDCs. Naturally, we didn’t have the resources to take it nearly as far as that game will, but we were able to get players designing birds that end up in other players’ games, which we’re very happy about.

For the first half of the project, I resisted playing Pokemon Snap, because I didn’t want to be overly influenced by it. Then I finally broke down and played a bunch of it, and I’m glad I did. There are some elegant design ideas in that game that definitely influenced our thinking.

What sort of development tools are used by the team?

WT: The game was developed in our heavily modified version of the Torque Game Builder engine, with Visual Studio for the C++ and the Torsion IDE for editing script. The birds were modeled in 3D Studio Max and textured in Photoshop. All the other art in the game was either created directly in Photoshop, or sketched in pencil and then inked and colored in Photoshop. The audio was recorded using Ableton Live and the one-bar loops are tracked/sequenced in real-time using our custom audio engine.

What do you think the most interesting element of your game is?

WT: There are actually two elements of the game which I’d like to mention (sorry, I’m breaking the rules). First is the pollinated content that I mentioned earlier. Players can design birds, upload them, and then get information back about how many times their bird has been been spotted by other players. We worked hard to come up with a system to alter models and textures in real time on low spec machines in order to support player creativity and keep the file size down. The results are a huge variety of birds in the game. All told, almost half a million birds have been created by players since the game was launched.

The second thing is the residual learning that comes from the game. There are over a hundred real-world bird species represented in the game, with accurate field markings and real field recordings of their song (we worked closely with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology to achieve this level of accuracy).

While we did not design Snapshot Adventures as an “educational game”, many players have told us that after playing the game, they now notice the birds around them more, and are able to identify many of them. Although I can’t say we designed it purposefully, the fact that playing the game is changing people’s perspective in this way is fascinating to me. I hope we can do more of this, both at Large Animal and in the game industry at large.

Roughly how many people have been working on Snapshot Adventures, and what has the development process been like?

WT: The core team was five people, but we had different folks pinch-hit on various aspects. All-told, there were around 15 different people who touched Snapshot at different times. Our development process is always highly iterative, when we were developing Snapshot, we had not yet fully committed to using Agile software development techniques, so that iteration made it hard to manage our time well. We learned a lot from the process, and now we have a much better framework in place.

If you had to rewind to the very start of the project, is there anything that you'd do differently?

WT: Be more explicit with ourselves about the design risks and force ourselves to tackle them head on and early. Specifically, we spent way too much time trying to create a system that would subjectively evaluate player photos. We should have realized that this problem is tremendously difficult to solve and instead designed around it.

Instead, we spent weeks of engineering time trying to tune it. No matter how close we got, there were always exceptions – cases where someone thought a photo should have scored higher. In the end, we opted for an objective, learnable (by players) photo evaluation system.

What are your thoughts on the state of independent game development, and are any other independent games out now that you admire?

WT: This is a great time to be an indie developer, and an even better time to be a player of independent games. Yes, the competition is stiff, but with online advertising making a comeback and the market for short-session games on all platforms growing, there are actually ways to build and monetize an audience of players around games that are more affordable to build. Also, there are more companies out there who are actively funding these smaller projects.

In terms of specific games, there are too many to mention them all by name, but Crayon Physics definitely gets a shout-out. Great game.

You have 30 seconds left to live and you must tell the game business something very important. What is it?

WT: Work smarter, not longer. Oh, and please vote for Snapshot in the IGF Audience Awards!

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[The Aberrant Gamer is a weekly, somewhat NSFW column by Leigh Alexander, dedicated to the kinks and quirks we gamers tend to keep under our hats – those predilections and peccadilloes less commonly discussed in conventional media.]

It’s easy to knock action video games. It’s all vaguely silly, implausible stuff – bullet time, acrobatic corkscrews, explosions, and heroes who sass monsters with hip one-liners. But you can’t really blame them – after all, action video games are the torch-bearers for action films, and when it comes to emulating their conventions and allowing players to interact with them, games are quite admirable as imitators.

Take the Devil May Cry series as an example, whose next-gen successor has just hit the scene this week. It achieves the formula handily, even stylishly. And it should. A triple-A melee franchise about devils, demons, babes, guns and swords – playing it demure, intellectual and understated? It just isn’t meant to be.

So you can’t fault it for flaunting high-powered, scantily-clad females with impossible measurements, suffering under a combination of neck-breaking high heels and massive endowments that, taken as a pair, make them likely to tip over. Aggressively foxy babes are part and parcel of the action format to which the game skillfully – and enjoyably adheres.

When we talk about sexuality in video games, the closest thing we’ve got is these cleavage-spilling women, and to some extent, the endlessly resilient, solidly built and smoldering (though much more thoroughly clothed) men alongside them. This column previously defended the value in gratuitously-fleshed game gals as a useful complement to the raw, animalistic nature of brawler games. Blood, bare flesh and adrenaline rush as a package are the closest we as humans can get to our primal state, and it’s amazing that video games can tap into that.

Some people will buy my theory that video game flesh is effectively bestial; others feel it’s simply juvenile, a disservice to women and men alike. Either way, it's true we don’t live in caves anymore – and we’re growing up. So what will it take for sexuality in games to grow up, too?

Though sexuality needn’t necessarily mean sex, the most immediate example that comes to mind is Mass Effect. It offered players the opportunity to personify their hero to a degree almost unprecedented on consoles, and then, through developing interaction between characters, to develop a relationship. And then, of course, we all know what happened after that.

And therein’s the rub – do forgive the pun.

Pioneer's Syndrome

When I first raised this topic at Sexy Videogameland, I suggested that Mass Effect may have suffered a bit under what I call pioneer’s syndrome. If sex in games were a familiar and established thing, the fact that Mass Effect contained a customizable romantic scene would not have been such a big part of its advance buzz. And while it’s an opaquely detail-heavy game, with enough background and story elements to satisfy the appetite of traditional science fiction fans, I would never believe anyone who told me that the sex scene was not at least somewhat on their mind when beginning the game and when selecting characters within it.

Thus, to put it bluntly, the sex act became like an Xbox achievement, the whistle warp in Mario, or anything else you know’s coming, but just have to figure out how to accomplish. As Chris Dahlen put it in his column about the Mass Effect romance, character dialogue seemed to reduce itself to, “Keep talking to me and someday we’ll have that sex scene you saw on YouTube.”

In other words, sex in a game became game-like. I’ve often asserted that whether, and how deeply, to become immersed in a game is largely the player’s decision – instead of being primarily a developer’s task. So to be fair, perhaps I just didn’t emotionally engage with Mass Effect to the extent that I could have. Can’t help it – I was too distracted wondering which character I wanted to get it on with.

Stunted Conventions

A good number of Sexy Videogameland’s readers have suggested to me another possibility, though, one that I think is much more viable when thinking about sex in games. Just as Devil May Cry 4 and other games in its genre drip with sexiness because its film predecessors do, Mass Effect and its ilk may be suffering under traditional sci-fi and fantasy genre constructs.

Commenter Mark Hughes pointed out that traditional fantasy, which often has a very influential role in today’s video games, is primarily “juvenile, sexless material.” As an example, he points out that Tolkien, essentially the "father of the genre" as we know it, features almost no women in Lord of the Rings – and those that appear are “’romantic’ (but non-sexual) interests for the men, kept at a distance.”

So video game sex lacks maturity because the dated constructs it has inherited lack maturity. No one would call Lord of the Rings an unsophisticated novel, and its heroes are most definitely nuanced. But like most hero stories, complexities within people’s spirits and the ill deeds they commit can be explained away by evil magic – the main characters with whom readers largely identify are almost implausibly focused on noble deeds, not intimacy.

Starting Small

Intimacy, however, might be where respectable sexuality in video games needs to begin. And games have, often accidentally, stumbled on real and affecting intimacy quite often over their history – the subtle, charming poignancy of holding hands with Yorda in ICO far outdoes Mass Effect in that department. And I’m loath to overexpose the Companion Cube any further, but in only mentioning it, you get the idea.

The Final Fantasy series often gets teased for its sometimes over-emotional, hyper-fantastic character presentation, and no one would call FF heroes anything more than constructs. But the most recent incarnation, FFXII, presented more subtle layers among the characters’ relationships than we’ve yet seen – we learned more about Balthier and Fran, for example, through what was not shown.

An inanimate cube, juveniles holding hands, and the nuances of a complicated adult relationship as seen through the eyes of a youth – the conclusion here seems to be that games are able to create that sense of intimacy by revealing less, not more – just as FFX’s quietly tragic heroine Yuna lost a lot of dignity by cropping her shorts way up into her "personal crease" and gyrating around like a pop star in X-2 (even though it was cute and fun), games lose dignity the more decadent cleavage shots and full-body pans they show.

In addition to prioritizing intimacy and emotional connection over the direct, exploitive route to nudity, games need to start inheriting their influences from more mature media. It won’t be long before games can build primarily and foremost on the established successes of other games in this area, and quit passing the baton from genre archetypes, but until then, they can look to more innovative and more modern sources to create characters that act like adults – only then will they believably make like adults.

[Leigh Alexander is editor of Worlds in Motion and writes for Gamasutra, freelances and reviews often for a variety of outlets, and maintains her gaming blog, Sexy Videogameland. She can be reached at leigh_alexander1 AT yahoo DOT com.]

Posted by Leigh Alexander at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

Well, here's a wacky one. Having raided my local library's used book section a few weeks back, I'd repurchased a copy of Douglas Adams' practically psychedelic Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency - one of the most delightfully out-there books of all time - and was happily re-reading it on the train, when I realized that the successful computer company in the book was called WayForward Technologies.

Wait, WayForward Technologies, the game developer that just finished Contra IV and is also famous for titles like Shantae and Sigma Star Saga?

Well, the Wikipedia page reveals noted that the real-life Southern California-based developer was "founded in 1990 by technology entrepreneur Voldi Way", adding "The name WayForward Technologies may reference the novel "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency", by Douglas Adams."

The software entrepreneur in Adams' book is called Gordon Way, incidentally, giving him the same last name as WayForward's founder - perhaps an obvious inspiration for the company name, but making the off-the-cuff reference even cuter!

Even odder, Voldi Way's small Wikipedia entry reveals that, "In 1980, at age 10, he starred in the film The Changeling" - where he played the title character opposite George C. Scott. From child horror actor to video game auteur? Neeto.

Meanwhile, one of the programmers elsewhere in Adams' book discusses his pile of beloved Byte magazines, another serendipitous coincidence, considering that I'm now in charge of the IP to Byte as part of my expanded responsibilities here at CMP - suggestions about wonderful things to do with the currently dormant property are welcome.

Anyhow, I sent an email over to WayForward's John Beck (who will be speaking at the Independent Games Summit at GDC, incidentally!) to see if he can pass me on to Voldi to confirm or deny the Dirk link and how it came about. We'll see what he says...

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Aha, the latest set of GameSetLinks is upon us already, and they seem to include a fun new title from Crayon Physics creator Petri Purho in which you have to type words correctly to win the day.

This, of course, reminds of the gorgeously fun Typing Of The Dead, which needs to come to some kind of console downloadable service (at least, one on a machine that allows a USB keyboard to be plugged in!) some time in the near future.

It's on GameTap, which is a good start, but the saga must continue in the West, darn it, esp. now Typing Of The Dead 2 came out in Japan. Anyhow:

Cryptic Sea: Coil
More awesome experimental Flash oddness from the Gish co-creator.

MTV Multiplayer » The Case Of The Missing DS Drawing Games
I appreciate articles like this which start with a thesis.

Saving Games Workshop | Madness & Games
Not directly video game related, but really darn interesting.

TechCrunch: Play A Multiplayer Online Game While Surfing The Web: PMOG
Justin Hall's surreal concept gets some more press - neeto.

The Game Has Changed: Entertainment & Culture: vanityfair.com
Vanity Fair looks at LucasArts' game renaissance, comes away impressed.

Moogle.net » Blog Archive » The Team Game
Games are made by teams, he points out. And it's true! Via Tyler Sigman.

Kloonigames » Blog Archive » Grammar Nazi
Petri 'Crayon Physics' Purho's latest game, typing long words FTW!

Nullsleep | 2007.11.30 Blip Festival 2007 @ Eyebeam - New York, NY
Haha, can totally see Matt 'Fort90' Hawkins dancing like a loon in the front row.

GameDev.net -- IGF 08 Interviews Part 1
Neat, a first set of 5 finalist interviews - great to see GameDev.net supporting.

Why Perfect Entertainment Died -| Artículo | Aventura y CÍA
Talking about a Naked Gun-themed adventure game? Blimey! Via Jason Scott.

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Over at the ScottishGames.biz site (which is as excellent a regional primer for Scotland as Sumea is for Australia, incidentally), they've published an article pointing out some wonderful historical pictures/videos from Grand Theft Auto and Lemmings creator DMA Design (now Rockstar North).

As Brian Baglow explains: "Mike Dailly, one of the originals from DMA has uploaded several photo sets to Flickr, showing the background daily life of DMA from the early 90's right through to the point the company became Gremloid/Rockstarred."

And for game geeks, there's all kinds of amazing stuff there - how about a 3D visualization "to better visualise isometric rendering... in the 1st GTA prototype", and pictures from a never-released 'Kid Kirby' game, presumably for the Super Nintendo, blimey.

There's also concept art from AnnArchy, an early prototype that never got off the ground (and wasn't Penny Arcade-related!), and even the original animation Mike did that inspired Lemmings.

Mike's YouTube videos also include a Lawnmower Man game concept from DMA, plus an early office tour and DMA Xmas party footage. Yay - as far as preserving game history goes, it would be wonderful if more developers could take time to dig out and post forgotten gems such as this, helping to get them out there online and available for game geeks to coo over.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

[The explosive growth of games mean more and more crossover with other media such as music (Guitar Hero/Rock Band) and movies (Brash Entertainment). But is it good for games? In the second of a two-part opinion piece, Gamasutra and GameSetWatch's Leigh Alexander offers the case against.]

Recently, I rounded up some evidence of entertainment media and technology convergence marching ever more swiftly onward. Permit me the bizarre indulgence of quoting myself:

"It's been obvious for some time that games are going mainstream in a big way, which is necessarily bringing them squarely into the territory of other entertainment media that has enjoyed much more visibility, economic impact, widespread adoption and social acceptance for as long as my generation's been alive."

And how do you feel about it? More importantly -- is it good for games?

The answer's maybe. And, following my article on The Case in Favor, let's now look at the case against.

If cross-media boundaries continue to dissolve, we'll have characters, settings and themes that we can visit and enjoy through gaming, film, episodic television or internet content, and anything else you like.

In the case in favor, I asked the question: "Let's say that, after watching your favorite TV show, you can go online and play with those characters, in that persistent world, along with your friends, and then the property's producers make a movie from the events and stories written and played by you and your companions, did you just play a video game, watch a TV show, or make a film?"

Well, it's hard to tell. And that could be a problem.

Arresting Development

Relative to these other media forms, gaming is still young. Some people would say it's in its infancy; I'm more inclined to call it early adolescence. And when we look to the ways in which games have grown up since the eight-bit era, we can project some of the directions in which we need them to continue developing in order to call it a mature medium. So what strides have we made?

Games have developed from being reflex-based amusements into immersive storytelling and shared cultural experiences. Whether or not you believe games are art, they've certainly become more artful, at least -- back in the days of Tetris and Donkey Kong, could you have imagined the landscapes of ICO, for example, bathed in white light and foreboding, substantial shadow? Even the simplest of genres, like the stick shooter, has evolved from a brutal sprite march into an arena for innovation using art and music, like Mizuguchi's synaesthetic work and the multitudes of effort to emulate and build on it.

Maybe as recently as three or four years ago, we could have accused certain genres of stagnating -- most especially the first-person shooter, and yet this year saw Portal, which relies on that basic gameplay convention -- take top honors for innovation.

Only a few months ago I found myself wondering what it'd take to build a better RPG, one that really let us roleplay within a story, not just snooze through cut scenes and battle grinds. This year, there were quite a few better RPGs than we've ever seen -- even titles like Mass Effect that maybe wouldn't have been called RPGs a few years ago. And while we're seeing a blending of genres, it's not taking place in the name of generalization, of broadening appeal. The key driver in our industry has always been specificity.

More Specific, Not Less

If we sought to identify formulae, it was only so they could be broken, expanded on, improved upon. Gamers, however fallaciously, were always considered a "vocal niche," not a broader audience. And it seems as if the industry had just begun to learn that segmenting us into strict genres -- shooter fans, puzzle fans, RPG fans -- was ineffective.

Rather than targeting such general, superficial and mechanical preferences, games began to aim themselves squarely for that little itch in our hearts and minds that couldn't be scratched any other way. Games are a very specific type of entertainment that it's impossible to replace -- and this is because games are finally beginning to understand what it is we need from them.

You can even thank casual gaming for this. With the advent of casual gaming, people realized that there were variations in gaming preferences and behavior that were actually quite broad -- people who want to zone out clicking dots, or who just want light interactive play to enjoy with their families, versus those of us who want to personify the content, see the impact of choices on a story, or become engaged in a long-term emotional investment. And if development was to specify the casual gamer, it must necessarily differentiate not only the more traditional gamer, but identify various colors within a much wider spectrum than anyone ever imagined.

This trend of trying to please as many people as possible with the same title, console or gameplay mechanic is fairly new by contrast. And while films and television do stratify their audience, they do so in the most simplistic way possible -- action, comedy, drama, et cetera. If games were to become more like film and TV, and if gaming would have to share markets with them more intimately, this encouraging trend of specifying audiences would abruptly reverse.

Gaming has always worked because it wasn't for the masses. To continue on the specificity train -- it's a very particular type of entertainment, and whether a game "works" or not depends on factors that are not static or thematic.

Film and TV demand user engagement, it's true, but they do so passively. A game's success or failure depends -- perhaps even primarily -- on how well it allows for what the user wants to do. One of the most important things we've ever learned about games is that while art, story and characters are important, insufficient, ill-fitting or just plain bad gameplay can render them all worthless.

A marriage to other more static entertainment media means that the focus on engaging users with themes, settings and characters would increase -- but if developers must prioritize create a product that adheres to a larger media entity, what will happen to the gameplay?

Games are already a hit-driven business, and we lament that fact because it makes innovation difficult. Should games continue on their collision course into the territory of the Hollywood-based production empires, get ready for it to become much, much worse. Whether or not a game gets made will come down to how well it can be ported or broadcast to other devices, how well it lends itself to a community component, whether it has the potential to align with existing properties, or spawn new ones. They'll be weighed on how easily they can be generalized, and how readily they can be personalized, altered and claimed by the broader population.

The Downside To Mass Participation

Wait, wait -- letting users take the helm of stories is good, right? Letting them contribute content, take ownership of it, guide the direction of a game world's evolution? You want to have that kind of input and control, don't you? Maybe you do, but think of this -- to have that, you'd have to give the same right to every idiot, unimaginative automaton, disruptive teenage jerk and mouth-breathing drag you've ever played a video game to get away from. As I pointed out in the case in favor, games have always been a closed world. And that's how gamers wanted it.

Desiring a private sphere -- even as it becomes less and less possible -- is not, as some people say, a hipster-esque desire to keep under the radar to maintain some proprietary cool. The fact remains that there are heaps of people who we're glad don't get it, because we'd like something we don't have to share with others. Plenty of people wish they had a girlfriend who was as into video games as they are -- and plenty more people are glad they don't.

It might be fair to call such ideals immature or unfounded. We've always believed that an open world can rise to the level of its most sophisticated participant; that none of us is as smart, as creative, as all of us are together. I find Jane McGonigal's essay on the strength of collective intelligence fascinating, for sure. But recall that we have always been in a closed society -- our most broad population sampling has always, for the most part, been comprised of gamers, even if it's a spectrum thereof.

We've been trained to think critically and creatively in a very game-specific way. The truth is, an open world will primarily be branded and transformed by its lowest common denominator. And it only takes one percent to ruin things for ninety-nine. Do we really want to open our kingdom to that particularly disheartening social principle?

"Participatory" is a great word. But would you rather read a book written by your neighbor, or by your favorite author? We may chafe against utterly linear game experiences, but the idea that we want wholly and entirely to guide ourselves, to build our own play, is a bit of an extreme response. If that were really what we wanted, we'd all be in Second Life, making up stories while we social-network with each other constantly. And most of us don't do that -- while we'd like to be part of a story, I really don't buy that we all want to write it. For my part, I'd like to leave that to the pros.

The Smell Of Green

And, if you haven't forgotten -- movies based on games and games based on movies may be as old as the hills, but for as long as they have existed, they've unequivocally sucked. All of them. The two spheres have historically failed to "get" one another. They're trying again, because the money's there. -- Yeah, sure, that's gotta go well.

Speaking of money, one factor I raised in "the case for" was the rise of the ad-supported business model forcing games to monetize based on user engagement. Some people will be willing to buy a $60 retail box, to pay a $20 per month subscription fee. But more people aren't -- and yet, they want to play anyway. This puts control in the consumer's hands and extends the game company's commitment to the player, as I said. It also means they're going to be looking to wring us, at every turn, for every dime they can get.

They'll try to manipulate us into investing things with emotional value so that they can charge us money for it later; something we built out of love will be sold behind cellophane on the shelf as the season's must-have toy. The idea is that you can customize your engagement, pop in and out of online worlds as you please, and pay for no more and no less, or thereabouts, than what you consume. But how it's more likely to work is that rather than trying to engage you, they'll be trying to addict you; far from being left alone to your pursuits as you like them, both subtly and overtly they'll be trying to convince you you need more -- that's how mass consumerism works, and we will not be safe from that anymore.

Popularity Contest

I cited Chris Dahlen's always-excellent and forward-thinking transmedia articles in "the case for," and now I'll bring him up again. A few readers took a bit of an issue with one of his recent columns, "Games & The Birth Of The Cool," in which he argued that games aren't "cool" in the way that other pop culture is, and that their occasional efforts to act "cool" intentionally -- say, Guitar Hero III -- don't quite work.

That "cool" factor, he says, is important to all other forms of pop culture. But, asked one commenter, "Why consign gaming to the wasteland of popular culture?"

Why indeed? Do we really want to see our medium subject to whims, trends and in-jokes? Now, of course, we have our own "hip" lexicon and network of in-jokes -- think "party escort submission position." But we have historically attached ourselves to that kind of meme because there are so few others with whom we can share it. What would it feel like, after a while, to see Jonathan Coulton do Letterman, Leno and O'Brien, anchors gleefully tossing companion cubes around on the jovial morning news? Viral marketing stunts? Virtual worlds?

The lifespan of general enthusiasm within our audience for a new title is already short -- sometimes it even seems like we like to anticipate games more than we like to play them, and plenty of people can probably talk about a time they've become sick of hearing about a title before they ever even picked it up. What if that saturation level happened even more quickly, even more inescapably?

Some readers have pointed out Portal, Team Fortress 2, and Tim Schafer's work as being examples of what's "cool" to us. And they are. And do you really think the minds that are bringing you yet another Terminator sequel are ever going to understand that?

The message that gamers have been broadcasting should be loud and clear by now. At the end of the day, it's about gameplay. All of the "entertainment device" functionality in the world wasn't enough to sell PS3s without games. We don't want to play movies, we do not want the game industry to resemble the fickle music industry, we don't want games to emulate our real lives or our real relationships. All we asked for was a touchstone with reality -- now let's hope we can close this door before it all stampedes in, mashing beneath its feet everything that makes gaming what it is.

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Now, I realize this could be construed as a bit of an ad for Game Developers Conference, but it's less that, and more a bit of a delighted yelp that the near-final version of the GDC 2008 scheduler went up on the site today, and it's definitely the most useful and usable version of the tool we've constructed thus far to sift through the gigantic heap of GDC lectures.

When you're dealing with such as massive conglomeration of lectures to pick from for the conf (which runs in San Francisco February 18th-22nd), it can be really tricky to build a schedule picker that has enough information on it but doesn't overwhelm - and allows flexible sorting and ordering.

Anyhow, there's still a few usability and functionality rough edges to be iterated on, but kudos to Ben Veechai and the Minnickweb folks who worked on this, since I believe that this year's Schedule Builder will pass 'the editor test' for the first time ever - Gamasutra editors are actually going to use it to schedule their time at the show. And those guys are tough to please, haw.

[Incidentally, now is as good a time as any to mention that the guest co-editor on GameSetWatch for the week of Game Developers Conference will be Andy Baio - best known for his super-intelligent tech blog Waxy.org weblog, creating the now Yahoo!-owned Upcoming.org, and, heh, discovering Star Wars Kid. He'll be attending the show and we'll be cross-posting some of his Waxy posts on GDC, since he has a really interesting outsider's/Web 2.0 view on the game biz.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

Aha, time for a few more GameSetLinks, we fear, and among them as Jason Scott's steely rant on why documentary The King Of Kong sacrifices truth for a good story. And you know, having seen the movie on DVD at the weekend finally, I think he's at least partly right.

The whole concept of 'dramatized reality' seems to be getting increasingly common - see cunning cuts on reality shows like The Amazing Race to make it seem like teams are closer together, and especially the faux-reality of shows like Laguna Beach.

And now, there's a video game documentary that's almost as selective, but incredibly entertaining because of that. It's bittersweet for me, because I was entertained - but still felt like I'd maybe been cheated out of what really happened. Still... maybe it's closer to objective than we think, mm?

But onward to the links:

Hollywood Reporter: 'And the award for best video game writing is ...'
The main bar to entering the WGA awards is that you have to be a WGA member (or have applied to be one) - not made totally clear here!

Romance Novel Reviews: 'On Books That Make You Dumb, and Reading Pornographically'
Shih Tzu points out this odd musing 'on the connection between bad literature that one enjoys anyway and an epiphany had during a video game music concert.'

The Cut Scene - Video Game Blog by Variety
Newish blog, good stuff, too.

ASCII by Jason Scott: The King of Wrong
Watched this at the weekend, loved it but felt like it was skewed, a la M.Moore. Not sure how far, still.

YouTube - Half life: Full Life Consequences
Garry's Mod + crazy people = scary

Mechanically Separated Meat » Super Mario World vs. the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Physics
Yikes, Mario madness.

Eegra : A Trouserful of Melody: Fami-mode 2008
A neat YMCK, 6955 concert in the Japan, all NGJ-ed up for your pleasure.

Spectromancer - online CCG in open Beta
Co-developed by Magic creator Richard Garfield - via The-Inbetween.

Emily Enough: Imprisoned - Introductions and Asides | The New Gamer
Examining an intriguing indie adventure title.

Play This Thing! - Game Focus Germany event report
Thanks to some good speaker wrangling from Jurie Horneman, this was an interesting event.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Coming down the home stretch on our 'Road To The IGF' feature, Patrick Murphy talked to Wyrdsym Games' Singapore-based creator Sean Chan about his 2008 Independent Games Festival Design Innovation Award finalist Battleships Forever, a tactical real-time strategy title that prioritizes visuals and intuition over stats and spreadsheets.

Chan explains Battleships Forever's board game influence and the other games that influenced its art style, and also discusses why some of his frustrations with existing strategy titles gave rise to this game.

What kind of background do you have in the game industry or in making games?

Sean Chan: I started off making maps for Warcraft III. I made Tank Commanders, a couple of Starship Troopers maps (One of them, named SST: Zulu Angel, had the alien bugs able to climb over the walls of your fortress) and a bunch of other stuff that never got released in WC3's World Editor.

After about a year or so of that, I realized that the WorldEditor couldn't do some of the games I wanted to do (mainly action games), so I moved on to Game Maker, and I've been using that ever since. Battleships Forever is my third Game Maker project that I made available on the web but it's my first really full-scale game. The other two games had only a couple of levels.

What motivated you to create a game like Battleships Forever?

SC: At that point in time, I was playing a whole bunch of other space strategy games. What I found is that those games tend to get bogged down in menus, dropdown boxes, hidden values and other needless complications. Battleships Forever was built on the core design principle of design elegance. Everything in the game had to be tangible.

It's a little odd to describe anything in a virtual world as 'tangible,' but what I mean is that everything in the game actually exists. I threw out the idea of using behind-the-scenes modifiers, multipliers or similar concepts. There are no armor types, damage types or to-hit chances.

For example, some weapons are inaccurate. My way of making inaccurate weapons less effective against certain enemies is by designing the ships to have a slim profile. A ship with a slim profile is harder to hit with a weapon with a wide spread.

This is tangible because you actually see the projectiles going out and missing the target. To encourage flanking and tactical maneuvers, I didn't just apply a damage bonus for attacks from the side/rear -- the ships are really designed to be more vulnerable from the rear. The Hestia has a wing that is connected to the core by a strut. If the Hestia is attacked from the rear and the strut is destroyed, the wing also drops off.

What this adds up to is that there aren't any values that you cannot derive by simple observation. Gameplay is intuitive, and the GUI is unfettered by spreadsheets.

Where did you draw inspiration from in its design and implementation?

SC: I play a lot of board games. Board games have plenty to teach about elegance in game design, because their very format means that they are limited in terms of complexity (you can't expect players to be doing too much arithmetic just to play a game). One of my favorite games was Babylon 5 Wars by Agents of Gaming, and the influence of that game can be clearly seen in Battleships Forever.

It's also pretty obvious that I adapted the art style from Warning Forever. In some ways, Battleships Forever is a tribute to that great game. The truth is that I only went with this because this is the only kind of art that I could pull off on my own. I actually do have a few versions of the game with more realistic graphics, but they look terrible.

What sort of development tools have you been using to make Battleships Forever?

SC: Game Maker for the game itself, Adobe Photoshop for sprites.

What do you think the most interesting element of your game is?

SC: The game comes with a custom Ship Maker program that allows you to create your own completely custom ships for use in the Sandbox play mode in the game. It transforms Battleships Forever from being just another RTS to a platform that allows players to enact space battles that they can only imagine. I've seen players write up and create whole back stories and giant fleets of ships.

What has the development process been like for you?

SC: My objective with Battleships Forever was to have it as a portfolio project. Just a little something I could carry around in my laptop and wow a potential employer with. It's kinda run away from me in that respect and has ballooned into a much larger project.

One of the things I wanted to do with Battleships Forever was to create a full-featured game that has all the features you would expect a commercial game. A tall order for a one man affair, but I did it for the experience.

If you had to rewind to the very start of the project, is there anything that you'd do differently?

Well, I have made many mistakes in the architecture of the project over the course of development. Mistakes that have caused me to rewrite hundreds of lines of code when I realized that they just weren't working out. But as for the project as a whole, no I don't think I would have gone about development in any other way.

What are your thoughts on the state of independent game development, and are any other independent games out now that you admire?

SC: Indie games are definitely the way to go. Game budgets need to shrink, not grow. To me, games are all about gameplay, not the bells and whistles. Somewhere along the line we lost track of that and followed the white rabbit down a hole. It's time to get out of that hole.

You have 30 seconds left to live and you must tell the game business something very important. What is it?

SC: Make games for the sake of games. Games aren't film, games aren't books, they are their own medium and deserve to be treated as such. Stop trying to copy what's been done in other media and just get down to making games.

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[In this opinion piece originally printed on sister site Gamasutra, Crystal Dynamics' Arnab Basu outlines how the Tomb Raider developers operate a shared game design department, explaining how he believes it can lead to greater efficiency and innovation at many game studios.]

With the game industry at a stage of significant maturation – stabilizing the process of game design implementation at a studio through detailed customization based on operating principles is of paramount importance.

The concept of a shared game design department for a mid sized studio revolves around the central identity of providing cross-functional design services and incubation: operating like an ‘internal startup’ with reduced risks and steady returns.

The department consists of a number of junior and senior designers who along with a producer and design director of the studio form the group. It was founded with the mission directive to provide a diversified set of important services: new concept development, focus feedback and fire fighting open design issues for the studio’s game production teams to name a few.

The department serves the dual purpose of providing a training ground for junior design talent as they transition to working on game teams as well as a ramp up/off point for designers in between projects.

The success of the department’s functioning lies in its ability to meet the multifarious design needs of the studio. At any given point, there are a number of active internal or external projects that designers from the group work with. These are collectively referred to as projects in development.

Design resources refer to the mobilization of both information and talent. In addition, there are a number of design services like training, focus feedback and stunt design offered. The following figure illustrates the detailed categorization of the nature and scope of the department’s footprint.

The design department touches every game that comes out of Crystal Dynamics, most recently those for the Tomb Raider franchise. The shared design department interfaces in different capacities with game teams that are dedicated to shipping games.

As it relates to new concept development, the department provides an umbrella for opportunities to scope innovative game design concepts; explore novel production methodologies and allows junior designers/interns to plug into such exciting ventures to gain hands-on experience.

Design Resources

The department serves as a valuable central hub for all game designers in the studio. The shared design department is a place where designers can access resources as well as get guidance in charting their short to long term career growth.

Many rely on the circulation of general design publications and templates (game design specifications, pitches, concept docs, etc) that set standards as well as serve reference for documented processes.

The department also provides a neutral ground to engage in designer updates and discussions through weekly meetings where senior designers across game teams get a chance to interact. This is valuable for collective discussion and objective analysis of design related challenges or issues.

Design Services

One of the core tenets of the shared design department in all its endeavors has been incubation – whether it falls in the realm of harnessing the potential of pure design talent or idea generation.

The former is addressed by the design intern training program that runs year around where junior talent is recruited from a variety of sources – academic institutions, internal quality assurance departments and the employee referral program.

Training Program

Trainees are put through a fairly intensive curriculum that can be broadly categorized into 3 stages: awareness, action and application. They get a chance to understand Crystal Dynamics' own franchise-focused design methodologies. They learn how to author content using the proprietary game engine and scripting system.

And most importantly, they develop a deeper and more practical understanding of the design process. The biggest advantage with this approach is the ability to maintain relatively reduced time pressure for the requirement of design talent ramp-up on teams developing games on tight production schedules.

Stunt Design

This is when a junior designer is assigned to a game team to assist with a specific design challenge for a certain amount of time. As an example, just recently there was a junior designer who came onto a team to help out with scripting and level design work. Within a period of two months, this designer was responsible for the entire scripting of a section of the executive demo the team was working on.

While a significant amount of work takes place internally - designer training and concept development, there is an equally large amount of time spent interfacing externally with game teams and other shared departments like the creative services and shared technology groups.

Pre-production assistance, brainstorming and need based ‘stunt design’ partnerships serve as good examples of such initiatives.

Focus Feedback

Towards the tail end of production on big-budget titles, the department engages its junior and senior design talent in assisting with the play-testing and focus feedback process. This not only gives the game teams a fresh perspective on the state of the product but also provides an extra set of hands to help in its final polishing.

To be competitive in today’s gaming landscape, it is imperative for a company to set aside resources for research and development.

This is not just for the exploration of new technology pipelines and latest art tools but also for identifying industry movement such as: latest design trends in games, platforms usage and distribution, scope of developing games with unique interaction mechanisms, etc. Efforts towards such initiatives get chased down by the shared design department.

In next steps, the department hopes to continue with its turnaround of fresh talent as well as add skill sets and/or people to flesh out the group to build arsenal for its continual goal of enhancing studio-wide game design implementation.

So why should your studio be in a Shared Design state of mind? Out of the different art forms that go into making a game – game design to this day still remains the most dynamic and free form of disciplines. Applying such a targeted and structured group of game designers to tackle varied challenges is imperative to a studio’s successful functioning.

[Arnab Basu is an Associate Producer at Crystal Dynamics, Eidos Interactive. In the past, he has managed the studio's Shared Design department, and is currently working on an unannounced title. He completed a Master's degree from Carnegie Mellon University, prior to which he received a BS in computer science and engineering from Bangalore, India.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The virtual collection embodiment of Atari historian and arcade machine collector Scott Evans - formerly housed at SafeStuff.com - is incredibly important, containing a lot of incredibly rare prototypes and documentation built up over time and purchased after Atari Games' Milpitas office closed down a few years back.

So, the exciting news is that Scott is updating again on his new URL, AtariGames.com, after no updates through most of 2007, and he's posting absolutely amazing scans of documentation based around the creation of some of the most enduring Atari arcade games of all time.

For example, stored in the Document Library are PDFs including "Centipede Documentation. Over 60 pages of memos, design docs, field test reports and other interesting information" - with handwritten design suggestions from Atari execs - and the full Marble Madness design document, as well as rare info from the (pictured) proto-only sequel. Brilliant. [Via Atari Age.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

So, online worlds that you don't have to actually pay to access (like the pictured Habbo Hotel) - they're still pretty big! And this GameSetLinks leads off with FreeToPlay.biz's look at what might stop them getting bigger.

But, let's be honest, dabbling and then microtransacting is probably going to carry own growing (perhaps not quite as much as VCs would like, tho!), and elsewhere in this round-up, there's also Lore Sjoberg humor, the stages of MMO auteurship, and an illustrated look at indie games. Yay:

Top 10 Free To Play Growth Killers « Free To Play
Will things not go as fast as VCs are evidently banking on?

Siliconera » Pop‘n PC, Pop’n Music Be-Mouse
Haha, totally cute idea for Konami's most female-friendly Bemani series entry.

the2bears.com » Gridrunner++
Now available in Flash, on Facebook - yay Minterism.

Tales of the Rampant Coyote: Explaining Indie Games, Illustrated!
Yes, with handy diagrams.

Game gifting « schlaghund’s playground
'Why is it that even despite my obvious appreciation for anything and everything game-related, I hardly ever receive game-related gifts from family members?'

Alt Text: More 'Filthy' Games to Drive Fox News Crazy
Lore Sjoberg strikes again!

Come One Come All Kongregate: A Talk With The Director Of Games
Good view into what Kongregate has coming up with premium content - actually rather insightful.

Elder Game: MMO game development » The Stages of Designerhood
From 'eager newbie' to 'zen master' via 'burnout', heh.

Game-Ism: Finding the Middleground
'If you find your gameplay becoming stale and stagnant, see if by tweaking a few rules you can’t find some new (and possibly even better) fun in between your core feature goals.'

Radical Dreamer: Yasunori Mitsuda Interview from 1UP.com
'Yasunori Mitsuda is the composer of some of gaming's finest melodies, from those found in his first project, Chrono Trigger, to the more recent epic orchestral soundtrack of Xenosaga Episode I: Der Wille zur Macht.'

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)